Media performance after the Boston Marathon bombing

Or, should I say, non-performance?

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My observations:

• CNN really truly sucks at journalism.  cnn.com, though, is still a useful source of breaking news.
• Fox I avoid on general principles, but they can manage breaking stories in between the toxic bigotry of their opinion personalities. I watched a little Shepard Smith on Monday while the story was still news and not yet another opportunity to push invidious delusions into the puke funnel of the VRWC.
• MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is vital for background. Her competitors who lean backward into infotainment breathlessly reported on pressure cooker bombs, as if everyone knew what that meant. She actually reported it.
• Both the Boston Globe and the New York Times web sites failed. To judge by the Globe's subsequent removal of access controls, they may lack enough oomph in their user authentication servers.
• NECN was o.k. for a while, but then reported that Boston was being evacuated on the strength of one cop with a bullhorn. Panic, people, panic! But keep watching!
• Any media outlet that gives Alex Jones a platform cannot be trusted.
• Infotainment is the norm:

Who are the takers?

A fundamental belief of today's wealthy corporate Republicans is that they are deserving and no one else is.

They can take, take, take from the commonweal:

[Mitt] Romney, ignoring the fact that he has echoed this same sentiment on multiple occasions, organized 24 “We Did Build This” events in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada. At each event, local business owners are speaking about their self-sufficiency in running a business and how government is hindering their growth.

But, like the New Hampshire business owner showcased in Romney’s attack ad on the issue, many of these business owners have received significant support from the government, a ThinkProgress analysis finds.

But no one else deserves this sort of help. They're all slackers who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

These Republicans can't even grasp their own selfish double-standard. They invented the Internet, dammit, not the government, not that fat Al Gore guy who tried to steal credit.

It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.

Hard to imagine anyone more thoroughly missing the point without trying to, but then he was editorializing for the Wall Street Journal. Until it's monetized, it doesn't exist. What a strange epistemological idea!

Republicans believe that whoever exploits a resource, infrastructure, an externality, or the gullibility of the public should get all the rewards and the credit.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (R-whatever you need Mitch) shows the problem in more plebeian terms. He had a rough childhood, abandoned by his father, and his mother spend time on welfare, which Scott made her eligible for. Now, however, Brown has money, success, and the gift of forgetfulness. He wants to deny any such help to people like him. I guess they're just not handsome enough to deserve it.

Where I grew up, we called this gittin' above your raisin', and it was a mortal sin for a politician.

Nowadays, though, merely driving a gimmicky pick-up truck and wearing a barn coat every election season is enough to remain a regular guy, never mind that you spend you entire career ardently defending the self-proclaimed right of the wealthy to be taxed and regulated at very low historical rates.

Who feels entitled? Who takes without giving back? Who votes out of selfishness?

Not the middle class, that's for sure.

Update: The wealthy not only don't want to pay, they want to get refunds that make their tax rate negative.

The last piastre

Emboldened by the prospect that SOPA will pass and bring with it copyright vigilantism, the Grey Lady is ready to make us all pay:

(Aside: Is anyone considering anti-trust proceedings? The dead tree media suddenly and coincidentally all got serious at once about squeezing some piastres out of their freeloading Internet readers.)

The Times hints condescendingly that it might restore actual fealty to facts in favor of its current wingnut-fearing neutral view of bullshit and the faux balance that results. (Although, isn't a blogger pretty much the definition of truth vigilante?) But then Jill Abramson defensively quashes that hint much more swiftly than any reporting error.

We foolish readers misunderstood!

First, though, I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

At least the condescension is consistent.

If the Times doesn't demand a factual basis for the dialog in its pages, it fails utterly to do journalism. Maybe its editors don't care about that, but they should care that reality-based, skeptical reporting is the only function they have that can't be performed more cheaply and almost always better on the Internet.

Maybe they're just going to shut down every blog that links to them, once SOPA passes. That would be a whole different kind of truth vigilante. Still...

Romney lies, you can see it in his eyes.

Not called the authorities for nothing

I had thought of collecting the videos of police violence against the Occupy movement. Joshua Holland at AlterNet beat me to it. Beat. Ha.

There are sobering lessons to learn here:

• The police choose violence to enforce order.
• The police serve power, not the citizens.
• The police don't give a shit about Constitutional rights, only about authority.
• The police handle teabaggers much more gently than they handle Occupiers. Teabaggers can carry firearms without being beaten. Unthreatening Occupiers get attacked for their resolute non-violence.
• The police are trying to provoke a violent response from protesters - and sometimes they succeed.
• Power is restrained by ever-present video, not fully but often. A few cops are too stupid to realize their actions are going to wind up on YouTube. The rest mill around, unsure what to do.
• The big media, who should be all over these videos because they're vivid TV, mostly aren't playing them and will never play them in the sort of heavy-handed rotation Fox uses when it can illustrate one of its spin points. (You can bet they'll loop - out of context - any protester violence).
• Of course, we already knew that big media serve their corporate masters.
• Net neutrality is essential to showing the world what's true. A corporate-controlled Internet would be a censored Internet - hey, those crummy little videos use too much of their precious bandwidth.

Can you imagine how different the Vietnam War protests would have been with guerrilla video? Or the coal country union wars?

Balkanizing the net for fun and profit

Business continues to pose a greater danger to democracy (and especially to privacy) than government.

Wingnut welfare

Remember teabagger Dale Robertson?  A year ago, he was taking incoming rounds for something he had done in the depths of history - 2009 to be exact.

In his defense, how racist could someone be if he can't even spell his slurs correctly?  And isn't it a desecration to wear the Lone Star flag over such an, ahem, barrel chest?

So what's this piece of work up to now?

He sends out fundraising surveys from waaay out on the fringes.  Yeah, that means smack in the middle of the John Birch teabagger standard fantasy universe.  Here's a sample:

The Barack Hussein Obama Administration and the internationalists in our U.S. Department of State are quietly surrendering our national sovereignty to the future One World Government based at the United Nations.  Should this surrender of our sovereignty be stopped immediately and the internationalists be removed from office?

He also has a web site.  It's about as well-designed as his protest sign - none of them effeminate esthetics for him.  On the site, he refers to himself in the third person - "Dale Robertson is a man of courage and conviction... Sincerely, Dale Robertson".  But he's a founder!

The site sells stuff from T shirts to blast faxes that he says will go to every Senator and Representative.  You can get a volume discount if you send the same fax twice.  One of those faxes tells the Congress to keep its hands off the Internet, though only in paranoid language, not in any terms that could be consistently translated into policy.

He's a regular teabagger entrepreneur, suckling at the teat (or something else) of the credulous tihadists who no doubt freely send him their money.

Marginalized

It's true that so-called progress is not an unalloyed good.  There is something gratifying about a bound paper book, and those will become rare specialty items and nostalgia pieces.

But marginalia are not vanishing - my Kindle can add notes.  Other chances to comment on a writer's work are vastly increasing.  The Internet's not bound in leather, but it's everywhere, and everyone can comment.

Maybe it's democratization that the scolds are worried about.  (And they have some reason to be.)

Waziri leaks

In all the hue and cry over Wikileaks, I haven't seen much to get too bent out of shape over. Most of it was, duh, obvious. A lot of it had already been reported.

While governments need to be able to keep their conversations confidential, even some that are merely embarrassingly frank, the main damage has been the need to blush a little.

Still, imagine this: You're a foreign service officer talking with your opposite number in another country's diplomatic corps. You know how certain you would be that he will keep your confidences, small and large! C'mon, no one is that naive.

Instead of laughing off the embarrassment, governments have pursued Julian Assange, arrested him, and locked him up on unrelated charges that look trumped up (h/t Digby). These governments have certainly responded with much greater focus than they would have had he been, say, Brett Favre or Kobe Bryant.

The biggest take-away from the whole affair so far has been how thoroughly inculcated the media is in the culture of secrecy that they are supposed to expose to light. Sure, they've reported on the leaks, but I'm starting to wonder how thoroughly.

When I heard that the Pentagon was directing its service people and contractors that they were not allowed to read classified documents even after they were published on the Internet, I thought they were typically, bureaucratically overreaching. Just like the world's most command-oriented bureaucracy to pretend that the genie right there in the room was still safely in the bottle. Even a genie not nearly as revealing as Barbara Eden.

Then, today, the New York Times carried the story of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad had fled Pakistan after his name got out into the open in local media. What is his name? The Times pointedly wouldn't say:

The legal complaint that named the station chief, who was working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over attacks that killed at least two Pakistanis. The complaint sought police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be filed.
The agent’s name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name had been reported in local media.

The rest of the world can know, but Americans can't! The big media is in on the suppression of information.

Of course, Google is still up, so it's easy to find out. No, not the character actor by the same name.

I'm showing fear here, too, by not simply typing the name. I don't want to be charged with espionage for "revealing" something that's widely known the world just because there's a Top Secret stamp marking a piece of paper locked in a vault that I've never seen. Think about what that fear means to an open society, without which democracy is a sham.

The name I'm omitting is probably itself a cover identity. Really, would the CIA send someone to Pakistan for covert action under his own name? Of course not. Yet the Times and I won't simply type the name, and it's itself a fiction. Am I still allowed to name Winston Smith?

Funny, I don't recall the American big media being so solicitous of the classification status of non-official cover identity when the exposed agent was Valerie Plame.

The question: How long before the U.S., like China, decides it needs to block sites that expose its own citizens to this slightly uncomfortable sort of truth?

Update (1/7/2011): Related comment on Salon.

Control of the Internet

China's no longer so concerned about separating their people from freedom of information:

The message delivered by the office, the person said, was that “in the past, a lot of officials worried that the Web could not be controlled.’’

“But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: The Web is fundamentally controllable,’’ the person said.

The U.S. security apparatus is working on control, too:

The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Donald Beyer, told NZZ am Sonntag that Switzerland "should very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone [Julian Assange] who is on the run from the law."

Then there's Internet neutrality, which is doomed in the current environment in which corporations can buy the government they want.

Better living through Internet

The big media whines incessantly about the perils and depredations of the Internet. Even so, they know they have to publish here, and they bring their art departments - if they still have them - to bear to give us traditional newspaper graphics.

Oh, sure, the New York Times pastes up some cool interactive widgets. Many of them go beyond eye candy and are actually informative. They are also well beyond the budgets of ordinary papers.

There are thousands of stories that will never contend for a Pulitzer, for which the Internet provides freely available tools to make those stories better. Any story about a particular place can put the reader there much more effectively with a clip or a link to Google Maps or Microsoft Bing or one of the other mapping sites. Sure, it might be better to send a news photographer out, but that's too heavyweight and expensive for bread and butter stories that fill out a paper.

Here's a pedestrian story about real estate and eminent domain that shrieks for illustration. In five minutes of googling, I found the Newton Assessor's database and this aerial view with approximate bounds shown:


Google Maps gives a better image, sans plot plan, here.

Imagine what I might find if I were a professional journalist! (Yes, I know there are savvy people who are professional journalists. I even know a few. I just don't get why more of their savvy doesn't find the page.)

Where

Exactly where a news story happened is often important. The Arkansas flash flood deaths occurred here. You can see how the hilly terrain could concentrate run-off into a flash flood.

Yet big media seldom pins down location. I don't understand why not. The tools are readily available on the Internet. During the Tennessee floods, I was able to locate the site of a photo in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which told me how far the flood was out of its banks - a couple of hundred yards - which might be an important fact needed to understand the story.

There's also the back story of Albert Pike, a relatively minor Confederate general. Most non-Southerners would be amazed how many federal government sites in the South are named for Confederates.

Syncronicity: I happened to learn who Albert Pike was because the second National Treasure movie was on in my house, and it mentioned him. Yep, besides being a Confederate, he was a Freemason. Ooooweeooo.

Memories of ancient civilizations

Print's not dead, but at this point blogging is ordinary.

Shopping Amazon the past two days, I noticed even more variety of its wares. Sex toys? Yep, though I bet they don't ship to Alabama. They're fulfilling orders now that they once left to partners. Why? Servers fulfill Kindle downloads automatically, and Amazon is really good at filling orders.

Click image for full Doonesbury by G.B. Trudeau.

Paperless

Some results from ending my paper subscription to the Boston Globe:

• Once it's in your hand, paper has higher bandwidth than the Internet.
• I really, really can't tell when I'm finished on line.
• It's easier to read more deeply from paper than from web sites.
• It's easier to find interesting stories in paper outside your primary interests.
• I'm still not going back.
  

All Internet traditions

Now's a good time to remember the glory days of Media Whores Online, which in its time was an island of snarky sanity in a Water World of horseshit. Of course, the busted reporter has allegedly graduated to pimping.

What I'm really, REALLY sick of

Windows routinely lets processes run away and hide with the CPU stuffed down their pants. For a while I thought Firefox sucked, but if so Google Chrome sucks, too. The anti-virus package my company's IT people require sucks, too. Anything running a JRE sucks. There's a common thread here, but then Outlook sucks, too. And PowerPoint sucks all the suck out of sucking.

The common thread is the defective process executive of Windows, under which a greedy process can suck up every last cycle that Intel or AMD can give. You don't even need Task Manager to know. The cooling fan ups its duty cycle to 100%, and that means everything up to and including keyboard input turns sclerotic. Rhymes with erotic but makes the blood rush to the other head.

It's not quite as bad as when my college roommate's acoustic fucking coupler used to drop back from 300 baud to 110 and you might as well type with your damn nose, but after 30 years and the assumption of progress, it's close.

We will now return to your regularly scheduled political rants.

Got down ... off my (grass-mud) horse

... and stepped into a pile of shi...fting sand. Almost broke my as...pirin bottle.

My eighth grade English teacher would not permit our juvenile attempts to walk up to the line of George Carlin, but the Chinese communist authoritarians are having a hard time stopping the infiltration of such almost-cussing near-puns into Internet dialog.

I have to say that I'm happy to see this childish technique giving the "harmonizers" fits.

Internet slammed today

Millions of Americans will see history later today in person. Many of my friends will be among them, shivering from the cold and the excitement indistinguishably.

Hundreds of millions will not be there. We will depend on TV to show us the momentous events in Washington.

Or those of us at workplaces that don't block streaming video will be trying to find a server at C-Span or one of the networks that hasn't been brought to a frame rate of one per five minutes by the overwhelming demand.

So, loons, dimbulbs, wingnuts, and moonbats, just because the Internet doesn't work tomorrow, that doesn't necessarily mean something bad has happened.

Update: Well, no, not only is our government still working, the Internet is, too.

Update: The slam happened later than I expected. It was funny that CNN cable continued to tout its web site, when all I could get out of that was page load failures.

Did you get the meme-o?

I've been tagged with a net meme, and I will pass it on soon.

But right now, I'm busy trying to get Democrats elected. I don't even have much time to watch my traffic ebb and flow.

Mother's maiden name

The hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account should be a teachable moment for people who really are regular people. Don't use stuff that other people know to "secure" your data!

When your bank or your credit card or your service provider asks you to choose a challenge question on your account and they offer you vintage 1950 questions - mother's maiden name, place of birth, high school graduated from, last four digits of SSN, etc. - it's pretty clear that either (1) they don't know what they're doing, or (2) they don't care, and their real goal is to fob responsibility for security off on you. (Of course, CNN sanitizes the story, hiding how the hacker reset the password and pretending that the contents of Palin's account only appeared "briefly.")

The hacker committed a crime, and David Kernell is probably guilty as alleged. This level of foolishness should be best resolved by a misdemeanor plea agreement and a slap on the wrist, say public service, much as has happened in various past illegal taping cases involving partisans of both sides.

The crime exposed the fact that Palin has indeed used unofficial email for official acts, shades of the Bushists. She's an apt pupil. I seriously doubt that this is a crime in Alaska (though it's clearly an evasion of law in Washington), but it's a legitimate subject for political controversy even if it isn't illegal.

At least Palin can send email, even though her writing skills are right in line with her extemporaneous speaking skills. Which is to say, right up with some of the wingnut commenters on this blog.

Taking down the paper tube

The delivery guy wasn't using it anymore anyway. On to the Intertubes!

I've stopped the Boston Globe. It's not that I don't have time to read it. It's just better on line, no ink on my fingers, no unopened papers piling up in the recycle bin, no scattered clutter throughout the house. The print contrast on line is better, too, and at my age you can't get enough of that.

From the dead-tree edition, I will miss the Sidekick section with its concentration of comics, puzzles, and poker columns.

The telesales guy I spoke with was meekly down at the mouth about my cancellation. I'm guessing that the circulation hemorrhage hasn't slackened at all.

A ton of printing press and distribution infrastructure is going away. Anyone who has ever smelled a paper mill knows this will be better for the environment (though not without a cost in unemployment). All that will remain is figuring out how to turn pulpwood into building products, which may have already been done for all I know.