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Bloggercon, belatedly

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Bloggercon III was great. I barely had time to digest everything I took in because I was flying off on a long-planned trip the next morning. Here are some notes.

My session was on Journalism: I talked for about ten minutes, outlining some basic things that I think bloggers can learn from professional journalists and vice versa.

What bloggers can teach the pros:
*How to blur the line between the personal and the professional — creatively
*How to improvise in real time
*How to have a conversation with the “people formerly known as readers”
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

What bloggers can learn from traditional journalists:
*the value of legwork
*the nature of accountability
*The positive aspects of editing
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

Then I just opened the mike, which is the custom at Bloggercon, where there are no speakers — just “discussion leaders.” We didn’t get trapped in the “Is blogging journalism?” rathole, thankfully; and I think we are now well past the stage of simply re-fighting the old holy war between bloggers and pros, which was never as heated as press accounts had it, anyway. Journalists cast every new phenomenon in horse-race terms — who wins? who loses? — because that’s such a fundamental news template. But I think the smarter participants in both camps, and the many of us who have feet in both camps, or wear hats with multiple insignia, now well understand that this ought to be a win/win game.

I was too busy moderating to take decent notes, but the entire audio for the session is now online (along with other Bloggercon sessions) at Doug Kaye’s excellent ITConversations site, and there’s tons of others who did take notes.

Staci Kramer wrote it up for OJR (those are my bullet points quoted anonymously). There are also good posts about the event from Rebecca McKinnon, Claude Muncey, Barnaby, and Colin Brayton, who posted a a big picture of me that shows just how tired I was… (Note to Colin: if I was edging away from you after our brief conversation it’s because it was late in the day, I was trying to hit the road — my kids were waiting at home!)

Most interesting idea aired at the session (and apologies that I can’t remember whose idea it was — step forth and remind me so I can give you credit): Perform a controlled experiment in which readers take in the work of a number of journalists covering a controversial issue or election who are striving to be “objective” but who actually have a point of view that they do not disclose (i.e., they are normal human beings). The readers will try to guess the writers’ sympathies based on the “objective” work. Can journalists really hide their views? Or, as some critics maintain, can we always tell which side they’re on, anyway?

It is, as Dan Gillmor suggested, a great idea for a thesis. Only you’d also somehow have to control for the biases and sympathies of the readers making the calls. This “objectivity is impossible” thing cuts in all directions. There is no alternative to being human. (Unless you’re, er, a marsupial or something. But then you’re probably not worrying about the nature of journalism.)

UPDATE LATER: That was indeed conference host and organizer Dave Winer who proposed the great “controlled experiment” idea. Thanks for that. Could someone — Poynter? Columbia Journalism School? NYU Journalism School (Jay?) — now put up a little money, or assign it to a class, to make it happen?

Also — more good notes from the session over at John Adams’ blog.

(Fwd) Re: Election fraud!

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My little coda below about exit polls and the thirst for tales of a stolen election among the throngs of disappointed Kerry voters, of whom I am one, led to a little fracas in the comments. So here’s my position, plain and simple, and maybe we can move on:

There’s no question that the paper-trail-free, unaccountable, closed-source model of electronic voting is flawed, precisely because it leaves no room for after-the-fact authentication, and allows rumors and suspicions of skulduggery to ferment. We need to change that system. Salon, and particularly our reporter Farhad Manjoo, have been at the forefront of coverage of this issue since long before the current election.

When complaints of problems at the polls arise, it’s the duty of responsible journalists, including us here at Salon, to take them seriously and try to evaluate them. If reported patterns of voting raise questions of any kind, that’s worth looking into. Nothing is more important than assuring ourselves that our elections are won fairly.

But elections are messy exercised in democracy — there’s no such thing as a perfect one. There’s always some conniving local official trying to win an edge for his side; the history of voter intimidation and voter-roll tweaking and political-machine tampering is endless. (“Vote early, vote often” was not a joke in Daley’s Chicago, and most historians have concluded that in 1960 Kennedy probably won Illinois, and the White House, thanks to some deft ballot-box stuffing.)

The inevitability of problem precincts and questionable tallies is a given. They demand our inquiry nevertheless. But their presence does not, in and of itself, offer proof of electoral crookedness or a stolen election.

My beef is with the legions of outraged and aggrieved e-mail correspondents who are utterly convinced that the election was stolen. Why? They got an e-mail that told them! They read an article by Greg Palast! And they’re not going to be satisfied by the work of some Salon reporter who went out and actually reviewed the evidence and talked to the participants. (Here’s the most recent back and forth between Palast and Manjoo.)

There’s a dynamic at work here that people really ought to be recognizing by now — the “I have no idea if this is true, but I’ll pass it on anyway” meme-propagation that the Internet so efficiently accelerates.

The worst case is that the more gullible and misinformed wing of the Democratic left will turn into our side’s version of the gullible and misinformed legions of Republican voters who believe that Saddam had WMDs and worked with al-Qaida. We’re not there yet, but if we keep going down this road of crying “fraud!” at the drop of a dubious e-mail tip, we’re in for trouble.

We need to become smarter, more skeptical consumers of the information we get online. All the information, including — no, especially — the information that confirms our preconceptions and prejudices. If we (here at Salon, or in the blogosphere, or even on CBS or Fox!) find real evidence of the sort of significant voting problems that could affect the election’s outcome, then I will join the charge. But I won’t leap to the barricades on the basis of me-too forwards from people who are desperate to believe and unwilling to face facts.

The 2000 election, with its razor-thin margins, its rampant problems at the polls and its ultimate resolution by a partisan Supreme Court, left us all understandably hyped up on this issue. This battle should have been fought then, and wasn’t. But 2004 turned out to be a different sort of disaster. We can close our eyes to that change and pretend it’s still 2000, or we can look around at the landscape of reality and figure out what we have to do to pull our nation back from the brink of its current madness.

The corrections

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I was traveling a lot during the past week, then returned to my backlogged domestic duties, and both kept me from this blog for far too long — apologies for the hiatus. Now for some catching up!

Soon, reports from Bloggercon and some other comments from my trip. But first, an amazing cavalcade of corrections.

Every news organization has to deal with a difficult or embarrassing correction every now and then; since everyone makes mistakes, the only alternative (pretend you never goofed) is unthinkable. But surely this season has been extraordinary.

We started shortly before the election with the Wall Street Journal’s act of postmodern performance-art journalism, in which the leading national conservative newspaper absolved the leading national conservative TV network of leaning Bush-ward: “NEWS CORP.’S Fox News was incorrectly described in a page-one article Monday as being sympathetic to the Bush cause.” Oh, right, thanks — you know, without the tip we just might have gotten that one wrong…

But the strange corrections keep coming. Here’s a couple of recent ones from the New York Times.

At the end of the most recent column by David Brooks came this timid confession: “Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.”

Unfortunately, the quote Brooks is now retracting formed the centerpiece of the columnist’s Oct. 30 piece; it was the key piece of evidence he cited as to “why Kerry is not cleaning Bush’s clock in this election.” Yeah, I guess it won’t do Kerry much good at this point. In this little craven act Brooks is simply working in line with the administration he supports, whose modus operandi routinely involves lying when it matters and letting the truth mop up when it no longer makes any difference.

But as we Bush opponents rightly push back on the distortions and outright lies that the crew in Washington have been peddling for four years, we need to take care that, in our anger and frustration, we don’t fall into some of the same practices.

For instance, take the matter of President Bush’s chief legal adviser, Alberto Gonzales, whose nomination to be Attorney General has raised hackles because of a memo (PDF) Gonzales wrote suggesting that the war on terrorism meant we could ignore aspects of the Geneva Conventions. Now, Gonzales wrote that memo, and no matter how you cut it it’s a fairly appalling document — one that can accurately be linked to the abuses and torture committed by American troops at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, crimes that Bush administration officials have amorally and shamefully refused to take any responsibility for. (In the Bush White House, the buck stops nowhere.)

Gonzales has plenty to answer for. But some critics (including Salon’s Joe Conason) have latched onto a single word that his memo uses to describe aspects of the Geneva Convention: “quaint.” Unfortunately, tarring Gonzales with that particular adjective appears to be unfair. If you read this correction from Friday’s Times, it’s clear that Gonzales used “quaint” only in the fairly narrow and reasonably defensible context of several trivial provisions that are not at the heart of this controversy:

  “A front-page article yesterday about the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be attorney general included an incomplete version of a quotation from a memo by Mr. Gonzales or his aides that his critics contend opened the door to the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. (Excerpts from Mr. Gonzales’s legal writings, published with the continuation of the article, included the complete quotation.) The passage, discussing the war on terrorism, read in full: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms and scientific instruments.” The version in the article yesterday was truncated after “some of its provisions.”

Oppose Gonzales? Sure. But let’s leave the selective quotation, the context-free criticism and the misquotational smears to the GOP. They’re better at it, anyway.

BONUS LINKS: For those of you who are still burning the midnight oil with nightmares of electoral fraud and recount fever, I can only recommend the yeoman work of Salon’s Farhad Manjoo (here and here). Every potential election problem is worth looking into, and Salon will keep at it, but let’s face it, it is hugely unlikely that this election was stolen. (Guess what? The exit polls were off because exit polls are lousy. And this entire election was within the margin of error at all times.) The more energy we spend focusing vainly on pursuing the chimera of fraud, the less we have to fight real battles.

And to keep up one’s spirits in this dark hour, there’s always The Onion’s deadpan realism: “Nation’s Poor Win Election For Nation’s Rich.”

Friedman’s choice

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I gave New York Times columnist Tom Friedman a hard time for not following his arguments about Bush’s failures in Iraq through to their logical conclusion, which would be a call for readers to vote against Bush.

It seems I was ignorant of an apparent Times policy that columnists can’t outright endorse candidates. And now Friedman has tiptoed up about as close to that line as possible.

No TV? No problem!

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Dave Winer and I were talking about journalism, politics and the upcoming Bloggercon session I’ll be leading, and I mentioned to him that I have not regularly watched television news in 20 years. He seemed more than a little shocked by that statement and suggested it required disclosure, so here it is: It’s true, I don’t watch TV news on any regular basis, never have. From my teens on I got my news from newspapers and magazines; once the Web came along that became another center for my personal information flow. Our house has only one TV and we don’t even get cable.

Of course I turn the TV on for earthquakes and terrorist attacks; of course I watch the presidential debates, and the TV is on for election night. When I’m traveling I’ll sometimes turn on the hotel TV for a taste of the cable news networks and the local broadcasts. That’s about it. For me, TV simply feels like an inefficient way to learn what’s happening in the world; it takes too much time to tell you too little, and it’s pretty much hopeless when it comes to any subject of any abstraction or complexity, particularly economics.

So there it is. I completely understand that this information diet seems alien to most people and marks me as peculiar and even un-American. Oh well. And I know that by not watching much TV I’m disconnected from the central arena in which our politics are (temporarily, I believe) forged. But I will not hand over the hours of my life to a medium I neither trust nor enjoy.

Some things never change

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Back in 1999 I wrote a column that pointed out that it’s really hard to get accurate numbers on visitors to Web sites, that MediaMetrix can’t be trusted (it undercounts critically important at work users), and its competitors aren’t much better.

Fast forward to 2004. Wired News’ Adam Penenberg writes a column that says that it’s really hard to get accurate numbers on visitors to Web sites, that MediaMetrix (now Comscore MediaMetrix) can’t be trusted (it undercounts critically important at work users), and that it’s competitors aren’t much better.

Adam’s right. Plus ca change… And today, the whole explosion of RSS and blogging promises to further cloud the statistics that marketers want.

In my column, I argued that the whole concept of “reach” as the be-all and end-all yardstick of success on the Web had some pretty negative implications, favoring sites and services with broad and superficial followings. I still think that’s the case. If there’s a future for businesses and services that offer depth and rich value rather than “quick hit,” low-loyalty visitors — and of course, sitting here at Salon, I think there is — then we need to do better than MediaMetrix, Neilsen and company.

Tom Friedman — still waiting for Bush to do right

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New York Times columnist Tom Friedman returns from a book leave today with a column that roars its outrage at the Bush administration’s disastrous Iraq policy — and then, bizarrely, collapses into a quivering heap of divorced-from-reality bipartisanship.

First Friedman catalogues Bush’s catastrophic choices, in great detail and with the brevity and forthrightness that mark his best work — and minus the catch-phrase coinages that mar his worst. Bush failed to commit enough troops to secure post-invasion Iraq. He relied on the bad word of Rumsfeld’s “Iraqi pals.” He “never established U.S. authority in Iraq.” A “decent outcome in Iraq” is vital, but “this Bush team can’t get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can. Why? Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology.” Bush couldn’t bring himself to fire “an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army,” or raise taxes on gas, or fire anyone who was responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib. “Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.”

So, obviously, Bush must go, right?

No, I’m afraid Friedman’s conclusion is as follows: “We’re in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we’ll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.”

I’m sorry, but this makes no sense. America is already deeply fractured — just look at the polls, or talk to your neighbors; at war with itself — look at how insanely close this election is likely to be; and isolated from the world. The nation’s leaders gave Bush bipartisanship in the days after 9/11, and again in the leadup to the Iraq war, and Bush abused and insulted those foolish enough to think he is actually the “uniter” he once claimed to be.

There are just about 30 days to the presidential election. Politics cannot, will not, should not stop at such a moment. Anyone who believes all the points Friedman makes in his column has no choice but to demand that Bush be booted out of office. Why can’t Friedman bring himself to say that?

Time after time in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, we were subjected to the spectacle of this columnist — who’d made an agonizing-in-public call to support the war, but only if it was pursued in certain carefully defined ways — wringing his hands: “Bush said he was going to turn Iraq into a beacon of democracy. Why isn’t he doing all the things he promised to make that happen? Time is running out!”

At this late date, I fail to understand how Friedman thinks there is even an iota of possibility that Bush might suddenly wake up, alter course and salvage something out of his Iraq mess. Perhaps it is just desperately wishful thinking, an involuntary reaction to the awful pit-of-the-stomach queasiness of contemplating just how far off track Bush has led this still-imperilled nation.

However he arrived at his colossal non-sequitur, Friedman, I think, needs to brush up on that old saying about “Fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me.” This line, of course, is probably best known today in its Texas Bushism variant, in which our president got his folklore all tangled up with his Who’s Next song titles. “We won’t get fooled again” are actually pretty good watchwords for anyone whose eyes have been open during the last four years. Tom Friedman, meet Pete Townshend.

BONUS LINK: Doc Searls posts on the same topic, framing the election as a “recall” of Bush.

Anchordammerung

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I haven’t posted much on the CBS Guard memos saga because it didn’t seem like there was much more to say. CBS seems to have had the essence of the story right, but allowed itself to get duped by some bad evidence. The White House evidently found it credible, too. The moment the documents hit the Net they were questioned and ultimately discredited. CBS compounded its error by failing to take its critics seriously and adopting a blustery, “we stand by our story” wagon-circling defense.

That’s pretty much it. On the one hand, no one seriously doubts that President Bush obtained his Guard posting through family influence, then used family influence again to bail out on the service he’d signed on for. (Today’s New York Times account puts this story together one more time.) On the other hand, CBS has provided the Bush campaign with a great gift of distraction.

I don’t view this saga as a demonstration of the power of the Internet’s fact-checking multitudes so much as a display of the network’s extended ineptitude. Everyone makes mistakes; professionalism lies not in perfection but in responsibility, responsiveness and openness. CBS’s “we know better” response was the opposite. Dan Rather and his colleagues have now stuck a fork in the tattered remnants of the blue-chip brand name they inherited from Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

What really hurts, for CBS and the rest of the networks’ news operations, is that, at this late date in media history, trust is the only advantage the broadcast networks can claim. They no longer deliver the news faster than rivals, they certainly don’t deliver it in more depth or from more viewpoints or with more style. Their only remaining edge has been a sort of generic, fossilized authority. More people get their news from us than through any other channel, the broadcasters’ unspoken claim went. That makes us the arbiters of the news. And we take that responsibility seriously — you can count on us to get things right.

This claim was always problematic, of course, but it bore enough relationship to the truth, back in the days of Walter Cronkite, that when Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War in 1968, it actually meant something. Today’s network broadcasters simply glop together the mediasphere’s news judgments into boluses of headlines — and when they try to do original reporting, they slip on banana peels.

I don’t think CBS’s mishandling of the Guard memos story has much to do with left vs. right or Kerry vs. Bush; it’s about the passing of an ancien regime. The twilight of the anchors has been upon us for some time, but with the affair of the memos, the flames are now climbing up Black Rock.

In the end, it feels fitting that “60 Minutes’ ” vaunted TV news operation was taken in through its ignorance of the Selectric-to-software history of typography. The typed word — TV’s achilles’ heel!

Bonus links: Good reading on the subject from Reason’s Jesse Walker and, as always, from Jay Rosen.

Correction 9/21: It appears that, though the “Black Rock” building (a/k/a the CBS Building) is associated in the public mind with the network, it has not actually housed CBS for something like a decade.

Jay Rosen on the Miami Herald’s policy

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Jay Rosen has more to say on the lunatic ethics policy at the Miami Herald that forbids reporters from attending benefit concerts. He points out that the Herald editor who counseled that buying Springsteen tickets would imperil his paper’s credibility saw no problem with signing a petition “along with 32 others at the Herald. They and more than 2,800 like-minded professionals want the Justice Department to stop pressuring journalists to reveal confidential sources.”

Proportional fonts, welcome to your 15 minutes of fame!

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All I can say is, if the Bush-service documents CBS presented on “Sixty Minutes” yesterday really are forgeries, then boy, what incompetent work!

For those who missed the backstory, people — from the blogosphere to the Washington Post — are pointing out that those memos are typed in a proportional font, Times Roman, and such typography would have been unusual (though not totally impossible) in the early ’70s.

As a teen type geek at the time, I recall jealously eyeing those IBM electric typewriters — the IBM Executives — that did proportional spacing, and occasionally I got to play with them. (But boy was it hard to fix typos with Korectype — the characters wouldn’t line up!) But it’s strange to think a military office would have had one. So certainly, there’s something odd here.

But the forgery scenario has problems, too. It’s pretty damn easy to set your word processor to a monospace font like Courier. I do all my writing that way, in fact. (All right, I’m nostalgic — I still cherish that monospace clarity, see?) So if these things are fake, then someone took an immense amount of care to futz up the papers and make them look old and get a signature on there that experts seem to think is a pretty good rendition of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian’s — then forgot to change the fonts on his word processor.

It’s certainly possible. But it seems awfully strange. Furthermore, if you were going to the trouble of producing a forgery, wouldn’t you go all out and really nail Bush directly on something more spectacular than the murkier, though still somewhat incriminating, details of these memos?