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Archives for February 2003

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Cory Doctorow lays out what a lot of good journalists have long known: E-mail is a wonderful tool, and great for checking a fact. But most “e-mail interviews” suck.

The Raven defends philosophy.

The Bachworker’s attention is drawn to the “Scroll Lock” key.

Real Live Preacher on Fred Rogers: “Integrity combined with faithfulness is a powerful force and worthy of great respect.”

Mark Hoback is celebrating six months on Salon Blogs — and, I daresay, nearly that long publishing his Virtual Occoquan as a digest of Salon Blog writing. He’s also keeping a list of active Salon blogs.

Some of us bloggers use our blogs as total grab bags. I love watching how others use a blog in a more structured way — to focus a project. So we have Julie/Julia doing her Long March through the bible of French cooking; and we have Morgan Sandquist reading and commenting his way through Montaigne.

All the Sultan’s Men

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Read “Our Idiot Ottoman Sultan Problem,” by Brad DeLong. It’s about how we pick our presidents; why we seem to end up with leaders who have little experience in Washington; and how that leads to a situation in which the ignoramus president “picks his initial Grand Viziers. Other competing Vizier-candidates are jealous, and work to undermine them. The Viziers in favor flatter the Sultan, and try to strengthen their hold over him. Disasters happen. The Sultan’s temper flares. A coterie around the Sultan decides that somebody has to go, and policy shifts as a new Vizier takes the reins…”

Walk right in

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Sometimes good reporting is about just walking in. That’s what Noah Shachtman did over at Los Alamos National Laboratory: “There are no armed guards to knock out. No sensors to deactivate. No surveillance cameras to cripple. To sneak into Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world’s most important nuclear research facility, all you do is step over a few strands of rusted, calf-high barbed wire.” Shachtman has more over on his blog, Defensetech.org.

One less source of terror

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We still don’t know who sent the anthrax. We’re still not spending the money on homeland security that was promised after 9/11. But hey, when the next terrorist attack leads to the next round of finger-pointing, the Ashcroft Justice Department can proudly remind us that it bravely rounded up the bong peddlers so they could no longer menace us.

Laurie Garrett and Davos: What do journalists really think?

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James Grimmelmann has posted an extremely lengthy and thoughtful piece on LawMeme about the whole Laurie Garrett e-mail brouhaha. (This is the saga of a well-known Pulitzer-garlanded science journalist who attended the Davos conference this year, sent a bunch of her friends a sizable e-mail describing her experiences, and then became outraged when she discovered that somehow one of those friends had forwarded it beyond her circle, and it wound up all over the Net.)

Grimmelmann examines the controversy from so many different angles that I’m surprised he misses the one that seems most obvious to me.

I’m sure it was upsetting to Garrett to find that words she intended for a small group got broadcast online. I don’t envy her. But I think what irked a lot of people on the Net was the feeling they got that the story she told her friends was very different from the one she was likely to tell readers of her “official” work.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people feel that reporters know a lot more than what they actually put in their stories — that the “real story” of our times is the one that reporters tell each other over beers, and in for-private-distribution-only e-mails, rather than the one they tell in their formal stories.

The Garrett episode seemed to confirm that. Here was a journalist returning from “hobnobbing” with the global elite and announcing that “the world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power.”

Her e-mail is a casual, unvarnished and sometimes blunt assessment of the poor state of the world (“The global economy is in very very very very bad shape”). With a little editing, it could have turned into a good magazine column. For all I know, that was Garrett’s intention. But her reaction of outrage and violation at the viral-like spread of the e-mail suggests otherwise — and reinforces readers’ hunch that they’ve just gotten a fleeting glimpse of how journalists talk to each other when they think the mike is turned off.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to blogs.

A lot of the energy in the weblog world is anger at old-line journalism for its sloppiness, its biases, but most of all, I think, its unresponsiveness. Many people who blog get justifiably excited at the prospect of presenting their own words without relying on an intermediary reporter.

In a post today labeled “Why Weblogs are cool,” Dave Winer explains why he prefers presenting his views on his blog to offering quotes to a News.com or N.Y. Times reporter: “People reading the article would not likely find out what I really think,” whereas on a blog, “I get to say what I want, and I can get it right.” And he’s absolutely right. No reporter can present an individual’s complex and changing views as faithfully as that individual himself — and now we have the technology for virtually anyone with a computer and a Net connection to do so.

Dave also happens to be an unusually honest, open and spontaneous writer: That’s one of the things that makes his blog special. But not everyone is so open. In fact, there are even people who don’t want the world to know “what they really think.” In my experience most politicians and business leaders fall into this group. I’m not enthusiastic about giving blogs to politicians because it seems to me they will use the format as another outlet for the same old spin. They won’t spontaneously reveal themselves. It requires persistence and effort to dig out “what they really think” — or at least what they really say and do — and tell it to the world.

The value journalists continue to provide in a “disintermediated,” Net-enabled world — when they are doing their jobs right, of course — is to continue to ask public figures the uncomfortable questions that they won’t choose to answer on their own.

I think that the people who stumbled upon Garrett’s e-mail felt that it provided them with an informative and interesting glimpse of what she really thought about Davos — which is a gathering of just the sort of leaders who are unlikely to say “what they really think” in public.

That is precisely what a lot of people in blog-land actually want from journalists. And instead, Garrett told them, sorry folks, you can’t have that, it’s for private consumption only. Too bad.

Stupid pundit Shakespeare quotes

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James Schlesinger is a man with a long pedigree of government responsibility (Pentagon, CIA, etc.) that lends weight to his words. But someone should tell him to lay off the Bard.

On today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page, Schlesinger adds his voice to the “Don’t waste any more time with the U.N. — invade Iraq now” chorus. But in his final paragraph he unwittingly likens President Bush to a murderous assassin. How’s that?

Schlesinger writes that “The sequence of events, over the last six months, raises the question whether the president was right to take the issue back to the U.N. rather than move ahead early with the support of the willing…. It raises, perhaps underscores, the words from Macbeth: ‘If it twere done when ‘t is done, then ‘t were well It were done quickly.’ “

Uh, yeah. It doesn’t require an advanced degree in Elizabethan drama to recall that these are the words of Macbeth, who is vacillating as to whether to go ahead with his plan to murder his king. The “it” in question is a crime, one that will ultimately bring down those who commit it.

Now, I don’t think Schlesinger meant to suggest that the campaign against Saddam Hussein is a crime that will ultimately bring down those who commit it — did he?

A quote is a dangerous thing in untrained hands!

Look who’s a media expert now

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The media vultures continue to circle over Salon, hoping, for whatever schadenfreude-fueled reasons, that all the noise about our imminent demise might actually be true this time around. We’ve learned, pretty much, to live with that around here, continuing to do our jobs and grateful for the strong support we receive from our subscribers. But sometimes something comes along that must be commented on.

In a piece in the Online Journalism Review titled “Salon to Leave Bloated Carcass?,” Mark Glaser half-heartedly surveys the landscape of Salon-deathwatch coverage. He cites my post of earlier this week, then approvingly quotes a post from this blog’s comments board (he calls it “more believable”) that criticizes Salon’s business acumen.

Glaser doesn’t seem to have noticed that this anonymous poster’s pseudonym, “Bay Aryan,” is indicative of his political perspective — which is, shall we say, somewhere in the general vicinity of Adolf Hitler. It would have taken Glaser about 30 seconds to scroll down in this blog’s comments and find sage commentary from “Bay Aryan” like this: “Hey, Scott Rosenkike, I hear that Salon might go bankrupt at the end of the month! Woohoo! Death to the liberal Jew-run media!”

So thanks to the Online Journalism Review for striking one more blow toward granting anti-Semitism some badly needed credibility. It’s this kind of careful vetting of sources that has made the OJR into the power that it is today.

My attitude towards the comment boards here has been the usual online approach of “let a hundred flowers bloom, and ignore the occasional weed.” I’m happy to say that the other posters who occasionally comment — whether they agree with me or disagree — have generally managed both to remain civil to one another and to give the likes of “Bay Aryan” a cold shoulder. How ironic that it’s a “Journalism Review” that fails to make such distinctions.

Tolkien’s time is now — always

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I finally got around to reading the Time magazine issue from December about “The Two Towers” — the one that contained a much-talked-about essay by Lev Grossman that tried to identify a cultural shift away from science fiction and toward fantasy.

Grossman’s idea is that the zeitgeist right now — post 9/11, war-on-terrorism-driven — is tilted towards clear conflicts of good and evil. Tolkienian fantasy fits this bill in a way that the dominant science-fiction mode of the ’90s — dystopian cyberpunk, Philip K. Dick, “The Matrix” and so on — doesn’t.

All of which seems to make sense on the surface. Except for one annoying fact: Tolkien first achieved huge popularity in the U.S. during the 1960s — the very era when American certainties about good and evil fell apart under the burden of Vietnam. Grossman tries to address this by writing: “A country drowning in the moral quicksand of Vietnam and Watergate found comfort in the moral clarity of Tolkien’s epic story of a just, clear war. Good and evil are fixed stars in the skies of Middle-earth even as they’re starting to look wobbly in ours.”

Maybe so. But now we’re having it both ways: Tolkienian good and evil are appealing in times of (ostensible) moral clarity like the present — and they’re appealing in times of moral ambiguity, too!

I think the problem here is one endemic to the kind of trend-story journalism Grossman’s piece represents — in which a writer starts from a cultural phenomenon and then tries to use it to draw wider conclusions about “the state of the culture.” The writer must assume that the cultural phenomenon is “touching a nerve” or “striking a chord.”

But sometimes the culture moves for simpler reasons. It’s probable that Tolkien’s books became popular in the ’60s because that was the first era in which they were widely available in affordable paperback editions in the U.S. If they’d been published in the ’50s or the ’70s or the ’80s, they’d have probably ended up just as popular — and we’d have writers trying to explain that popularity in terms of those decades’ zeitgeists.

Similarly, the “Lord of the Rings” movies are great film adaptations of Tolkien’s work that are popular because they are really good, and they would be popular in virtually any era you can imagine. We probably had to wait till now for the opportunity to see Tolkien on screen because the filmmaking technology had to reach a certain level — not because the culture needed to move into a state where it was receptive to Tolkien’s tales.

Rumors of our demise…

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I know it’s easy to read our latest financial filings and assume, as some correspondents have, that Salon’s tragic fate is already a done deal.

Here’s the situation: We are a public company, I am an executive of the company, and as such there is no way I can sit here and go into detail about all the steps we’re taking to secure Salon’s future. Our SEC filing, upon which all the coverage has been based, specifically stated that Salon would run into trouble if it fails to raise new funds. Somehow that conditional clause seemed to drop away from most of the press reports. Sure, nothing in business is certain, but Salon also has a long history of raising the money it needs to survive.

This is the quote from our CEO, Mike O’Donnell, in our press release:

“We are in active, continuing discussions with potential investors to complete an equity financing that would give the company financial stability for 2003. Salon has reported the issuance of notes with equity conversion features in recent months and believe these will become part of a significant round.”

Unlike the AP, which didn’t even bother to call us for comment before running its imminent-death notice, this CBS Marketwatch report tells more of the story from our side.

Those of you with long memories will recall that Salon’s imminent death has been predicted with almost clockwork regularity over the past several years, each time we have filed a quarterly statement with the SEC. And yet here we are. When we celebrated our seventh anniversary last fall, David Talbot published an amusing review of some previous — and inaccurate — predictions of our doom. It’s worth another look as the vultures gather once more.

Bulletin: American people support France, Germany over Bush!

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Much remains up in the air as I write this: Will the Bush administration barrel forward with its Iraq invasion timeline in the face of international opposition and domestic uncertainty? If it does, is the war a blitzkrieg or a quagmire? Either way, does the U.S. have the will or the interest to commit long-term resources to rebuilding Iraq afterwards?

One thing, however, is now beyond dispute: President Bush has shattered whatever popular consensus he forged or inherited in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The press, which tends to discard conventional wisdom only slowly and under duress, is still suffering a hangover from the grim autumn days of 2001 — a notion that Bush has achieved wide popularity and deep respect as a leader able to pull the nation together at a moment of crisis. One look at the latest polls shows just how fully that vision of Bush now lies in ruins.

The New York Times/CBS poll released today show’s Bush’s approval ratings now down to almost exactly where they stood before 9/11 — a moment, let’s remember, when the Bush presidency seemed rudderless and statureless: 54 percent approve, 38 percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing. These numbers have dropped nearly 10 percent in the last week. Even worse for Bush are the “is the country on the right track” numbers: down to 35 percent “on the right track” versus 56 percent “on the wrong track.”

The other headline here is that, though the American public continues to support war against Iraq by about a 2/3 margin, and supports “the way Bush is handling the situation with Iraq” 53-42, the majority also continues to feel that the U.N. and inspections should get more time: When the poll asks, “Should the United States take military action against Iraq fairly soon, or should the United States wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time?” 59 percent support the latter choice. (That’s 10 percent more than voted for Bush in the first place.)

Dear reader, what this means is that the majority of the American people agree with the “perfidious” French and Germans and disagree with their own administration.

Somehow this little fact does not bubble to the surface of most of the press coverage of the current crisis. The media are locked into a template established in the wake of 9/11: International crisis looms; President Bush proposes resolute action; the American public rallies. That worked in the months after 9/11 because the resolute action proposed (a war upon al-Qaida’s Taliban sponsors) made sense to the public as a response to the World Trade Center attacks. As Bush tries to repeat that performance today, the public is not going along — probably because the response does not make a whole lot of sense and does not seem to accomplish what should be our central goal, reducing the threat of terrorism and making the United States a safer place.

Now, polls are fickle, and one doesn’t want or expect a leader to make decisions based on them alone. But when an American leader pushes a risky and potentially difficult war, he needs more than a thin and confused margin of support — support that isn’t even really support once you look at it closely. That was the lesson of Vietnam.

Oh, I forgot — Bush wasn’t there.