Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Archives for October 2003

Back to the future

by

In a previous life I spent my time writing about plays and movies. At the S.F. Examiner — may it rest in peace — I had the privilege of being movie critic from 1992 to 1994. One of the challenges of the job was finding ways to respond creatively, and uniquely, to products that were rolling off Hollywood’s assembly line with depressing uniformity. Another of the challenges was to do so between the hours of 10:30 p.m., when a movie screening often ended, and my 2 a.m. deadline.

Sometimes I found ways to have fun. Today’s sad news from the recall election reminded me of one of those occasions, when, bored beyond reason by Schwarzenegger’s 1993 dud “The Last Action Hero,” I discarded the usual review format and instead wrote up an imaginary dialogue between video archivists of the future. It was clear to me then that Arnold’s career as an action star was tanking. I was not sufficiently prescient to predict his second career (third, really, if you count bodybuilder and movie star as one and two) as a demagogue.

I’m posting the piece here for those looking for some Schwarzenegger-y diversion.

The act became real

by

Far be it from me to insist that politicians actually take positions before the election, but now that we’ve made Arnold governor, it will be neat to find out what he actually stands for and how he intends to deal with our various crises. It’s a little disheartening that his only campaign position with any specificity was to promise cutting the auto licensing “tax” (really a fee). We already have a budget gap in the tens of billions, so hey, what’s a few billion more?

As a California citizen and parent, I wait with great interest to find out how Schwarzenegger’s approach to the state’s cruel budgetary quandary is going to differ from Davis’s. Schwarzenegger is about to learn that funding a state’s schools and services is a different beast from funding a movie production.

Maybe what’s actually happened is that we’ve elected Pete Wilson as governor and Arnold as figurehead. Maybe Maria Shriver will call in the Kennedy brigade. One thing’s for sure: Somebody better write Arnold a good script, and fast, or all that telegenic flesh is going to ooze off him to reveal the metallic exoskeleton of greed and power-lust that actually shaped his campaign.

For my money, by the way, the absolute best piece of writing so far on this election is today’s piece in Salon by Cary Tennis. Here’s a taste:

  The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger is profoundly undemocratic not because the majority didn’t win but because the majority acted as moviegoers rather than as citizens. Democracy is not simply about the vote. The vote is not simply like a ticket bought at Disneyland. And citizenship is not about the satisfaction of the id.

Monday notes

by

Bloggercon was fun. I saw some old friends, met some people in person who I’d only known by their writing, and got to chew on some toothsome ideas.

I think that my panel probably could have gone on for two more hours — felt like we just barely scratched the surface — but there were lots of other people who had as much or more that needed to be said. At this sort of conference, the distinction between who’s at the podium and who’s in the crowd is pretty meaningless — a room full of bloggers is a room full of people with a lot to say.

Other people took tons of notes if you want to follow some of the conversation (though keep in mind these transcripts are pretty rough — I’ve seen a few things here and there that I know are mistaken!). Dan Bricklin took some great pictures.

I’ve got more to say but it’s going to dribble out through the week, I think. Too much other work right now…

Presidential blogging

by

One of the highlights of the sessions here at Bloggercon yesterday was the panel of presidential-campaign bloggers. Here we had lead bloggers for the Dean campaign, the Clark campaign, and the Democratic National Committee — along with a bright-faced 19-year-old volunteer for the Graham campaign. These folks are all central figures in the struggle to drag the world of political campaigns, in some cases kicking and screaming, into the Internet era.

In their own camps I have no doubt that these folks are the resident idealists, pushing their colleagues toward a better understanding of how online tools can make the political process more open, direct and engaging. But at this conference, surrounded by people who passionately believe that blogs are changing the entire universe, I think these campaign bloggers were a little surprised to find themselves cast as the pragmatists, the realists.

When Esther Dyson asked whether the campaign blogs had any impact on, or even discussions about, actual policy as opposed to campaign news and promotion, Joe Jones of the Graham campaign declared, with charming bluntness, that no one cares about policy, and of course blogs were all about PR and buzz.

The panelists were asked, what real-world impact is the Net actually having? And Mathew Gross of the Dean campaign reported that, while George Bush is raising millions in big-denomination contributions from well-heeled supporters, Dean is raising equivalent millions in small donations from a much, much larger number of supporters.

Money raised is usually considered the ultimate yardstick of campaign success. But conference organizer Dave Winer pushed the speakers: Weren’t they just using the Internet to raise money to buy TV ads? Why take money from the bright new distributed world of the Net only to feed it back into the Big Media machine? Why couldn’t the candidates commit to responding to one question from blog visitors every day? (Josh Marshall gently told the crowd that they simply didn’t understand how crazed the candidates’ schedules were.) The candidates were taking from the Net, but what were they giving back?

I think the panelists were all flummoxed by this line of questioning; they are used to trying to justify their seemingly quixotic online techniques by pointing to hardnosed results. Instead, they were being charged with playing the same old political games while paying lip-service to the notion of online participation.

I consider myself about 60/40 on the idealism/pragmatism scale, but all I could think was, get real. TV still controls American politics. No one is going to get elected in the U.S. today without spending millions on TV advertising. If you care about getting your candidate elected — or you care, as all these Democrats did, about seeing Bush defeated — then you’d be foolish and irresponsible to pretend that this is not reality.

It would be great to see that reality change someday, and maybe the kind of innovation exemplified by campaign blogging will help make the change happen. That won’t occur in the course of a single election. In the meantime, money still talks, and Dean’s success raising money through the Net is an extraordinary development, worth celebrating in itself. Dean may be using his blog — and the Net — as a means to an end; he is more interested in getting elected than in making an abstract point about online people power. To me, the 2004 election is too important to be used as a
testing ground for a new theory. Pragmatism should rule.

The offline blues

by

Salon Blogs server has obviously been having some serious problems over the past 24 hours. I’ve been traveling and unable to monitor the situation but we appear to be back up. More as I learn more.

A little fact is a dangerous thing

by

Since I’m talking on Saturday at BloggerCon about blogs and journalism, I’ve been thinking about what seems to me to be the central issue in this field: trust. Here is a semi-formed essay — consider it a sort of notes-in-progress.

Three weeks ago, reading a New York Times “Political Memo” piece (9/7/03) by Adam Nagourney, my eyes scanned the following sentence: “Perpetuating a widely circulated myth, a senior adviser to a Dean rival recently sent an e-mail message saying, ‘You do know that he is the Dean of Dean Witter, don’t you?’ He is not.”

It was the “He is not” that grabbed me: Its definitive tone. Its absence of attribution (no linking to supporting evidence possible in a newspaper, of course). Its assumption that the reader would simply accept its assertion. And my own willingness as a reader to accept it.

Because I did, the first time I read the piece. I trusted it. I didn’t ask, “Sez who? How do you know? Why should I trust you?” Which are the questions I would almost certainly have asked had I found such a statement on a Web page. I trusted it based on my years of experience reading the Times, on my faith in its still-formidable (Jayson Blair affair notwithstanding) editing apparatus, on my belief that the people who work at the Times are (mostly) devoted to getting the facts right.

But then I started wondering. And I got curious for myself. So I started poking around, using the same search tools available to everyone. And this is what I found.

If you search Google for “Howard Dean Witter” you will find a profusion of blogs and pages posted by people who don’t like Dean saying snide things about how he’s the Dean of Dean Witter. Many of them point to an August column by Jimmy Breslin which asserts that “His father was the head of Dean Witter stocks on Wall Street.” Comments posted here and there by Dean supporters challenge this statement by pointing out that Dean Witter is not a firm founded by Messrs. Dean and Witter; rather, a guy named Dean (first name) Witter (last name) gave his name to the company when he founded it in 1924.

Ahh — so Breslin got this wrong, the anti-Dean bloggers spread the bad meme, then others corrected the record, and Nagourney closed the case, right?

Not so fast. If you keep poking through the factual detritus on the Web you eventually find that Howard Brush Dean Jr., the candidate’s late father (he died in 2001), was a successful stockbroker. And Time reports that the firm he worked for, and indeed was a “top executive” at, was none other than Dean Witter (known at that point in its corporate evolution as Dean Witter Reynolds).

Assuming that Time can be trusted on that, as far as I can tell, we have the following facts:
*Howard Dean’s Deans are not the Deans who founded Dean Witter; BUT
*Howard Dean’s father was a top executive at Dean Witter.

In other words, Breslin and Nagourney were both technically accurate. Breslin’s statement “His father was the head of Dean Witter stocks on Wall Street” seems factually contradictory to Nagourney’s flat-out dismissal of the “myth” that “he is the Dean of Dean Witter.” But it is quite likely — unless I have completely bungled this little inquiry — that both are right.

The purpose of this exercise is not to cast aspersions on Dr. Dean for his stockbrokerly upbringing. My point is that facts in political debate are always at the service of perspective. “Facts all come with points of view,” as David Byrne sang 20 years ago. Facts are not the endpoint but rather the starting point for a political argument. But too often — among bloggers like everywhere else — we use them as a way to close off debate. “You’re wrong,” we say; or, worse, “you’re lying.”

We like to cordon off “fact” from “opinion” in our brains, but there is no bright sharp line between them. A fact can mislead depending on what other facts it is or is not juxtaposed with. (Jay Rosen has a good piece about this in relation to the hoary question of whether blogs are reporting or opinion.) Opinions need facts to give them persuasive heft, but facts need opinions to give them meaning. We all have lots of both. It’s how we integrate them that counts.

One way of defining honesty is this: Honesty is the quality of accepting new facts even when they run against your opinions. And that quality is what earns trust — whether you’re a professional journalist, a blogger, or any combination thereof.

Blogging Plame

by

As the Plame affair rolls forward, we are seeing an interesting split in the blogosphere — unsurprisingly, along liberal/conservative lines. You can find almost round-the-clock updates and thoughtful commentary from Josh Marshall (the independent journalist) and Brad DeLong (the economist and former D.C. insider). DeLong leads the way in reminding us that this story first broke over the summer, that Bush had many weeks to pursue this, and in fact, rather than being eager to find out who leaked Plame’s CIA status, he has done nothing to find that out, and instead waited until the CIA forced his hand:

  The White House has had eleven weeks to act, and has not done this. The cover-up is already eleven weeks ongoing, with the Bush White House hoping first that the CIA could be pressured into not making a criminal referral to the Justice Department, with the White House now hoping that somehow the Justice Department will make the thing go away, and with George W. Bush having “no plans” to ask any of his aides whether they are the ones who think it’s cool to blow the cover of CIA operatives actually trying to find weapons of mass destruction. It’s not just the two principals, by now it is virtually the entire White House staff who are accessories after the fact to a plan to aid and abet our enemies, et cetera.

A lot of people find this story dramatic and important. On the other hand, you have normally astute conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh admitting that they just can’t get excited about it and will not be posting much on the subject. Ed Cone chastises them for this. To me it seems to be entirely their their right. Still, the story isn’t going to go away, and ignoring it isn’t going to make it irrelevant — it might instead make them (bloggers who ignore the story) less relevant. Time will tell.