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Foul and Unbalanced

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We too are now “Fair and Balanced.”

Excerpts from the Fox/Franken suit are on Salon here. And Tom Tomorrow linked to this incredible Bill O’Reilly transcript which really must represent a high-water mark of pot-kettle-black-ness:

  The main point here is that trying to hurt a business or a person because you disagree with what they say is simply unacceptable in America. And that message has been sent by FOX. There’s a principle in play. Vigorous debate is embraced by us, but smear campaigns will be confronted. It is simply a joke for The New York Times to editorialize that fabricated personal attacks are acceptable under the banner of satire.

So, fabricated personal attacks, I guess, are acceptable to O’Reilly under the banner of “fair & balanced.” But Fox owns that banner, and no one else can use it. And as for the banner of satire — one that has long had its own special niche under First Amendment law for the obvious reason that it is one of the most effective ways to “speak truth to power” — well, O’Reilly obviously lacks a sense of humor, so I suppose he wouldn’t miss it if it got furled up and sent off to Guantanamo to grow mold.

Voice of the Preacher

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Real Live Preacher has long been one of my favorite Salon blogs. It remains anonymous — I don’t know the writer’s real name — but now I know what his voice sounds like, because Chris Lydon (the great Public Radio interviewer who is now plunging into the blogosphere) has interviewed him. Here. Definitely worth turning the “mute” off and the volume up. (Lydon previously interviewed Julie Powell, too, here.)

Spotlight on Julie/Julia

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Congratulations to Julie Powell for the lengthy and well-deserved profile in today’s New York Times. For the record, I should note that I said a lot of nice things about the Julie/Julia project to the Times writer, Amanda Hesser, that did not make it into her piece, which sensibly focused on Ms. Powell, Ms. Child and the food.

And that, contrary to what the Times article says, “Salon’s blog editor” is not now nor has it ever been my title. These blogs don’t have editors, as most of you know! That’s sort of the point…

Kudos for 0wnz0red

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Cory Doctorow reports on Boing Boing that his short story “0wnz0red,” which we published here at Salon last year, has qualified for the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Awards. Since he has a better grasp of the functioning of the awards process than I do, I’ll let him explain what this means: “That means that in a couple of months, all the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America will have the opportunity to cast their preliminary vote for the piece, and if it gets enough votes, it will appear on the final ballot.” Congrats. We’re proud here.

More grist for Mill

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Every now and then I get to pull back from my managerial duties and write a full-length piece. Today in Salon you can find my essay on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” It’s part of the series we’ve been running called “Documents of Freedom” — a look back at some of the pieces of writing and speech that form the foundation of the liberties Americans often take for granted. (Here’s the full list so far.)

David Weinberger has posted an interesting response. David raises questions about what he sees as Mill’s too-rational vision: “Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism’s calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle.”

I think it’s probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us — steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives’ optimism. And yet it’s also clear to me that “On Liberty” intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways — to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals and that enrich the world without necessarily being useful in a way that Bentham would have recognized.

Wired’s big push

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In its heyday, Wired magazine gave the entire technology and Internet press a steady stream of wacky, outrageous material to react to. On the blog he has created to accompany his new history of Wired, “Wired: A Romance” (Andrew Leonard’s Salon review is here), Gary Wolf is posting some reminiscences and other Wired miscellany.

I have to agree with his judgment that Wired’s worst story ever was the “Push” cover story he was credited as co-author of. Wolf’s recollections of how that absurd piece of puffery came into existence is illuminating and worth reading; Wired, it seems, was even more seat-of-the-pants in its editorial process than those of us on the outside could tell. I’ll stand by my assessment of February, 1997, that the story wounded the publication’s credibility. But reading Wolf’s account, you can’t help feeling a little more charitable toward the people responsible for the open-ended, improvisatory provocation that was the Wired game. Viewed as a moment rather than a movement, it all seems a little funnier and less heinous. After all, the next three years would see far vaster corporate scams unfold — and ones with far less style.

Also, don’t miss Wolf’s riff on the hapless San Francisco Chronicle, whose book reviewer made a big fuss about Wolf’s single misspelling of a single name — only to wind up with his own review sitting under a misspelled headline.

Time off

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I’m on vacation this week as Salon slows its publishing cycle a bit. Blogging will be sporadic.

“I think your public lacks focus, and needs a snappier lead”

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The New York Times has released its internal report and review of the Jayson Blair affair and related issues that recently rocked 43rd St. and toppled Howell Raines. It’s 92 pages long and I haven’t read it all yet. The big news seems to be that the paper is finally appointing an ombudsman. But perhaps in an effort to show some deference to the paper’s many statements over the years that it didn’t need an ombudsman, didn’t want an ombudsman, and indeed sneered all over the concept of an ombudsman — that’s only for weenie papers! — it will label this new position “public editor.”

Which just leaves me thinking, public editor? Wouldn’t that be someone who edits the public? If this person is the public editor, does that mean all the other editors at the Times are “private” editors? Couldn’t the entire collective editorial brain of the Times come up with a better title?

Bomber bingo!

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The news that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) — the agency whose predecessors were responsible for the primordial development of the Internet — has planned to open an anonymous global futures market or gambling parlor in which participants can bet on future terrorist acts has elicited understandable perplexity and consternation. Sen. Byron Dorgan tells the New York Times he has had trouble persuading people it’s not a hoax.

But the project does not seem quite so outlandish if you are versed in the latest trendy theories of the market and emergent behavior. The Web is full of these operations, play markets in celebrity and reputation, most of them relatively frivolous or fun, like blogshares or the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Why not harness the collective wisdom of the market to save terror victims’ lives? Why not let the invisible hand stop the terrorist’s hand?

Here’s why.

Markets depend on good information. The DARPA plan is based on the theory that an open market will draw out the best information from multiple sources. That’s fine if, in fact, the incentive of making money in the market is strong enough to overcome other motivations of participants. If you were a terrorist planning an attack, would you try to make a little money on the side by using your insider knowledge to place a winning bet? Or would you allocate a little extra money in your operating budget to placing decoy bets to delude those who you knew were turning to the U.S. military-funded terror market for intelligence? Or would you simply stay away, distrusting the market’s anonymity mechanism on the assumption that its American designers will have built in some sort of back door? It’s nearly impossible to imagine any set of circumstances in which this market would provide untainted information.

Which leads us to the other problem, which just exploded in the face of the Bush administration: How could the folks at DARPA not understand that they had created an unbelievable PR gaffe? What tone-deaf idiot there couldn’t see that the relatives of victims of terror attacks or the families of soldiers risking their lives ostensibly to fight terrorism might find it a wee bit disturbing that the government was funding an operation which, if it worked properly, would allow terrorists to profit from their knowledge of their plans?

Here it is useful to remember that today’s version of DARPA is the same outfit that brought us the infamous Total Information Awareness program. And all these brilliant efforts have been spearheaded by Admiral John Poindexter— who apparently learned nothing from his years fending off conspiracy charges relating to his last bout of foreign policy innovation in the Iran-contra scandal.

If there were a futures market in Poindexter’s career it would just have cratered.

POSTCRIPT Apparently this project has already met a swift end. Think of it as a sort of anaerobic-bacteria idea — hatched in the darkness of an agency, unable to survive once exposed to the oxygen of public awareness.

Salon Blogs birthday report

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Mark Hoback and a couple of other people have asked that I take the one-year mark for Salon Blogs as a chance to offer some state-of-the-project notes, since I originally described it as an “experiment.” “Experiments have results, positive, negative, or ambiguous,” Mark wrote in the comments below.

True. On the other hand this is not a lab experiment with a fixed time and the goal of proving or disproving a hypothesis. Like so much else on the Web, it’s more like an ongoing improvisation.

So the first thing to get out of the way is the business stuff. Salon Blogs has not resulted in vast numbers of people using the service, nor has revenue from the service (which we share with UserLand Software) had any significant impact on Salon’s bottom line. That’s no huge surprise to me; I’d have been (very happily) surprised if the opposite had happened, and such huge throngs of people signed up for blogs that it added major new revenue for our company.

What this means, though, is that Salon Blogs for now has to remain what it has been from the start: a labor of love. We don’t have spare bucks to spend on marketing it or revamping it. Our partner company, UserLand, is currently in transition after the departure of its president, John Robb. My hope is that over the next year, if the economy actually improves and Salon manages to end up in a better place financially, we might look at structural improvements to the Salon Blogs service. For now, it is what it is.

And what that is, for me, is still great, and utterly worth the energy we’ve put into it. Blogging is a vast terrain these days — and with AOL about to step into the fray, bound to get vaster. From where I sit, our little piece of the blogosphere has more creativity, personality and quality per URL than any other comparable community of weblogs. Aside from the business side, the other “result” of the experiment that does not surprise me in the least is that the greater Salon community would turn out to harbor so many great bloggers — and so many new ideas about what to do with a blog.

The only thing I could reasonably predict, going into this project, was how thoroughly unpredictable the range of bloggers and blogging would be. I had no clue that Julie was out there somewhere, ready to dig into thousands of Julia Child recipes… or that the Real Live Preacher was looking for a virtual pulpit for his stories… or that the Reverse Cowgirl was about to begin a new trend in “sex blogging”… or that Mark Hoback was going to plug the collective talents of the Salon bloggers into a weekly anthology on a whole ‘nother site… That we would have blog novels and stuff about software development and teenagers’ international correspondence from the early ’70s and an in-depth discourse on Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You and so much else that I’m sure I’ve missed or failed to recall.

All is flux, and so we have lost some great blogs, too (I miss The Raven, and just saw that No Code has moved on too, and I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting).

One of the things I’m disappointed about is that the exigencies of my own life (including being the parent of two wonderful and all-consuming boys approaching four years old) and job (including the ever-changing challenges of keeping an independent original-content Web site afloat and up-to-snuff) mean that there’s only so much reading and blogging I can fit in. But that’s a good kind of problem to have.

Since in the coming year it is unlikely that peace, love and understanding will conquer all, and more likely that the flow of news and events will continue to provide us with too much to talk about and to be disturbed by — including more than one election! — I can’t think of a better group of cantankerous, contrary, eloquently individual people to be posting with. Thanks to all you bloggers, past, present and future.