Sunday and Monday the Net was abuzz with word of Stephen Colbert’s bracing, revelatory acts of lese majeste at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Videos were posted. Emails were exchanged. Word spread. This was, or at least felt like, a watershed event, an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of moment.

That, apparently, is not how it seemed from inside the Beltway bubble. Colbert’s highwire irony apparently left the D.C. press corps cold. It didn’t even merit a mention in the New York Times coverage of the event. Colbert “fell flat because he ignored the cardinal rule of Washington humor: Make fun of yourself, not the other guy,” the Washington Post told us. It seemed that a silly routine that President Bush concocted with a Bush impersonator went over better with this crowd.

At Salon we’re well accustomed to this disconnection between the D.C. consensus and the view from beyond the Beltway. We felt it keenly during the mad Monica days, when capital insiders and mainstream media boffins puffed themselves up with outrage at an inconsequential presidential transgression while a significant portion of the rest of the nation sat there thinking, “Get over it — move on, and get back to work on the real problems we face.” Today, this dynamic is inverted: the outrage lies beyond the Beltway, where it’s almost impossible to believe how badly the nation has been run into the ground by the current administration and its allies.

In Washington, it seems, the emperor’s nudity remains a verboten topic, and our leader is to be feted with business-as-usual niceties. Meanwhile, beyond the corridors of power, the clothes vanished a long time ago, the folly is transparent, and we can’t believe the ugliness of the resulting spectacle. Our young people are dying in a war based on a lie, our national leadership reeks of corruption, our economic well-being has been sold out for a mess of tax-break pottage, the global environment is being wrecked for our children, the absence of a smart energy policy has left us powerless in the face of an oil shortage — and we are supposed to be nice?

Maybe the editors and reporters in that banquet room didn’t find Colbert funny. Watching his performance at home, I couldn’t stop laughing.

[Watch Colbert here (Videodog, Youtube 1, 2, 3); read Michael Scherer’s Salon piece; there’s a full transcript over at Kos.]

LATE ADD: Dave Johnson calls the absence of mainstream Colbert coverage an “intentional blackout.” Me, I don’t think it’s coordinated in quite that way; newsrooms independently reach the same (wrong) conclusion about what’s newsworthy — then see their choices reinforced by those of their colleagues at other outlets. Mostly I think they resented Colbert’s jabs at them — and cheered themselves up by telling themselves that he wasn’t really funny.

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.

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.

If it weren’t so pathetic it would be hilarious.

The Washington Post, caving in to a right-wing campaign against its blogger-columnist Dan Froomkin, recently hired a raging young conservative named Ben Domenech to start a blog called “Red America.”

If it were serious about balance, the Post would then have hired someone like Tom Tomorrow or Kos to bring the scales back to level. But then, they have track records. And they’re not plagiarists.

Domenech, it turns out, spent his college years at William and Mary cribbing whole paragraphs from movie reviews in Salon (and other reviews by Steve Rhodes, and other pieces by P.J. O’Rourke.)

I don’t know which is worse: the act itself or the stupidity of doing so in 1999, as a college student in the Internet era, when you just have to know that it will catch up with you someday.

Shouldn’t he at least have been copying from National Review or the New Criterion? Did he figure none of his conservative pals would read Salon, so he could pilfer with abandon?

However the story plays out — and it will, fast — the black eye for the Post is, sadly, deserved.

Domenech has already posted an apology for complaining that President Bush shouldn’t have attended Coretta Scott King’s funeral because she was a “Communist.” So far, no attempt to explain the multiple acts of plagiarism.

UPDATE: Read Joe Conason’s take. And Salon has a compendium of Domenech’s plagiarisms.

With the news of its unwillingness to turn over large quantities of data to the federal government, the spotlight has been on Google all week: What exact information does the Department of Justice want, why is Google refusing to provide it, whose privacy might or might not be compromised?

These are certainly important questions. But the Google glare has obscured, in much of the coverage, the nature of the case that has caused this strange collateral damage — the proceeding that has been variously known through the years since its inception in 1998 as ACLU vs. Reno, ACLU vs. Ashcroft, and now ACLU vs. Gonzalez.

This case, a challenge to the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), has dragged on for so many years that even people who once perceived it with great clarity have succumbed to varying degrees of fuzziness around it. We start with the misleading name of the original law, which leads many people (and many reporters) to assume, wrongly, that the law has something to do with stopping child pornography.

It is, in fact, a law that, according to its proponents, is intended to keep more garden-variety forms of Internet-based porn away from kids’ eyes. That’s not a goal I object to, either as a journalist or as the parent of young kids (they’re six now, though they weren’t even born when this case started). Unfortunately, COPA adopted both a much broader definition of the kind of content it aims to restrict and a harsh set of criminal remedies. The law says that if you publish material that is “harmful to minors” and you don’t use a credit-card verification check to make sure that everyone who accesses the material is a grownup, you’ll face extended imprisonment, hefty fines or both.

Which leaves publishers like Salon, along with other publishers who are plaintiffs in the ACLU suit, wondering exactly where the government would draw the line: which articles about sexual mores intended for adults? which pages of sex-ed information intended for teenagers? Who are we supposed to trust to draw the line between gross, “harmful to minors” porn and legitimate, First Amendment-protected expression — John Ashcroft and his ilk?

The government playbook in this matter is to say to publishers like Salon that are not commercial pornographers, “Hey, don’t worry, relax, you’re not the target here.” We’re supposed to trust the Bush Justice Department’s interpretation of the law and ignore what the law actually says. No wonder every court that has considered this matter to date has sided with the ACLU and against the government.

All of this explains why my hackles went up when I read Slate columnist Adam Penenberg, in an otherwise sensible column about the Google/Justice dispute, describe COPA as a law that “required that adult sites implement age-verification policies.” Any reader of that description of the law who doesn’t know more about it will think, “What’s the problem? Shouldn’t adult sites require age verification?”

The problem is, that’s not what the law says. Penenberg’s description plays right into the government’s spin; by describing COPA this way, he’s making it sound like a perfectly reasonable statute.

I emailed back and forth with Adam about this today, and as far as I can tell he believes he hasn’t written anything inaccurate. It’s true that COPA does “require adult sites to implement age-verification policies”; but that’s an incomplete description that fails to explain to readers why anyone would find the law problematic. Say there was a new law that aimed to reduce street crime by enforcing a universal national curfew; you could decribe it as a law that “required all convicts to stay indoors at night,” and technically you’d be right, but you wouldn’t be helping anyone understand why people would find the law objectionable.

I’m zeroing in on one sentence here because, really, it’s the crux of the issue at stake in the case. The press seems to have a very hard time providing a simple, accurate description of what COPA is. (The original Mercury News report on the Google dispute also garbled its attempt to summarize the law.) By describing COPA this way, Penenberg is simply assisting the government’s effort to deceive people into thinking that this extreme law is really nothing to get upset about. That, you know, upsets me.

I started working with Andrew Leonard at Salon when he joined us in early 1997, and for several years I happily served as editor for his inspired technology reporting. At the height of the Internet boom I helped him conceive and execute a book project that we unfolded, chapter by chapter, online, in an early instance of a practice that has now become positively trendy. The Free Software Project had to be scuttled as Salon’s business went south, but even in its incomplete form I think it represents some of the best writing anywhere on the history of open source software development.

Today Andrew and Salon unveil the latest effort of this technology writer par excellence — a blog called How the World Works, in which Andrew will dig into some of the thorniest, gnarliest and most complex stories that reveal the strangely mutating dynamics of early 21st-century global capitalism. You can read Andrew’s introduction here. Or read about the strange saga of the run on polysilicon. The How the World Works RSS feed is here (or will be very soon!).

Well, I’ve researched and researched, and written and written, and now I must revise and revise. When I actually have a manuscript turned in to my editor — before Thanksgiving, for sure! — I will exhale and write a bit here about the process, and how things have turned out. I should also be blogging a bit more henceforth. Thanks for bearing with me through this hiatus.

In the meantime, I should mention that Salon is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week. It’s hard for me to believe that ten years ago I was a disaffected ex-theater critic, technology columnist and fledgling HTML adept making the jump from print to online. I knew it was risky, and the fact that our money-making plans were strictly theoretical made me think, okay, this will be fun for a year or two, then Salon’s likely to go down the tubes and I’ll make a living freelancing.

After a fun year became two, then three, then four, I moved over from my job as technology editor to managing editor, taking on a lot of responsibility for things like budgets and site management. And I began to think, hey, this thing might actually last! Whoops — cue the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The moment I started getting confident, suddenly it really did look for a while like Salon might go down.

But by then I was hooked. I was determined to see it through, as was everyone else who stuck it out, and I put my back into a lot of difficult and creatively unfulfilling work to do my part to help Salon survive. It was only last year that I felt comfortable enough about the company’s stability that I could think about taking a book leave this year without feeling like I was abandoning ship. Things are definitely on the upswing, but, you know, I’m a little wary of feeling too confident. Old wounds and all.

By now you may have seen Gary Kamiya’s history of the site — it’s hilarious, deftly captures much of the heart and soul of Salon through the years, and brought back a torrent of memories for me. My angle on some of the history might have been different: Gary’s less focused than I’d have been on Salon’s place in the evolution of the nascent field of Web publishing; he’s more immersed in consideration of Salon’s place in the general milieu of political and literary journalism. I always worked one step closer than him to the business side of things, and many steps closer to the technical side of things. My version of those aspects of the story may be a little less Stranger in a Strange Land and a little more In the Belly of the Beast.

When I’m a little less written out I may trot out some of those tales. Or maybe I’ll just wait till Salon’s 20th.

For now, as I near my own milestone of a finished book, I toast all my current and former Salon colleagues, and look forward to rejoining them in January. More on that, soon, too.

I should take a brief break from the hurlyburly here at Web 2.0 to point whatever tiny handful of my blog readers over to Salon proper, where my colleagues have, as of last night, unveiled the central piece of the site’s continuing redesign. It’s the first Salon redesign that I have mostly sat out of, from my on-leave perch this year. It is, naturally, a collaboration by many great people. But if those of you with longer memories detect a certain feeling of connection with previous Salon designs of the mid and late ’90s — elegance and openness — that’s the hand of Mignon Khargie, Salon’s original design director, who returned to lend her sharp talents to the project.

There are, inevitably, kinks to work out, and some features that still need to be rolled in. But it’s great to see Salon beginning to evolve again. For a few years in the early part of this decade, we devoted a lot of energy simply to survival. Now we’re able to change and grow again.

[having trouble posting this remotely…flaky network here at Web 2.0 — let’s see if this works….]

I’m keeping my head down to work on my book, most of the time, but Kerry Lauerman asked for contributions to a package about “Star Wars,” and, well, I couldn’t resist. You can read my thoughts on why I, as a passionate teenage science fiction fan in the 1970s, was never a fan of George Lucas’s epic, here.

On a related subject, I watched “Spaceballs” for the first time during my last vacation, in the company of my family, and while it was as, well, slight as I expected, there was something about the notion of “The Schwartz” (Mel Brooks’ answer to the Force) that really seemed to charm my five-year-old boys, who took up the concept as a rallying cry and did not let it go.

You can’t open your RSS reader these days without finding another thoughtful essay or exhaustive report on the troubles confronting the news business and profession.

These critiques are valuable and necessary. Still, sometimes I think the situation is much simpler. Reading Larry Lessig’s pained response to New York Times coverage of a recent panel he shared with Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) and Steven Johnson (of Feed and several great books, including the forthcoming “Everything Bad is Good For You“) reminded me of why.

Lessig read the Times piece and, despite the number of people who told him they thought it was great, reported his disappointment in David Carr’s coverage — specifically, Carr’s failure to offer his readers a full understanding of the issues in the copyright controversy, which are far more complex (and interesting) than the dull-brained dichotomy of “I support piracy” vs. “I think artists should get paid” that the Hollywood content cartel promotes, and to which, Lessig felt, Carr’s piece reduced Tweedy’s position.

This disillusionment happens every day, even with publications at the top of the heap, like the Times, the Post and the Journal. (Our expectations for broadcast journalism are so minuscule that there’s less room for disappointment — we assume the worst going in.) We’re happy with what we read in the paper until we’re reading about something we know really well. Then, too often, with all but the very sharpest and most conscientious reporters, we see all the small errors, distortions, omissions and problems that are daily journalism’s epidemic affliction.

Of course we experienced our share of this over the years at Salon, during the period when every little sneeze and twitch of our business — as well, to be sure, as some more significant seizures — seemed to call forth an avalanche of coverage. If you bothered to complain about problems in coverage, the common reaction of most journalists followed a sort of Kubler-Rossian sequence of stages that rarely cycled all the way through to the end:

• Denial: There’s nothing wrong with our story. You’re blaming the messenger.

• Anger: Ingrate! You should be glad you’re getting any coverage at all.
• Bargaining: Okay, we did mis-spell that name, but does anyone really care about the distinction between “losses” and “debt”?
• Acceptance: The correction will run when we get around to it. (And we’ll remember what a pain in the butt you are the next time around.)

When our own stories were challenged, I always tried to remind our staff of how they felt when we were on the receiving end of sloppy coverage, and to work past the inevitable human reaction of defensiveness toward a more disinterested stance: if we got something wrong, we should be the most eager to find out what “right” is and fix the record. (This is one of those discussions where it remains useful to try to uphold the fast-eroding distinction in the language between “disinterest” — meaning, you can be neutral because you don’t hold any interest in the matter — and “uninterest,” meaning you’re bored.)

Of course, many complaints about coverage aren’t about simple facts but rather about emphasis, scope and slant, and the correction process doesn’t really help there, anyway. Lessig’s issue is probably in this category.

The problem is that writing on deadline is hard to begin with. Writing on deadline about a subject you’re only modestly knowledgeable about is even harder. The newsroom is a place of generalist bravado, in which most reporters feel perfectly qualified to write about anything, even if they’re flying blind. They’d better feel that way, since their editors ask them to do so all the time.

Until recently, each reader who saw the holes in the occasional story he knew well was, in essence, an island; and most of those readers rested in some confidence that, even though that occasional story was problematic, the rest of the paper was, really, pretty good. Only now, the Net — and in particular the explosion of blogs, with their outpouring of expertise in so many fields — has connected those islands, bringing into view entire continents of inadequate, hole-ridden coverage. The lawyer blogs are poking holes in the legal coverage, while the tech blogs are poking holes in the tech coverage, the librarian blogs are poking holes in the library coverage — and the political blogs, of course, are ripping apart the political coverage in a grand tug of war from the left and the right. Within a very short time we’ve gone from seeing the newspaper as a product that occasionally fails to live up to its own standards to viewing it as one that has a structural inability to get most things right.

Blogging potentially allows CEOs and politicians, companies and institutions to tell their own stories in their own words, and that’s dandy, but I’d never trust it as the only record. Coverage of important news by smart generalists — disinterested generalists — remains of great public value. But too many practitioners of this venerable art have grown (figuratively) fat and lazy from their monopoly position. They’re not used to being challenged, they don’t like being challenged, and too often their first reflex when challenged is to question the motive of the challenger.

Now the monopoly is fraying, the challenges are coming on in a wave, and the entire field is at a crossroads. As a profession, journalism has a choice: It can persist in a defensive, circle-the-wagons stance, pretending that nothing has changed. (The public has spontaneously and inexplicably decided to withdraw its trust from journalists! How strange! Let’s wring our hands and wait for the madness to pass.) Or it can accept the presence of millions of teeming critical voices as a challenge to shape up and do a better job.

It’s hard work, and it requires a level of humility that is not yet in wide enough supply in the newsrooms I’ve known. But most journalists are, or once were, idealists, and I think enough of them still wake up in the morning wanting to seek out and tell the truth that there’s hope they’ll come to understand that the Internet can be their ally in that quest, and not just a channel for random noise and personal invective. (It helps to have a thick skin and a functioning “ignore” filter for such invective when it’s encountered.)

As a business, journalism has a choice, too: It can ride out the monopoly’s sunset, delivering the dregs of a once-profitable position to investors until the business sputters out, replaced by a whole new system with new opportunities, problems — and owners. Or it can get entrepreneurial, invest in some new experiments, knowing that many will fail, but that the few successes could point a way out of today’s cul-de-sac.

Almost inevitably, incumbent business franchises choose door number one, the cul-de-sac. There are just too many reasons to say “no” to change, and too few guarantees of a payoff if you say “yes.” So, while I’m hopeful for the choice that the journalism profession will make, I’m skeptical that the business management of most media corporations today will will hear the alarms through their profit-drugged stupor and rouse themselves to do the unexpected.

After all, if they did, it would mean admitting that some of those ragtag bloggers might have been, you know, right.