Xark!

Which one is smarterer?

AP v. Bloggers: The cartoon version

News Item: Associated Press claims bloggers are infringing on its copyright, threatens action.

Right...

Lessig: The flaw in our OS

Reforming our corrupted and corrupting political system is Job No. 1 for Americans during the coming political era, and here's video of Xark hero Larry Lessig laying out the case for his Change Congress movement during his keynote address a week ago at the National Media Reform Conference.

If you haven't donated to Change Congress yet, please do. If you haven't taken the Change Congress pledge, please do that, too. And if you haven't taken the time yet to introduce yourself to these simple but transformative ideas, please watch this video (28 minutes) and wrap your brain around Lessig's clear, profound ideas.

Media sexism

I'm not a Hillary Clinton fan, and my estimation of her has diminished geometrically since April. But when Clinton supporters say that they're mad about sexism in the news media, don't dismiss it as sour grapes. They've got a legit beef.

Americans should demand better.

'You don't know what you're talking about'

Chris Matthew's talk-over-the-guest interviewing style on Hardball has always been nails on a chalkboard for me, but this might be the first time it ever came across as utterly appropriate. Kevin James, a right-wing talker from California, came on the show Thursday after President Bush's Knesset speech to talk about Israel, appeasement and Barack Obama, and his aggressive platitudes prompted Matthews to run a history check on his ass.

It immediately becomes clear that James doesn't have a clue who Neville Chamberlain was, or what happened in Munich. Partition of Czechoslovakia and dialog with Palestinians the Iranians? "It's the same thing!" he says.

What follows might be the greatest smack-down of a self-important, shallow idiot ever witnessed on national TV. Listen to the high-school essay-test evasion ploys and the empty wingnut counter-attack maneuver ("Thirty-eight or 39, Chris? Which one do you want?").

You've got to be morally and intellectually bankrupt if Tweety makes you look small in comparison.

Why? Because O'Reilly is just a dick

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Jesus. Will somebody please give this jerk a loofa and a Prozac?

9 a.m. Tuesday UPDATE: It didn't take 24 hours before someone (in this case, some guy in L.A. who goes by RevoLucian) turned the O'Reilly Freakout into a dance remix. I gave up on trying to login to MySpace Music to get the download, so here's the Oliver Willis post instead.

10 p.m. Wednesday UPDATE: Now there's a MUSIC VIDEO to the freakout dance mix. THANK YOU, GOD!

7:30 a.m. Thursday UPDATE: Here's Colbert's own historical meltdown (with the O'Reilly tape tacked on at the end for comparison?)...

FOX (& minions) v. Obama

Five lessons about newspaper contests

Here's a humbling series of events, and the still unpopular lessons I learned as a result:

In February 2005, my co-workers put a crown on my head and carried me to the front of a banquet hall to receive a plaque that said I was the state's Journalist of the Year. I'd secretly dreamed of winning that award for years, but it took the end of my career as an editor to make me eligible.

I got my paper's nomination because, as our former executive editor put it, 2004 had been "kind of a down year" for the staff.  Most years we nominated a reporter for a specific article or series, but my nomination was just for my "body of work" as a features writer. Ouch.

That was the fall of 2004. Fast-forward to early 2005: The South Carolina Press Association posted the winners list for most of the award categories to its website, and I eagerly I called it up.  I'd entered lots of categories, and after spending years polishing other people's work I was hungry for some glory in my name.

And here's what I won: Nothing. In category after category, nothing.

A good question

"If you were covering the Crucifixion, would you take the lead from Pilate's press conference?"

--My reaction to the Poynter Institute's Roy Peter Clark's essay on media bias ("Narrative Chic & Kowtowing to the Bush Bashers"), posted on Jan. 15, 2005.

Three years later, two things are painfully obvious: 1. I'll bet Clark wishes he could take THAT one back; and 2. Yes, not only would his douchebag-ilk lead with Pilate's press conference, they'd also wax sanctimonious about it. Every goddamn time.

More with the New Media, Old Media

A series of Tweets this morning from our friend Dave Slusher:

• All this talk about superdelegates is GOP spin to convince voters that the Democratic party is as autocratic and heavy handed as they are.
• If the mass media starts chattering on a topic and it is not verifiable, I assume it is a lie. "Long Dem primary hurts them." Uh huh. Liars.
• Mass media has the viewpoint of moneyed interests and reports thusly. In the blogosphere it is too hard to buy everyone's opinion.
• I mean "buy" as in pay for, not believe. In the interminable bloggers v. journalists fight, I'm leaning away from journalism ever more.
•   When I interviewed people at Orycon, they made me get a press pass to do it. I fought because I really didn't want one.
• I didn't want to identify as press. I'd rather tell people I'm a piano player in a whorehouse so they don't lose as much respect for me.
• Individual journalists are on the side of the angels but they don't control the cameras and printing presses.

I don't want to talk about Dave's perceptions and opinions and their relative validity. I have no doubt that some of these thoughts resemble those of many, if not yet most, Americans. I'm not even going to defend the integrity of professional journalists -- I've seen or read about too many opaque decisions that "professionals" have staunchly refused to explain.

But from my standing as a pro-jo AND a blogger, I did want to make one observation of my own. I think New Media people, as a group, tend to be overly optimistic about the integrity and immunity-from-manipulation of whatever we consider to be "the blogosphere" (does the blogosphere include the Twitterstream? Or the Videoborg?) these days.

The news narrative is broken: Let's fix it

I've touched on this before, but let me bring it farther into the light: This idea that presidential primaries can be explained via analogies to sporting events or military campaigns is a fundamentally confused media construct. Why? Because for all our talk about "momentum," each primary or caucus is an inherently local event.

Which is to say:  It is often true that any perception of momentum or success is more the result of the order of the contests than the actual performance of the candidates.

FOX ATTACKS: Going after Obama

The FOX VIRUS...

Even Chris Wallace gets disgusted by it...

Just for context on the M.O. of Rupert Murdock's corporate news philosophy, The Investigators meet The Buzzsaw...

No, of course we're not surprised. I'm sure they originally prepared for an all-out assault on Hillary Clinton, but they retrenched, retooled, and sent their minions out after Barack Obama instead. And let's face it: The GOP is going to continue this steady drumbeat of sleaze from now through the election, supposedly at arm's length via their "remote operative," Roger Ailes, at the FOX News Division.

Our job is to recognize it, name it, talk about it, share it. Human beings, like many living things, are quorum sensors (bacteria do it chemically; we do it psychologically). So it isn't just the quality of the signals we receive from our environments that matter -- the number of signals of certain types that we receive quite literally count toward shaping our image of reality.

Ailes, Rove and others on the Right understood this many years ago.

Which is why I say: Share these videos. Embed them. E-mail them. Every time you use the power of human relationships and social networking to spread this exposure of media sleaze you are acting as an antidote to the sickening virus FOX keeps deliberately injecting into our culture. We have to become D.I.Y. media antibodies in defense of our society. We must inoculate ourselves against bullshit. When you show a thing that attempts to be secret, you remove some of its power.

To clarify: I have no quarrel with anyone who opposes Obama for policy reasons. Don't like his ideas about Iraq, or social security, or economics, or taxation? Fine. I disagree, but I respect reasonable disagreement.

But if you think that Obama is a Muslim, or a black racist, or a shadowy figure who secretly hates America? Conversation over.  You've just defined yourself out of  relevancy. My suggestion? Take another look at why you believe what you believe, and then rejoin the rest of us in our imperfect lurching toward a better future.

Hat tips: Janet, Revere at Effect Measure, MoveOn.org, Robert Greenwald.

For the record: In their own words

Received this a.m. via my subscription to Christian Newswire: 

Rev. Wright is Wrong - Conservative Media are Wimps 

MEDIA ADVISORY, March 21 /Christian Newswire/ -- Barack Obama has pulled the race card (which effectively brings to an end all meaningful conversation) while FOX News and conservative talk radio have proved once again that "conservatism" is pretend salt. Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, et. al., cannot see, nor do they dare to portray, the cataclysmic "change" that Barack Obama is espousing. It is a shift from one God and standard of Law to another. It is a shift from the God of the Bible and our Founding Fathers to the false god of Rev. Wright. Rev. Wright serves the god of his own hate-filled, bigoted imagination and calls it "Jesus." Yet our conservative friends dare not call this blasphemy treason. They have yet to call Wright for the apostate he is.

Wright is preaching "a different gospel" (2 Corinthians 11: 3-4). The Apostle Paul tells us in Galatians 1:6- 7, "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to 'a different gospel' which is really no gospel at all..." Rev. Wright is wrong about the Jesus of the Bible!

Pastor Jeremiah Wright's church is apostate as are all the United Churches of Christ (UCC) in America. Long ago this institution abandoned its rich Christian heritage and responsibility to stand upon the Word of God. It now follows the god of, "...everyone does that which is right in his own eyes." Abortion, Homosexuality, Islam, and every false religion are welcome in Trinity United Church of Christ. It's one Commandment is, "Don't judge me!" Biblical Christianity is, however, not allowed.

We should not therefore be surprised that Barak Obama will defend his pastor when he (his pastor) is exposed to the light of the true Gospel of Christ. We should furthermore not be surprised when FOX News can't seem to get it right about Rev Wright. Rev. Wright is no more a Christian than he is a poached egg.

We are indeed heading for change with Barak Obama. Oprah is helping us to get there. For the first time in its history, the United States of America may elect a President who does not acknowledge the Jesus of Scripture as the Savior of the world. Barak Obama and black liberation theology (a mixture of Islam, false Christianity, and any other religion that opposes true biblical Christianity) is not Christianity, and those of us who know better (real salt) need to say so.

We could not give our Lord Jesus a better gift on this Good Friday than to just say so!

Rev. Flip Benham, Director, Operation Save America/Operation Rescue

For comments by Rev. Flip Benham 980-722- 4920

www.operationsaveamerica.org

Christian Newswire

Got it? Treason.

I don't assume for a moment that this is what most white Americans, or most Christians, believe. But sometimes it's good to see the opposition unfiltered beyond what they choose to present to the world. Because if these people are against us, I feel pretty good.

 

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...

A remarkable paragraph

The concluding paragraph from a post written yesterday by Jon Taplin:

We live in an age of forgetting. The monstrous information flow that washes over us on a hourly basis, pushes out recent events and their lessons and fills our minds with new obsessions: Spitzer, Ferraro, Spears, Market Meltdown. The fact that men and women are dying and being maimed in their loyal service to a fatally flawed policy is soon pushed off our TV screens and the front pages of our newspapers. Communications scholars have long understood the power of governments to persuade by obfuscation and fear. If the coming election is to serve the purpose of renewing our commitment to Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people and for the people”, then we must not forget our brothers and sisters dying on the plains of Iraq. We are in the role of British Redcoats and Hessians on the commons of Concord, Massachusetts 232 years ago. We must take our soldiers out Iraq and let the Iraqi people decide their own fate.

I certainly agree with the first sentence. I also agree with the last. It's the penultimate one that will bug me all day -- because though I understand the thought, I think the analogy is misleading. Yes, we've cast ourselves in the role of occupying army, but to think of Iraqis as the militia at Lexington and Concord on that fateful day misses some important points.

The British colonists who survived the running skirmishes of April 19, 1775, later helped form a wildly diverse young nation via often painful compromise with fellow countrymen of different beliefs, backgrounds and interests. I think it would be a mistake to presume that the people attacking our soldiers in Iraq have anything in common with the Minutemen of 1775 beyond mere gun ownership.

Our debt to them isn't merely rhetorical. I think modern citizenship now requires that we struggle daily against our own forgetting. It's the beginning step in all that we must do.

(And no, there were no Hessians at Lexington or Concord. But let's not quibble.)

Another g-damn magnum opus

I just published an enormous overview of my ideas about the future of media ("Foundations of 21st century journalism") over at my revived media blog. I'm rather appalled by how long it is (3,275 words), but it's a big topic. And I'm not writing for everyone.

The subheads:

Monoculture to ecosystem
Structured and semi-structured data
Scalability
Open Source
Informatics
The Blur: News, information and advertising
Newsbots and Intelligent Agents
Multiple revenue streams and business models
The Intelligence Briefing model
Mainstream retrenchment
Nichestreaming
E Pluribus Unum
Watchmen watchers
Credibility grading
Death of monopoly pricing and profits
Game theory
Social technology -- virtual and otherwise
The Web is Local
True Convergence
Curating information
New elites
The Creative Middle Class
Surplus people
Yes, newspapers are going away

This was written for the students and faculty at the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi, but you're all welcome to have your say.

Talking to the next generation

Janet and I are preparing for a trip to the University of Mississippi next week. The agenda: Appearing on a media panel called "Quality in the Digital Environment."

My way of getting ready: Writing up my ideas -- the ideas that I can't (and shouldn't) communicate in a few minutes while sharing a stage with others. I started posting them at my otherwise defunct media blog earlier this month.

Introduction: Waking up the blog.

Quality and other essential bullshit.

Thinking versus Quorum Sensing.

Why quality is a moving target.

Gloom and doom.

More to follow...

We report, you decide

Ed Cone: "It's almost as if they were reading from a script..."

Meme 2008: "Control doesn't scale"

Three words of infinite simplicity and value (via Dave Weinberger):

"Control doesn't scale."

Want to understand the convulsion that lies ahead of us? The transitions in economics, technology, management, politics, media and art that must be made if we're to benefit from the new tools? The divisions that animate our "culture war" bullshit sessions? 

Three words: "Control doesn't scale."

Think that's a recipe for anarchy? Think again. Think it's unprecedented? It isn't. Think distributed control is a geektopian pipedream? I disagree.

Human beings have been giving up control in exchange for the expanding wisdom and benefits of freedom for as long as we've been a species, so there's plenty of historical precedent to instruct us on what course to follow. The unprecedented part is actually the rate of change, which means that the challenge in the scaling issue really lies in the feedback loops we imagine. We can't wait around and expect the old culture to vet new ideas for us. We'll have to invent the "new normal" on the fly, and  we'll certainly screw that up a few times.

But this is the central issue. And the other thing history teaches is that the people who have control generally don't like giving it up. So that's our short-term future in a nutshell.

William Grieder on political reporting

This is the curse that leads to enervating, brain-dead presidential cycles. Substance bores political reporters. Most of them do not understand economics or even know much about how government actually works. Given their ignorance, they prefer to play the role of theater critics and imagine that readers are desperate to hear their highly subjective and utterly unreliable reviews of the sideshow...

If reporters were to give up the arrogant role of reviewers, they would have to do real work -- the unfashionable task of reporting on what candidates actually say. Then the diligent would subject the substance, not style, to critical analysis and reactions from many quarters. This drudgery would seem humbling to the "boys on the bus." Most of them, anyway, are incompetent to do such work.

--William Greider, writing about the recession, John Edwards, and the failure of the press to see past labels...

Iran, I-exaggerate?

I have to admit: My reactions when I saw the headline-alert Tweet announcing the "Iranian naval showdown" story were not pleasant. My first thought was that our government was hyping whatever happened for political reasons.  My second thought was that the News Lords were going to uncritically pound that hype right into the national consciousness.

I don't like either thought, but that's where I find myself today. The federal government says something, and I have to discipline my reaction to make sure that I at least give it the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't this way before 2004, but that where I am now, and it's based on experience, not ideology. The Bush  administration certainly didn't invent politicized bullshit (Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?), it's just that ... great Gawd, there's just so much of it, and the skeptical reporting is just so slow to catch up that it's practically irrelevant.