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Blowing bubbles

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Over in that Slate e-mail thing between Andrew Sullivan and Kurt Andersen, which has gotten a little more interesting, Andersen, the erstwhile mogul of the late Inside.com, writes:

  If we had put the capital we raised into Treasury bills, we’d have had $1.5 million a year in income, with which we could’ve employed and published our best dozen reporter-commentators forever.

Well, sure. The problem is, the money Andersen raised at the height of the Internet investment bubble — just like that raised by every other dot-com, of course including (before you start flinging e-mails my way) Salon — wasn’t invested to be put into T-bills. It was invested because the people who chose to invest it had the notion, however hard to fathom from 2002 hindsight, that said investment was going to pay off big — that it would be used by energetic entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses. The people who sought that investment believed it too, right, Kurt? If you told the investors, “Gee, guys, now that you’ve given us your money we’ve decided, come to think of it, that we’re not actually going to make any money from this Internet thing — instead we’re going to take your cash and set up a journalistic trust fund,” you’d be looking at a boardroom civil war, if not an outright lawsuit.

Marc Canter’s blog

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Marc Canter was one of the people who, in the early ’90s, sparked what was known as the “multimedia revolution” to those of us who were involved, one way or another, in it. He’s still offering smart perspectives on how entertainment and technology collide — now in blog form.

The right vs. the Times

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This summer we saw the New York Times do some superb reporting on the growing debate over whether the U.S. should pre-emptively attack Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. While Bush and his administration tried to pretend that there was no debate and told the nation to “move along, move along, nothing happening here,” the Times accurately reported, in a series of front-page stories, that there were real divisions both among Bush’s close advisers and among the Republican old guard of foreign policy poobahs who’d advised his father.

Because of this reporting, the Times has come under fire from the right. Conservatives have argued that the Times is wearing an anti-war bias on its sleeve, and twisted the facts to support their case (see Josh Marshall’s careful debunking of the complaint that the Times inaccurately reported a Henry Kissinger position).

I’ve never been very comfortable with the idea, entrenched in the old Times culture, that reporters can become impersonal conduits for the news and completely screen their own biases from their coverage. Reporters are human beings; objectivity is a myth. For all I know the conservatives are right and Times executive editor Howell Raines really does feel that war with Iraq is a bad idea and has let that view shape his paper’s coverage. The Wall Street Journal wears its pro-markets philosophy on its sleeve; Fox News is the most biased major news organization in history; so what? Every news outfit has a tilt that’s shaped by the people who run it and the people who work at it.

The media form a vast ecosystem of information and ideas, and even an institution as powerful as the Times is only one stream. The value of any stream doesn’t lie in its putative freedom from bias but in whether it is contributing something important to the flow — some key piece of information, some perspective or some idea that would otherwise not surface.

What people are missing as they argue pointlessly over the “Is the Times biased?” trope is that the Times has played precisely the role it should — morally and constitutionally — in exposing the rift among Washington’s insiders. It ought to have been the Bush administration’s job, as it contemplates a new war, to spark a public debate, but Bush and his gang dropped the ball. Enter the free press. The echo here is of the Times’ publishing of the Pentagon Papers, its proudest moment, and another time when the right accused it of bias and of betraying the nation. Raines acknowledged this in a recent PBS interview: “As the Iraq debate plays out of a war, I’m hearing a lot of echoes of the early ’60s, when people were saying it was unpatriotic to report the debate over Vietnam… In this kind of reporting, one of the lessons of Vietnam is that it’s important to ask the questions at the front end of the war, not afterwards.”

War is grave business. In a democracy, we don’t and shouldn’t go to war without the people understanding why we’re doing it and what our goals are. If the government fails to set the stage for war, the press has not only a right but a stern duty to step in and ask difficult questions. It’s no surprise that those questions arouse consternation among the “invade first, ask questions later” crowd.

Salon Blog watch

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On Fitznseizures, Pat Christensen offers a keenly observed saga of a doomed unionization drive at a small outlying newspaper bureau.
In Playing With My Food And Other Things, Paul Hinrichs is chronicling culinary exploits, including roast tomatoes, fresh pasta, and sauvignon blanc for breakfast(!).
Maxine: Talking mannequin heads. A new art form?
Unrelated Disney asks, “Are Republicans and Democrats living in different universes?” Interesting poll numbers. Widely divergent.
Radio Free Blogistan links to a site that lets you test whether any particular Web site is being filtered in China. (Salon apparently is not.)

“Appeasement” in our time

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Andrew Sullivan is back from vacation and blogging away, reminding me both of how regularly I disagree with him, and of how much I still find reading him valuable.

He is an able rhetorical tactician, and sometimes you have to stop reading and step back to decode those tactics. For some time now, Sullivan has referred to those who do not share his exact hard-line, pro-Bush stances as “the forces of appeasement” or “the appeasement brigade.” In applying this label he is, of course, associating his opponents with Neville Chamberlain and the other European leaders who, in the dark days of the 1930s, chose either not to oppose Hitler’s aggressive moves against Germany’s neighbors, or to oppose them with insufficient spine.

This invocation of the Nazi analogy skirts perilously close to Godwin’s Law, but it’s worth examining. An “appeasement” policy depends on the notion of propitiation: There’s a threat, but you believe, somehow, that you can give your enemy what he wants and avert the threat — you can stop Hitler from going after you by giving him Czechoslovakia.

But there is no Czechoslovakia today. If there were any true advocates of appeasement right now, you could identify them by their willingness to give in to some demand of our enemies. (The “war brigade” does not like to be pressed too hard to define exactly who our enemies are, which makes this a little problematic, but for the sake of argument let’s name al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, whom we can widely agree on.) Well, what are those demands? There are none. Which makes the whole “appeasement” argument a big red herring.

Now, if you really wanted to get interesting here, you could say that, while al-Qaida has no explicit demands, it does have some goals: It would like to see the West’s freedoms curtailed, our open society hobbled, American democracy undermined and replaced by theocracy.

But, no, you won’t find me calling John Ashcroft an “appeaser”!

Cheney vs. Powell

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Josh Marshall offers a smart commentary on the strange noises emanating from the White House about whether either Cheney or Powell was out of line in their recent comments on Iraq policy:

  This is just clumsy damage control, an effort to make sense of the fact that the vice-president and the Secretary of State flatly contradicted each other on the central point of the president’s foreign policy agenda in less than a week. Consider the administration’s conceit: the president’s leadership is so vaunted, they say, that when he makes up his mind the allies, who oppose us, will support us. The public, which is ambivalent, will overwhelmingly endorse his policy. But how will he bend the world to his will when he can’t even get his own cabinet secretaries to endorse his policy?