While the Doctor's away

a collection of links to the alternative press, media and politics commentary and analysis, and way too much data. Use wisely, use well.

Priceless

Serendipidy

Appropos of the post below, the nation's finest newspaper weighs in:

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence

Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored

"The world’s most ambitious vanity press"

There's a terrific article in the most recent Journal of American History (June 2006) by Roy Rosenzweig: "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past." Available here. Or, try this New Yorker take.

Particularly interesting is how much time appears to be devoted to discussions about how to manage the new beast, as opposed to, as the kids say, creating (or editing) content.

In some ways it's hard to know how to think about it, but increasingly difficult, as both these articles suggest, not to see that there's something genuinely radical about the manner in which it compiles and disseminates knowledge (although it, so far, forbids as a matter of policy the dissemination of new, unpublished scholarship, and thus the creation of new knowledge).

But the next time I need to explain what Anarchy is, and that, as a form of government, it doesn't necessarily mean chaos, I'm likely to simply point students to Wikipedia.

This is what anarchy looks like, and it's not all bad.

Blogs and big media: together again at last?

Jane Galt via Ezra Klein:

Blogs are a very efficient filter for odd stories, really big stories, and policy arguments. They are a very bad filter for stories you want to know about, but not to argue about: local transportation bills, burglary rates, hospital corruption scandals. In short, blogs are a pretty good substitute for an op-ed page. They are rarely good substitutes for news reporting. This is especially true of politics, because bloggers by and large simply do not have the access or the historical relationships with enough insiders to make an informed judgement. If you've ever spent any time around lobbyists, politicians, or political staffers, you know that legislation and regulations are crafted in a web of complex power relationships unbelievably more intricate than it looks from the outside. There is simply no substitute for spending an enormous amount of time listening to tedious and often petty arguments from all the various stakeholders.

That's why I was so surprised by the New York Times' TimesSelect strategy. It seemed unbelievably ass-backwards to me. The Times has always had a distinctly mediocre editorial page (at least since I've been a reader), populated largely by household names whose schtick had already begun to wear a little thin when they joined the page. Its news gathering organisation, on the other hand, is probably the biggest and best in the world, with the exception of the wire services and the BBC. So it decided to give its content away for free in the one area where it has a serious competitive advantage over its rivals, and put a pay barrier in front of its opinion journalism.

But it seems to me that with the possible exceptions of Paul Krugman and David Brooks, people read the columnists because they are in the nation's most widely circulated paper, not the other way around. The NYT confused what people read and email each other, with what they will pay for. If those two things were the same, poems about Jesus and pictures of animals dressed up in costumes would have displaced porn and gambling as the internet's biggest industries.

Bloggers are making the same error when they talk about displacing the mainstream media. People like op-eds, but they buy newspapers because they want to know what is happening in the world. That implies an organisation that steadily churns out not just flashy stories about global geopolitical summits, but also not-particularly-interesting items on the EU agricultural ministry and flash floods in Arizona--even if the editor's cat has died.

In a way, I think blogging has the same trouble that I think open source will continue to have: without the profit motive, there is no incentive to invest in the dull-but-necessary, or cater to outsiders. I doubt many of us would go down and check out what the city council is doing about the sewers voluntarily, so it's a good thing that the local paper pays someone to do it. Similarly, open source user interfaces tend to be powerful and less-than-intuitive to non-technical people, because open-source developers produce what they want, not what some hypothetical customer needs. Newspapers, and software companies, are a very efficient way for us to each chip in a tiny sum to pay people to develop knowlege we want to have, but don't want to take the trouble of getting for ourselves. They work because they are centralized. There are drawbacks, of course, but I think the model will still be with us for some time to come.

Always fascinating

but moreso of late, alas. News broadcasts about the Middle East from the Middle East, compiled daily by Link TV's Mosaic, with translations. Especially interesting, at least from Monday's broadcasts, is how much media coverage was devoted to discussing, well, media coverage. In that vein, see the link about the Bias Bias, below.

Notice the variation from country to country in the language used to characterize events -- and then revisit Orwell's Politics and the English Language. (Scroll down, and start with the sentence that begins, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." Plus ca change. . . .)

PR is PR is PR

The revolving door, out for a spin:

Wal-Mart Stores, which has long cultivated a folksy, outside-the-beltway image, has hired the ultimate Washington insider as its next head of public relations and government affairs.

The giant retailer said yesterday that Leslie Dach, a prominent Democratic operative who advised President Bill Clinton during the impeachment process, would join the company in August.

The bias bias

From the Washington Post:

Partisans, it turns out, don't just arrive at different conclusions; they see entirely different worlds . In one especially telling experiment, researchers showed 144 observers six television news segments about Israel's 1982 war with Lebanon.

Pro-Arab viewers heard 42 references that painted Israel in a positive light and 26 references that painted Israel unfavorably.

Pro-Israeli viewers, who watched the very same clips, spotted 16 references that painted Israel positively and 57 references that painted Israel negatively.

Both groups were certain they were right and that the other side didn't know what it was talking about.

The tendency to see bias in the news -- now the raison d'etre of much of the blogosphere -- is such a reliable indicator of partisan thinking that researchers coined a term, "hostile media effect," to describe the sincere belief among partisans that news reports are painting them in the worst possible light.

Were pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers who were especially knowledgeable about the conflict immune from such distortions? Amazingly, it turned out to be exactly the opposite, Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross said. The best-informed partisans were the most likely to see bias against their side.

Ross thinks this is because partisans often feel the news lacks context. Instead of just showing a missile killing civilians, in other words, partisans on both sides want the news to explain the history of events that prompted -- and could have justified -- the missile. The more knowledgeable people are, the more context they find missing.

Even more curious, the hostile media effect seems to apply only to news sources that strive for balance. News reports from obviously biased sources usually draw fewer charges of bias. Partisans, it turns out, find it easier to countenance obvious propaganda than news accounts that explore both sides.

What he said

Kevin Drum:

SURPRISE!....I have a wee request: Can we please stop treating as major news the unceasing "surprise" visits to the Middle East by various Bush administration luminaries? Rice does it, Rumsfeld does it, Cheney does it, Bush does it, and these things really aren't much of a surprise anymore, are they? More like a transparent effort to get a headline from a gullible press corps. It's time to wake up.

Holy wedlock, Batman!

From today's Times:

The course is a prototype in the Bush administration’s campaign to fight poverty and aid children by promoting marriage — an effort that, after years in the pilot stage, is about to get going in earnest this fall and has drawn surprising support from some liberal poverty experts.

Now take a look at the article. What's missing from it? Yup. No evidence at all of support for the plan from "liberal poverty experts."

Leaflet bombs

The Explainer explains:

Capt. James Monroe invented the American propaganda bomb during World War II. Thousands of pieces of paper were stuffed into a laminated paper cylinder with a detonator and a delay, and then loaded into a B-17. The "Monroe bomb" exploded on the way down, sprinkling leaflets over enemy territory from a low altitude. The Air Force quickly developed more advanced versions of the same idea. For many years, their standard leaflet bomb was the M129, a fiberglass case that holds up to 80,000 flyers. . . .

. . . . According to the PsyWar Society—which publishes a quarterly magazine called The Falling Leaf—aerial leaflet propaganda goes back at least as far as 1806, when a British admiral used kites to drop messages on the French. The French used balloons to drop leaflets on the Prussians in 1870, and the practice continued at least until the Second World War. Twentieth-century armies also fired leaflets at each other in howitzer shells, grenades, and rockets.

The Logical Fallacy

demontrated by Reuters

The Collective Action Problem Explained

courtesy of the nation's finest newspaper, The Onion

The FISA Specter

From Greenwald:

The media's reports on this travesty illustrate, yet again, that the single greatest problem our country faces -- the principal reason the Bush administration has been able to get away with the abuses it has perpetrated -- is because our national media is indescribably lazy, inept, dysfunctional and just plain stupid, for reasons discussed in this comment from Jao and my response.

The reporters who write on these matters literally don't understand the issues they are reporting, even though the issues are not all that complicated. Notwithstanding the fact that this bill expressly removes all limits on the President's eavesdropping powers -- and returns the state of the law regarding presidential eavesdropping to the pre-FISA era, when there were no limits on presidential eavesdropping of any kind -- Charles Babington and Peter Baker told their readers in The Washington Post -- in an article hilariously entitled: "Bush Compromises On Spying Program" -- that "the deal represented a clear retreat by Bush" and that "the accord is a reversal of Bush's position that he would not submit his program to court review."

Anyone with a basic understanding of what FISA was and of the conflicts in play could read the Specter bill and see that the last thing it does is entail "compromises" on the part of the White House. Nobody who knows how to read could read that bill and think that. At this point, I believe they don't even read the bill. It's hard to see how they could read the bill and then write that article. Instead, it seems that they just call their standard sources on each side, go with the White House-Specter assessment that this is some grand "compromise" on the ground that it is a joint view of both warring sides, and then throw in a cursory ACLU quote somewhere at the end just to be able to say that they included some opposing views. But the reporters who are writing about this - and I mean the ones writing in the pages of our country's most important newspapers - don't actually have any idea what they're talking about.

I don't think his point is rhetorical or overblown -- I wonder just how many Washington reporters who are and have been reporting this story have, in fact, taken the trouble to read the bill itself? If the normal course of affairs is any indication, in which the political story always (okay, almost always) takes precedence over the policy analysis, I'd wager it's very few indeed. But that's okay. It's only the Fourth Amendment. Pesky bugger.

"You can only manage the news to a certain degree"

Rod Nordland in Foreign Policy

FP: Are journalists and the military seeing two different pictures in Iraq?

RN: Sometimes it’s hard to say. Many in the military are here on their second or third tour and they don’t want to feel that this is all a doomed enterprise. I’m not saying it is, but to some extent they are victims of their own propaganda. Two reasonable people can look at the same set of information and come to different conclusions. A good example: I traveled recently to Taji for the handover of a large swath of territory north of Baghdad to the Iraqi Army’s 9th Armored Division. This was meant to be a big milestone: an important chunk of territory that has lots of insurgent activity, given over completely to the control of the Iraqi Army. But when we spoke to the Iraqi Army officers, they said they didn’t have enough equipment. They are still completely dependent on the U.S. Army for their logistics, their meals, and a lot of their communications. The United States turned territory over to them, but they are not a functioning, independent army unit yet.

Things I learned

from Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine. Your learning experience may differ.

• There are some 100 "unaccounted for" "suitcase nuclear weapons" (p. 6)
• CIA warned about al Quaeda in its very first briefing to President GWB (22)
• DOD controls some 80 percent of the total US intelligence budget (31)
• First Data has been monitoring credit card transactions, without warrant, since 2001 (34, 208-9)
• Rumsfeld: "Every CIA success is a DoD failure" (77)
• How aggressively the Saudis obstructed US efforts to investigate the fifteen Saudi nationals who were among the nineteen 9/11 highjackers (109)
• Moussaoui was not meant to be the "twentieth highjacker" -- al Quaeda pulled him from the op "because he was deemed unreliable" (133)
• Perhaps two-thirds of all Islamic-terrorist funding comes from Saudi Arabia (143)
• Suskind claims that it was "immediately clear to U.S. policy makers" that bin Laden's target was only indirectly the US -- that his ultimate goal was to force the US to withdraw from the Mid East, thereby unsettling regimes and creating room for him and his followers to move in and assume greater power (147)
• An e-book anonymously written by al Quaeda's Yusef al-Ayeri "said that an American invasion of Iraq would be the best possible outcome for al Quaeda," because it would create a "radicalizing quagmire" (235)

And Suskind offers the most satisfying, credible explanation I've yet heard about why the US invaded Iraq in the first place:

The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those who attended the NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period [spring/summer 2002], was to make an example of Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.

In Oval Office meetings, the President would often call Iraq a 'game changer' (123)

And, of course, there's much that's not news, but is confirmed, such as infighting between CIA and FBI, the control VP Cheney has over the US foreign policy decision-making apparatus, the fait accomplis that was the invasion of Iraq, that CIA never trusted Chalbi, the targeting and bombing of Al Jazeera's Kabul office by the US, the fact that Khaddafi's turnabout had nothing to do with the US "War on Terror", the pathological privileging of politics over policy in the White House, and the manner in which belief precedes (and often creates) evidence.

It inevitably brings to mind something from another work by Suskind (NYT, 10/17/2004):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush [I've always assumed this was Rove; it certainly sounds like him -- sp]. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

The enemy of thought. . .

From Alan Jacobs, "Goodbye Blog". For the record, I think he gets it wrong. But it's beautifully argued. Go read the whole thing.

As I think about these architectural deficiencies, and the deficiencies of my own character, I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as "that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation." For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, "could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure." Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.

On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.

Billmon, on An Inconvenient Truth

From the Whisky Bar:

In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere – even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.

Climate change is only one of those challenges, and maybe not even the most urgent one – at the rate we’re going, civilization could collapse long before the Antarctic ice shelves do. Maybe as a species we really have reached the same evolutionary dead end as Australopithecus robustus – intelligent enough as a species to create problems we're not bright enough, or adaptable enough, to solve. I don’t know. But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power.

None of this seems to faze Gore – or if it does, he and his cinema Boswells manage to keep it well hidden in An Inconvenient Truth. I don’t know if that’s because Al simply doesn’t see the situation in the same bleak terms that I do (he seems like a smart guy, but you never know) or whether, like the doctor protagonist in Camus’s The Plague , he’s decided that work – all that schlepping from airport to airport – is the only sane alternative to despair.

Is it racist, or just charicature? How do you tell?

Pack journalism

To celebrate Independence Day in the traditional fashion, I read two accounts of the 1972 Nixon/McGovern campaigns, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus. Thompson was more entertaining, no suprise, but arguably more informative, too -- or, rather, he was better able to offer a feel for the campaign. I could almost smell the press bus. Not that that's necessarily a good thing.

Most striking about both accounts, however, was how familiar they seemed. Sigh.

What both also remind us of is how conservative (small c) the Washington press corps was and is. Here's one explanation, from Crouse interviewing Karl Fleming, then LA Bureau Chief for Newsweek, on why reporters were unwilling to ask rude and provocative questions of the Campaign (he didn't mean you, Hunter):

You delude yourself into thinking, ‘Well, if I get on the bad side of these guys, then I’m not gonnna get all that good stuff.’ But pretty soon the realization hits that there isn’t any good stuff, and there isn’t gonna be any good stuff. Nobody’s getting anything that you’re not getting, and if they are it’s just more of the same bullshit. . . . . .

. . . .But while these papers want to have a guy there getting all the inside stuff, they don’t want reporters who are ballsy enough and different enough to make any kind of trouble. It would worry the shit out of them if their Washington reporter happened to come up with a page-one story that was different from what the other guys were getting. . . .The editors don’t want scoops. Their abiding interest is making sure that nobody else has got anything that they don’t have, not getting something that nobody else has.

So eventually a very subtle kind of thing takes over. . . . . .”

If it's just too summery out to read, Alexandra Pelosi's documentary of the 2000 Bush/Gore campaigns, Journeys with George, captures the pack dynamic nearly as well.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition

This week, the conservatives declared war.

Not on The New York Times. Not even on the media in general. No, this week the entire conservative movement -- from the White House to Republicans in Congress to Fox News to right-wing talk radio to conservative magazines -- declared war on the very idea of an independent press.

They declared war on the idea that journalists have not just the right but the obligation to hold those in power accountable for their actions. They declared war on the idea that journalists, not the government and not a political party, get to decide what appears in the press. They declared war on the idea that the public has a right to know what the government is doing in our name.

This is a profound threat to our democracy, and we underestimate it at our peril.

Yes, it's partisan. Yes. it's shrill. But it bears reading. Honest.