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Archives for April 2006

Opinions? We don’t allow no stinking opinions!

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Amazing. A producer at ABC’s “Good Morning America” named John Green apparently sent an email to colleagues during the Sept. 30, 2004 presidential debate, and declared, “Bush makes me sick. If he uses the ‘mixed messages’ line one more time, I’m going to puke.”

Drudge got some of Green’s emails and posted them on March 23. Now ABC has suspended Green for this.

And a good thing, too. How dare this producer express such an opinion! I’m sure every single one of his colleagues had enough professionalism and self-discipline to ban all opinions from their brain-pans during that important political event. There wasn’t anyone else at ABC watching that debate who might have been thinking, “Bush makes me sick,” or, for that matter, “Kerry is such a boob!”

Only, it seems, John Green had the temerity, the gall, the poor form, not just to have an opinion but to share it in an email message. Really, the guy shouldn’t just be suspended, he should be drummed out of the journalism profession without a hearing. Revoke his credentials (whatever they are)! Let’s make sure all the editors, reporters, producers and correspondents out there never have opinions. Because then they might, you know, have something to say.

(Gee, I wonder whether anyone at Fox News was emailing any opinions on that debate night?)

There was another Green email in which he apparently expressed a dislike for former secretary of state Madeline Albright because of what he termed her “Jew shame.” That’s a pretty crude phrase. Beyond that, I suppose we’re supposed to be upset that Green is admitting he doesn’t like some of the people who appear on the show he produces. It would indeed be a better world if all producers liked every single one of the people they booked. Beyond that, so what? And since Bush and Albright belong to different parties, which side is Green supposed to be biased toward, anyway?

At some point we will need to give up and simply accept that journalists and editors are human beings, and human beings have points of view, and it’s better to know those biases than to pretend they don’t exist. There’s no escape from this — not even via the Google News route of news-judgment by algorithm. Somebody’s got to write the algorithm and choose the data sources, and that person will have opinions, and those sources will have opinions.

Windows on Mac? No thanks

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So Apple is going to make it easy for owners of the new Intel-based Macs to dual-boot to Windows, and there’s a lot of buzz, but…I’m sorry, it doesn’t really make a difference to me. There’s two reasons I’m still using Windows (I switched eight years ago after losing one too many work-in-progress files to the then-utterly-unreliable MacOS): many years’ worth of data that I don’t feel like transferring (some is cross-platform, but some isn’t); and one Windows application — EccoPro (a long-orphaned but still remarkable outliner program) — that I use every hour of every day, for which there is no Mac equivalent. (Also, I hate using touchpads, and Apple doesn’t make a laptop with a Thinkpad-style Trackpoint device.)

Dual booting doesn’t help. Ecco is my life- and work-organizer. There’s no way I’m going to boot into Windows each time I want to jot down a to-do. Even if I could alt-switch from one OS to another, I’m not sure that would help. Maybe gaming devotees will appreciate the opportunity to reboot their Macs in Windows, but I’m not sure anyone else will care.

In the end, anyway, what’s happening in software today — as John Markoff’s overview of Web 2.0 software development modularization in today’s Times indicates — is that everything is moving to Web-based applications. I’ll move to a Mac when there’s a Web app that can do for me everything that Ecco does for me now. Then my operating system won’t matter — I’ll use a Mac for its superior hardware integration, and because it’s got more developers doing more interesting new things, and I won’t look back to Windows, and won’t ever want to boot it up on a Mac or anywhere else.

Welcome back, my friends, to the argument that never ends

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Jay Rosen has written an intelligent piece about New York Times editor Bill Keller’s admission that he doesn’t read Romenesko and other media blogs. Jay traces Keller’s aversion to blogosphere chatter through a series of comments about “self-absorption.” This term is closely related to navel-gazing, and somewhat more distantly, to “inside baseball.” These are all terms journalists use when they fear that shop-talk and meta-conversations about their profession will bore the readership. (Sometimes they also fear that such “self-absorption” might lead to embarrassment, loss of authority or a little too much light shed on the profession of light-shedding.)

Of course, the blogosphere has opened an inexhaustible faucet of such meta-conversation. This brings us to the most interesting part of Rosen’s piece, to me. “There seems to be no end to any argument in your world,” Keller complained to blogger Jeff Jarvis in a public e-mail exchange last year. Well, right, Rosen says. He sympathizes with Keller’s concern that all this transparency and online dialoguing might place infinite demands on a busy manager’s time — and that’s a legitimate concern for anyone who is trying to lead a newsroom while also representing it to the wider world, online and off. But really, Rosen argues, the complaint is off base: “Do arguments on the opinion pages normally ‘end?’ How about arguments about higher taxes, racism, war or globalization as found in the Times news columns? Do they end?”

I largely agree with Rosen’s retort to Keller — which is to say, look, of course this thing is a time-sink, but so is any communication of value, and there are smart and time-conserving ways to use your own blog to engage in dialogue with your critics without having it become an infinite loop of self-justification and “self-absorption.”

But I think Rosen has missed one central element of the “no end to any argument” argument, and that has to do with the matter of who gets to say when an argument is over.

Because, until quite recently, for most of the career of the editor of the Times, or any other leading journalist today, it was the newspaper’s editors who nearly always got to say, “This argument is at an end.” An editor operates in a world of limited resources — limited staff, limited time in the day, limited column inches in the paper. The work of editing is almost entirely the work of making choices about how to deploy those limited resources. An argument becomes an argument in the first place because an editor makes a story assignment, decides to highlight the story, assigns a follow-up. And the argument is over when the editor decides, okay, enough of that — now this!

Add up those choices taking place in newsrooms around the country and you have “the news cycle” — that arc of coverage from “breaking story” to “analysis” to “follow-ups” and so on that governs the media today. The news cycle is finite; stories lose steam and are replaced by other stories with their own cycles. This is often because a story has run its natural course. But it is also because editors, forced to choose between expending resources on continuing to cover yesterday’s news or jumping on today’s, will almost always choose to start a new cycle. After all, they became editors because they’re excited by news.

The blogosphere presents an entirely different structure for the flow of information. There is no single news cycle here. If you are blogging about, say, campaign finance reform, or global warming, you will keep dogging that subject day after day. You aren’t going to be reassigned to cover an aspect of the next breaking news cycle. No one is going to tell you that there’s no column-inches (or air-time) left for your beat, and besides, didn’t we already run a big take-out on that topic last week? None of those constraints apply. Keller is right: Here, there is no end to the argument.

In the end, that, I think, is what is so unnerving about the blogosphere conversation to him and his coevals. Gone are the familiar newsroom rhythms — in which last week’s chatter about Andy Card’s resignation is replaced by this week’s chatter about Tom DeLay’s resignation, which will be replaced by next week’s chatter about next week’s resignation.

Certainly, the best editors and publications — among which the Times certainly belongs in the front rank — transcend the news cycle, with long-form features and long-term investigations that make news rather than respond to it. Certainly, too, the blogosphere responds to resignation chatter and other news-cycles; its ripples and waves most often start from newspaper or TV splash.

The difference is between a closed system, one of limits, and an open system, with no boundaries. The editor who assigns three reporters to a six-month investigation of some fraud knows that those reporters are not going to be available to cover City Hall. The blogger who’s got a case against the local school board, or who thinks that Dan Rather (or the New York Times) is biased, is never going to stop. The whole point of a blog is that no one can make you shut up.

So I think, when we hear an editor complain that “There seems to be no end to any argument in your world,” we are hearing the reflexes of a professional who has spent a lifetime deciding, “It’s time to move from this story to that story.” It’s the voice of someone whose whole expertise lies in assessing when one news cycle is ending and another is starting.

When such an editor surveys the blogosphere, he hears a multitude of voices who do not operate in such a zero-sum world — and who stubbornly refuse to give up talking about this issue or that story even if the cycle has rolled on. For the old-school editorial mind, engaging with such voices isn’t just an exercise in futility — it’s an act of self-torture. The world of “no end to any argument” isn’t just a world that challenges specific choices editors make; it’s one that eliminates the very editorial occupation of argument-ending.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Dave Weinberger: “We are not going to settle our arguments. There’s enough room on the Web to permit that…The big question is whether we can adapt this lesson of the Web to the real world with its finite space and inescapable proximities. If we’re never all going to agree, can we at least all keep talking?”

DeLay has left the building

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A brief moment of silence, please, for the political career of Tom DeLay. The Hammer has fallen. He’s leaving Congress and abandoning his re-election bid. Time has the story.

DeLay makes the usual noises about how he’s doing it for the good of his party. Time says: “He decided last Wednesday, after months of prayer and contemplation, to spare his suburban Houston district the mudfest to come.”

Oh, come on. Tom DeLay has never been one to shun a mudfest. He lives for the mudfest. Le mudfest, c’est DeLay.

We’re not supposed to pay any attention to those investigations behind the curtains — the ones connected with Jack Abramoff, in which two of DeLay’s key aides have already pleaded guilty to corruption charges. No, they don’t have anything to do with this move. “It had nothing to do with any criminal investigation,” DeLay’s lawyer told the Times.

Right. Sure. If you believe that, you perhaps also believe that the mid-decade Texas redistricting plan DeLay rammed through was intended to make sure every Texan’s vote counted — rather than to grab a half-dozen seats for the Republican party. If you believe that, maybe you believe that DeLay — the man who singlemindedly transformed the last president’s tawdry lies about adultery into an impeachment war — is an easygoing innocent.

No, I think it will become obvious soon enough that this is the act of a cornered man. As Josh Marshall writes: “DeLay’s lawyers must have sat him down over the last 72 hours and explained to him that he needs to focus on not spending most of the rest of his life in prison.”

The Time piece, which gives DeLay plenty of space to defend himself, deny wrongdoing, and talk of his profound love for God and golf, says the former House majority leader will rededicate himself to his conservative causes: “He said he feels ‘liberated’ and vowed to pursue an aggressive speaking and organizing campaign aimed at promoting foster care, Republican candidates and a closer connection between religion and government.”

Well, we’ll see how many Republican candidates want to share a podium with him. The GOP leadership may feel glad to have one fewer albatross around the party’s neck. But something tells me this isn’t the last DeLay headline we’ll see in the months between now and the fall elections. It may not be so easy to forget the Hammer amid the sound of falling gavels.

DeLay specialized in party discipline, the harvesting of lobbyist money, and creative innovation in the realm of political-machine funding. As I wrote a month ago, DeLay is no garden-variety bribe-taker (like that clown Duke Cunningham); he is clearly a new wave, Enron-style crook — the Andy Fastow of the Republican Party. The K Street Project he spearheaded set out to make sure that lobbyists, formerly understood to have a need for bipartisanship, directed their largesse strictly in the GOP direction. And his dream, seemingly delivered on by the grotesque Texas gerrymander, was to use the money and power he accumulated to cement a permanent Republican majority.

The only fitting epitaph for his political career will be for the American electorate to deliver a landslide rejection of that vision in November. But even if that doesn’t happen, even if we’re still stuck with a Republican House and Senate, at least Tom DeLay won’t be hanging around the Capitol to sanctimoniously gloat.

Wall Street Journal joins free-speech cause

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I was amazed recently to find a Wall Street Journal editorial agreeing with me — in this case, suggesting that it might be time for the government to give up its ill-fated defense of the Child Online Protection Act, which the ACLU has been fighting for nearly eight years now (Salon is one of a group of publishers that are plaintiffs represented by the ACLU).

I was surprised, really, because in the past the Journal has, let’s just say, been less than sympathetic to the cause. This editorial from 2004, for instance, viewed the online free speech argument as an object of contempt (“Larry Flynt…pretending he’s Thomas Paine”). What upset the Journal there was the prospect that the Supreme Court might end up more protective of adults’ right to free expression online, even on sexual topics, than of the rights of wealthy people to contribute unlimited sums to political campaigns.

That should have tipped me off to what might have swung the Journal over to the ACLU’s side in the COPA matter. It turns out that the Journal’s indifference to the Right to Free Speech is outweighed by its horror at the prospect of government interference with the Right to Do Business.

Specifically, when the government’s effort to save COPA spilled over into what the Journal rightly called a “fishing expedition” into Google’s log files, sparking a headline frenzy, the paper’s editorialists had enough: “If commandeering such data from private companies against their will is what it takes to defend the law,” the Journal wrote, “maybe defending it isn’t worth the effort.”

Indeed. Welcome to the team, WSJers! Next, can we interest you in some ACLU membership cards?