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BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis
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March 31, 2005
Making Google transparent
: Private Radio's routine that scrapes and analyzes GoogleNews' sources keeps getting better and better.
Pope worsens
: I'm at MSNBC's Connected at 5p ET. Was going to do more Schiavo blog links. Sudden switch to the pope as his condition worsens. If you see any good blog notes, please do leave a link the comments.
: Note that bloggers are quoting CNN saying that the Pope received last rites. A theologian called the producer of the show as I hung out saying that's wrong; he received rites for the infirm (I may be getting the exact name wrong). No confirmation either way on this question but it is a question.
: Later: Not being Catholic, I clearly got the paragraph above wrong. FoxNews said this is known as the last rites.
Bad taste award
: FinkTank3000 discovers that the American Family Association puts up Terri Schaivo merchandise. Get your bumperstickers: "Remember Terri Schaivo. www.stopliberaljudges.com".
Oh, and by the way, if the judges strictly interpreted law and supported state's rights, what makes them liberal?
Terri Schiavo dies
: She has died. I'll be doing the MSNBC blog roundup at noon. I'm seeing many prayers but also much anger.
: MSNBC just reported that Bush will make a live statement about Schiavo at the start of a statement about WMD. He doesn't make live statements about the soldiers who die in Iraq but he makes a statement about this.
Her death is political to the end.
: A few of the links I'm finding:
GlennBeck.com goes all black: R.I.P. Terri.
This site has a photo, graphic tribute
Blogotional.com prints the lyrics from the hymn What Wondrous Love is This.
RobBushway.com says: "Our society has shown its true colors for allowing this to happen and the true after effects of 25 years of Roe v Wade."
EternalPerspectives.com says: "Truly, the death of Terri Schiavo diminishes us all."
Mobyrebuttal.blogspot.com says that Terri's will prevailed. 'I believe that you prevailed. I will not say rest in peace, you have rested in peace far too long, bound to this earth in a broken mind and body. But now you are free to soar, to walk again and talk with your maker."
Keepstumblin says: "I suspect she will posthumously become the poster child for the cause, her husband will continue to be demonized by these people, and her parents will be portrayed as long suffering (which they are, but not for the reasons they should be) and saintly. It's my hope that everyone involved in this unfortunate situation will come to terms with both Terri's death and the actions of those on both sides of the debate. It would be too bad if this entire saga only resulted in more misunderstanding, mistrust, and anger."
On media coverage:
A comment at Catch.com: "And perhaps some mention is warranted that regardless of what her wishes may have ultimately been -- I strongly suspect that to spend her dying days at the centre of a media circus was not among them."
Tributaries says: "May she rest in peace. GOd knows the living shan't from now on."
A lonely impulse of delight at getifa.com:
"I’d like to go a day without seeing a woman who has been brain-dead for 15 years on the front page of the newspaper and the MSN home page on my computer."
The Bull Speaks says:
"Perhaps now Terri’s parents can let her go and perhaps the Nation can begin to heal from this media-driven horror story."
: LATER: Intolerant Elle quotes Bush on the death of Terri Schaivo: "The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak."
A good reason to support universal health insurance.
Giving God a bad name
: The front page of The New York Times today reports that religious leaders from Islam, Judaism, and Christianity came together in a rare meeting and rarer agreement in Jerusalem to unite in a single cause.
What cause could that be? Peace in the Middle East? Regaining God-given freedom in the Middle East? An end to economic despair in some parts of the Middle East? A call to condemn terrorism as murder?
No. Gay bashing. Bigotry. Hatred. That's what brought them together. They oppose a gay pride event in Jerusalem: "They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable," Shlomo Amar, Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel's two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. "It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it."
Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, added: "We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem." ...
When the first WorldPride festival was held five years ago in Rome, religious opposition came from the Vatican, while secular opposition came from a neo-Fascist group that vowed to hold a counterdemonstration. But the neo-Fascists canceled their demonstration, the march came off peacefully, and even a few center-right politicians joined many thousands of marchers.
One day later, however, Pope John Paul II appeared on a balcony over St. Peter's Square and delivered a message expressing his "bitterness" that the gay festival had gone forward, calling it an "offense to the Christian values of a city that is so dear to the hearts of Catholics across the world." For shame.
March 30, 2005
Your correspondent
: I continue to enjoy reading AfghanWarrior. Waheed reports on the trials of everyday life -- people simply cannot afford to buy meat, for example -- and in his latest post, he answers questions, including: 11. Waheed, if someone said to you five years ago that the Taliban would be out of power, Afghanistan would have democratic elections, Kabul would be being rebuilt and blossoming, women would be actually allowed to protest for their rights, new schools would be being built, you would be working for the U.S. Military and telling the world about Afghanistan through your Blog on the Internet, would you have believed them?
During the Taliban regime we wouldn't have believed that the US Army would come to Afghanistan, but we were hoping that one day Afghanistan will be free. But when the US attacked, everything changed very quickly. I wouldn't have believed that one day I would be working as an interpreter and we would have 4 TV channels and women would have their ministry and protest for their rights. The contributions to Waheed to help him get a laptop and pay for access have leveled off.
Go there now and give him some payment for being your corresponent in Afghanistan. I don't have a tip jar. SO give to Waheed instead, please.
What to do tonight
: EVDB, a new events data base service from Brian Dear, launches. Looks good.
Ouch
: If I worked on his tech team, I think I'd pull out my feeding tube now.
 With three billion pickles on that
: Technorati is about to pass 1 billion links served.
Pass the soap
: A flack crows about something I wrote yesterday. I don't know why, but it makes me feel a little dirty.
Freedom to Connect
: I'm at the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington.
: David Isenberg, who put this all together, gave a stirring rap (and I mean rap) saying that our freedom to connect is not political enough. He said that thanks to a six programmers somewhere in Europe (read: Skype) had eliminated the need for phone companies ... and paying them $1 trillion dollars. So what will we do with that trillion, we people? Feed people? Solve the energy problem? What?
Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet project gives stats just in from their latest study (which will be up on their site shortly):
: 136 million American adults use the internet -- 67 percent of adults.
: 87 percent of teenagers use the internet
: 59 million Americans have high-speed at home, just over half of users.
: 40 million Americans used the internet to get news online yesterday -- half the number who got it from TV, two-thirds of the number of who got it from newspapers.
: 4 million Googled someone they were about to meet.
: 1 million googled themselves.
: Lee also told me that they asked about use of Craigs List and online classifieds and found very high usage.
He says "the internet has become the norm in America." They're having trouble asking people when they use the internet because it's so much a part of their lives in so many ways now.
: Susan Crawford is unbloggable. She comes out with ideas that require digestion and by the time you've digested it to blog it she is on to the next idea. So I don't try. One questioner got up and said, "You're even better than your blog." You get the idea.
I finally figured out one of her points: If you want government to help you fix something (e.g., kill spam) you also open the door to government regulation of other things you don't want (e.g., email). So beware governmetn involvement.
When the First Amendment is 'the other side'
: CJR Daily goes after The New York Times, as I did the other day, for writing about new FCC National Nanny Kevin Martin and the so-called Parents Television Council without going to anyone -- anyone -- who defends the First Amdment against them. The Constitution is now the unheard other side. Relying exclusively on quotes from the PTC's president, L. Brent Bozell, Martin, and a few pro-fine Congressmen, the Times ignores any hint of opposition to the proposed new rules.
There's little question that there is a significant movement afoot to increase indecency fines, but the Times fails to report that an equally passionate movement has arisen to resist the proposed expansion of the FCC's mandate. [ via SpeakSpeak]
Star blogging
: In one of the worst-kept secrets around, Arianna Huffington, blogger and blog lover, is starting an online thing -- group blog, zine, whatever -- that is supposed to be attracting big names to little media. Writes Greg Lindsay: Based in New York and staffed with a full complement of editors, the Huffington Report appears to be a culture and politics webzine in the classic mold of Salon or Slate. It will have breaking news, a media commentary section called "Eat the Press," and its most interesting innovation, a group blog manned by the cultural and media elite: Sen. Jon Corzine, Larry David, Barry Diller, Tom Freston, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Harry Evans and his wife, Tina Brown. That's just to name a few, and Huffington is still recruiting.
Her business partner is Ken Lerer, the head of AOL Time Warner corporate communications until Bob Pittman lost and Dick Parsons won. PaidContent also found a connection to Jonah Peretti of Eyebeam. Lerer, Peretti and others worked together on projects for the Million Mom March.
Of course, the punchline here is that Tina Brown, who loves to dis blogs, could blog. But that assumes that these guys will be blogging. It's more likely they'll be dropping their political bon mots when they want. But it's a smart move to create the bon-mot-catcher to take advantage of that: Send an email to Arianna and have it published to the world. It's a lot easier than having to go into Air America or Bill Maher's show.
To the barricades, bloggers -- again
: No surprise: Add Syria to the list of countries jailing or intimidating -- or rather trying to intimidate -- bloggers for exercising their God-given right to free speech (that list so far includes Iran, Bahrain, Maylasia, China...).
Syrian author and blogger Ammar Abdulhamid was hauled in for questioning: “So, you believe in American democracy eh, - the democracy of torture and fucking as we can clearly see from Abu Ghraib and Guatemala [sic]?” exclaimed the interrogator.
“Pardon me, but did you say Guatemala?” The heretic inquired ever so innocently. “I see. Can I be interrogated by someone higher up the fuck chain?” He pleaded.
The heretic got his wish, and he seems to have made the right call indeed. For the higher fuck was a bit more “sophisticated,” for the lack of a better word, and the interrogation went somewhat smoothly from then on.
This was the first round of investigation by this particular apparatus, Branch 235 as it is known, but it will not be the last, that’s for sure. I will have now to submit a report on my “dubious” activities and contacts during my fellowship at the Saban Center for Middle Eastern Study at the Brookings Institution, and then I will be interrogated again.
So be it. So be it. [ via Tim Oren]
Journalism is a verb, not a noun
: Many knickers are twisting into knots over the questions ofwho is a journalist and how to save journalism. But those are the wrong questions.
Journalism is not defined by the person who does it or by the medium or the company that delivers it.
Journalism is not a thing. It is an act: The act of informing is journalism. It's a verb, not a noun.
And no one owns journalism. It is not an official act, a certified act, an expert act, a proprietary act. Anyone can do journalism. Everyone does. Some do it better than others, of course. But everyone does it.
Realizing that -- embracing that -- will be the key to saving journalism: its quality and its business.
: Cut the act of journalism into its component pieces:
Witnessing: Seeing news happen is usually the beginning of the act of journalism. Used to be, witnessing news didn't matter, it wasn't heard, unless the witness was a reporter or was interviewed by one. Now, thanks to technology and connectivity, any witness can share the news. Within minutes of yesterday's Indonesian earthquake, I went online and found eyewitness accounts that beat any news organization by hours, even days. As we learned in the tsunami, photos and video will also come from witnesses.
Asking: Seeking information you don't have and want to know is also known as reporting. This was supposed to be the domain of the pros but more and more we see just people with sufficient knowledge or curiosity reporting.
Editing: Everyone edits. We select, we correct, we package, we present in the media we choose. (Some call this censorship but it's not, of course; it's just editing.)
Commenting: Giving news perspective is also part of journalism and everyone does that, too: We say what we think about a story or we criticize a movie. It's the journalism absolutely anyone can do.
Distributing: Until a decade ago, this was where journalism was held hostage: If you didn't own the press or the broadcast tower, you couldn't do journalism; it wasn't real, official, trusted (said those who owned those assets). It wasn't heard. But now, of course, even a guy in Afghanistan can broadcast to the world.
When you slice journalism into its atomic elements, and generously define the acquisition, distribution, and consumption of information as acts of journalism, it's apparent that, as Dave Winer says, either everyone is a journalist or no one is.
Now this analysis leaves out a few critical functions of the journalistic process up until now: Today, the journalistic organization invests in acquiring information, aggregates, selects, edits, vets, presents, and distributes. Can these functions be performed outside the journalistic organization? Yes. Do they have to be? No. Should they be? Well, you'll decide that.
Right now we have people fretting over just those questions: Can journalism be saved? I think that's the wrong question. Maybe we shouldn't save the old way. Maybe, now that we have new opportunities, we should find a better way. The right question is: Can journalism be improved? Can journalism be expanded? Can journalism be exploded?
I believe -- no surprise -- that a key to the future of journalism is embracing the idea that everyone does journalism. This doesn't mean that all journalism is equal or good or of interest. We still need to find ways to aggregate, select, edit, present, and distribute information in ways that are efficient, effective, and reliable for each of us. We still need to find ways to support these functions financially, whether they are performed by, as Chris Nolan says, stand-alone or corporate journalists. We especially need to find those ways in the face of declining -- no, disappearing -- revenue.
Old journalism is facing three crises:
1. Flat or declining audience. I am confident that the total time spent on news is actually increasing, but with more competitors, the time spent on big journalism is not. And I'm not talking just newspapers, of course; look at TV news as well.
2. Declining revenue. Classified is going pfffft. TV upfronts will no longer support ever greater prices for ever smaller audiences. Radio is a flat line. As Jay Rosen points out, it's still profitable. But that's not the same as growing or investing.
3. Declining trust. Enough said.
But turn this around and look at how exploded journalism faces new opportunities: By embracing all this new journalism people are doing, there is a no limit to the news that can be reported and there is tremendous efficiency to it. In this new world, the reporters are also the marketers. And once again, trust is something that is earned rather than protected. Here's a vision of the future of news where that happens.
Rather than looking at all that as a competitor to be stopped, old journalism needs to see how to embrace the new but the new will go on whether or not it is embraced because everyone will be doing it.
So if old journalism were smart, it would find ways to support the new: Train the everybodies doing journalism; share financial support with them; share trust with them; find the best of them; aggregate them; share the spotlight with them; take advantage of the work they do; respect them.
We won't save journalism the way it was. We shouldn't if we could. The business must change. Some in newsrooms think they should not change, that change is sacrilegious. Of course, that's ridiculous. From a consumer perspective, if the habits, needs, and abilities of the audience change, then so must journalism. From a business perspective, if every other industry in this country has gone through restructuring as it finds new ways to do business, then why shouldn't journalism? From a journalistic perspective, well, wouldn't you hope that journalists would be the most curious, the most eager to explore the new? OK, that last one is a straight line.
But here's the news: I am starting to see executives in old, big media figure this out and seek out this change. Will it work? Who the hell knows?
: Sorry this has been so generalized, so basic. I was going to write a short post responding to all the links in the first paragraph above: a provocative essay by Jay Rosen arguing that journalism is starting to eat away at its own body; Dan Gillmor responding to Rosen; Jack Shafer giving David Shaw the slap he deserves; Phil Meyer as the ghost of journalism future; and Ken Auletta mourning the death of the cash cow that is advertising. But as I tried to tackle the beast, I kept coming back to the most elementary analysis:
This isn't about the old journalism of people and things. It's about the new journalism of acts.
March 29, 2005
Closed captioning -- and metadata! -- for vlogs and online video
: Go take a look at this version of the vlog I put up the other day to demonstrate the form for TV and newspaper folks. (The link works only in IE with Microsoft Media Player).
Chicago Captioning Corp. added closed captioning to the video.
They did that in an effort to serve the 10 percent of Americans who are hard of hearing. And that's great.
But I see another important use that is of value to 100 percent of Internet users:
By attaching a script to the video, we get metadata associated with it. That makes the video searchable via Google et al. That means that the content of the video can be analyzed. That means we can link to specific content.
That's big.
Now it so happens that because I was using Visual Communicator, I had a script in the teleprompter (aka my laptop) that is timed specifically to my reading of the script. To me, that means it'd be trivial to publish the script as a closed caption file timed to the video.
I even wonder whether URLs could be associated with the graphic files inserted into the video -- or simply with text -- so people could go to addresses. More metadata. More interactivity.
I got email with that link from Steven Knoerr at Chicago Captioning and emailed him back this bit of excited blathering. I have no idea what Chicago Captioning's business proposition is; I'm not trying to sell them.
But I do think there's something important here for citizens' video (and TV news video brought online): If we can associate closed captions and scripts with video, we make that video far more accessible not only to the hard-of-hearing but also to Google searchers.
: UPDATE: Mark Randall of Serious Magic (the Visual Communicator and VlogIt folks) emails me to report that there is a free plug-in for the latest version of the software (which, regretably won't work on my machine) that automates the creation of closed captions from the teleprompter script. I hope they include this in VlogIt (hint) and encourage all vloggers to use it.
Metadata, man, metadata.
Talk is cheap
: A few weeks ago, I was a chump. Well, I'm often a chump but in this particular case, it's about a call I got from a futurist marketing think tank -- read: bullshitshop -- that asked me attend a session with other smart people -- ah, but they flatter me -- to talk about trends we see in media and society. Somebody's actually asking me to blather? Well, sure, I said. But what I found when I got there was that I was merely part of a focus group and I was paid $200, plus cookies, for consulting. That is consulting for which I should have charged much more (doesn't mean they'd pay it but at last I'd have found myself in a transparent marketplace instead of talking with a nameless company's paid middlemen). It was my fault that I fell into their trap, so I played along. But I was the chump.
The irony is that I give opinions for free every day. Right here. Pity you. If somebody wanted to see what I said, they could have come here. They could have emailed me or even left a comment -- better yet -- to spark a conversation with all of you, where they'd find the real wisdom. They could have dealt with me and us directly. Instead, they paid a middleman and stayed behind the mirror.
Well, as President Bush says, once burned is... uh, what'd he say again?
So today I got email from another such organization wanting me to fly out of New York for a talk with three or four other smart people -- ah, now I see through your flattery -- for an unnamed client. When I said I wasn't interested in being part of such a focus group, they protested that "an Expert Panel is NOT a focus group. The tone is more that of a living room setting." So the chairs are stuffed. It's still a focus group. If this were a true living-room setting for me, I'd be on the couch with feet up on the coffee table and laptop on lap conversing via blog.
The email also said their firm "is in the newness business. We help our clients gain fresh thinking and insights. We are experts in the process of stimulating new thinking and in designing and facilitating engagements that result in exciting new strategies/plans/products that people are committed to implementing."
What a hock of hooey. "Newness business"? Sounds like they're in produce.
It's at moments like this that I find blogging has affected my worldview profoundly. Yes, it has made me grumpy and opinionated and disagreeable. But I don't mean that. I mean that it has made me expect transparency and direct conversation.
If this unnamed client were smart, they'd do the same thing. Oh, I'm not suggesting we'd all give them consulting for free. But we all would give them opinions for free if they'd just enter into an open conversation. You want people to reinvent your product in new ways, unnamed client? Well, why don't you try asking your customers to do it for you; they're the ones who'd know best. Start a blog. Start a conversation. Read others blogs. Join in the conversation. Ask people what they think. Surprise: They'll tell you. Then all you have to do is listen.
And you can save on the cookies and the newness gurus.
Getting past the shouting
: MSNBC's Connected has a good show on right now trying to get past the shouting and have on experts who debate the issues, ethics, and facts about whether there is a chance of recovery in a case like Schiavo's and whether a feeding tube is medical treatment.
Just finished watching the whole show. It was good because it used the form -- talk -- to get past opinion and shouting and tried to find the facts and inform (ain't that journalism?). Of course, there was disagreement. But the show was grounded in an effort to inform.
: LATER: See also Cathy Young getting down to facts at Hit & Run.
Blog campaigning
: Corzine's gubernatorial campaign is planning to do up blogs and Joe Territo has the exclu.
Hey, man
: Fred Wilson tells David Byrne to get with it.
How to piss off your customers, chapter 476
: I just got an invitation to join a beta of Yahoo 360. I'd heard good things about it and wanted to. But when I went to sign into my Yahoo account, I was "deactivated," which sounds painful, eh? Well, it's more painful for them than for me. Yes, I hadn't used the account much because it became a spamagnet. And I never was big on personalization. But here I had a reason to return to Yahoo and what does Yahoo do? It tells me to buzz off. So buzz off, I do. What would it cost Yahoo to keep that account there? Nothing. What does Yahoo gain from killing the account? Nothing. What does Yahoo lose? Me.
Another Republican response
: The Moderate Republican also responds to my Jumping the shark for Jesus post: Sometimes I wonder though, aren't the theocrats the "mainstream" of the GOP these days? As an old-style Republican (I sometimes think I'm the lovechild of Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller), I feel kinda like the odd duck in the party these days. I guess it leads me to wonder if Jarvis is right. In the past I believed that if the party realized how nutty the theocrats were, they would drop them like a hot potato and move towards the center. But the GOP has come to dominance because it catered to these yahoos or at least the leadership would like to believe that. I want to believe that the GOP will see how dangerous these people are to our democracy, but I'm not certain they will.
It's not like the Democrats are any better. Now that the Michael Moore/MoveOn group has taken over, the party really out in Left field. : LATER: Glenn Reynolds says: Hugh's right that it's hard to ascribe the Congressional legislation to "theocrats" when it was supported by Tom Harkin (and Ralph Nader!). There's much more going on than that; this is a matter on which all sorts of people, of all sorts of persuasions, can be found on both sides.
On the other hand, here's some advice, very similar to advice I gave to the antiwar movement: If you don't want to be confused with a movement led by theocrats, don't let actual theocrats be seen as your spokesmen. It may be impossible to shut Randall Terry up -- though if I were Karl Rove, I would have tried really hard -- but he needs to be loudly and regularly denounced as a nut. Otherwise you're in the same boat as lefties who don't want to be identified with Ward Churchill, but happily use him when they want to draw a crowd.
(In fact, the Terry / Churchill axis is surprisingly close -- they both view 9/11 as a necessary chastisement for a sinful America. If that's not a distinguishing mark of full-bore idiotarianism, I don't know what is). We can only hope that both parties start fighting like cats and dogs over the moderate middle of America rather than trying to suck up to the lunatic fringes. Emphasis on the plurals.
: LATER: Common Room, a home-schooling blog, uses my post and Hugh's post as an exercise in writing and reading. I'm not going for the grade. I'm auditing this course.
: LATER STILL: Linking to Micah Sifry's review of Hugh Hewitt's Blog book will be seen as a political act, but it's not: I like both both of them.
: FILM AT 11: Glenn Reynolds does the blog report on MSNBC Connected and mentions this very disagreement. Political Teen has the video.
March 28, 2005
Our freedoms
: Bill Hobbs gives you a quiz: Can you name the five freedoms enshrined in and guaranteed by the First Amendment?
A response from the right
: Just got back to a connection and saw that this morning, Hugh Hewitt responded to my Jumping the shark for Jesus post. Crazed doing important things like eating dinner so I don't have time to respond but wanted you to see the link.
Quake: 'Bloggers are morons'
: Peter Tan blogged during the earthquake, reporting that "my apartment is shaking." More: I had just finished posting my latest entry when I felt my wheelchair moving. I thought I was dizzy because I have not been getting enough sleep lately. A short while later, I realised that it was another earthquake when I heard my door rattling. I quickly woke the maid up.
My neighbours were fast. They had already locked their apartment door and were waiting for the elevator. I chose to stay in the apartment. There was no point rushing to get down since everybody else will be waiting for the elevator too. This is in fact a bad move since they could get trapped in the lift should the building tilt.
This temblor is stronger than the one on Boxing Day and lasted longer. It began at approximately 0011 and lasted a good two minutes or more. When the taskbar clock showed 0013, the apartment was still swaying. The water in the tank in my toilet sloshed about and spilled over the edge. I looked down from my window and saw many neighbours lingering in the driveway, barely 5 meters from the buildings that are 22 storeys high.... And this great post: Bloggers Are Morons
Blogging has fried our brains. Instead of evacuating after the tremor, we, bloggers staying in high rise apartments, sit here n blog about it, oblivious to the risk should the building topple over or collapse. I, for one, was furiously typing away as the floor swayed under me instead of making plans to leave my apartment. Should I laugh or cry at this stupidity that has befallen me? : Amazing how quickly news from ground-level comes up on the internet. Shortly after the earthquake off Jakarta, blogs started updating. See this: I've just been messaged by my mom who's with Oxfam in Sri Lanka and she says that the tsunami warning sirens have been sounded 2 hours ago. The country's emergency serivces have been put on standby. I've phoned my volunteer coordinator at VolunteerSriLanka in Habantota on the South Coast of Sri Lanka - and some IDP camp residents have been evacuated about 5km away from the coastal areas - thats about 3 camps I've heard so far.
Meanwhile Peter Griffin & Dina Mehta have rallied and sent out an email to all current SEA EAT volunteers in the region and those still involved with the relief operation to standby to start blogging alerts via txt msgs & email....
Phone lines have apparently got jammed once again in Sri Lanka & everyone is just panicking instead of remaining calm until we all know what's going on. Shall keep you all posted as i get news....
UPDATE - 10.18PM - Bahrain Time (+3GMT) :
All Sri Lankans living on the coast have been asked to move away from the coast within an hour. This was about a half an hour ago. The information has been distributed fairly widely. The Commissioner of Police has also stated that they are taking steps to stop traffic on the Galle Road. People fleeing also asked to watch out for looters.
-SMS from Sanjaya with the Daily News in Sri Lanka ... : The TsunmaiHelp blog is keeping up on the news.
: Jeff Ooi, the Maylasian blogging wonder, is on the story again.
: Another eyewitness blog report: So I’m in bed with Hubby, when suddenly I felt my world start to rock.
We’re mid-way through an episode of Frasier when suddenly we felt the tremors. It was pretty freaky! We were watching telly in bed and I heard loud creaks and felt my bed swaying back and forth. For a nanosecond I almost thought my cat was playing under the bed again — yes, and she had gained super strength… Look, it’s past midnight, I’m sleepy, my brain’s not all there, ok?
Turns out there’s a quake measuring 8.5 on the richter scale near North Sumatra. And we felt it all the way here in Punggol....
I hear dogs barking incessantly. I’m remembering all the movies and tv shows about animal instincts and I’m getting weirded out. Meanwhile, Hubby goes “hey, this is so fun”. I stare at him like he’s grown a third eye....
brown suggests I get a camera phone, so that : “can snap pic with phone, send via email to flickr plus also to blog. Too cool. macam ‘Live from Mordor’ ” The "brown" she refers to is a blogger here.
: Eyewitness reports on an MSNBC community blog.
Free speech for free speech, please
: The Times today talks about censorship under the reign of Kevin Martin, new chairman of the FCC. They quote Brent Bozell, self-appointed head of the so-called Parents Television Council.
But they don't quote anyone from the other side.
The other side needs another side. We need an Americans Free Speech Council. We need to stand up for the First Amendment. And when reporters write stories such as this, they should see that their stories are incomplete if they don't hear from the other side, the side of free speech and the First Amendment.
Google views
: Dana Blankenhorn says that the demonization of Google has begun. He says they need an editor and he applies.
I'm not so sure that solves their problems. An editor chose the neonazi hate site they had. A business strategy has to deal with Agence France Presse. Customer relations have to deal with hiding basic business terms from ad partners. A corporate policy of transparency is needed.
It's really about attitude. I'm seeing in Google the same sort of aloof arrogance I saw in Yahoo and so many other online giants in their day.
What we're really seeing his the humbling of Google. And Google needs it.
Not again
: A large, 8.2 quake has hit near Jakarta. Tsunami warning issued. Command Post is on the case. GoogleNews feed here.
The new CBS News
: Even before CBS News is redone it is redoing itself. In a comment on the post below, Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report says he studied the show for Broadcasting & Cable and sees big change already: Less than three weeks after Dan Rather's departure from the anchor chair, Schieffer has already markedly revamped the job description, showcasing a more inquisitive, interactive style than his predecessor or his competitors....
This anchor approaches his role more as a viewer's representative than as a reporter's leader [yes! - ed]; Schieffer's emphasis is more on summing up a story than on introducing it.
Specifically, Schieffer's CBS Evening News actually makes constructive use of the live sign-off that often ends a correspondent's taped report. In the TV news business, the live sign-off tends to be just an ornamental transition, but Schieffer makes it a valuable access point, posing follow-up questions to reporters on a couple of stories each night. He reminds the reporter that, like the viewers at home, he has just watched the preceding package himself. He drives home the story's lead. He cites the angle that interested him most. He uses vernacular, even blunt language, to ask for more...
The before-and-after is striking. Schieffer's live interactive style was used in 40% of CBS' items (ABC used it 9% of the time, NBC 3%); in Rather's final days, CBS used those techniques only 11% of the time (ABC 17%, NBC 3%)....
The questions that Schieffer asks out loud are the same routine ones every anchor and executive producer asks of correspondents before a story is filed. What CBS Evening News is doing is showing that Q&A in action, rather than simply weaving its results into the on-air report.
So Schieffer makes more of the anchor's behind-the-scenes job visible for all to see. How modish is that? At age 68, our oldest rookie news anchor is not only interactive, but transparent, too. I've been of the view that CBS News can change with Schieffer in the anchor chair.
It's not about what's before the camera but what's behind the camera -- changing it and showing it.
It's not about new faces but new voices.
It's not about format but attitude. And it sounds as if the attitude is changing.
Wikicities
: The Wall Street Journal writes up Jimmy Wales' Wikicities business (another free link). It's just starting so it's hard to tell whether this will work as well as Wikipedia. I think that wikis work best when they try to gather the ongoing wisdom of the crowds on lasting topics; they work when they hit a critical mass of interest, people, contributions, and time. That's why I remain dubious that Wikinews will work; it's too transient: By the time enough people swarm around a topic to add their collective wisdom, the world has moved on. Wikipedia did, in fact, do a good job collecting news during the tsunami, but that had enough interest, people, and time to make it work. WikiCities is a third model: A portal where people can create free, ad-supported special-interest wikis. On the one hand, I wonder whether people won't just do that on their own sites, in their own communities. On the other hand, perhaps special-interest wikis need a portal to gather that critical mass of contributors. We'll see...
Godcom
: The Wall Street Journal reports (free link) that TV programmers are trying to exploit this God thing said to be sweeping the nation: Judging from several comedy and drama pilots now in progress that are already getting close consideration, America's couches will be turning into pews.
A splashy drama called "Book of Daniel" is in development at NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., while Viacom Inc.'s CBS is building a supernatural thriller around a character described as "a brilliant physicist with strong religious beliefs." News Corp.'s Fox, meanwhile, has "Briar + Graves," which the producers describe as "The X-Files" goes to church....
"We try in the entertainment business to find veins of interest to tap, and religion is a huge one that is currently very underserved," says Kevin Reilly, president of entertainment at NBC, which is set to begin airing "Revelations," a six-part apocalyptic miniseries, next month.
Also weighing heavily on programming executives' minds is President Bush's re-election. In addition to giving religion a starring role, several shows this development season are set deep inside "red" states and feature ultraconservative characters in the mix. In fact, Walt Disney Co.'s ABC is looking at "Red & Blue," about a conservative grandfather. An essential rule of entertainment: If a show (or magazine or any media effort) starts with a creative vision that clicks, it will succeed. If it starts merely trying to pander to a demographic or a trend in polls, it's likely to fail. But network programmers never learn that.
Having that said, a religous reality show would be a hoot. Churches are filled with drama, politics, what the American TV audience loves best: humiliation. I can't wait for ConfessionalCam.
: See also my post yesterday: Jumping the shark for Jesus
Command and control-key
: Fascinating discussion of the military using blogs to get to what's really happening in command. This is about more than media. It's about new ways to communicate and inform and manage... and take over the world. See Sgt. Stryker here and Joe Katzman's follow here.
Vlogging again
: I just put up a new vlog I made to demonstrate citizens' TV for the Radio Television News Directors Association. I was invited to be on a panel at their Vegas confab but had a conflict and suggested blogcasting and vlogging (it is a TV conference, after all). To any who've been subjected to my blatherings on ciitzens' media and exploding TV and all that, there's nothing new here but it's a brief demo. I hadn't used Visual Communicator since I made these Fred Flintstone attempts more than two years ago. I had problems getting the newest version to work on my Bedrock laptop but the prior version works well; it is a neat tool. Serious Magic, creator of the software, say they will have the lite VlogIt version out in a few weeks.
New news
: Cory Bergman at Lost Remote notes changes in the CBS Evening News already -- and likes them.
March 27, 2005
Deader trees
: Michael Malone at ABCNews.com plays taps for newspapers: Needless to say, I still read the news, much of it coming from the newspapers I used to religiously read. But I am not reading the "paper," either literally or figuratively, that the publishers want me to read. Throughout the day, I construct my own newspaper in cyberspace, a real-time assemblage of wire service stories, newspaper features, blogs, bulletin boards, columns, etc. I suspect most of you do, too.
In any other industry, a product that lost 1 percent of market share for two decades — only to then double or triple that rate of decline — would be declared dead. The manufacturer would discontinue it and rush out a replacement product more in line with the desires of the marketplace. So, let's finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate — 90-plus percent — that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.
So why do newspapers linger on? Why do so many papers refuse to accept reality and metamorphize into real Web presences rather than merely online downloads of their print copy?
One answer is that most newspapers are unbelievably retrograde. They grew up in a world of newsprint and that's where they intend to stay. They cannot believe an institution as venerable as the newspaper can ever go away....
This is the last great divide, and my sense is that few newspapers will be able to make the crossing. If they kill their print editions now, they won't have the revenues to make a smooth transition to cyberspace; but if they keep wearing their paper albatrosses, they'll have less of a chance of succeeding in the new world. Thus, if all of the old-fashioned newspapers are going to die, nearly all of the forward-looking ones will too. Before it is all over, the number of "newspapers" left in America will probably be less than 10 — and they might not be individual papers but rather new entities created out of the current large chains. They will become the primary sources of national and international news, delivered into multimedia form.
As for the local papers: they will be shut down, their presses depreciated and scrapped, their offices leased out and the newsroom reporters scattered to the four winds of blogdom and specialty Web sites … where they will provide local news, commentary, movie times and maybe even those long lost Little League box scores. Now about broadcast news.... [ via Bill Doskoch]
Jumping the shark for Jesus
: Many say that the Schiavo episode is splitting the Republican party; others say is it splitting Democrats, too; others say it is dividing America. But I think something more fundamental is happening:
The religious right is separating itself from the rest of America. The theocrats may have finally gone too far too often.
They have been aided and abetted --- but ultimately undermined -- by a media that bought their PR and presented the loud voices of a few as the voice of the nation marching to the right and up to the altar. But the overdose of overdoing it that we're seeing on TV these last few weeks may just be the catalyst that causes a backlash, that reminds us that we are a secular nation of churchgoers and that we value separation of church and state over either church or state: That is our mainstream.
In the case of Terri Schiavo, we have heard angry, even frightening rhetoric from the religious right: people in Florida and in Congress accusing judges of murdering Schiavo; the Schindlers and their advocates, many of them ministers, turning on even their allies (even on Jeb Bush if he doesn't do enough to satisfy them, if he doesn't do the impossible); online advocates saying that the laws and the courts should be damned; and conservatives throwing over their political philosphy opposing federalism and government interference in service of their religous philosophy.
It's not just Schiavo.
It's also about the FCC and censorship, where we have a few, a very few religious nannies trying to tell the rest of us what we cannot hear and see. And, again, the religious conservatives throw away their allegiance to small government and their opposition to government interference in citizens' lives in favor of their religous orthodoxy. (And religous Democrats ignore their belief in free speech -- not for religious principle but instead for cynical political gain ... which, I could argue, is worse, for it is unprincipled.)
Of course, it's about abortion as well: Every time I drive my kids to their orthodontist, I pass what must be a clinic and see protesters standing outside not just protesting but trying to shock with their images and words. They don't appear to be merely protesting or just angry; they look extreme.
And it's about sex: At the same time they oppose abortion, the religious right opposes sex education beyond pushing abstinence with young people; in the age of AIDS, that's doubly dangerous.
Finally, it's about attempts to stake claim to the moral high ground. See also David Brooks in The New York Times this weekend trying so very hard to be Mr. Reasonable. But, in the end, by taking what he calls the high moral ground, he accuses those who do not agree with his stand of being ammoral, or at least less moral: The socially conservative argument has tremendous moral force, but doesn't accord with the reality we see when we walk through a hospice. The socially liberal argument is pragmatic, but lacks moral force. He is arguing that only one side holds a moral argument. No, both sides have moral arguments but they are different arguments. There is not just one-true-way, or at least there's no way for us to know what it is... yet.
It's about some people telling the rest of us how we should live -- and this comes from the people most resent being told how to live. It's self-righteous and shrill. And I'm betting all that is turning off more people than it is converting them. That is jumping the shark culturally.
But it's happening politically, too, as the theocrats stand apart from their own political principles and from the rule of law and the voters who reject their actions.
I think that those factors alone -- shrill media appearances and hypocritical political actions -- are enough to spark a backlash against the religious fringe.
This will have impact on politics: I will not be surprised to see the mainstream of the Republican party disassociate itself from the fringe -- especially if the polls continue to scream that they should and especially if the Democrats stop acting politically fringy and self-righteous themselves and start inviting that mainstream in.
I hope there will be impact on the press: The press repeated again and again, 24 hours a day, that we are divided on this issue but, in fact, we are not: Most people backed Terri Schaivo's husband's efforts to do what he believed she wanted. (Hear On The Media this week on this.) A vast majority of people objected to Congress' intervention. But the press got that wrong in its running commentary, just as they get wrong the notion that we are a nation of red vs. blue extremes when, in fact, we are the nation of the vast maintream, a mainstream of individuals who all hold their own beliefs. Just as the Congress should looks at this episode and the polls and realize they blew it, so should the press.
And I hope this has cultural impact: We need to see a renewed defense and appreciation of the First Amendment: of free speech and separation of church and state. This is not about one true religion ruling the day; that is what our ancestors left so many years ago. This is about the democratic tension that occurs as our society struggles with what is right. That struggle is never over but we are blessed to be in a nation that allows us to struggle freely.
Mind you, I am writing this after leaving my church on Saturday setting up the lillies and pansies for the dawn of Easter sunday. And I am posting this on Easter morning as millions of Americans go to church -- huge numbers of them who may not be devout in media terms and, in fact, go only once or twice a year. These are the reasonably religious, not the zealots, not the theocrats, just Americans.
Easter is about celebrating a new day.
: LATER: Frank Rich bangs this same drum today.
: LATER STILL: Joe Gandelman joins in.
It comes to Britain
: Both the Observer and The Times of London write about the religious right coming even to Britain, where, says the Observer column, only 16 percent say religion is very important to them: The worldwide Anglican communion is in disarray, and only 16 per cent of Britons say that religion is very important to them. Yet God is suddenly the referee of choice for a secular nation. Leading churchmen want to take abortion to the ballot box and though the Prime Minister warns evangelical Christians that faith and politics don't mix, the religious right smells power. Says the Sunday Times Review: Meanwhile, Michael Howard had made abortion an election issue and suddenly secular Britain found itself in the distinctly weird position of having to “do God”, of having to face the fact that, like it or not, the Big Guy is back.
These are, of course, tentative steps. Howard and Blair know perfectly well that playing the God card in the modern, know-nothing, believe-nothing UK is a high risk move that is likely to be met with blank stares from the masses. Fewer than 8% of us go to church, since 1968 the number who believe in God has fallen from 77% to 44% and the number who positively do not believe in God has soared from 11% to 44%. If secularity can be defined as the destruction of conventional religion then we are, indeed, a secular nation.
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, seems therefore to be right, though not for reasons that would make him particularly happy. Backing calls for a reform of the abortion law last week in this paper, he wrote: “The idea that raising the issues here is the first step towards a theocratic tyranny or a capitulation to some neanderthal Christian right is alarmist nonsense.” A debate begins but on a different scale.
March 26, 2005
The wind blows through Bahrain
: Robert Mayer at the world-changing PubliusPundit reports freedom marches in Bahrain demanding government reform.
: Also, Babbling Bahraini has more on the release of the jailed Bahraini bloggers. The struggle is not over.
Abdul's Heroes
: The BBC has pix of a tunnel dug by prisoners escaping a U.S. prison in Iraq.
Hmm. If even a Nazi POW camp could become a sitcom, I wonder whether Abu Ghraib could be someday. Naw....
Whereabouts: tech hell
: I've spent/wasted an incredible number of hours in the last day on technology headaches. I reinstalled Visual Communicator to start making vlogs again (and it's working now and I still do love the program). And my son's brand new Dell laptop suddenly died (spent an hour and a half waiting on hold for Dell but then the gave me incredible service and so, try as I might, I can't complain). But in the end, I couldn't work or blog or live; I teched. If the toilet died, I wouldn't go through that; I'd call the plumber. What we need in this world is butt-crack geeks who can just fix this crap for us.
Against the grain
: Conservative radio talk-show host Neal Boortz breaks from the pack on Terri Schiavo with a religious argument that we have rarely heard: Where do your concerns truly lie, with the eternal soul of Terri Schiavo, or with her earthly body?...
Is it possible that the soul of Terri Schiavo has been floating – held in some prolonged and excruciating limbo – waiting for doctors to stop interfering with the process of her death? I believe that this is so, and that is why I have supported her husband’s desires to have her feeding tube removed. Terri Schiavo isn’t being murdered. She’s being allowed to die. Death will not be an end for Terri Schiavo, it will be a beginning. She will finally be allowed to claim the reward that ultimately we all seek, a reward she’s earned and deserves. : LATER: Nuclear Dann corrects me and says he is a libertarian and not a conservative and is, indeed, staying with the grain of libertarians who say that government imposition of medical treatment violates individual rights. Boortz, though, put himself in the club of nonliberal talk-show hosts and is certainly against the grain among them. I quoted it less for the political graininess than for the religious view we've seen infrequently.
Will the first blogging president be... Iranian?
: Hoder reports that a candidate for president of Iran is blogging. If he wins, would he be the first blogging president in the world? Isn't that ironic? Well, actually not: It's a testament to the cultural change Hoder brought to Iran with citizens' media. It's also, as Hoder notes, a commentary on the Iranian leadership that the site is now down because Hoder sent them too much traffic. As we Americans say: Heh.
Whose fault is the fakery?
: Jay Rosen praises the Boston University journalism faculty for condeming the use of "fake reporters" in video news releases.
Joe Territo says the fault here isn't in the White House but in the newsrooms that run them.
: More fakery: I got email headlined "Innovative Companies Interview Request on Forbes Radio Channel." Well, shucks, we're flattered.
But reading down to the seventh paragraph, I find the reason this smelled fishy: They want to charge $5 grand for the privilege of being "interviewed."
: UPDATE: Jay educates Joe.
March 25, 2005
Paranoia springs eternal
: James Miller at TCS tries to argue that mainstream media is behind the FEC's threats to regulate political blog links and every other fear befalling blogs. I think he's crafting a tin hat. In truth, every mainstream media executive I know -- and I do hang out in that crowd, in the daytime -- is trying to figure out how to embrace blogs. At worst, some are still ignoring them. Blame the FEC on the FEC. [via Glenn Reynolds]
The cost of free speech
: The Congressional Budget Office estimates the FCC will collect $10 million in fines over the next decade.
TV explodes on Amazon
: From PaidContent's digital jobs list, Amazon is doing more in video: : Amazon.com is looking for a Content Acquisition Manager (CAM) for our forthcoming Digital Video Store. The CAM's job will be to find and license content from content owners near and far.
A word from our sponsor
: Here's a free link to a Jessica Mintz story in the Journal on ads and blogs. I'm running out now for a day with the family so I haven't had a chance to read it... but I thought you'd like to. See you later.
It ain't over when it's over
: If you think media has overdosed on coverage of the Schiavo case, just wait until she dies. What should be a sad moment in a tragic story, a private mourning for her family -- yes, all the family -- will become, instead, a most public spectacle, you can be sure.
The rhetoric of the people before the cameras in Florida and Washington has gotten hotter and hotter. The crowds in Florida are growing. I fear the Schiavo riots, I really do.
There are a lot of ministers and people trumpeting Christianity down there. I hope some of them remember that this is a religion of forgiveness, grace, and peace -- remember that turning the other cheek thing, folks. Unfortunately, though, it is the men of the cloth who've been the angriest on TV.
I'll bet we'll see shrines beyond those for Elian Gonzalez. This story will not end soon.
What I'm really afraid of is that Fox will bring back John Edwards, the flim-flam TV man who says he talks to the dead -- yes, they interviewed even him on this story. Then we'll hear Terri speak.
Jon Stewart says: "The Schiavo feeding tube will soon be removed from the cable news networks." (Make sure to watch it.)
Now, of course, I was part of that feeding frenzy, doing reports on what the blogs said about Schiavo for MSNBC. I did that once, earlier in the story, and found lots of prayers and really nothing being said on the other side; there wasn't an other side online TV wants another side. They asked me to do it again, later, and I protested that we wouldn't see anything new, just more prayers; we wouldn't see two sides and cable news wants two sides. But I was wrong. In the meantime, Congress got involved; the story was now not just a media spectacle but also a political spectacle. Now there was plenty of talk on the blogs about the politics, the ethics, living wills, media. The comments in this blog alone exploded with discussion. The people were indeed talking about the story. So I reported it... more than once. (I leave it to you to judge my culpability in adding to the spectacle.)
Last night on Connected, I was glad to see Ron Reagan go after the people who've issued the most inflammatory rhetoric, accusing the judges in the case of wanting to murder Schiavo. Ron also asked one of the guests during the same segment in which I reported, again, on what the blogs were saying: Is media overdoing this; is this spectacle media's fault? I think he was as shocked as I was at the answer: The guest said no; the people were talking about this case and so it's OK for media to talk about it.
Hmmm. Chicken: Meet egg.
This, we are learning, is the nature of 24-hour news. It's no longer about picking the top stories and packaging them in a paper or a show. I've said before that we used to wait for the news to come to us and now the news waits for us to come to it. So now we turn on the TV and expect to see the hottest story. And each cable channel fears being the one on right then without the hottest story. So we all get the hottest story all the time. And the problem is that all "hottest stories" become equal: war = Terri Schiavo = Michael Jackson.
I'm not sure what the solution to that is. I'd like to see one of them try a format that guarantees the rest of the news, what else is happening in the world. I'd watch that.
In the meantime, in the Schiavo story, I hope we see some restraint from the participants and from the media. We'll see....
Stern's restraint
: Howard Stern was remarkably restrained this morning gloating about the Wall Street Journal story that reported on an investigation into the Imus Ranch and the PVS jock not paying the charity that runs the spread for his personal use of it. Howard, who has harped on this for years, played his Imus theme -- "I'm a Fake Cowboy" -- only a couple of times. The Journal story is a great read that also shows restraint: It doesn't accuse Imus of anything but let him paint an amusing self-portrait. But today, the Journal also had to report that the investigation is over. It's not scandal. But it is comedy.
March 24, 2005
Off-air
: Just got off MSNBC's Connected.
We talked Schiavo links and I'm glad to see Ron and Monica talk about how the rhetoric -- especially from Congress -- is getting overheated. BlogsForTerri is calling for people to fly to Florida. I hope that is just for a vigil but I fear that the anger is getting red-hot. I also mentioned a petition on MoveOn telling Washington to butt out (funny, you'd think it'd be the Republicans saying Washington should butt out of state business). And I mentioned the split in the Republican party, blogged below, quoting Andrew Sullivan and Joe Gandelman.
: On a general blogging segment, I reported the news on GoogleNews, below, and mentioned the good news of blogs in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
And I got to mention the growth of vlogs, pegged to the release of OurMedia.org as a new home for citizens' multimedia. And we played RocketBoom on the air. Now that's cool: citizens' TV on mainstream TV.
Ron said he'd be leaving early to see his vlogging coach.
Good Google news
: GoogleNews has dropped the nazi site. Says InternetNews: "Google News does not allow hate content," said Google spokesman Steve Langdon. "If we are made aware of articles that contain hate content, we will remove them."
Langdon said news media must apply to be included in Google News and that they are evaluated by editors before inclusion. He wouldn't provide a list of news media that Google News indexes, nor would he give details of the evaluation process or criteria for inclusion. I still want them to be transparent on that list and on their criteria. And note that some editor did decide to include the nazi site in the feed.
But it's gone now. Good for Google.
See also GoogleBlogoscoped.
: MORE: This is great... John at Private Radio put up a script that is scraping GoogleNews to discover its news sources. Great work! List is here.
Schiavo
: MSNBC just said that the Supreme Court refused to order reinserting the tube.
Blog confessions
: Steve Rubel wants Oprah to have bloggers on the show. That's a scary vision.
GOP meltdown?
: There's increasing buzz among -- what should I call them? nonleftist? -- commentators that the Republican party is splitting over the Schiavo case.
I'm not sure the -- what should I call them? progressive? -- other side should start singing "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead" quite yet. Bush has Teflon. I don't think Congress does, though.
Nonetheless, there are clear issues of inconsistency and ideology for the right: fights over whether religion trumps political philosophy.
And that should yield opportunities for Democrats -- not by yelling at nya-nyaing at the the Republicans over this too-sensitive story but instead by finding new middleground that; I'm not seeing that yet but I hope I will. Or to put it another way: With this case and others, the Republicans do not stand on clear principle -- or they can't decide what principle to stand on. So the Democrats have the opportunity to stop being a party of complaint and start being a party of principle.
All that said, the opportunity to nya-nya is, of course, irresistable. As Kos says, inspired by a poll that shows 82 percent of Americans opposed Congressional interference in the Schiavo case: This is turning into a disaster of epic proportions for the GOP. They thought they had the Dems wedged, and instead they have wedged themselves from the American public. Congress is being exposed as the cynical, power-mad, ethics-free zone that it has become under DeLay's leadership. On the melting GOP, Andrew Sullivan says: We're getting to the point when conservatism has become a political philosophy that believes that government - at the most distant level - has the right to intervene in almost anything to achieve the right solution. Today's conservatism is becoming yesterday's liberalism. And he continues: It's been clear now for a while that the religious right controls the base of the Republican party, and that fiscal left-liberals control its spending policy. That's how you develop a platform that supports massive increases in debt and amending the Constitution for religious right social policy objectives. But the Schiavo case is breaking new ground. For the religious right, states' rights are only valid if they do not contradict religious teaching. So a state court's ruling on, say, marriage rights or the right to die, or medical marijuana, must be over-ruled - either by the intervention of the federal Congress or by removing the authority of judges to rule in such cases, or by a Constitutional amendment....
Again, the demands of the religious right pre-empt constitutionalism, federalism, and even the integrity of the family. When conservatism means breaking up the civil bond between a man and his wife, you know it has ceased to be conservative. But we have known that for a long time now. Conservatism is a philosophy without a party in America any more. It has been hijacked by zealots and statists. Glenn Reynolds quotes blogger Mark Daniels: In taking jurisdiction over Terri Schiavo's case from the state courts, where conservative Republicans would have previously said it belonged, and handing it to federal judges, the Republican Party arrogated to the federal government breathtaking new powers that would have made Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan wince. On his MSNBC.com, Glenn looks at this from various angles, and says this is causing a split between Republicans and libertarians in the party. Congress's involvement in this case seems quite "unconservative" to me, at least if one believes in rules of general application....
Quite possibly. National security is the glue that has held Bush's coalition together. The war isn't over, and we haven't won yet, but it's going well -- Austin Bay notes that it's a war that we are winning -- and this is allowing the divisions to show. All of the people I've quoted are on the right, and they're all unhappy. One may argue that libertarians and small-government conservatives aren't a big part of Bush's coalition, but his victory wasn't so huge that the Republicans can surrender very many votes and still expect to win. So this is a real threat. And Joe Gandelman -- who has a great roundup of posts on this here; he is the best rounder-upper around -- sums it up this way: The genie is now out of the bottle: this wing of the GOP is at variance with process conservatives and many libertarians — and is defining the party as the party of theocracy. In other words, if God is on your side, the voters might not be....
: LATER: Of course, this is hardly the only issue to split parties. Hardly. Iraq was hardly unanimous in either party. And I like this description of the political splits in indecency from this week's Time cover story: Granted, conservatives and liberals tend to be offended by different things. Conservatives tend to see a culture glorifying promiscuity and drug use. Liberals get more concerned about violence and degradation of women. The right sees the machinations of amoral Hollywood. The left sees soulless megabusinesses dropping their standards to court the coveted 18- to 34-year-old male demographic. Here, too, there is a religous angle, by the way.
Google nazis
: I honestly do not understand those who don't understand the problem with GoogleNews including a nazi site in GoogleNews. Michael Zimmer writes: The whole point of GoogleNews is that you have a wide variety of sources. You can read, filter, process, absorb what you want, and ignore the rest. A plurality of voices, perspectives and, yes, even biases is a positive feature of web-based news aggregation. Readers might actually learn something about the world (and themselves!) by reading about how people they don't agree with (including anarchists, socialists, leftys, communists, etc) see an issue. Here's the comment I left there (pardon the caps for emphasis; it's easier than bold in a comments box): I honestly don't understand how you don't understand this: An EDITOR (or someone fufilling that function) at GoogleNews makes a SELECTION of sites to include in a NEWS service (read: JOURNALISM) and selects a NAZI site that actively goes on about hating people who are not white and Christian. This is not Google itself, which should vacuum up everything. This is a NEWS site. Is there no definition of news at all? Or more to the point, is there no definition of decency? Would you include Ku Klux Klan news? Would you include North American Man Boy Love Association news? These are choices and there are responsible and irresponsible choices. So we start getting to the definition of news: not in a sense of certification (official news) but in a sense of value (worth knowing).
Is it worth knowing what nazis think is news? No, it is not. In no universe.
On the other hand, is it worth knowing what al Qaeda thinks is news? They, too, are hateful, murdering nut jobs. Well, I could see a debate there because there is value in knowing what this enemy says.
But there are questions about the line you draw -- and GoogleNews cannot avoid that because it is making selections -- and also about presentation: When you present hate sites as news you redefine news.
I stand by my contention that including a nazi site is irresponsible.
Meanwhile, BlogHerald thinks this is about blogger jealousy: They included nazis but they didn't include blogs. No, if they never included a single blog, they certainly should not include nazis.
Neverdock thinks it's still about GoogleNews liberal bias. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd think that somebody who thinks he's funny at GoogleNews is saying to those who complain there aren't enough conservative sites in the service: 'OK, here is a right-wing site: a nazi site.' But I'm not a conspiracy theorist. And I think that the right/left bias is a different and still-fascinating issue because it assumes you can catalogue right v. left and I say that's a helluva lot more difficult than it sounds.
Oh, and if Agence France Presse wanted to pull its content out of GoogleNews wouldn't a better, more Euro-PC rationale have been that they didn't want to be associated with nazis?
: LATER: Michael Zimmer says in the comments that we should be clear that earlier in his post he said this: "I'm not here to defend or support the actual content of these various news sites...." Yes, to be clear, I'm not saying that Michael is defending nazi sites: He's questioning my questioning of their inclusion and I'm questioning him back ... and no, I'm not trying to be cute in the way I said that; believe it or not, I'm trying to be clear.
March 23, 2005
Les Moonves speaks
: Still at the ANA confab and CBS boss Les Moonves is being interviewed by Scott Donatan of AdAge. Asked about the future of CBS News, Moonves said: Obviously, this has not been a banner year for CBS News... We're making changes that probably should have happened a long, long tie ago. One of hte problems with being the Tiffany tnetwork was that people at CBS News still thought that Edward R. Murrow was down the hall and still alive....
All the networks have been operating the same way for 25 years in how they do the news and there's a new thing called cable news... We're looking at doing something somewhat different... We're looking at changing the format somewhat, makig it a bit more relevant, faster paced...
We've said this before: that single anchor voice of God.. may be over or certainly we should veer away from it. : On the American Idol voting glitch, Moonves jokes: Do you really think they had a problem or they wanted to stretch it out? "I wish I'd thought of it first for Survivor."
Fighting for the First Amendment
: I'm at an Association of National Advertisers' meeting on TV in New York and Bob Corn-Revere, the leading First Amendment attorney (whom I'll be interviewing at the Freedom to Connect conference) is speaking to the industry:
He is subbing for an FCC speaker and he's doing so because, he reveals, when Kevin Martin got the chairman's job at the FCC, people in the agency were told to cancel all speaking engagements.
He lists new content-control initiatives: on violence (see the post below), on children's TV and ad limits (including even the inclusion of URLs for network promotions), on advertising of food ("the new tobacco?"), on product placement, and, of course, on indecency and profanity.
Media on Media
: Will be on MSNBC at about 9:15a ET on nazi sites (out of the high-school shooting murders); plan to mention the GoogleNews dustup.
The value of aggregation
: Tribune, Knight Ridder, and Gannett buy a controlling stake in Topix. Unlike the idiotic Agence France Presse (hey, what do you expect... they're French), these companies -- like The New York Times, which bought promotion on Topix -- recognize the need for (a) aggregation of news for consumer convenience, (b) getting audience from such services, and (c) the distributed nature of news and media in the future.
A Saudi blog
: The country that may need blogging more than any other -- Saudi Arabia -- has a new blogger working in both English and Arabic. See SaudiJeans (Arabic blog here). He says that forums are still big in the Arab world but he bets that blogs will explode. We came across each other in links because he found Spirit of America's Arabic-language blogging tool. And he points to a story in the local paper about blogs. He says: I think blogs could make a real difference, especially in the Arab World, where the lack of freedom of expression is a main barrier to progress and development. And to encourage more Arab users to start blogging, I'm glad to announce that I'm ready to give away the design of my Arabic blog... About another reporter's story on blogs he reports: She also said the word "blog" is not translated to Arabic yet, which is wrong because the word "مدونة" (Modawanna) is a perfect translation, coined and approved by Arab bloggers.
Indecent
: Lots of news on the indecent indecency front:
: ANOTHER INDECENT BILL... Sens. John D. Rockefeller (a Democrat... for shame) and Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced an indecent indecency bill that is even more constitutionally abhorrent than the House version.
They would extend FCC censorship to violence, not just indecency. How the hell they're going to define violence is beyond me. So Saving Private Ryan can go on the air even with the F word but it has to go off again because it's violent? And let's get rid of the news, of course. Wave as you go down the slippery slope, senators: First, you want to censor indecency. Then profanity. Now violence. Warning: Political speech is not far behind.
And they would extend FCC censorship to cable and satellite. Warning: The internet is not far behind.
They also require full-screen, 30-second warnings every 30 minutes for any "violent and indecent programming... on broadcast, cable, and satellite programming [sic]." Since no one knows what violent and indecent programming is, the warning should just go up on every show.
They require more children's programming. So they want children to watch more TV, eh?
And they raise fines up to $3 million per day with a provision that appears to allow the FCC to double fines if the violation was scripted or if it occurs on a show with a "viewing or listening audience ... substantially larger than usual, such as a national or international championship sporting event or awards program..." Henceforth known as the Jackson Clause.
: IT'S THE CONSTITUTION, DUMMY... Even national nanny and FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein knows that this bill is unconstitutional: "Right now it's not in our rules to go after any material that's broadcast over cable or satellite," Adelstein said. If Congress were to make such a law, "it would likely be held unconstitutional in the courts. The courts have told us to be very careful about what we say is indecent and they recognize that we’re walking a tightrope between the First Amendment and the need to protect children from hearing this kind of thing.
"If it’s a cable system, or a subscription service like satellite or cable, people are paying for it," Adelstein continued. "They’re inviting it into their homes. And the basis for the broadcast restrictions is that it’s pervasive… But taking that into cable or satellite, the courts would probably look askance at." : CNN NOT FUCKED.... Just yesterday, the FCC turned down a complaint for a dropped F bomb on CNN during convention coverage because... well, duh, the FCC doesn't censor cable... yet.
Here's the Washington Post's take.
: ON TIME... A few notes on Time's cover story (not really online) on the indecency kerfluffle:
: THE SURVEY SAYS... A poll asks, "Should government ban it from TV?" Note that in no case does a majority say yes:
: Violence? 36 percent yes.
: Cursing and sexual language? 41 percent yes.
: Explicit sexual content, such as nudity? 41 percent yes.
: Drug and alcohol abuse? 33 percent yes.
Well bring on the naked, cursing, drunk ninja ladies!
: OK, then, how about that supposed national consensus of outrate over Janet Jackson's breast? Asked whether they were offended by the incident, only 31 percent said yes. Well, then, were they offended by the Desperate Housewives promotion on Monday Night Football? Only 24 percent said yes.
Asked whether any of these things were "never suitable" -- bare breasts; frontal nudity; bare buttocks; implied sex, no nudity; same-sex couple kissing; advertising for sexual potency drugs -- none gained a majority.
: DISNEY IS EVIL... The story drew to my attention the fact that a Disney executive just broke ranks and favored FCC regulation of cable -- because it's preferable (for Disney... to hell with the Constitution and free speech) to the alternative suggestion that cable customers should be able to buy only the channels they want. Says Broacasting & Cable: Of course, anytime you hear a media company volunteering for tighter government controls, it sets off the old Follow the Money alarm bells. As it happens, some lawmakers are suggesting an alternative to the content restrictions: forcing cable operators to allow “à la carte” channel shopping so that parents can opt not to receive channels they don’t want their kids to see. Mostly wholesome Disney doesn’t have much to fear there. Ah, but à la carte selection would also allow millions of subscribers who don’t like sports but do like cutting expenses to dump ESPN—one of the priciest items on cable’s prix fixe menu. Disgusting Disney.
: DAMN, DAMN, DAMN... Time follows around an "analyst" from the so-called Parents Television Council, Kristine Looney [note my restraint], as she catalogues even uses of the word "damn" in a data base covering the naughty bits in 100,000 hours of TV. Naughty includes "every incident of sexual content, violence, profanity, disrepect for authority, and other negative content."
Disrespect for authority is now indecent?
: I WISH THEY'D CLEAR OUT OF MY HOUSE... Time says that "almost single-handedly, the PTC has become a national clearinghouse for, an arbiter of, decency."
Whoa! These bozos appoint themselves to that role and Time swallows it. Even to the FCC, the PTC is not the arbiter of decency; even the FCC turns down many of its prudish yelps.
: DAY IN COURT... A court test of indecency law and enforcement is long, long overdue. Time says that "industry sources tell Time" that broadcasters are considering a court test case. I thought that was already underway with Viacom's refusal to pay the Janet Jackson tit tax and Fox's decision to fight the record Married by America fine that led to my FOIA (quoted in Time). Maybe they have another case. Good. More = merrier.
"There are difficulties" that the FCC faces, a broadcast executive tells Time. "One is that extreme [regulatory] positions are going to run into constitutional problems. The second is inconsistent and vague rulings are going to run into contstitutional problems."
March 22, 2005
Pathetic little troll
: There is a pathetic little troll I banned who is coming into various posts typing "poop" and snickering like the first grader he is. This the guy who has the bad taste to call himself Gandhi. He went overboard once too often. If he had taken his meds and behaved, I might have let him back. But instead, he went on a "poop." So intelligent. So mature. So friggin' pathetic. He is no longer welcome here. Just to the kind of guy I am, I'll link to him here so you can go read his fine prose in his house. And my advice to him: Get a life. But get your meds first.
: Just Barking Mad uncovers the whole conspiracy.
: UPDATE: I continue to play wack-a-mole with this little boy with no life. And to answer his questions stupid innuendo: I have no financial relationship whatesoever with anyone he lists (apart from making contributions to SoA... and he doesn't seem to understand that so I'll make it clearer: no one but my employer pays me); I've explained many times that ITM are the friends of one of the early bloggers in Iraq with whom I communicated; I never heard of the other organizations he tinfoil-hats about; and I do still wish this poor, pathetic little troll would get his meds.
GoogleNews II: What's missing?
:
: Below, I ask you to list questionable/wacky/offensive sites included in GoogleNews. Here, I ask you to nominate sites that are not included but should be. Please leave comments on this post.
GoogleNews: Whose news?
: Let's start reporting on GoogleNews. As you find questionable sites scraped by Google, please list them in the comments on this post. See post below on Google's nazi site. If Google isn't transparent, let's report on Google. Obviously, we won't all agree on what's questionable but let's use our collective effort and wisdom to judge GoogleNews' judgment. I'm not suggesting that there should be an orthodoxy of news or certification of news, but some of these sites are just ridiculous.
Case in point: Geologists in the East and West coasts are busy understanding a new theory that shows possible underground UFO bases all around the world....
According to this theory, the UFO bases need to be deep under the ground because the UFO crafts need to be close to the mantle of the earth. Servicing of these crafts can be done in that electromagnetic environment only. Film at 11.
Antisocial media
: Engadget reports that iPods are banned in a school as antisocial. My son just told me that in his school all the kids bring iPods to lunch but -- get this -- they're not allowed to bring books to lunch. Now, to be reasonable, I'm assuming that's because books are big and clunky and iPods aren't. Time to digitize the textbooks (and lighten those backpacks!). [via InstaPod]
Schiavo today
: The judge refuses order that Terri Schiavo's feeding tube be reconnected.
One moral to this story: You can't game the system. After all the grandstanding in Congress and at the White House and on TV news, it still came down to one judge charged with following the law. It's a system and most of the time, it works. If you don't l | |