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March 21, 2005

Demand Google News transparency

: We're demanding transparency of mainstream news.

Well, it's high time we get transparency from GoogleNews.

Instapundit and LGF point to a nazi site -- complete with "love your race" graphics -- that is part of Google News, while mainstream sane blogs are not.

Enough.

Google: Release a complete list of your news sources now. And institute a means for questioning those choices and for suggesting other choices now.

Google: It's bad enough that you won't share information about ad revenue sharing. But not to share information about your means of selecting news sources is inexecusable... in this case, evil.

: UPDATE: Roger L Simon killed Google ads for two reasons.

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The scariest thing about this...

: ... is that instead of waking up to music or a buzzer like a normal person, Matthew Yglesias wakes up to politics. So he does, indeed, eat, sleep, and dream this stuff.

: Meanwhile, David Weinberger needs more sleep.

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The illusory political appeal of the Schiavo case

: An ABC poll shows strong opposition to Congressional and Presidential interference in the Schiavo case:

The public, by 63 percent-28 percent, supports the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube, and by a 25-point margin opposes a law mandating federal review of her case. Congress passed such legislation and President Bush signed it early today.

That legislative action is distinctly unpopular: Not only do 60 percent oppose it, more — 70 percent — call it inappropriate for Congress to get involved in this way. And by a lopsided 67 percent-19 percent, most think the elected officials trying to keep Schiavo alive are doing so more for political advantage than out of concern for her or for the principles involved.

This ABC News poll also finds that the Schiavo case has prompted an enormous level of personal discussion: Half of Americans say that as a direct result of hearing about this case, they've spoken with friends or family members about what they'd want done if they were in a similar condition. Nearly eight in 10 would not want to be kept alive.

In addition to the majority, the intensity of public sentiment is also on the side of Schiavo's husband, who has fought successfully in the Florida courts to remove her feeding tube. And intensity runs especially strongly against congressional involvement.

Included among the 63 percent who support removing the feeding tube are 42 percent who "strongly" support it — twice as many as strongly oppose it. And among the 70 percent who call congressional intervention inappropriate are 58 percent who hold that view strongly — an especially high level of strong opinion.

Views on this issue are informed more by ideological and religious views than by political partisanship. Republicans overall look much like Democrats and independents in their opinions.

But two core Republican groups — conservatives and evangelical Protestants — are more divided: Fifty-four percent of conservatives support removal of Schiavo's feeding tube, compared with seven in 10 moderates and liberals. And evangelical Protestants divide about evenly — 46 percent are in favor of removing the tube, 44 percent opposed. Among non-evangelical Protestants, 77 percent are in favor — a huge division between evangelical and mainline Protestants.

Conservatives and evangelicals also are more likely to support federal intervention in the case, although it doesn't reach a majority in either group. Indeed, conservative Republicans oppose involving the federal courts, by 57 percent-41 percent.

[via Joe Gandelman]

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Turning the tide in Iraq

: Note well that The New York Times noted on its front page a tide turning against the insurgents in Iraq. John Burns writes:

In the first 18 months of the fighting, the insurgents mostly outmaneuvered the Americans along Haifa Street, showing they could carry the war to the capital's core with something approaching impunity.

But American officers say there have been signs that the tide may be shifting. On Haifa Street, at least, insurgents are attacking in smaller numbers, and with less intensity; mortar attacks into the Green Zone have diminished sharply; major raids have uncovered large weapons caches; and some rebel leaders have been arrested or killed.

American military engineers, frustrated elsewhere by insurgent attacks, are moving ahead along Haifa Street with a $20 million program to improve electricity, sewer and other utilities. So far, none of the work sites have been attacked, although a local Shiite leader who vocally supported the American projects was assassinated on his doorstep in January.

But the change American commanders see as more promising than any other here is the deployment of large numbers of Iraqi troops.

The story is well-reported, getting down to details of tactics fighting insurgents in this one place.

But this is a trend we've been hearing elsewhere. Last week on MSNBC, the military analyst made a convincing case with numbers for the declining activities of the insurgents.

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Blogvision

: USA Today features the blog segment on CNN's Inside Politics and that's good. I'm delighted that CNN has given bloging a regular berth on the air. And let's also note that Jon Klein, the head of the network, does, indeed, like and respect blogs.

I think they also should have noted the constant blog segments on MSNBC since last year -- now aggressively presented on Connected -- plus blog-happy TV personalities such as CNBC's Larry Kudlow.

It's odd, by the way, that Fox is not a leader in blogs. They were early on -- online. Remember that Glenn Reynolds blogged for them until the internal booster left and he switched to MSNBC.com. You'd think that blogs would be perfect for Fox: independent (and, yes, often conservative) voices and inexpensive programming; a great fit.

: MORE: Andrew Tyndall adds in the comments:

Fox News Channel made news last year in all the publicity around Outfoxed about how disciplined its top-down message-of-the-day operation was at presenting a unified line across all dayparts. Although I personally was not as outraged as others about the instructions for framing stories that those memos contained, they were certainly no evidence of love for "independence" at FNC. A diverse panel of independent bloggers would be anathema to FNC's renowned message discipline.

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More Schiavo

: See Mark Kleiman on the irony of other cases involving the Texas Futile Care Law signed by Gov. George W. Bush himself.

: Matthew Yglesias sends us to a good post by Rivka on the medical claims in the case; see another on the ethical issues. And Rivka recommends a post by Hilzoy, which includes a picture of a scan of Terri Schiavo's brain.

: Barbara O'Brien says (relevant to the economic points I made below):

We need a list of politicians and commentators, including bloggers, who have been calling for cuts in Medicaid but who now have joined in the "save Terri Schiavo" cult. These people need to be challenged to take her off Medicaid and pay for her maintenance themselves.

[via Kevin Drum]

: My views today here.

: Below, I said that the connection would not be made between this case and the death penalty. But right now on MSNBC's Connected, Sister Helen Prejean talks about the Catholic church coming out strongly against the death penalty.

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Suncasts

: Joe Territo makes a very good suggestion: podcasts of congressional debate.

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A soldier's tales

: Just got email sending me to a pretty amazing blog by a soldier in Baghdad. I now see that the email came from that soldier. Glad he sent it. Just to take one post as an example, the bloggers writes about helping a soldier under his command with an SAT question and the soldier comes back in later to ask an uncomfortable question:

What SPC Frances said as he sheepishly stood before my desk staring at the floor was “Sir, you’re like, ummmm, you know, really smart. And you’re doing this when you could ummmm, you know, so many other things. Don’t you wish you were, ummm doing something better?”.

The question is one I’ve heard from several well meaning individuals, but never, ever from a soldier.... The first deadly lie is that soldiers are stupid. The second is that the Army is a dumping ground for people with no other options....

...I told him about how part of my heart chipped off when I looked into a mass grave in Bosnia. How for days after my dreams were clouded with an image of the very earth opening a yawning pit to engulf the dead, only to choke on their numbers and leave them on the surface half swallowed.... And the story that did not need telling, the story of our ongoing struggle with insurgents who revel in the misery and deaths they cause our forces and the Iraqis.

...I told SPC Frances to close his eyes and I would tell him why. As he closed his eyes I told him to imagine his young wife, his beautiful infant daughter and the future he wanted for them. He paused a moment and a smile slowly creased his face. As he looked up I caught his eyes and told him a simple truth. I told him that the thin line that separates the two realities isn’t a line on a map or the signature block on a document filled with hollow proclamations. The dividing line between the two kingdoms is a long line of soldiers. And that is why I’m proud to call myself a soldier. Its not about a lack of options, or the size of my paycheck. Its about what kind of world I want to leave for my children if I am lucky enough to be a father.

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Going tab

: The New York Times reports today on the switch to tabloid just announced for The Jersey Journal, the paper published out of the building where I work most days.

Apart from sometimes bragging about some bloggy things happening at my day job or asking questions of you all for a project, I try to make a point of not getting into discussions of company policy on this blog because it's a clear conflict; apart from the sport of watching me tie my tongue in knots, it wouldn't be of much value. That, by the way, is why I disagree with Debbie Weil and Rick Bruner when they ding Boeing and GM executive bloggers for not immediately gabbing about public controversies in their companies. Especially in public companies where their words could have an impact on stock prices, there is only so much they are allowed to say and they should not try to use their individual platforms to set company policy.

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. Neither is the tabbing of the Jersey Journal, which I'm delighted to see happen (the prototype is great and the format is perfect for that paper).

Now, at last, I'll start getting to the point: The Times story is written by Kit Seelye, a good reporter on the media beat whom I read all the time, and when she called there was a moment's awkwardness, for it was a story cowritten by her that set me off in my, shall we say, theatrical complaint about some Times' coverage of bloggers, which led to the email exchange with Times Executive Editor Bill Keller. So now she was calling on a story regarding my day job, which presented an interesting new conflict in the double life of MediaMan and BlogBoy.

She was extremely nice, saying that they tried to get the essence of my quote. I rather fell over myself to be cordial back just to get quickly past that awkwardness. (And, no being nice wasn't going to get me treated better in the story; that is the advantage of dealing with professional, dispassionate reporters; they will most likely fall over themselves to be fair in such circumstances.) And the truth is that I have no problem with the reporters who wrote that story and I frequently link to and quote their work; I did have a problem with that story and, Lord knows, I had my say.

It occurred to me that this is like being a critic: I absolutely love some shows by David Kelly and I don't like others and neither judgment has anything to do with Kelly himself but only with his work and my individual view of it. It's not personal. As a critic though, I never met Kelly and for all these reasons didn't want to; I wanted to maintain some separation and remain just a member of the audience, not a would be friend. But in this small world, we bloggers could very well run into folks we write or snark about (at one conference or another) and though that can cause a moment's awkwardness, we still should say what we think. Should I say it less theatrically sometimes? Sometimes, yes.

But that's still not the point. Here, at long, long last is the point: Blogging is also not like being a critic because most of our criticism tends to be negative, at least when it comes to the press. When I was a TV critic, I wrote about shows I liked and shows I didn't and I argued that the more valuable reviews for my readers were the positive ones (who wants to waste time on a piece of junk?). That's why I instituted the grades that became Entertainment Weekly's critical conceit, so readers woudn't have to waste their time figuring out what we thought of a "D" show.

In this new intersection of citizens' and professional media, I think it would be valuable to give positive reviews, too. Of course, we often do that simply by linking to a good story. But when we write about the press and how the job of the press is done, it's usually to find fault. That is valuable, I believe, and it should continue to give ballast to the hot-air balloon that the press has become. But it's also important to value good reporting, or many fear we'll start to lose it.

Will I do that? I have no idea. I'm not taking a pledge for I'll probably fall down on it. But as I thought about this analogy of blogger to critic, it made me think that it's also important to recognize good work and to say it more often.

There: That was my point. And I did a damned bad job of getting to it. I give myself a D. I'm going to go to a mirror and rant at me now.

: Oh, and by the way, I think I should be very proud to have gotten the word "cooties" into the New York Times.

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How news spreads... now

: Doc has neat stats on how the news of Yahoo's purchase of Flickr spread on the internet vs. MSM:

Technorati finds 1853 yahoo flickr results, mostly about Yahoo buying Flickr. Google Web finds 350,000 results, starting with old reports, mostly on blogs, of rumors that Yahoo might buy Flickr. Google News finds 22 results, of which only this blogcritics item has current news on the matter. That's at 5pm, Mountain time, today. [Sunday]

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Citizens' media finds a home

: This is a big deal: OurMedia.org has launched as a home for citizens' media. This matters mostly because distributing audio and video you create can cost you a fortune in bandwidth. Now here's a place to put it. I don't think this is about being a portal to citizens' media; the entire point of this new world is that it's distributed. But it allows more people to serve more stuff. I've watched some videos; some are good and, of course, some are crap: nature of the beast. What will make this work, of course, will be the links to individual pieces from weblogs and news sites.

Congratulations to J.D. Lassica, Marc Canter, et al for making this happen. It is a very good thing.

: LATER: Mostly Muppet says:

“Our media” should be fully distributed using a leader and innovator in P2P software - BitTorrent. Hosting large multimedia files on a web server is so Web 1.0.

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Schiavo fallout

: As Congress and the President rushed into their exploitation of Terri Schiavo, they set off a bomb that will have considerable fallout, I think:

: Without incredibly explicit instructions directly from the patient -- and even with explicit instructions from the spouse or guardian -- I can see doctors and hospitals refusing to take people off life-support for fear that some family member can come forward and start suing.

: Not that moneyu should be a factor in matters of life and death -- though, of course, it is in the insurance industry -- but we are going to end up with who-knows-how-many-more vegetative patients who will be kept alive out of fear of litigation and the high cost of maintaining them will fall to the people through insurance and taxes.

: We now have the federal government -- and not just the federal goverment but both houses of Congress and the President himself -- inserting themselves into an individual medical, legal, family dispute. Watch the avalanche of individual cases that will now fall upon Washington: You did it for Terri, why not for my cousin?

: The Republicans set some odd precedents in matters of state's rights and government interference in individuals' lives that may come back to haunt them.

: You can bet there will be attempts to extend what happened last night as a principle of life into the debate over abortion.

: You can bet you will not see attempts to extend this principle into the debate over the death penalty, however.

: You will see Terri Schiavo continue to be used as a political hostage as any Democrat who dared question the wisdom and legality of this action will be accused by opponents in the next election as being against life.

What else?

This is not the result of deliberative government and the rule of law. This is the result of the fog of media and cynical politics.

: MORE: I also believe that this will have an indirect impact on the issues surrounding right-to-die and euthenasia. I do agree that starving a person to death -- or choking them by withdrawing a resperator -- is potentially cruel (the arguments about whether a person without a brain feels pain are, of course, inconclusive). I would be scared of agreeing to die that way. But if I were eased into death with drugs, that might be a different matter. [Note to the future: Do not take this as my living will. I'm not sure yet.] But to ease me into death with drugs -- in other words, to kill me with medication -- is illegal in all states but Oregon. And so we are forced to choose what certainly seems to be a crueler means of ending life. It's not wrong to draw the parallel many have (one commenter on this post, one blogger I quoted on MSNBC last week) to death-penalty treatment: We also cannot be sure whether they suffer (there is debate about that) but even if they do, it is for a far, far shorter time than starving someone to death or choking them (which is terribly frightening to me). So more fallout of this case -- quite unintended by those who set off the bomb -- could be more liberalization of laws regarding medically assisted death. Or put it this way: If I wrote my living will with explicit instructions [again: I'm not going that yet] saying that I would want life support removed but only with sufficient narcotics to cause death, what would doctors and courts do then?

: Joshua Claybourn discusses the constitutionality of the legislation just signed. Here's a link to the Senate bill. See also Joe Gandelman's analysis of the politics.

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The star Bittorrent made

: By now the story is everywhere: Fiona Apple's unreleased album is spreading all over the internet thanks to Bittorrent (I just downloaded it and what I've heard so far is good). Sony wouldn't release the album but I wouldn't be surprised if they did now.

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Cuff 'im

: We're wasting an ankle bracelet on Martha Stewart.

How much better it would be if we slapped that ankle bracelet on a sex offender.

The slime who confessed to kidnapping and murdering Jessica Lunsford was a sex offender who was not where he was registered; he was across the street from the poor little girl and that's where he killed her.

Registration, unfortunately, is not enough. Something more needs to be done. So shy shouldn't sex offenders be cuffed with electronic bracelets and tracked for the rest of their lives?

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