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Times 2, Journal 0

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Well, it’s official: The New York Times, having replaced William Safire with John Tierney, now has two dedicated “conservative seats” on its op-ed page. Meanwhile, as I wrote a month ago, the Wall Street Journal, having lost its sole token sorta-liberal, has…not replaced him at all.

The Times constantly takes brickbats from the right for its supposed liberal bias, but it’s clearly trying to find room on its opinion pages for a variety of perspectives. Meanwhile, the Journal, whose editorial pages list far further to the right than the Times’ lean leftward, doesn’t seem to think it need bother expose its readers to those who disagree with it.

These papers pretty much represent the U.S.’s two most important national dailies. When I beef about the Journal, I sometimes get e-mail from people I know (or don’t know) who work there, protesting that I shouldn’t hold the editorial pages’ neanderthal bias against the rest of the paper. And it’s true: I love the Journal’s feature writing, and a lot of its news coverage is fair and reasonably non-ideological. I would say exactly the same thing about the Times’ news pages.

Yet on the opinion/editorial side, the distinction couldn’t be more vivid, and it needs to be said, over and over again: One paper has a hubbub of different points of view, the other has a starkly uniform party line that is significantly off to the margins of the American mainstream.

That difference hasn’t seemed to filter very far into the blogosphere’s media-criticism memepool. Anti-Times noise is endemic here, whereas the Journal doesn’t seem to warrant more than an occasional snipe. Maybe that’s a sign of the Journal’s subscription-only self-marginalization; but Dow Jones has actually placed most Journal opinion-writing on the free Opinionjournal.com site, so I don’t think that’s it.

Rather, this is one more data point in the right’s campaign against the Times and other media institutions that it sees as impediments on the path to total reality control. The scorched-earth ground rules parallel the CNN/Fox argument. Conservatives jealously defend their right to own their own partisan media outlets, while loudly complaining that anyone still foolish enough to struggle for balance is hopelessly biased to the left.

Dosed

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Here’s a little tale of life in the 21st century.

As I suffered through a bout of the usual seasonal cold last week, I found that my supply of my remedy of choice — a generic over-the-counter combo antihistamine and pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) — was running low. As I ran errands, I searched for this variety on the shelves of local drug stores, but to no avail. Finally, this morning, at a Walgreen’s in downtown San Francisco, I found the precise medication, so I thought, gee, better stock up.

But when I plopped three boxes of “Walfinate D” on the counter, the checkout lady said, “There’s a limit of two on those.” She couldn’t tell me exactly why, but since all she wanted to do was ring box number three up separately, I didn’t pursue it.

Back at my desk, I decided to look for answers. I couldn’t remember how to spell “pseudoephedrine” so I just Googled “sudafed controls” and found this page, which pretty much answered my question: Pseudoephedrine is apparently a key raw material for the proprietors of meth labs, so the government wants to limit bulk sales.

First I was irritated that my need for cold relief was being made more inconvenient by the chemistry demands of speed freaks. Then I was delighted at how simple a matter it was, in these Google-powered times, to discover exactly why my cold medicine was considered a suspect substance.

My inconvenience was hardly severe. But if they try to ban my Sudafed, as the commentator on the above page proposes, they’ll have to pry it from my germy, sneezed-into hands!

Random links

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I’ve been sick all week with a miserable cold — no fun, but hey, it does wonders for catching up with RSS backlog.

## GQ is not normally where I turn for quality reporting on the Valley, but look — they got John Heilemann to write about Google, and, well, it’s a great read. [via John Battelle]

## In a recent Wired piece pegged off his new book, Daniel Pink explains why I no longer need feel guilty about dropping math in high school before calculus kicked in.

## Evolution and cooperation? How’d that happen? Some big questions briefly plumbed in American Scientist. [via Arts & Letters]

## This is the way the world ends: Or maybe not. Dozens of theories and ideas inspected. Good fodder for the next time my five-year-old son asks, “Could the earth ever explode?” — which will be soon. [via MeFi]

## Hypercard reverie: a tour through late ’80s monochrome multimedia. With more chapters here. [via Boingboing]

Personal publishing

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Jason Kottke, a Web veteran and longtime blogger whose work I’ve always respected and enjoyed, has quit his job to blog full time, and rather than go the advertising route, he’s passing a patronage hat. I kicked in a wee bit and encourage you to do so as well if you are one of Kottke’s readers, or if you become one.

Making blogging pay is not easy; making any kind of online publishing pay, when you’re hand-producing content, is hard, I can safely say, after a decade of trying. Sponsorships and advertising raise the same sorts of ethical concerns in blogs as they do anywhere else; even when you’re ethically alert, you can’t help facing tough calls pitting your duty to your readers against the demands of your advertisers. (J.D. Lasica’s recent piece in the Online Journalism Review thoroughly explores this ground.)

Some high-profile political bloggers (e.g. Sullivan, Marshall) have made a go of it as independent blogger/publishers outside of any institutional framework. But the passions of partisanship help open people’s pocketbooks; it’s brave of Kottke to try this from a perch largely outside the political fray.

Personal publishing is a grand dream. Exactly ten years ago, in February 1995, I posted the first (and only) issue of my own Web magazine (warning: ancient HTML alert! Prehistoric navigation scheme ahead!). It’s what I thought I’d end up doing, and if Salon hadn’t come along, I probably would have given it my all. Today the tools are better, and our understanding of the power of the network is stronger and subtler, and if folks like Jason Kottke can make a go of it, we’re all going to feel a little more free.

Random links

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## Some people think that it’s a bad idea for government to get involved in helping organize local wireless networks. This great little post by Glenn Fleishman asks, what if we’d applied those arguments to the introduction of electricity 100 years ago?

 

Electricity is too important a resource for America’s future to be left in the hands of cities and towns, the council argues, which are inefficient enterprises that take profits from industry in their pursuit of ever-greater control of the flow of capital within their borders. “How big may these so-called public utilities grow in their efforts to stifle free enterprise and increase the size of government?” the report asks.

The report notes that 97 percent of all neighborhoods in the U.S. have at least one functional electric street lamp running built through private enterprises’ effort, and that some urban areas have two electrical lamps on each corner, as well as lighting available at different times of the day and night both within and outside of homes and businesses.

## Cliff Figallo, who I once had the pleasure of working with at Salon, is blogging thoughtfully at “What Retirement?” about all the issues — Social Security and otherwise — facing today’s workers as they ponder the (long, we all hope) tail end of their careers and lives.

## Annalee Newitz of the EFF deconstructs EULAs (“end user license agreements”), those boilerplate legal agreements we all click through without reading so that we can actually use commercial software.

## Leftie SF author China Mieville put together this list of “Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read”

## The hotel that inspired the greatest farce of the television age, “Fawlty Towers,” has been sold. But how can the Patels, the new owners of Torquay’s Hotel Gleneagles, possibly maintain its proud tradition of rudeness and incompetence?

Fox blood on the tracks?

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A CNet columnist, Molly Wood, totally misunderstands what Firefox, and open source software, are all about. She’s arguing that now that Microsoft has said it will issue an update of its browser, we can write Firefox off:

“For a moment there, it looked like the tyrant IE could actually be overthrown. Those were heady days, weren’t they? Well, they’re over now… If IE 7 is even 50 percent more secure than current versions, the Firefox rebellion is finished. If IE 7 has tabs, Firefox will be destroyed as surely as the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was crushed by the Soviets… now that the sleeping giant has awakened, I think the buzzing gnat of the browser wars is about to be squashed flat.”

This is a prime example of one of journalism’s worst habits — a knee-jerk application of “who wins, who loses?” logic to situations where it doesn’t really apply. “Finished.” “Destroyed.” “Crushed.” “Squashed flat.” This is the language of pro wrestling, sometimes adopted by business writers who are desperate to paint the typically colorless corporate world in the bright colors and action-packed imagery of sports.

Yet the whole point of the open-source challenge to Microsoft is that it can’t be “crushed” like a small commercial competitor. IE 7 may or may not cut into the extreme growth curve of Firefox adoption; but the people who are building the open-source browser will happily continue to fix their bugs and add their plugins and improve their product whether their adoption rate stalls out or not. And Firefox has already achieved critical mass in the market such that responsible Web site designers can no longer take the lazy “everyone uses IE” route.

Naturally, everybody wants their work to be appreciated and their products to be used, and I’m sure the Firefox team are going to pay close attention to Microsoft’s competition — but I can’t imagine them sweating the way the employees of a commercial startup in their shoes would. Microsoft can improve its browser from now till doomsday — and if it does, we should applaud — but there is no way it can “cut off the air supply” of an open source project the way it could “squash” a company like Netscape. Firefox’s air is free.

Frank Rich on Jordan and Gannon

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“Is the banishment of a real newsman for behaving foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a more pressing story than that of a fake newsman gaining years of access to the White House (and network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances?” Frank Rich offers a thorough amplification of the argument I offered Monday — that the Jeff Gannon saga has more to tell us about where the mediasphere is headed than the Eason Jordan affair.

Baby names, Flickr networks

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Two amazing examples of the power of good graphic presentation: Here’s the most wonderful dynamic web-page chart showing the churning rise-and-fall of popularity in baby names, boy and girl, across 100 years. I don’t know where the data’s from — wait, I do, it’s from the Social Security Administration! — but it’s presented in a glorious interface (reminds me of Edward Tufte‘s beloved graphic of Napoleon’s Russian campaign). Go, type your name in, see how the mighty monikers rise and fall on the waves of human fickleness! [link courtesy Steven Johnson]

Over at Flickr, there’s this cool series of charts exploring the web of inter-relationships of users of that photo-sharing service. Interesting stuff for the online social anthropologists, but what I dig is the reflexivity: the study’s offered up as just one more batch of Flickr images.

Susannah Breslin’s project

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Susannah Breslin, who once roamed these Salon Blog parts as the Reverse Cowgirl and then rode off into the sunset, is now writing a novel (titled Porn Happy) while blogging about writing the novel. Meanwhile, she is also posting the novel as a blog. Finally, she is looking for patrons to kick in some cash and support the project.

The Salon blogspace has been lucky to be associated with an amazing series of literary experiments, from Diego Doval’s Plan B to the now-between-covers work of Real Live Preacher to the amazing saga of Julie/Julia, which we expect someday to read on paper. And no doubt many others I’m forgetting. Best of luck to Susannah.