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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?

Buggy BART

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People ask me what my book (Dreaming in Code) is about, and I usually answer, “It’s about software…” And, if their eyes don’t glaze over immediately, I’ll add, “…and why software is still so hard. Why it’s always late and it’s always breaking. Why we’re 50 years into the computer age and we still don’t know how to make it reliably.”

By this point, one of two things will have happened: either listeners will have nodded and smiled and said, “I know exactly what you mean!” Or their eyes will have eventually glazed over, after all, and they’ll look at me a little quizzically, as if to say, oh really? And why does this matter? What do I care?

I thought about those people as I passed through the BART turnstiles this morning, a little glazed-eyed myself. There, neatly by the attendant’s booth, lay piles of orange flyers under a “BART BULLETIN” letterhead. I grabbed one and read it on the escalator-ride down.

It was an apology for the screwed-up state of BART yesterday morning — which had seen half-hour delays and incorrect train-destination signs. How considerate! A mass transit system that apologizes to you! In my many youthful years of New York City straphanging, I can’t say I ever had that experience.

But this is the paragraph that caught my eye:

  BART technicians believe the delays were caused by new computer software that was installed over the weekend. The new software has been removed and the software that was previously in use has been re-installed. Although the new software was repeatedly tested before installation, it failed in the demanding real-world environment of a weekday morning commute.

BART had botched a software upgrade. It had plenty of company in that experience, of course.

As C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup puts it: “Our civilization runs on software.” BART does, too. And understanding why software remains so balky — a topic I happen to find fascinating in the abstract — also has some everyday, pragmatic interest.

UPDATE: And how. I just tried to get on BART for my ride home this evening but could tell from the milling crowds outside the Embarcadero station something was radically wrong. Walked down the stairs to catch a garbled announcement on the PA: “We have closed the gates… no trains are moving… computer problems…”

I’m grateful for the consideration in illustrating my point, but I’d really rather just be on my way home!

Stop the presses! Blogger reviews books by bloggers!

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Tonight Salon has posted my double review of Glenn Reynolds’ “An Army of Davids” and “Crashing the Gate,” by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos) and Jerome Armstrong.

It was interesting to me how differently these leading bloggers used the opportunity of a book deal: Reynolds (Instapundit) waxes prophetic about the future of individual empowerment, while Kos and Armstrong narrow their gaze to a tight beam of focus on how the Democrats should proceed if they hope to regain the White House.

In my review, I attempt to relate their blogging styles to their worldviews. As for me, I enjoyed returning to the couple-of-thousand-word Salon format after a year of my own book-length labors, interspersed with short-form blogging here.

Letter rip

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Last fall, Salon switched its letters-to-the-editor format from an old-media mode — email us a letter, and maybe we’ll publish it — to a more Web-native model, in which readers post their letters by themselves, and then Salon provides a filter after-the-fact for those readers who still want us to don our editors’ hats.

We’re mostly very happy with the result. Occasionally, of course, there are flamefests, and people go crazy complaining about an article or writer they don’t like or, more often, another letter writer they detest. But more often there are knowledgeable, creative responses to the articles we publish. And sometimes they push a discussion forward in ways we could never have expected. (Some of the letters in response to our Abu Ghraib Files feature, including some from people in uniform, were unforgettable.)

Still, we continue to get a smaller volume of letters to the old e-mail inbox that we still maintain for not-for-publication communications. It is here, inevitably, that certain categories of perennial correspondence continue to pour in.

Over the weekend, we got two in succession: First, there was the borderline-literate note from a reader who had just stumbled upon our 1999 feature on Brazilian bikini waxing — and wanted to know where she could get one. Sorry, can’t help. (I suppose the Salon name doesn’t help these readers disambiguate.)

Then there was the letter-writer who just couldn’t tell Salon apart from that other politics-and-culture Web magazine whose five-letter-name begins with S. When the e-mail begins, “Dear Mr. Weisberg,” we know what we’re dealing with.

Scanning such missives, I find my years at Salon collapsing into a durationless Now, a frozen moment of e-mail eternity.

Odds and ends

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Cleaning out a reading backlog. Herewith some links, some going back months:

## Fascinating piece from the New York Times last week on the man who wrote the song that became “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”: It started out, in Solomon Linda’s 1939 recording, as “Mbube,” which is pronounced “EEM-boo-bay.” That, in Pete Seeger’s hands, became “Wimoweh.” Then songwriter George Weiss added the “Lion” lyrics. Linda got 10 shillings for the rights in 1952. He died poor in 1962. His family did recently get some money from Disney, which used the song in “The Lion King.” There are over 150 recordings of the song. One is by Brian Eno (I still own a 7-inch single of the 1975 recording, somewhere).

## Writer’s block or creative logjam? Now you don’t have to hunt for a collector’s item edition of Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards offering cryptically helpful aphorisms as rut escape strategies. It’s all online. And it’s probably been there forever, but I only found it recently.

## This interview with Ray Ozzie from ACM Queue from a few months ago is a great read. It’s especially insightful about the disparity today between individuals and small businesses and large enterprises — like Microsoft, where Ozzie is now a CTO. Little guys are free to adapt to the newest and most flexible technologies; big enterprises find themselves hogtied not only by the money they’ve already spent on older technologies, but by fear and turf-wars and regulations that make it almost impossible for them to embrace openness and change. Choice quote:

  RSS is an extremely important standard. It’s the HTML of the next generation of the Web, or some people might refer to it as the Unix pipe of the Internet. It’s a way of channeling data from one application to another in very interesting and robust fashion. Again, I think it’s important as a technique far beyond just collaborative software.

(For the non-Unix geeks out there, a “Unix pipe” is a fast, simple way in that operating system to connect the output of one program to the input of another.)

## Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos provides a crystal clear explanation of what Moore’s Law is and isn’t (it’s not about chips doubling in speed or halving in cost, it’s about doubling the number of transistors you can fit on a chip).

## Find yourself checking for new e-mail every five minutes? You might be a victim of continuous partial attention, but Rands in Repose has a slightly different take on the idea — he calls it Repetitive Information Injury. And a Discover column from Steven Johnson offers some novel ideas for new approaches to computer interfaces that are designed to help us focus more and multitask less when that’s what we want.

## Meanwhile, Paul Graham suggests that procrastination isn’t really a problem if you’re forsaking some dull work that you have to do in order to explore something you love. This advice is easier to act upon after you have sold your startup company, as Graham once did — those in need of a steady income may have greater trouble following his recommendations.

Horrors

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Award for most depressing read in the Sunday paper today goes to Jeffrey Gettleman’s piece from Baghdad, in which the New York Times correspondent, returning to Iraq after a year away, describes the new state of affairs there.

  It’s true that American soldiers are still dying, but the focus of the bloodshed has changed… By conservative counts, nearly 200 civilian men have been executed in the past two weeks and dumped on Baghdad’s streets. Many have been hogtied. Some have had acid splashed on their faces. Others have been found without toes, fingers, eyes… This new wave of executions was different. It was more sadistic and less selective. These people weren’t rounded up because they were important. They were tortured and killed simply because of their religion. And because most of them were Sunni Muslim Arabs, there was no response from the Shiite-led government.

This is the situation that our government is unwilling, for profoundly self-interested reasons, to label “civil war.” It is the worst-case outcome for the American misadventure in Iraq, and we are rapidly sinking toward it.

Gettleman writes: “I recently met a Sunni man who used to be virulently anti-American. He showed me postmortem pictures of his younger brother, who had been kidnapped by death squads and had holes drilled in his face. ‘Even the Americans wouldn’t do this,’ he said.”

Holes drilled in his face.

In the early months of the Iraq occupation, the insurgency was using car-bombs to blow up U.S. soldiers; every now and then, there’d be a beheading. American true believers in the war, stranded by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, would point with anger to this barbaric behavior. “These are the kind of beasts we’re fighting,” they’d cry, and, stoking their anger with outrage at such cruelties, they would find new resolve to pay the war’s escalating costs in dollars and blood.

So what are we to make of people who drill holes in victims’ faces? What new awful depths are trap-dooring open below us? How about this: These new sadists aren’t even on the same team as the others we’ve been fighting. The car-bombing insurgency, the “Al Qaeda in Iraq” beheaders led by Zarqawi, are Sunnis; the new Baghdad slaughterers are radical Shiites. They’re fighting each other, the American-backed Iraqi “unity” government can’t or won’t stop the miserable carnage, and U.S. forces are either unwilling or unable to step in. (Here’s Gettleman’s dispatch for the Monday paper: “American officials are now saying that Shiite militias are the No. 1 problem in Iraq, more dangerous than the Sunni-led insurgents who for nearly the past three years have been branded the gravest security threat.”)

The Samarra attack last month now appears to be the match that lit this civil conflagration. Gettleman, again:

  Not enough can be said about the attack on a Shiite shrine in Samarra last month. That explosion opened a cycle of revenge that seems to have split modern Iraqi history. There is before Samarra and after. Before Samarra, many Iraqis tried to play down Sunni-Shiite tensions. Since Samarra, they live in mortal fear of them.

Perhaps it’s time for the American leadership to stop the game of delusional behavior, admit that Iraq is now in the early stages of a civil war, and begin figuring out how to get our forces home before the Sunni-Shiite crossfire decimates them. Or are we going to keep spending $100 billion a year to garrison Iraq with an army that can’t even stop people from drilling holes in faces?