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Tracking bugs with the Times

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The response to my idea in January that newsrooms borrow a page from the open-source playbook and adopt bug-tracking systems wasn’t exactly thunderous (not that I had any reason to expect anything else!). But I was pleasantly surprised — while reading the New York Times’ recent internal report recommending a variety of smart moves the paper should take to combat the erosion of readers’ trust — to see that the flagship paper of American journalism is talking about taking a step in this direction. The Times committee proposes that the paper begin to use a database to track errors:

 

Last year we published almost 3,200 corrections. We can do better. Our goal should be to eliminate error, beyond acknowledging it and correcting it.

The proposed database would track the types and causes of errors that lead to corrections. The data would come from a mandatory form filled out by the individual(s) responsible for an error. It would include a draft of the proposed correction, with an explanation of how the mistake happened and how it could have been avoided.

This is OK, as far as it goes, but notice that the responsibility for entering the error falls on the party least motivated to do so — the “individual responsible for an error.” The resulting system may help the Times notice patterns of errors that it can try to remedy. But it won’t fundamentally improve the feedback loop between the paper and the world it is trying to cover — unless and until the database goes public. Why not open it up and let readers file “bugs” against stories? As I wrote in a follow-up post in January, “I think this approach would pay off best for a newsroom that is having difficulty convincing readers that the publication is actually listening to them. If you showed the public that you were recording and responding to the issues they raised — whether you end up publishing a correction or simply saying, ‘We don’t think that needs correcting, and here’s why’ — I think you’d start to bank some confidence and trust pretty quickly.”

The difference between a private database and a public bug-tracker is the difference between a management tool and an open channel of communication. The former isn’t a bad thing, but the latter is what you want if you really intend to restore public trust.

The report seems overly worried that tying names of journalists to numbers of errors would be unfair to individuals (“Only masthead editors, department heads and the editor in charge of overseeing the error-tracking system should have access to names in the database”). Certainly, the paper’s managers are being enlightened to say that they’re not going to judge reporters based on “raw counts of an individual’s errors,” which “can be simplistic and misleading.” Well and good. But the idea that these numbers need to be kept private seems both overprotective and naive.

The readers who know a subject well enough to know that an error has been made in coverage of that subject also know very well exactly which reporter(s) were responsible for the goof. Bylines are public. Journalism is public. Errors are public. If a particular reporter ends up embarrassed because of an unduly large number of errors associated with his name, he should be. A well-designed public error-tracker for a newspaper could help make sure that those reporters who have real problems getting their facts straight either improve or are eventually retired or moved to less sensitive jobs. Meanwhile, if readers complain repeatedly about a particular reporter’s errors and the paper feels they’re not errors at all, then at least its response and defense of that reporter would be on the record.

The Internet ensures that criticism of journalists and complaints of their mistakes will be public and will name names. Newspapers can’t reverse that. But if they handle things right, they can provide an orderly and reliable record of complaints lodged against them, of actions taken to correct errors or to demonstrate that charges of error are simply mistaken. If they do so, they will help bolster public trust in their work. If they don’t do it on their own terms, the distributed intelligence of the Net will continue to do it on terms that editors will find less and less hospitable.

Bombs away

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If a suicide bomber attacks and the media don’t cover it, are the victims still dead?

Today the New York Times’ rookie conservative columnist, John Tierney, offers a variation on the See No Evil argument about Iraq (itself a variation of the Blame the Messenger gambit). The real problem with Iraq, Tierney argues, isn’t that the nation is drifting into civil war and that two years after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow the U.S. still can’t provide any measure of personal safety for those Iraqis brave enough to volunteer to serve in the new government, or show any sign that it has begun to figure out how to reduce the level of violence in the country. The problem, says Tierney, is that the U.S. media is too darn determined to report on the Iraqi rebels’ attacks.

Tierney spins his case by donning the cape of a crusader for media quality: Sensationalist journalists are just too easily distracted by gory photo opportunities. There’s no news here, the columnist argues; seen one suicide bombing, seen ’em all. “How much shock value or mystery is there anymore to suicide bombings? How intrigued are people by murders when the motive, the weapon and the murderer’s fate are never in doubt?”

In this view, the bombings in Iraq are context-free acts of brutality set apart from any historical continuum. Tierney thinks the media should show “a little restraint” and “reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings.” In his formulation, everything that’s happening in Iraq — all the complex interaction between Sunnis and Kurds and Shiites and American forces, all the ethnic and religious cross-currents, all the backdrop of oil politics and the post-9/11 war with al-Qaeda — gets reduced to the phrase “suicide bombings.” Don’t think that we’re dealing with the latest chapter in a war started by our own government; it’s just a strange rash of “suicide bombings.” Putting the bombers on TV only encourages them! But if we stop the cameras, maybe they will go away.

Tierney’s column is self-evidently ridiculous, but it’s worth noting that it also represents an odd twist in conservative rhetoric. Before the Iraq war, it was liberals who argued that there was no compelling reason to send an army into Iraq — that the equivalent of international police action was doing the job and would continue to do so. (Some liberals also argued for the “police action” approach against Al-Qaeda: Frame the 9/11 attackers as criminals, not as wartime enemies. But the president’s religio-apocalyptic “War on Terror” rhetoric became America’s marching orders instead.) Now that there really is a sad, bloody, endless war in Iraq, the conservatives’ line is shifting: They don’t want us to think of it as a war at all. It really is policing, now, even though we’ve still got a few divisions in the field and soldiers are dying every day. We should deal with it, Tierney says, the way Rudy Giuliani dealt with criminals. Cutting out the press worked in New York City; let’s try it in Baghdad!

The trouble is, while obviously the bombers in Iraq treat media coverage as a part of their strategy, every CNN camera could switch off and every American reporter could come home — you could have a complete blackout of U.S. coverage of every bombing — and the Iraqi rebels would continue to pursue their goals. The U.S. is only one part of a bigger game to them. The horrific bombing attacks in Iraq are not random acts of brutality; they are part of a calculated war plan aimed at undermining any chance of success for the Bush administration’s project in Iraq.

If you were an Iraqi contemplating whether to run for office or serve in the Iraqi police force, you might be reasonably afraid of being targeted by a fanatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. You might overcome your fear; you might choose the better part of valor. One thing I seriously doubt you’d consider was whether said fanatic’s bomb attack was going to get U.S. press coverage or not. Life might be a little easier for the Republicans in Washington if the American media paid less attention to Iraqi suicide bombers, but things wouldn’t get any better for Iraqis.

It’s true that the Bush administration has had some success in applying a See No Evil strategy to U.S. casualties in Iraq. Not allowing the American media to show pictures of American coffins returning home really has helped the administration keep the lid on domestic discontent with its policies. So we might expect White House officials to like the idea of extending the tactic more widely to the Iraq field of operations. What’s hard to fathom is why a journalist would propose anything of the sort.

No reader is an island

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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.

Apple vs. the press

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As long as I’ve written about blogs I’ve made the point that blogging and journalism are separate activities that may or may not overlap. Since this debate has now entered the legal realm, let’s restate this with mathematical precision: Bloggers can be journalists; journalists can be bloggers. Neither state — I Am A Journalist, and I Am A Blogger — excludes the other, but neither guarantees the other. There is an axis of blogger to not-blogger, and an axis of journalist to not-journalist. The two axes are orthogonal, not parallel.

The legal matter that forces us to contemplate such a graph is Apple Computer’s suit against three online journalists in an attempt to get them to reveal the sources they used to publish some advance scoops about forthcoming Apple products.

We’re fortunate to be at a moment in history when changes in technology, begun a decade ago by the rise of the Web and accelerated by the introduction of anyone-can-publish software, mean that the spectrum of journalism has been broadened in ways that were previously unimaginable. The danger in the Apple suit lies in the possibility that a bad court decision — like one a lower court has already delivered in this case — might careless and foolishly decide that in order to be a journalist one has to receive a salary from some operation that some legal authority has defined as a journalistic entity.

That such a definition would be not only wrongheaded but actively harmful to the vibrant and lively democratic free-for-all on today’s Internet is the point of an amicus curiae brief filed today by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. I’m proud to be among the signers of this document, which was written by Lauren Gelman of the Stanford center. (Here’s a full list of the amici, with links.) The brief argues that, when the courts need to determine who receives the various legal protections available in some circumstances to working journalists, it should decide who is a journalist by looking at what putative journalists actually do, not who pays their salary or what membership cards they carry or what degrees they hold:

 

Amici come together to urge this court to hold that Internet publishers, including webloggers who are engaged in the reporting and dissemination functions a journalist performs, may invoke the protection of the journalists’ privilege on equal footing with traditional reporters and news organizations….

The applicability of the newsgatherers’ privilege is determined not by the reporter’s formal status as a ‘professional journalist,’ but rather by the reporter’s functional conduct in gathering information with the purpose of disseminating widely to the public.

If you take the time to read the somewhat confused state court decision that is now under appeal, you’ll see that the judge’s initial ruling, in favor of Apple and against the Web sites, declares that it doesn’t really matter whether you consider the Apple news sites to be conducting journalism or not, because, the judge seems to be saying, journalists have no business publishing trade secrets anyway.

I’m not enough of a lawyer to try to predict where that argument is headed; it seems of a piece with a variety of assaults taking place today on the rights of journalists to protect their sources. (The parallel amicus brief presented by the AP, a long list of California newspapers and the Reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press tackles this issue.)

What I do know is that, if the New York Times or Time magazine published a scoop from an anonymous source about a forthcoming Apple product, the company wouldn’t be suing the press. So it’s important here for people who do journalism at all points along the spectrum from “pro” to “citizens” to step forward and say: If you ask questions with intent to publish, and you publish information someone considers news, you’re a journalist, and should be treated as one by the courts.

Gallup’s half-empty blog glass

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I’m a long-term believer in blogs; three years ago, I wrote, “Weblogs expand the media universe. They are a media life-form that is native to the Web, and they add something new to our mix, something valuable, something that couldn’t have existed before the Web.” That column was written three years after my first column on blogs, back when you had to call them “Web logs” and explain what they were to everyone each time you used the term. (Just as those of use who were writing about the Web for mainstream publications in 1994 had always to append some boilerplate phrase every time we mentioned “The World Wide Web,” like “…the popular, graphical network of Internet sites…”)

So blogs are having their moment in the media sun today, and that’s just fine. But Gallup now has a poll out that tells us that “relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon of blogging.” Gallup wants us to stop and realize that blogs aren’t so big after all. Its headline is dripping with contempt: “Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues: Very few Americans read them with any frequency.” But really, this is a glass half-empty or half-full kind of thing. And the glass is filling up awfully quickly.

You can tell Gallup is a little uneasy from the phrase “relatively few”; since it appears that we are talking about nearly half of Americans, I’d like to know, relative to exactly what? Gallup’s numbers say that one out of four Americans are “very or somewhat” familiar with blogs. I think that’s extraordinary, but Gallup seems to thinks it’s some kind of weak showing.

Gallup tells us the following: “Three-quarters of the U.S. public uses the Internet at work, school, or home, but only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs (the shortened form of the original ‘Web logs’). More than half, 56%, have no knowledge of them. Even among Internet users, only 32% are very or somewhat familiar with blogs.”

I think what we’re supposed to be hearing here is, “Forget all the hype about blogs, this isn’t a big deal, the majority of Americans don’t even know what the hell they are.” But you could take these exact same numbers and present them in the inverse light if you wanted: “Though the Internet has been around for almost forty years, only 3/4 of Americans use it. Yet blogs — which have only been around 6-7 years, and have been popularized under that name for half that time — are already a phenomenon recognized by nearly half of the U.S. population. And fully one-third of Americans who use the Internet, or one quarter of the entire U.S. population, say they are very or somewhat familiar with blogs — an impressively high number, given their novelty.”

The interpretation of polls, in other words, is really a matter of the assumptions you bring to them. The Gallup write-up starts with a chip on its shoulder; it sets out to prove that blogs aren’t as big as the hype, though if the hype were as big as all that, you’d think there’d be a much bigger group of “heard of ’em but don’t read ’em” respondents (i.e., there’d be more people who’d at least have heard of the phenomenon thanks to the hype, without having spent time actually reading blogs).

At some point over the last couple of years blogs crossed the threshold from niche to mainstream. Gallup’s numbers confirm that. The bias in the company’s article is like what you could find in a music industry trade publication of the 1980s that might have said, “Though CDs are growing in popularity, our survey shows that less than half of Americans actually own a CD player, and most still purchase their music in the form of records.” The trend line had already crossed the point of no return, but the statistical snapshot made it look like the LP was king.

Of course blogs won’t replace the old media with anything like the thoroughness that CDs drove out vinyl (new media channels of communication don’t kill their predecessors the way new physical delivery formats often do). But the news from Gallup is clear: Blogs have now become part of the mass culture. Too bad the company chose the wrong headline.

“On the Web but off the record” does not compute

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When you post something on a public weblog, you’re posting it to the open Web, which is to say, you are making it public to anyone who follows a link to it. So I was a little taken aback, as I followed the blogosphere chatter over the Microsoft-Groove deal (here’s the commentary by Groove investor and former board member Mitch Kapor), to come upon this comment by Ed Brill of Lotus / IBM.

Brill labels his post as a “not-for-quote-by-press observation.” He boldfaces the phrase, so clearly he means it seriously, he’s not joking. In a follow-up post he explains that “the posting isn’t my complete perspective on the announcement. … In a press interview, I’d offer a broader view of the deal, and, more importantly, put it in the context of what we at IBM/Lotus have to offer the market.”

But, um, Ed, you’ve posted words on the Web that are readable by hundreds of millions of people. I’m afraid the cat’s out of the bag. If a reporter (or anyone) wants to quote you, you can’t say, “Sorry, that was off the record.” If you don’t want to be quoted, post your comment in a private forum! Put it in a private e-mail labeled “Do Not Quote”! Call your friends and tell them what you think, and don’t let any reporters on the line! If you need time to compose your “complete perspective” on an announcement and don’t want your quick initial scribblings to be quoted, don’t post them.

This is a small point, and there’s nothing particularly incendiary in Brill’s posting that would cause any fuss. I’m just finding it impossible to get my head around the oxymoronic notion of a public Web posting that is “not-for-quote-by-press.”

UPDATE: Read Ed Brill’s reasonable response. Looks like, as an IBM employee, he’s feeling his way through this complex and still-evolving landscape.

Are telephone callers journalists?

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Despite its having been on the table for at least six years now, this question of whether bloggers are journalists won’t seem to rest, and now that the courts are getting involved, we don’t have much choice but to revisit it, as Slashdot, among many others, has done today. Dan Fost’s San Francisco Chronicle story provides a good summary of the issue, as Apple Computer pursues its suit to get some bloggers to reveal the sources of anonymous information they published. But the article misses the most basic distinction at work here.

A blogger is someone who uses a certain kind of tool to publish a certain kind of Web site. The label tells us nothing about how the tool is used or what is published. We went through this discussion a decade ago, when people first started asking whether Web sites were journalism. To understand this, just take the question, “Are bloggers journalists?” and reframe it in terms of previous generations of tools. “Are telephone callers journalists?” “Are typewriter users journalists?” “Are mimeograph operators journalists?” Or, most simply, “Are writers journalists?” Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not.

That is the only answer to the “Are bloggers journalists?” question that makes any sense. Bloggers sometimes engage in journalism, just as they sometimes engage in diary-writing, art-making, essayizing and many other forms of communication.

This answer is inconvenient, as we face the question of whether bloggers should receive the same legal protection as more conventionally defined journalists; it doesn’t provide a clearcut legal rule. But, let’s face it, legal protections for journalists have always involved a certain fuzziness. Since, thankfully, the U.S. government doesn’t legally charter journalists — that would be difficult to square with the First Amendment — everyone is free to apply the label to themselves. You don’t need a journalism degree, either. (I’ve been a journalist for three decades and I don’t have one.)

You can try to define journalists by applying the filter of professionalism, by seeing whether people are actually earning a living through their journalistic work — but then you rule out the vast population of low-paid or non-paid freelance workers, and those who are not currently making money in their writing but hope to someday. Apparently most of the existing shield laws use some version of the “you are where your paycheck comes from” definition of journalist (see Declan McCullagh over at CNET for more). That’s one good reason for thinking that they might need some revision.

There’s a good definition of “journalist” sitting right at the top of Jim Romenesko’s journalism blog today (is pioneering blogger Romenesko a journalist?), where CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein says: “I define a journalist as someone who asks questions, finds out answers and communicates them to an audience.” By that standard, a hefty proportion of today’s bloggers qualify.

Does this vast expansion of the journalism population mean that the courts and legislatures are going to have second thoughts about protecting the confidentiality of journalists’ sources? Perhaps — and maybe those shield laws need tweaking or amendment, given the transformations underway. But any attempt to draw a narrow line around the journalism profession in order to preserve those laws is doomed to fail. There is no way to draw that line — income level? circulation? corporate size? forget it! — that is not ridiculous on its face.

So we’re left with the pathetic spectacle of beloved Apple Computer chasing down some bloggers to find out which of its employees leaked some early peeks at product information. Apple may win, and the laws may contort themselves to exclude the vast new throngs of online journalists from the protected club. But is there any doubt that, in the long run, it’s Apple’s dam-building effort that’s doomed? Whether protected by law or not, the teeming network of the blogosphere is not going to shut down, any more than online music file sharing could be ended by the legal campaign against Napster. In this sense, the whole “journalists or not?” debate is an irrelevant, backward-looking theological dispute.

[I wrote this post this morning but the computer that I run Radio on died for some reason, so it’s going up late, and with some revisions…]

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.

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.