September 23, 2004

JD Lasica has a piece in the Online Journalism Review that tries to solve the mystery of why Google News seems to skew right when it aggregates stories about John Kerry. Fascinating.

July 22, 2004

Great news from Dave Sifry at Technorati: Technorati is going to be CNN's guide to blogs discussing the Democratic Convention. Plus, Dave is going to do color blog commentary for CNN on-air. This will help pull more people into the blogosphere as readers and writers. Plus, I love the Technorati folks, so anything that makes them happy makes me happy. (Disclosure: I'm on their board of advisors.)

July 18, 2004

Ernie Miller responds to Susan Mernit's suggestion for Web-Media cross fertilization with an idea of his own:

Many election events (not to mention general news, such as the War in Iraq, White House Press, etc.) are going to have press pools (a group of journalists who cover an event and then by agreement share their reports with participating news media). My thought? Google (or similar) should join key press pools and make all materials available under a Creative Commons license (such as Attribution/Non-Commercial 2.0) so that bloggers can use the materials for their reports. Joining press pools frequently costs money, but the benefits of fostering the conversation in the blogosphere would very likely be worth it. If Google won't do it, perhaps bloggers could organize enough to fund a "Citizens' Media Press Pool Fund" or similar.

Now that's a cool idea!

July 01, 2004

...Or Fahrenheit 9 out of 11, as I prefer to think of it. I just posted it over at BlogCritics.

May 11, 2004

Michael O'Connor Clarke reprints an editorial from a small paper in Wisconsin imploring its readers to write more letters supporting President Bush in order to "balance" the influx of critical letters. Nice to see so blatantly expressed how the desire for balance can distort the news...

April 29, 2004

From Chris Nelson's blog:

The following is what one of the Bush administration's representatives told journalist Ron Suskind, regarding their philosophy behind the administration's actions and their relationship with journalists.

I'm quoting from an Air America Radio interview with Suskind:

Suskind: He says, you know, "You, Suskind, you're in what we call the 'reality-based community'" — that's actually the term he used.

I said, "The WHAT?"

He says, "The 'reality-based community'.". He said, "you all believe" — now let me see if I can get this right — "You all believe that answers to solutions will emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."

I said, "Yeah... YEAH, OF COURSE..."

He says, "Well, let me tell you how we really see it. You see, we're an empire now. And when we act, we kinda create a reality. Events flow from our actions. And because of that, what we do is... essentially... we act, and every time we act we create a whole new set of laws of physics, which you then judiciously study for your solutions, and while you're doing that we'll act again, promulgate a whole other set."

Janine Garofolo: "So you throw a rock in the pond, and the ripples go out..."

Suskind: And this guy said, "and that's where we'll stand ultimately; you'll study us, and we'll act. We'll be the actors, and you will study what we do. And if you're really good — on good behavior — maybe thirty years from now one of us will visit that graduate seminar you'll be teaching at Dartmouth in your tweed blazer." That's the thinking.

Cynical, yet dead-on accurate. It's not just history that's written by the victors. Now it's also journalism, politics, and talk radio.

It's scary that the Bushies recognize this. It is the nuclear bomb of politics. And it's what terrorists have always known: 19 guys can create a new normal in a single morning.

[Thanks to Joe Copperas for the pointer.]

April 04, 2004

It was disappointing to hear Terry Gross let Karen Hughes off the hook in her Fresh Air interview. Hughes said something like, "When people talk about this administration being secretive, I think they actually mean that there aren't many leaks." Then Hughes gave an example of a leak that did damage. "No," Terry didn't say, "That's not what we mean. We mean that Cheney won't release the names of the people he consulted with about energy policy..." and then she didn't go on from there.

April 02, 2004

Richard Clarke objects to MoveOn.org using clips of him in an ad. MoveOn replies that it's their right under the First Amendment to use the clips.

I assume MoveOn does have the right to use the clips. But I think it's bad politics. Clarke says:

I don't want to be part of what looks like a political TV ad. I'm trying hard to make this not a partisan thing but a discussion of how we stop terrorism from happening in the future — keep this on a policy issue. I don't want this to become any more emotional or personal than it has already."

Yes, and using the clips also hurts MoveOn's own cause. It plays into the Bush administration's attempt to portray Clarke as someone who acted out of partisan interests. I'd rather that MoveOn waited until the issue has played itself out before reinforcing the idea that Clarke is out to get the Bushies.

(Thanks to Zoltan Majdik for the link.)

April 01, 2004

As you've undoubtedly heard, a Canadian judge has made, in a nutshell, all the right decisions about file sharing and copyright, and then added in a defense of customer privacy as well. David Akin of the Canada's Globe and Mail blogs about this here, but you should check his overall blog for updates.

March 30, 2004

JD reviews Lessig's Free Culture. Positive and insightful.

March 22, 2004

Josh Marshall on Cheney on the Richard Clarke affair and The NY Times on the Clarke affair.

March 12, 2004

Mary Matlin today on CNN immedialy denied that the new Bush ad is an "attack ad." She said that the ad merely tells the truth about Kerry's voting record.

This is simple. When an ad solely discusses an opponent, it's an attack ad. It may not or may not be vicious or unfair, but if you're not focusing on your candidate, you're attacking the other guy. Quibbling about this just makes you look like a scaredy-pants.

You can see the Bush ads here. The one on Kerry is called "100 Days." The one called "Forward" is not an attack ad. It's merely a pastiche of tendentious lies and phony emotion. Or so I would say if I weren't a seasoned and objective observer.

March 01, 2004

Jay finds a positive example, a reporter who sets out to avoid the lures of the Master Narrative. Brilliant, important stuff.

[Cross-posted at Loose Democracy]

February 24, 2004

Tim Porter blogs some of the highlights of the Digital Democracy Teach-In's panel on the media. The transcript is here.

February 20, 2004

Salon this morning is running an article of mine about the "echo chamber" meme, i.e., the idea that the Net encourages members of groups to listen only to their own opinions. I think it's a confused meme that diverts attention from the real echo chambers, beginning with the mainstream media. And then there's a president who has the newspapers summarized for him by his objective aides. Here's what W told Brit Hume:

I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. ... I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. ... And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

Joe Conason points out that maybe this is why the President thinks we invaded Iraq because Hussein wouldn't let inspectors in, that he (W) has been cutting discretionary spending more than Clinton did, and that his new budget "cuts the deficit in half in five years."

February 07, 2004

I've worked for a few days on a long posting about why the "echo chamber" meme is deeply flawed. But Joseph Menn just published a piece in the LA Times on the Echo Chamber effect. My piece is still too confused to publish, so instead I'm just going to post the final point it makes. Then maybe I'll figure out how to say the more complex thing I want to say. So, here goes:

The echo chamber meme distracts us from the true echo chamber: The constellation of media, especially in the US.

The Internet as a whole, presents the broadest range of opinion, belief, feeling and creativity in the history of civilization. If you are not on the Net, you are limited to a diminishing selection of outlets expressing a diminishing range of views. Stories are picked up and replayed. Master narratives determine, with the rigidity of a machine for extruding plastic, the basic way of presenting those ideas.

No, the media is the real echo chamber. The fact that it explicitly presents itself as a forum for objective truth, open to all ideas, makes it far more pernicious than some site designed to let fans rage about how much better Spike was on Buffy than he'll ever be on Angel.

We are at a dangerous time in the Internet's history. There are forces that want to turn it into a place where ideas, images and thoughts can be as carefully screened as callers to a radio talk show. The "echo chamber" meme, by implying that the Net really isn't diverse, plays into the hands of those who are ready to misconstrue the Net in order to control it.

[BTW, someone who saw a draft of the longer piece assumed that my comment about the media echo chamber is intended to blame the media for Dean's falter. Not at all. That's not my intent and I don't even blame the media (much) for that.]

January 31, 2004

Nice piece by Katha Pollitt in The Nation on the stinky, sexist reporting about Judy Steinberg Dean. (Thanks to Doc for the link.)