If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend and interested in the notion of digital storytelling, On Saturday at 6 p.m. there’s a get-together over at KQED, cosponsored by the Digital Storytelling Assocation, the KQED Digital Storytelling Initiative, the Center for Digital Storytelling and the Digital Storytelling Festival. That’s a lot of organizational names for one event, but I think this is less bureaucratic than that sounds — just a bunch of people who’ve been involved with this movement checking in with their community and hearing what one another are up to.
Archives for November 2004
Bloggercon, belatedly
Bloggercon III was great. I barely had time to digest everything I took in because I was flying off on a long-planned trip the next morning. Here are some notes.
My session was on Journalism: I talked for about ten minutes, outlining some basic things that I think bloggers can learn from professional journalists and vice versa.
What bloggers can teach the pros:
*How to blur the line between the personal and the professional — creatively
*How to improvise in real time
*How to have a conversation with the “people formerly known as readers”
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!
What bloggers can learn from traditional journalists:
*the value of legwork
*the nature of accountability
*The positive aspects of editing
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!
Then I just opened the mike, which is the custom at Bloggercon, where there are no speakers — just “discussion leaders.” We didn’t get trapped in the “Is blogging journalism?” rathole, thankfully; and I think we are now well past the stage of simply re-fighting the old holy war between bloggers and pros, which was never as heated as press accounts had it, anyway. Journalists cast every new phenomenon in horse-race terms — who wins? who loses? — because that’s such a fundamental news template. But I think the smarter participants in both camps, and the many of us who have feet in both camps, or wear hats with multiple insignia, now well understand that this ought to be a win/win game.
I was too busy moderating to take decent notes, but the entire audio for the session is now online (along with other Bloggercon sessions) at Doug Kaye’s excellent ITConversations site, and there’s tons of others who did take notes.
Staci Kramer wrote it up for OJR (those are my bullet points quoted anonymously). There are also good posts about the event from Rebecca McKinnon, Claude Muncey, Barnaby, and Colin Brayton, who posted a a big picture of me that shows just how tired I was… (Note to Colin: if I was edging away from you after our brief conversation it’s because it was late in the day, I was trying to hit the road — my kids were waiting at home!)
Most interesting idea aired at the session (and apologies that I can’t remember whose idea it was — step forth and remind me so I can give you credit): Perform a controlled experiment in which readers take in the work of a number of journalists covering a controversial issue or election who are striving to be “objective” but who actually have a point of view that they do not disclose (i.e., they are normal human beings). The readers will try to guess the writers’ sympathies based on the “objective” work. Can journalists really hide their views? Or, as some critics maintain, can we always tell which side they’re on, anyway?
It is, as Dan Gillmor suggested, a great idea for a thesis. Only you’d also somehow have to control for the biases and sympathies of the readers making the calls. This “objectivity is impossible” thing cuts in all directions. There is no alternative to being human. (Unless you’re, er, a marsupial or something. But then you’re probably not worrying about the nature of journalism.)
UPDATE LATER: That was indeed conference host and organizer Dave Winer who proposed the great “controlled experiment” idea. Thanks for that. Could someone — Poynter? Columbia Journalism School? NYU Journalism School (Jay?) — now put up a little money, or assign it to a class, to make it happen?
Also — more good notes from the session over at John Adams’ blog.
(Fwd) Re: Election fraud!
My little coda below about exit polls and the thirst for tales of a stolen election among the throngs of disappointed Kerry voters, of whom I am one, led to a little fracas in the comments. So here’s my position, plain and simple, and maybe we can move on:
There’s no question that the paper-trail-free, unaccountable, closed-source model of electronic voting is flawed, precisely because it leaves no room for after-the-fact authentication, and allows rumors and suspicions of skulduggery to ferment. We need to change that system. Salon, and particularly our reporter Farhad Manjoo, have been at the forefront of coverage of this issue since long before the current election.
When complaints of problems at the polls arise, it’s the duty of responsible journalists, including us here at Salon, to take them seriously and try to evaluate them. If reported patterns of voting raise questions of any kind, that’s worth looking into. Nothing is more important than assuring ourselves that our elections are won fairly.
But elections are messy exercised in democracy — there’s no such thing as a perfect one. There’s always some conniving local official trying to win an edge for his side; the history of voter intimidation and voter-roll tweaking and political-machine tampering is endless. (“Vote early, vote often” was not a joke in Daley’s Chicago, and most historians have concluded that in 1960 Kennedy probably won Illinois, and the White House, thanks to some deft ballot-box stuffing.)
The inevitability of problem precincts and questionable tallies is a given. They demand our inquiry nevertheless. But their presence does not, in and of itself, offer proof of electoral crookedness or a stolen election.
My beef is with the legions of outraged and aggrieved e-mail correspondents who are utterly convinced that the election was stolen. Why? They got an e-mail that told them! They read an article by Greg Palast! And they’re not going to be satisfied by the work of some Salon reporter who went out and actually reviewed the evidence and talked to the participants. (Here’s the most recent back and forth between Palast and Manjoo.)
There’s a dynamic at work here that people really ought to be recognizing by now — the “I have no idea if this is true, but I’ll pass it on anyway” meme-propagation that the Internet so efficiently accelerates.
The worst case is that the more gullible and misinformed wing of the Democratic left will turn into our side’s version of the gullible and misinformed legions of Republican voters who believe that Saddam had WMDs and worked with al-Qaida. We’re not there yet, but if we keep going down this road of crying “fraud!” at the drop of a dubious e-mail tip, we’re in for trouble.
We need to become smarter, more skeptical consumers of the information we get online. All the information, including — no, especially — the information that confirms our preconceptions and prejudices. If we (here at Salon, or in the blogosphere, or even on CBS or Fox!) find real evidence of the sort of significant voting problems that could affect the election’s outcome, then I will join the charge. But I won’t leap to the barricades on the basis of me-too forwards from people who are desperate to believe and unwilling to face facts.
The 2000 election, with its razor-thin margins, its rampant problems at the polls and its ultimate resolution by a partisan Supreme Court, left us all understandably hyped up on this issue. This battle should have been fought then, and wasn’t. But 2004 turned out to be a different sort of disaster. We can close our eyes to that change and pretend it’s still 2000, or we can look around at the landscape of reality and figure out what we have to do to pull our nation back from the brink of its current madness.
Good morning, Fallujah
Well — with several dozen Americans dead, many more American wounded, and who knows how many Iraqi casualties that we’ll never be able to count — we now control Fallujah again. I heard an American official quoted on NPR this morning saying that we’ve “broken the back” of the resistance.
When we invaded Iraq a year and a half ago, we broke the back of the resistance pretty quickly, too. Only it turned out that the resistance had simply dissolved into the countryside to regroup. Similarly, today, most of the Iraqis from Fallujah seemed to have moved on before we moved in. Mosul is awash with Iraqi rebels now. Samarra, which the U.S. made a lot of noise about clearing out a few weeks before Fallujah, became a center of unrest again once the U.S. troops moved on and turned it over to shaky Iraqi government forces.
So now we own a bombed-out Iraqi city, one that, having strewn with rubble, we will pay to rebuild. But the Iraqi rebellion doesn’t appear any weaker. At what point will our leaders get their heads around the simple fact that our enemies here have no back to break? Isn’t this the starting point in fighting a guerrilla war? Didn’t we learn anything from Vietnam?
Our idiocy is not just wasting American lives and money; it is telegraphing to our enemies that we are clueless. Because the same lesson from Fallujah — that we are fighting an unconventional enemy with no “back” to break — applies to the larger war on terrorism. And until we learn it we have no hope of winning.
The corrections
I was traveling a lot during the past week, then returned to my backlogged domestic duties, and both kept me from this blog for far too long — apologies for the hiatus. Now for some catching up!
Soon, reports from Bloggercon and some other comments from my trip. But first, an amazing cavalcade of corrections.
Every news organization has to deal with a difficult or embarrassing correction every now and then; since everyone makes mistakes, the only alternative (pretend you never goofed) is unthinkable. But surely this season has been extraordinary.
We started shortly before the election with the Wall Street Journal’s act of postmodern performance-art journalism, in which the leading national conservative newspaper absolved the leading national conservative TV network of leaning Bush-ward: “NEWS CORP.’S Fox News was incorrectly described in a page-one article Monday as being sympathetic to the Bush cause.” Oh, right, thanks — you know, without the tip we just might have gotten that one wrong…
But the strange corrections keep coming. Here’s a couple of recent ones from the New York Times.
At the end of the most recent column by David Brooks came this timid confession: “Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.”
Unfortunately, the quote Brooks is now retracting formed the centerpiece of the columnist’s Oct. 30 piece; it was the key piece of evidence he cited as to “why Kerry is not cleaning Bush’s clock in this election.” Yeah, I guess it won’t do Kerry much good at this point. In this little craven act Brooks is simply working in line with the administration he supports, whose modus operandi routinely involves lying when it matters and letting the truth mop up when it no longer makes any difference.
But as we Bush opponents rightly push back on the distortions and outright lies that the crew in Washington have been peddling for four years, we need to take care that, in our anger and frustration, we don’t fall into some of the same practices.
For instance, take the matter of President Bush’s chief legal adviser, Alberto Gonzales, whose nomination to be Attorney General has raised hackles because of a memo (PDF) Gonzales wrote suggesting that the war on terrorism meant we could ignore aspects of the Geneva Conventions. Now, Gonzales wrote that memo, and no matter how you cut it it’s a fairly appalling document — one that can accurately be linked to the abuses and torture committed by American troops at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, crimes that Bush administration officials have amorally and shamefully refused to take any responsibility for. (In the Bush White House, the buck stops nowhere.)
Gonzales has plenty to answer for. But some critics (including Salon’s Joe Conason) have latched onto a single word that his memo uses to describe aspects of the Geneva Convention: “quaint.” Unfortunately, tarring Gonzales with that particular adjective appears to be unfair. If you read this correction from Friday’s Times, it’s clear that Gonzales used “quaint” only in the fairly narrow and reasonably defensible context of several trivial provisions that are not at the heart of this controversy:
“A front-page article yesterday about the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be attorney general included an incomplete version of a quotation from a memo by Mr. Gonzales or his aides that his critics contend opened the door to the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. (Excerpts from Mr. Gonzales’s legal writings, published with the continuation of the article, included the complete quotation.) The passage, discussing the war on terrorism, read in full: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms and scientific instruments.” The version in the article yesterday was truncated after “some of its provisions.” |
Oppose Gonzales? Sure. But let’s leave the selective quotation, the context-free criticism and the misquotational smears to the GOP. They’re better at it, anyway.
BONUS LINKS: For those of you who are still burning the midnight oil with nightmares of electoral fraud and recount fever, I can only recommend the yeoman work of Salon’s Farhad Manjoo (here and here). Every potential election problem is worth looking into, and Salon will keep at it, but let’s face it, it is hugely unlikely that this election was stolen. (Guess what? The exit polls were off because exit polls are lousy. And this entire election was within the margin of error at all times.) The more energy we spend focusing vainly on pursuing the chimera of fraud, the less we have to fight real battles.
And to keep up one’s spirits in this dark hour, there’s always The Onion’s deadpan realism: “Nation’s Poor Win Election For Nation’s Rich.”
Live from Bloggercom
I am in perhaps the only place in the universe at the moment where someone can say, “I assume that everybody in the room knows what podcasting is,” without being ironic.
The Net connection is flaky, but we’ll see how much I’m able to post. Adam Curry is now talking about podcasting (distributing audio content via RSS feeds — I think!). He says he built some software knowing it was a crude hack: “I put it out and said, ‘This sucks — please improve it for me.'”
Curry says that when he worked in TV, he’d get mad at a producer for not editing out a flub, but his wife would say that was the best part: “You became human, for a nanosecond.”
Bloggercon ahoy
I’ve prepared a page of relevant and in some cases provocative quotes and items for the session at Bloggercon on blogging and journalism that I’ll be leading tomorrow. (The original essay for the session is here.)
Correspondence course
For the past couple of days an intense, almost feverish conversation has busted out on the Net. Salon’s editorial inbox is overflowing. (Some highlights are here. And here. And here.) There’s, uh, a lot to talk about.
Here’s an exchange I had earlier today with one letter writer:
Dear Scott, On Wednesday, 11/03/04, you said, “So let’s remember that we’ve just lost a big battle, and that hurts, but it’s not the end.” Yes, it is. By the end of this 4 years the cartel will have sold our national patrimony to their fellow-travelers (note I did not say friends, they have no friends) and any civil rights will be tightly constrained by a court that KNOWS we are Xtian and nobody else counts. I will be long dead before any even get their rights back, though to be honest I think future generations have no hope of this whatsoever. Once the last national lands are sold, there will never be enough money to buy them back, so kiss wild lands and even the national parks goodbye… |
Here’s what I wrote back:
I think I understand your despair, and at times I’m tempted to share it. But I’ve also lived long enough to know that there’s really no alternative to persevering. When Reagan was elected, twice, I was sometimes quite certain that we would wind up obliterated in a nuclear showdown. I still think Reagan was a lousy president, but the worst didn’t happen — in part because people didn’t just accept his policies, they fought back. I intend to keep doing my own tiny part of fighting back, which, since I’m a writer, means continuing to write. I hope you find your way back to playing whatever your part may be. |
And here is a very powerful letter that one of the wiser people I know, the writer Sue Halpern, sent to some friends:
Yesterday, looking at the map of the United States, the visual metaphor was hard to miss: those of us who voted Democratic, who oppose the war, who support gay marriage, who value civil liberties, who believe in due process, who are concerned about jobs and health care and education and the environment, were relegated to the margins of our country. If we didn’t already understand that our point of view was marginal, that map showed us.
But the map is deceptive, and reading it that way is the equivalent to Dick Cheney’s arrogant declaration that the people of this country had delivered a resounding mandate to George Bush. We did no such thing. Even in states like Wyoming and Idaho and Georgia and Tennessee there are tens of thousands of people who did not stand with the majority, just as there were plenty of people in our own home states who stood with George Bush. Such is the nature of democracy, even a democracy as broken as ours. So the other metaphor from the election is the one about the glass being half-empty or half-full. About half the people in this country appear to support the politics of George Bush, and about half are with and among us. For the purposes of the election, the glass was half-empty and we lost. For the purposes of going forward it is half-full, and it is from that that we must take our solace, and from there begin. The solace, such that it is, is that despite the lies, the willful deceptions, the cheating, the abject meanness, the subversion of reality, half the people heard the truth. And many of them live in places where the noise machine is a lot louder than it is here in Vermont, or in New York or Berkeley or Cambridge. The solace is that we know each other and that we found each other — that friends urged friends to send checks to ACT or Run Against Bush or Band of Sisters and they did; that neighbors called upon neighbors to sign petitions and visit legislators and they did; that strangers from Duluth, Minnesota and Spokane, Washington met on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio going door-to-door to turn out the vote. True, it didn’t exactly work as we wanted it to work, and as we thought that it would work, but it did work. We raised a lot of money, we raised our voices, we raised a ruckus, we raised consciousness, and we learned that our point of view does not consign us to loneliness. This may have been the most divisive campaign ever, and the country may be divided, but we are not alone. This is important, because the agenda of the other side works best if we think we are. I am not simply suggesting that if we think we are alone we will be less likely to stand up and be counted, though that no doubt is true. Rather, that if we think we are alone, we might start to believe that the only way to regroup is to embrace the ideas and rhetoric of the other side. The Democratic party has already done that, of course, in many areas, which is why its economic platform sounded remarkably conservative, why it articulated no serious opposition to the war in Iraq, why both John Kerry and Howard Dean were quick to state that marriage should be reserved for the union of a man and a woman. This last is crucial, because it represents the beginning of the values “creep” that some believe will allow us to cast our net wider — wide enough perhaps to capture that crucial three percent of voters who, next time, will send us over the top. It’s a brilliant strategy — but it’s not our brilliant strategy. It’s theirs. How best to advance the faith-based theocracy that underlies the current discussion of “values” than by having us believe that the only way to “win” next time is by changing the language of the debate to make “our” side more palatable to some of “them?” But once you start changing the language, you start changing the content, and who wins then? We have to be clear: There is no such thing as a faith-based democracy. Democratic values are purposefully agnostic so that democracies can embrace people of all faiths. It is possible that as soon as the Supreme Court changes hands, this point will be moot. We have to be prepared for this. That is why the lesson of the past year or two — the lessons we learned from Moveon and the blogs and the Deaniacs and National Voice and ACT, and from our friends and neighbors, and from people all over the country whom we now consider our friends and neighbors — must be this: That while we can act we will act; that while we can speak out, we will speak out; that while we can organize, we will organize; and that while we can stand, we will stand together. |
Don’t it make your red state blue?
Both Kevin Marks and Marijo Cook point out, in comments below, that there are lots of “blue” voters in red states and vice versa. Kevin writes: “If you look at CNN’s county by county maps, you see that each state is intermingled red and blue blotches, with lots of pallid mixed counties. Most states were close.”
Well, yes. But our system, until it is reformed, remains a state-by-state, winner-take-all model. So that recurring election-to-election patterns of majorities, even when they are small majorities, have significant and persistent political meaning. “Red states” are effectively “red,” even if they have very substantial “blue” minorities, as long as they consistently hand their electoral votes over to a “red” candidate. From the candidate’s point of view, that’s all that matters.
Sure, it’s unfair to make assumptions about individuals within the particular states — each of whom is, in any case, a complex bundle of beliefs and thoughts despite the simplicity of an “either/or” ballot choice. We’re divided across the nation; we’re divided within our states; we’re divided in our cities and counties and our neighborhoods; and often we’re divided within ourselves.
That’s all interesting, but the only level of division that matters in presidential elections, the only unit whose behavior matters, is the state — that’s how the Constitution’s written. And so generalizing about the behavior of states, and seeing patterns across the map that recur from election to election, is what the art of political alignments is all about. There were Republicans in the old Democratic “Solid South,” too. But it took the divisions of the civil rights movement and Nixon’s “southern strategy” to build a Republican majority in the south. That’s called realignment.
Karl Rove took the fruit of that realignment, wedded it to the burgeoning numbers of Bible-Belt style fundamentalist voters, and forged a majority. That was smart. Democrats need to be equally smart and think creatively about how to shift a few states into their column by turning their minorities in those states into majorities. Until and unless the Electoral College is reformed or abolished, this is the fundamental mechanism of presidential politics in America — and that’s why the whole “red vs. blue” map, however over-simplified it might be in terms of the panorama of human individuals, remains a powerful model for presidential politics.
Bleary morning after
I’m sitting here waiting to watch Kerry’s concession speech. I’m going to jot down some thoughts before wandering out onto the Net and checking the pulse of the rest of the universe.
First thought: On NPR this morning they were talking about Bush now claiming a “mandate,” though it was unclear for what. It seems to me that this sort of result for an incumbent — a squeaker of an electoral college win based on a thin margin in Ohio, and a 51-49 popular vote win — is only viewable as a “mandate” if you apply the same scale that judged the even thinner Bush win in 2000 as a mandate. That scale, of course, is exactly what Bush and Cheney applied.
Bush did better this time around, and those of us who dislike him and his policies have to deal with that. But there is still just about half of this country that opposes him and what he stands for. We’re Americans, too. We have jobs and kids and beliefs and values, and we’re not going away.
What’s disturbing is how clearly split the country is geographically. The red/blue split first noticed in 2000 looks less like an anomaly of a tight election and more like a long-term alignment of the American people: The coasts, the Northeast, the Midwest — almost anywhere that people are gathered in big cities — for the Democrats; the West and the South for the Republicans. The last time the nation faced this kind of split, in the mid-19th century, we ended up shooting one another. I don’t think we face an actual civil war this time around, thankfully, but we do face something like its cultural and political equivalent.
So let’s remember that we’ve just lost a big battle, and that hurts, but it’s not the end. Richard Nixon won a gigantic landslide in 1972 and was out of office two years later. Ronald Reagan swept the board in 1984 but we survived and regrouped and recaptured the White House in the 90s.
The good news is that the country’s split still leaves the Democrats within a stone’s throw of winning an election. The bad news is, we couldn’t win it — even with a stagnant economy and Americans dying abroad in an ill-conceived war. Now the important thing to do is figure out why, and learn from our mistakes.
Bonus link: Sid Blumenthal’s reflections on the dark fears that fueled the Bush victory.