BuzzMachine

In a few posts lately, I have connected the apparently unconnected incidents of the riots and deaths over the alleged offense of the Mohamed cartoons, the David Irving imprisonment over Holocaust denial, and the suspension of Mayor Ken Livingstone in London over an offensive insult. In today’s Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash writes an eloquent column that also ties together these threats to chill speech under what he calls the “creeping tyranny of the group veto.” And he adds one more case, a story that has been getting much attention here in the U.K.: The bravery of a teenager to stand up against animal-rights fanatics and to stand for research and science, which has led to counterdemonstrations in favor of reason. Ash writes after watching this counterprotest in favor of an animal-research lab at Oxford:

…I was proud of the demonstrators who were reminding my university what, at best, it is still about: the pursuit of truth and the defence of reason. Protests against student loans or higher rents - these we expect. But here were students turning out on a chilly Saturday morning to stand up for science.

At stake was much more than the particular issue of using scientific tests on animals in order to save human lives. For a few minutes, Mansfield Road, Oxford, was at the front line of a new struggle for freedom that is being fought in many different places and guises. These days, the main threats to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of association no longer come from the totalitarian ideological superstate that inspired George Orwell to write his 1984…. That totalitarian horror still exists in places like Burma, but the distinctive feature of this new danger is the creeping tyranny of the group veto.

Here the animal rights campaign has something in common with the extremist reaction to the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, as seen in the attacks on Danish embassies. In both cases, a particular group says: “We feel so strongly about this that we are going to do everything we can to stop it. We recognise no moral limits. The end justifies the means. Continue on this path and you must fear for your life.” …

If the intimidators succeed, then the lesson for any group that strongly believes in anything is: shout more loudly, be more extreme, threaten violence, and you will get your way. Frightened firms, newspapers or universities will cave in, as will softbellied democratic states, where politicians scrabble to keep the votes of diverse constituencies. But in our increasingly mixed-up, multicultural world, there are so many groups that care so strongly about so many different things, from fruitarians to anti-abortionists and from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Kurdish nationalists. Aggregate all their taboos and you have a vast herd of sacred cows. Let the frightened nanny state enshrine all those taboos in new laws or bureaucratic prohibitions, and you have a drastic loss of freedom.

Ash argues that direct incitement to kill or commit violence deserves prosecution; saying something offensive does not. For someone to say ‘kill the Jews’, or ‘kill the Muslims’, or ‘kill the Americans’, or ‘kill the animal experimenters’, and points to particular groups of Jews, Muslims, Americans or animal experimenters — is one matter. Saying something that offends these groups and, they think, justifies their violence is not incitement.

So, Ash concludes:

That’s why, of all the recent high-profile cases where free speech has been at issue, that of the London-based hatepreacher Abu Hamza is the only one where I feel a criminal conviction was justified. Not because he was a Muslim rather than a Christian, a Jew or a secular European. No. Because he was guilty of incitement to murder. This is the line on which we must take our stand. Facing down intimidation, backed by the threat of violence, is the key to resisting the creeping tyranny of the group veto. Here there can be no compromise.

Jeff Cole of USC Annenberg just gave a compelling presentation at OPA of his five-year study of the impact of the internet on media and more. Rather than random bits, I’ll get a copy and share some of the fascinating findings later. The lead to the story: Newspaper doom (except, oddly, Sunday papers).

At OPA, Esther Dyson asks advertisers whether they are being disintermediated by Google and/or users. Rishad Tobaccowala, the master of the media soundbite and head of Publicis’ new Denuo, says no one is being disintermediated. The people want power — I believe he said we want to be entertained, connected, and empowered — and we will do what we do and marketers and media have no choice but to align with it. He gets applause.

Rishad talks about overdoing the age of relationships. “I want my headache to go away, I don’t want a relationship with Tylenol.”

I’ll paraphrase: Don’t overvalue brands. Don’t overdo CRM. Think human.

Asked about the value of research and measurement, Rishad says the results are in: Digital works.

Jay Rosen’s NYU blogging class produces a Blue Plate Special exhaustively reviewing big newspapers’ blogs, charting the state of the art, and interviewing USA Today’s Kinsey Wilson. I’ve been playing with the idea of having journalism students review media — wondering whether it was too meta — but I think this proves it works.

Ali Rahnema, managing director of the World Association of Newspapers, is pitching the OPA on WAN’s initiative to go after Google News and the aggregators. He acknowledges that some comments he has gotten are positive and some are angry that they are just a dead-tree industry trying to protect themselves. I vote with the latter. They don’t get it. Rahnema asks, could Google News exist if this content were not created by those papers?

That is so much the wrong question. The real question is: Will news organizations in the future exist if they are not found on Google and company?

If you want to boycott search and links, then you will die on paper.

: Rich Karlgaard of Forbes asks the OPA audience whether they agree with Rahnema about Google. Very few raise their hands. He asks who disagrees A vast majority of hands go up. Thank goodness for good sense.

: Obnoxious blogger that I am, I get up to challenge the protectionist panel and said that with their attitude, I fear for the future of the industry and of journalism because the distribution of today is about being found in search and links and aggregation and if you are not there you are not found.

Zach Leonard of Timesonline.com said that aggregators are like newsstands and they are a place to be found.

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, is giving a keynote at the Online Publishers Association. It’s good enough to live-blog.

Glocer said a year ago, the focus of Reuters was on “the consumer as editor,” with tools such as RSS to allow consumers to consume differently. Now, it has gone far beyond that:

They’re consuming, they’re creating, they’re sharing, and they’re publishing themselves. So the consumer wants to not only run the printing preess, the consumer wants to set the Linotype as well….

Our industry is facing a profound challenge from home-created content…. If we create the right crossroads, provide the consumers with the appropriate tools… we can harnass what otherwise from the outside would look like a punk revolution….

He says that media historians will see the acquisition of MySpace by News Corp as a “turning point…. Sites like Myspace are rebuilding our world” because they provide a means for anyone who has anything to share to do so. “What we are seeing today is an almost continuing talent show.”

“Technology is creating a kind of weird, hybrid world” of mashups, he says. He recognizes a “demand for this new kind of creativity” and there is also an advertising demand for it.

: What’s great about Glocer’s talk is not only that he gets it but he gives us respect. Standing in London, he compares bloggers to the great diarists. He says that people will turn to the Rafats of the world to interpret news. He says that bloggers were important in coverage of the last U.S. election. He says that citizen journalism has a long tradition, comparing citizens’ reports of 7/7 with a survivor’s account of the Titantic crash.

What has really changed is the nature of publishing, a “Gutenbergian transformation” that involves both tools and distribution.

“If the user wants to be both author and editor, and technology is increasingly enabling this, what will be the role of the media company…?” He has three answers: Media companies will be a “seeder of clouds.” Nice analogy. I call it a magnet and would recommend that to him for he says that just creating content is not enough; they must attract the people. The second role is to be a “provider of tools… We need to produce open standards and interoperability to allow” disparate people to create content of disparate types. “Let’s not make the same mistakes newspapers did with the protectionist online strategies that characterized Internet 1.” By that he means not recreating the old content in the new medium. The third role, he says, is that media companies will be “filter and editor.” He says that “the good stuff will rise to the top” online.

: Glocer uses the Tsunami and the Concorde crash to show how citizen journalists and professional journalists together tell the story more quickly and completely. “There’s no monopoly on being in the right place at the right time.”

“We can’t be a chokehold in a desparate effort to close the digital pipe,” Glocer says, arguing that media companies must not try to protect what they have by restricting those who come next.

: Speaking to fellow media companies, he concludes: “We are the go-between providing the structure and support… between the information provider and the consumer, even if today they are the very same person.” He tells them that trust is critical and so he argues that in a world with so much information, “the consumer gravitates to trustworthy brands.”

He asks what this means for Google and China and answers the question by not answering it: “Reputation is hard-won and easily lost.”

And he urges these media companies to understand and encourage citizen media.

: I get up to ask a question about copyright and remixing: He understands the value of being part of the converstation, part of the remix and so where does he think the line is in use of his material? He says that in the U.S. there is a fairly clear line in fair use but there is a question about objectionable use. He says content creators should have the right to set appropriate use; he’s endorsing Creative Commons (-like) licenses. He says that Reuters puts its RSS feeds out in the hope that bloggers will use them and include them in the conversation and if we quote a story they’re happy.

Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, who’s on the stage with Glocer, says he now reads Real Clear Politics and thus reads the sources of the opinions there less and he asks, “Are these guys friends or foes?” Glocer says they could be a foe to newspapers but they are a friend to readers.

In a related question, Karlgaard — looking for the dark side of the cloud still — asks whether bloggers et al are “a threat more in the loss of readers or the loss of revenue.” Glocer answers revenue and he says that bloggers are helping media find a new and younger audience. I think that’s also the right answer to the question about aggregators.

: LATER: Karlgaard leaves a comment emphasizing that he’s not a gloomy protectionist; he was just being a moderator.

Well, give points to Yahoo for recognizing — or to Terry Semel for forcing Lloyd Braun to recogize — the mistake of trying to ape old media on the internet. Braun, who seemed determined to build a Hollywood studio — a Time Warner without pesky print — recanted the strategy in an interview with Saul Hansel.

Indeed, Mr. Braun said yesterday that the way to keep users on Yahoo’s site longer — and thus be able to show them more advertising — was to offer ways they can create their own content and look at content created by others. He pointed to the site Yahoo built for the 2006 Winter Olympics, which prominently featured photographs from Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site, along with articles both by news agencies and by a few columnists exclusive to Yahoo.

“I now get excited about user-generated content the way I used to get excited about thinking about what television shows would work,” he said….

“Original content is the salt and pepper on the meal,” he said. “It is certainly not the engine driving this.”

He acknowledged that coming off developing ABC programs like “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives,” he had overly grand expectations for what he should do at Yahoo.

“I realized I have to check my ego at the door for a moment, and forget whatever expectations people had about me because of my former life, and really take a hard look at who should this business be built for the long term — a business that is not dependent on a series of expensive one-off’s to survive,” he said. Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said Yahoo’s shift in strategy was sound. “Embracing things like blogs and sharing of content between individuals” is at least as important as “coming up with the next mega-online event,” he said. “The Internet is such a niche content environment that the broadcast model does not really work.”

Emphasis mine. It’s as if Umair Haque consulted for them and they got it: This is not a medium made by blockbusters. Neither is it a medium made by content — “user-generated” (ugh) or otherwise. It is a medium of connections.

And somebody should wake up Valleywag to restart the Braun departure speculation.

Reading The Independent this week is a hoot. It is a self-parody of liberal orthodoxy. The best so far: To mark the start of Lent, The Independent made some suggestions about what to give up, like driving, bottled water, shopping at supermarkets and using plastic shopping bags there. Oh, and you now have to toss your iPod:

IPods are everywhere. We listen to them on trains, in the gym, and at home. But while we have been giving the world our very own soundtrack, we have forgotten that the world plays a mean tune itself.

“IPods are another distraction,” says Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler magazine. “They blot out our misery, but the misery is still there. If you are bored on the tube, bus or commuter train, I would recommend carrying around a copy of Blake’s collected poetry.”

“When you’re listening to an iPod,” says the philosopher AC Grayling, “what you’re trying to do is shut out the outside world. … If you take your earphones out you can hear that there is wind in the trees and birds in those trees still.”