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Slate goes bicolumnar

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I am a proud reader of Slate. So what if Salon and Slate have had their spats through the years? Any publication that offers both David Edelstein’s movie reviews and Steven Johnson’s technology commentaries — along with lots of other fine reading — is going to be a permanent bookmark of mine.

But may I humbly suggest to the good people at Slate that they have taken a big step backward in their recent home page redesign? (And yes, I’m well aware that there are plenty of things about Salon’s own site organization that could be improved.)

For many years now Slate has had a highly sensible home page design, one that paralleled the essential good sense of blog organization: Newly posted articles appeared at the top of a long scrolling list, and older articles sank to the bottom. Subheaders divided this list by day. Like a blog, Slate’s design let you load up the page and scroll down steadily, picking what to read, until you started recognizing stuff that you’d already seen on your last visit. And a big “display block” at the top of the page allowed Slate’s editors to call out the articles they thought were hottest or best or most deserving of our attention.

For reasons that I cannot fathom, Slate has now changed over to a two-column format. The list is substantially similar (though harder to read thanks to some font tweaks), but it wraps down one column and then starts over at the top again. This is an incredible pain; you scroll down and scan headlines, then you have to scroll back up and then scroll back down… There’s no scarcity of vertical space in a browser, the way there is on a paper page. A two-column format only makes sense if you are making editorial choices about what to put at the top of each column, so that you crowd more of the stuff you think is important onto the “top screen.” What point is a two-column format when the list is still ordered chronologically?

In other changes, Slate now lets you click on linked days of the week to see what the previous days’ “display blocks” looked like. That’s a nice touch.

Raise money, buy TV ads, repeat

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The latest trend in political coverage seems to be ranking the candidates based on how much money they’ve raised.

Now, I will not pretend for a second that this information isn’t vitally important to the outcome of a campaign. It is a story, no question. But more and more it seems to be treated as the story: The candidate with a lot of money is the candidate best positioned to get even more money. The candidate with even more money is in the best position to pay for the kind of advertising that will win votes. The ability to raise money is the ability to get elected. Fundraising becomes a proxy for political skill, positions on issues, get-out-the-vote passion.

Horse-race handicapping has always been the curse of political reporting, but this is a new meta-level of horse-race reporting that makes the head spin. It’s similar to what’s happened in movie coverage, where the old-fashioned opening-day question of “how good is it?” has long since been eclipsed by the meta-question of “how much did it gross on opening weekend?”

It’s bad enough that this focus crowds out coverage of the actual distinctions among the candidates as leaders, legislators and thinkers. It’s worse when you force yourself to face squarely the grotesque fact that nearly all the money that’s raised goes to TV advertising; in other words, it gets put directly in the pockets of the media corporations who pay for coverage of presidential elections — and whose coverage, more and more, is dominated by fundraising tallies.

The next time you hear a TV newsperson start telling you something like “such-and-such a candidate has raised nearly $8 million this quarter…” you can finish his sentence for him: “so that next quarter the candidate can hand it over to my bosses and help us meet our profit forecast!”

There is no conspiracy here, just the iron logic of a simple marketplace that has locked in most of the participants. There may be no way out, says the pessimist in me. But if there is, then the hope lies with unorthodox efforts like those the Dean campaign is making in its online organizing.

For now, ironically, the main value in such organizing is to enable an outsider underdog like Dean to tap some new sources of money so he can pay for the same old TV advertising everyone else is going to use. But maybe, just maybe, in the long run, the ability to build a grassroots campaign via the Net will help birth a candidate who is completely unbeholden to the existing cash/media nexus — and who can help move us forward toward a democracy where dollars don’t trump votes.

California’s energy drain

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One of the problems with the news media today, even when they do their job properly, is a failure to make connections, even when they’re obvious.

There is an unfolding story in California that your newspaper will typically cover as two separate stories. One story is a tale of budgetary woe, in which the state, suffering under a tenacious recession and stymied by its own political logjams, struggles to figure out how to close a gap of many billions of dollars in its budget. If it can’t, we Californians will discover very quickly that just as the federal government cuts our taxes (a little bit if we’re middle class, a lot if we’re rich), the state will either raise our taxes or cut our services and schools (or, if we’re really lucky, both).

This is a big story. Meanwhile, in the other story, the state of California tries to persuade federal energy regulators that it should be able to abrogate exorbitant energy contracts it signed at the height of the energy crunch in 2001. It is now a matter of public record, established by those same federal energy regulators, that California’s energy prices jumped through the ceiling because energy companies were illegally manipulating the deregulated market. (Though at the time the much-reviled Gov. Gray Davis was sneered at for suggesting as much, his claims were dead right.) But, strangely, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which thinks those prices were illegal enough to be bringing “enforcement actions” against 60 energy companies for gaming the California energy market, nonetheless thinks that they are still legal enough that the state — and citizens — of California should have to pay them.

It seems completely obvious to me that these two stories are closely connected. Californians, your billions can go to (a) buying energy at prices that were “Insane!!!!”, as Crazy Eddie used to put it, and illegal too (as Crazy Eddie turned out to be); or (b) keeping your classrooms open and your state services running.

Instead of wasting our time recalling the governor, we should be impeaching the FERC.

If it quacks like a quagmire…

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Back in March, on the eve of war, I quoted one knowledgeable observer’s predictions:

  In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.

That’s pretty much the way it’s gone. This analysis from the New York Times’ Michael Gordon outlines the shape of the guerrilla war we are now locked in, in which each day’s news brings another report of an ambush or an attack, another dead American soldier, another reprisal against some Baathist holdout, another batch of Iraqis wounded or killed.

The warmongering crowd sneered at those who cautioned of this likelihood; we were lily-livered traitors whose use of the word “quagmire” was lampooned as a ludicrous artifact of the Vietnam era.

Then consider this quote which appeared in a dispatch from the Times’ Steven Lee Myers, who appears to have spent enough time with the troops he is covering to win their trust:

  “You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home,” Pfc. Matthew C. O’Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant Betancourt’s platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. “Tell him to come spend a night in our building.”

Something tells me this serviceman — unlike the armchair warriors who stoked this war with bloated rhetoric and false evidence — might not find the word “quagmire” so objectionable.

Bringing up the rear
SIDE NOTE: My jaw dropped to read that word “asses” on the Times front page, given the paper’s tightlaced history. My own, now-ancient experience as a freelancer with the Times had led me to believe the paper was much more careful about such posterior references.

Back in the mid-’80s I’d interviewed Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo and written it up for the Times Arts and Leisure section. In the course of the article I needed to refer to a particular scene from Fo’s signature work, “Mistero Buffo,” a solo comic performance drawn from the iconoclastic commedia dell’arte tradition. There is a moment in which Fo plays a Pope who gets a kick to his, if you’ll pardon me, butt. I knew “butt” was out of the question for the Times, so I wrote “rear,” figuring it was sufficiently innocuous. But I got a call from the Times copy desk: “rear” didn’t pass muster. Hmm, I thought, OK; er, how about “behind” — who could possibly object to that? The copy editor sounded only partially mollified but we left it there.

When the article was published, if I remember correctly, the Pope’s bottom had become a “backside.” I could only marvel at an institution whose sense of propriety had such infinitesimal gradations.

O’Reilly vs. the ants!

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Bill O’Reilly, the Fox Network’s resident blowhard, went off on the Internet yesterday in a comical tirade. O’Reilly’s comments mostly speak for themselves. But I think anyone who has watched him bludgeon the guests on his show will be able to read what’s really on his mind, between the lines. Something like the following:

 

Sex, lies and videotape on the Internet, that’s the subject of this evening’s Talking Points Memo. Nearly everyday, there’s something written on the Internet about me that’s flat out untrue. (I know, because I ego-surf every night, to see just what lies people are posting about me.) And I’m not alone. Nearly every famous person in the country’s under siege. (As for the rest of you non-famous people, who cares?)

Today’s example comes from Web sites that picked up a false report from The San Francisco Chronicle that said a San Francisco radio station dropped The Radio Factor. If anyone had bothered to make even one phone call, they would have learned that Westwood One made a deal with another San Francisco radio station, weeks ago to move The Radio Factor. (And will someone please shut up that program director who had the nerve to say I don’t have “lightning in a bottle like Rush”?) Thus the word “dropped” is obviously inaccurate and dishonest. (True, you can no longer hear me on that radio station — but it pisses me off no end that anyone would actually report this using a good, plain word like “dropped” to describe what happened.) We’ll see if The Chronicle runs a correction, but you can bet you won’t be seeing many corrections on the net. (Thank God I’m on TV, which nobody expects to run corrections.)

The reason these net people get away with all kinds of stuff is that they work for no one. (They’re ignorant slobs without jobs. How dare they think they have a right to speak out?) They put stuff up with no restraints. (Unlike the guests on my show, who I can drown out or tell to shut up if they cross me.) This, of course, is dangerous, but it symbolizes what the Internet is becoming. (Freedom of speech — how un-American can you get?)

…The Internet has become a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled polluted waterway, where just about anything goes. For example, the guy who raped and murdered a 10-year old in Massachusetts says he got the idea from the NAMBLA Web site that he accessed from the Boston public library. The ACLU’s defending NAMBLA in that civil lawsuit. (If we could just stop evildoers from reading about or talking about Bad Things, the Bad Things would go away!)

Talking Points noted with interest the hue and cry that went up from some quarters about the FCC changing the rules and allowing big corporations to own even more media properties. But big corporations are big targets. (Big corporations pay my salary, too.) If they misbehave, they can be sued for big bucks. (And they can afford big-bucks lawyers to defend themselves. And they can pay lobbyists to write the laws to suit them.) These small time hit and run operators on the net, however, can traffic in perversity and falsehoods all day long with impunity. It’s almost impossible to rein them in. (In China, on the other hand, they really know how to keep those Internet crazies in line.)

So which is the bigger threat to America? The big companies or the criminals at the computer? Interesting question. (Especially the way I just stacked it! Now, where did I put that “no-spin zone” sign?)

FCC no evil

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If you’ve been reading Salon for the last couple of years this new FCC decision should come as no surprise. If you haven’t been, you can catch up on our coverage of the FCC here and of “the Media Borg,” as we have been calling it for two years, here.

Trent Lott says, “I want to emphasize that there is not a partisan position here,” and indeed he is criticizing the decision along with some other Republicans in Congress. Still, you can’t seriously argue that this decision — pushed through by President Bush’s FCC chairman, who happens to be the son of Bush’s Secretary of State; supported by the three Republican members of the FCC; and opposed by the two Democratic members — does not have a big GOP rubber stamp all over it.

Bad Net karma

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Reading this fascinating story in today’s Times, about a rebellion of teens in a sort of quasi-military disciplinary camp in Costa Rica named Dundee Ranch, I read a name that sounded weirdly familiar: Narvin Lichfield. (OK, it’s the kind of name you remember.) Hadn’t I edited a story involving this person?

Yes — Andrew Leonard wrote this strong story for Salon back in 1998 about an effort by an organization founded by Lichfield to spam search engines via spurious multiple sites overloaded with meta-tag keywords.

Today, Lichfield is facing criminal charges from the Costa Rican authorities. And Google has pretty much put the practice of spamdexing to rest.

Must reading

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Dan Gillmor’s on-the-scene report about OhmyNews, South Korea’s hugely successful experiment in grassroots-up online journalism. Most unexpected fact: The site’s progressive founder got some of his inspiration from his time as a student at Pat Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia, observing the way American conservatives get their message across in the U.S. media.

Also: “Dynamics of a blogosphere story”: An unusually comprehensive and detailed study of how blogs and the mainstream media interact to create “hot” stories, with interesting insights into how individual stories do or don’t “go viral.” [link thanks to Scripting News]

Bush and God, church and state

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I have never quite understood New York Times columnist Bill Keller’s take on George W. Bush. Every time Keller tries to zero in on the president — as in a long Times Magazine piece a while back, or in a column today about Bush’s God thing — he starts shuffling his feet, hedging and making apologies. He tells us that he understands important criticisms of the president, but then he finds some grounds upon which to explain that they don’t matter, or they’re not the point, or we shouldn’t worry about them.

In today’s column, Keller tries to argue that, yes, George Bush is driven by his religious belief, but that — since he does not have an overt agenda of converting the heathen or deriving specific political policies from his born-again faith — we should not worry too much. The president’s sense of divine mission? His apparent belief that every decision he makes is the right one because he is fulfilling God’s plan? No fear, says Keller — what’s wrong with self-confidence? Then he cites “John Green of the University of Akron, a scholar of religion in politics,” who “sees it as a perfectly ordinary way for a religious man to understand a task history has presented him.” “For Bush to conclude that this was God’s plan,” Green declares, “is not a whole lot different from a plumber in Akron deciding that God wants him to serve lunch to homeless people.”

Huh? I mean, I’d be delighted if Bush concluded that God wanted him to serve lunch to homeless people! The point that eludes Mr. Green is that the plumber in Akron is not making life-or-death decisions for millions of people, and devising policies that will shape the world economy for a generation. We worry when national leaders assume a mantle of divine destiny. The worry is based on history, not faith.

But the most bizarre passage in Keller’s column is his citation — with what I can only guess is approval — of a particularly ridiculous quote from the writer Gregg Easterbrook, trying to explain how Bush’s Christian faith shapes his policies: ” ‘I suspect Bush takes the view (which may prove right) that the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in something larger than themselves, and people who believe that it’s all an accident of chemistry,’ Mr. Easterbrook said.”

First, note the way Easterbrook — whom the article describes as “a liberal Christian” — stacks his language. If he’d said, “the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in supernatural mumbojumbo, and people who believe in their own powers of observation and reasoning,” we’d complain, rightly, that he’d injected a wildly unfair bias in his description of the disagreement between people of faith and nonbelievers. Instead, he’s turned that bias around and made it invisible — draping all the contradictions and difficulties of religion in the high-flying rhetoric of selfless dedication, and casually denigrating all the insights of the scientific worldview.

Easterbrook, on behalf of Bush, chooses to draw a wildly oversimplified spectrum of personal belief: There seem to be no other choices besides “belief in something larger than yourself” or belief that “it’s all an accident of chemistry.” Yet the two positions are hardly exclusive. I can forthrightly say that I have no belief in any traditional deity; put me firmly in the “accident of chemistry” camp. Yet such an accident is hardly trivial — it is itself full of beauty and wonder. It is very much “something larger than ourselves.” Indeed, there are many things “larger than ourselves” that I, despite my failure to be a “person of faith,” can and do embrace: Empathy, justice, generosity, creativity — none of these require the walls of a church, or trust in a “higher power.” Participants in institutional religions have no monopoly on the possibility of belief.

The real arrogance in Easterbrook’s stance — and one that I think also undergirds Bush’s worldview — is this implication that only people who have accepted Jesus, or Yahweh (or, Bush will add, opening the flaps of his “big tent,” Mohammed), can possibly find meaning in life. And only they can be trusted to find a moral path through life.

This is more complex, and probably more dangerous, than simple religious chauvinism of the “my god is better than your god” brand. Rather, it reflects a wistful desire, if not an active campaign, to turn back the clock to an era when being a non-believer actively disqualified one from participation in civic life. Of course Bush isn’t about to propose religious belief as a qualification for public office; but if we believe former speechwriter David Frum’s statement (repeated by Keller) that, in Bush’s White House, “attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory,” then it’s also hard not to believe that Bush would be happy to impose such a requirement if he thought it had any chance of passing constitutional muster.

Keller, of course, is way too muddled to point out the final absurdity in the Easterbrook argument: its dichotomy plainly puts George Bush on the same team as the Sept. 11 killers. Warped and vicious they undoubtedly were; but who can question that they committed their suicidal act on behalf of “something larger than themselves”? No, Mohammed Atta and his crew did not see human life as an “accident of chemistry.” They believed in Allah. Their belief may have been a perversion of mainstream Islam. But belief it was, nonetheless.

So, pace Keller, I’ll continue to put my moral antennae on alert any time a leader starts using his or her own religious faith as a touchstone of civic virtue. It’s not always and inevitably a bad thing — the obvious and legitimate counterargument is the Rev. Martin Luther King. But it’s usually a sign to watch out.

Henry Norr and the time card

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Though we work in the same town, I don’t think I’ve ever met Henry Norr; I only know him by his long-respected byline as a tech journalist. But I’ve been following the story of his suspension — and now firing — with some interest.

Norr, you may recall, was suspended from his job as a tech reporter for the S.F. Chronicle about a month ago. He’d taken a day off from work because he’d participated in an antiwar protest and been arrested. According to Norr’s own account, he’d followed Chronicle policy in alerting his supervisor to his activities. (The Chronicle has since changed its policy on reporters and political activity, but that’s another story.)

Now Norr’s been fired, and the ostensible issue is that he falsified his time card by marking his day off as a “sick day.”

Now, this may have been a tactical misstep — I suppose he’d be in a stronger position, bureaucratically, had he taken the day as vacation time.

But I can also report from personal experience of ten years’ employment at the San Francisco Examiner — whose then parent company, the Hearst Corporation, now owns the Chronicle; whose old staff, my former colleagues, now work for the Chronicle; and which always shared the same union representation as the Chronicle — that time cards for writers are a joke. (They no doubt have more relevance for copy editors and other folks who work at more shift-oriented tasks.)

I worked most of that time as a theater critic. My work spilled into all hours — I’d be reading a play and doing research in the morning, then maybe take a break for a few hours, then go into the office and check my mail and make my phone calls, then have dinner, then see a show, then return to the newsroom (or later, once I had a PC and a modem, home) to write my review and file it. Sometimes my workday ran in patches from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. the next day. Sometimes I’d write the next morning instead. I typically covered three to five shows a week, and my work cycle was shaped by the timing of opening nights.

Trying to fit this particular workflow into the management-mandated and union-approved time card template was impossible. If I’d followed the rules as the union had defined them via collective bargaining, I wouldn’t have been able to do my job well. If I filled out the time card accurately, I would have invoked the wrath of management, because overtime would have kicked in, and they didn’t want to pay overtime.

I figured my first responsibility was to my readers, to the theaters I covered and to my own standards. So I did my job the way I needed to, and for nearly a decade I dutifully filled out a time card that claimed that I worked a steady five day a week, eight hours a day routine.

I’m not reporting this because I’m unhappy with the result — I got to do the work that I loved, and I think I served my readership well. (Time cards do not really work when the people involved are creative professionals who love their work.) I’m reporting it because everyone involved knew that this was happening. And not just with me.

So when you hear that Henry Norr has been fired because he falsified his time card, be assured that this is not the real issue. The Chronicle is getting him on a technicality because it wants to fire him for some other reason.

Could it be that the paper wants to cow its staff from participating in political demonstrations that have nothing to do with their beats? Or could it be that it just sees an opportunity to trim someone from its payroll at a time when its financial woes are well-known? Maybe the editors don’t like Norr’s work, or maybe they think they’re over-staffed in tech coverage now that there’s no tech boom to cover. Maybe they’re mad at him because he went public with his dispute.

I don’t know. I do know that the time card is a pretty transparent excuse.