Glenn Reynolds links to a post on the Flying Debris blog on the apparently systematic harassment of a group of anonymous Chicago-based blogs:

The bloggers at the fantastic Chicago blog Uptown Update and the now defunct blog What the Helen have been subpoenaed by a developer of the notorious Wilson Yard project in the Uptown neighborhood. Additionally two Uptown community groups have recently been subpoenaed, the Uptown Neighborhood Council and the Buena Park Neighbors.

Glenn adds, "Expose Chicago politicians and their cronies, and they'll try to expose you, I guess."

See also: Plumber, Joe The.

"At least Henry Ford knew how to make a car."

I was on the Breitbart.tv B-Cast earlier today discussing the future of online video, as well as the current difficulty in making Internet advertising revenues work. Tune in here to watch.

The lead item has nothing to do with the future of multimedia, but it's quite a moo-ving story in its own right...

Set the Wayback Machine for 1981, fire up your TRS-80 and experience the magical new world of...online news!

Much more retro-futurism here.

Wendy Sullivan on the power of blogging:

I started blogging five years ago. It was news and political stuff, which I still do today. I had no educational background for it - just passion. I love it - it's my writing fetish. I do it for pleasure more than profit.

At the time I began, my dearest friend in the world was an unemployed journalist. She had done the "necessary" years of university to give her some kind of paper that said she had the "right" to report the news. Yet, she remained unemployed.

Out of my exuberance, I suggested she start a blog to help get her name known in the right circles. Her reply? "I'm a journalist. I don't write about the news for free!"

Fast forward five years. Today I will be lunching with the editor of the National Post, one of Canada's two national newspapers. Next week I will be a pundit once more on the Michael Coren Show.

And my friend? She gave up and now works in a bookstore, stocking shelves.

Exactly. Not that Wendy's friend needed to do blogging, but those who don't know how to proactively market themselves and who expect offers to magically arrive at their doorstep are largely doomed to fail.

Steve Green, my partner in crime on Pajamas Media's weekly show on Sirius-XM has taken the Boeing, and moved his blog into the Pajamas portal--complete with a swanky new logo designed by Blogress Stacy Tabb (who also styled this blog a few years ago) that would make Ian Fleming--not to mention Maurice Binder--proud.

James Lileks proffers key advice for navigating the final new media frontier:

Dull tweet: The plane just landed

Good tweet: The plane just landed in the hudson

Found, appropriately enough, here.

I've met Neo-Neocon in person a few times. Everyone knows she blogs anonymously (and man, is it hard talking to someone at a cocktail party when she holds an apple in front of her face the whole time), but who knew just how secret the life she was leading really was?

For you see, Neo-Neocon is also, simultaneously, Meryl Yourish at the same time. With the Bush administration concluding this week, this could be the final closely held American secret blown wide-open for the next four to eight years by the intrepid New York Times--not to mention its layers and layers of ace fact checkers and editors.

(H/T: Glenn Reynolds, who is also both Glenn Greenwald and Glenn Corbett. And maybe John Glenn, too. Who can say?)

Media Bistro's "AgencySpy" blog explains "why it's vitally important to watch what you say on Twitter":

A representative from Ketchum New York (a PR and Marketing firm) heads to Memphis to give a big presentation to their big client, FedEx, and totally offends everyone who works there before even stepping foot in the building.

Upon landing in Memphis and getting a lay of the land he tweets:

"True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, 'I would die if I had to live here.'"

Someone from inside FedEx was following Capt. Footinmouth, whose Twitter name is 'keyinfluencer' -- quite possibly the douchiest nickname of all history -- and that person sent the letter we posted below. You'll want to read it, because not only is it amazingly poignant, but because it was copied to "the FedEx Coporate Vice President, Vice President, Directors and all management of FedEx's communication department AND the chain of command at Ketchum." Thank you Peter Shankman for sharing this story.

"Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most important entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith.

Many of my peers and I feel this is inappropriate. We do not know the total millions of dollars FedEx Corporation pays Ketchum annually for the valuable and important work your company does for us around the globe. We are confident however, it is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry. A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write."

Now that you know what not to do, John Hawkins has assembled "The Super Awesome Right Wing News Twitter Guide For Newbies."

(Main story originally found, naturally enough, here.)

Related: Via Melissa Clouthier, helpful new media definitions--like, um "Twitter!"--are defined definitively, here.

Dr. Melissa Clouthier takes the pulse of the MSM, with some assistance from Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media's "Edgelings" tech blog, and a little video help from your humble narrator himself.

And speaking of a troubled MSM, Newsbusters reports that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has declared Chapter 11. Its best-known journalist in the new world of the Blogosphere and Satellite Radio directs us to this piece in the Minnesota Post for some additional details of the Strib's bankruptcy and what may be to come. (But not before including a sublime screen capture from A Night To Remember, taken at the apex between iceberg and eternity.)

Related: "Your MSM Moment of Zen."

In the mail today are the galleys for Roger L. Simon's new book, Blacklisting Myself. Here's an excerpt of an excerpt from (appropriately enough) "Big Hollywood":

In some ways, this new, less overt list is worse, because there is nothing concrete to rebel against, no hearings, no committees, no protest groups pro or con, no secret databases. There don't need to be. There is no there there, in Gertrude Stein's immortal words--only the grey haze of this mindless received liberalism, the world as last week's New York Times editorials, half-digested and regurgitated, never questioned, going forth forever with little perceived chance of reform, as if it were the permanent religious text of some strange new orthodoxy.

You see this new faith in practice at the average Hollywood story meeting. These are ritualized events and have been for the decades that I have participated in them. You wait an inordinately long time for your appointment, often longer than at a doctor's office, but with nowhere near the legitimate excuse on the part of the executive keeping you waiting. They are definitely not in surgery. The intention is merely to confirm your lower place in the pecking order. (I have personal knowledge of an instance when John Huston and Jack Nicholson were kept cooling their heels in a tiny room by the now-forgotten head of ABC Motion Pictures for nearly two hours--I assume he didn't realize they'd come to pitch him Prizzi's Honor. Or maybe he did and this was a form of envy or vengeance.)

Once inside the executive's office, the pecking order of talent and management thus confirmed, it's instantly waved off in a burst of small talk and a call for the requisite mineral water--originally Perrier, now something more exotic like an obscure Welsh brand in a blue bottle whose unpronounceable name you can barely remember. But the small talk is what's important. It usually revolves around the freeway traffic (a perpetual subject), the Lakers (depending on the year), and, over the last half-decade or more, a ritualized Bush bash. (What will they do without him?) Fucking Bush did this or that ... Did you hear the stupid thing Chimpy the Idiot said? You didn't even have to hear Bush referred to specifically-- the word "idiot" sufficed. You knew. The subtext was that we were all together, part of the secret society, the world of those who know as opposed to those who don't.

If you didn't agree with this particular Weltanschauung, if you dissented from its orthodoxy just a tiny bit, you had but three choices: One, you could argue, in which case you would be almost certain to be dismissed as a fool, a warmonger, or a right-wing nut (all three, probably) and therefore have had little or no chance at the writing or directing job that brought you there. Two, you could shut up and ignore it (stay in the closet), in which case you felt like a coward and experienced (as I have) a dose of nausea straight out of Sartre. Three, you could stop going to the meetings altogether--you could, in effect, blacklist yourself.

While this is (to the best of my knowledge) Roger's first non-fiction book, he's long been an exceptional fiction and comedy writer, and as we've long been documenting here, reality is always far stranger than satire. And as Hollywood's politically correct purges (see post below) continue and the level of dissent even less acceptable in a town that prides itself as being full of "free thinkers", many more people may well be blacklisting themselves as well in the years to come.

My interview last week with Andrew Breitbart, discussing his new "Big Hollywood" group blog for Saturday's edition of PJM Political unfortunately needed to be edited to fit into the rest of the show's weekly 55-minute running time on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio. However, the complete 15-minute interview is now online; click here to listen!

Finally added my Twitter feed to the sidebar on the right (along with a few other minor revisions). What is Twitter? For those who have not been assimilated into the Twitter Collective, a recent edition of the B-Cast on Breitbart.TV is a great primer:

Jazz Shaw has an epiphany: "Joe Wurzelbacher Is Not Edward R. Murrow":

During a recent interview, Joe informed us that he felt his safety would be well augmented as a good Christian, since he expected to enjoy "the protection of God." Our parting question should be: Who will protect the Israelis and the global news audience from Joe?

Israel has survived CNN, Reuters, the AP and AFP. I think they can handle Joe The Plumber.

Despite producing 50 hours of Blogosphere-oriented radio last year and a couple of dozen videos, plus another 2,000 or so blog posts in 2008, I'm curiously absent from here. I'm sure it's merely a glitch in the paperwork.

Fortunately, Iowahawk has a Festivus for the rest of us--and in the spirit of Ving Rhames, I'm giving this award to Jack Lemmon--but not before keeping one for myself.

Besides, I was Time's Man of the Year a couple of years ago, so why not?

Steve Green, my partner in crime on PJM Political, Pajamas' weekly show on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio is celebrating his blog's 7th anniversary today--"That's 21 in Blog Years", which means that at last, the blog itself can drunkblog legally.

And you can hear its boss in the latest edition of PJM Political, which also features Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, James Lileks, Roger L. Simon, and special guests Andrew Breitbart on his new "Big Hollywood"...and the man, the myth, the plumber turned war correspondent himself, Joe Wurzelbacher.

Tune in here!

In addition to Andrew Breitbart and John Nolte's new Big Hollywood, John Hawkins has just added Right Wing Video to make a troika of Websites he's running. The new site is your one-stop-shop for libertarian and conservative clips--err, like mine!

"For at least ten seconds there, it appeared Margaret Warner thought PBS stood for the Palestinian Broadcast Service."

Fortunately, there are new media alternatives available, as "Israel Shakes Up the Information War."

Danny Glover rounds up his choices; here's an excerpt:

3) Burning Down The House: When conservatives create videos that strike a chord with the public, they often become the target for copyright-infringement "takedown notices" at YouTube.

I can certainly relate to that; you can watch the rest of our videos here, including the Hillary 3:00 AM mash-up from March that the McCain Campaign eventually copied.

Danny also links to an interview with the anonymous maker of this awesome video, which was referenced in our recent "In Dodd We Trust?" video.

One reader emailed that he wasn't able to view my "In Dodd We Trust?" video earlier in the week apparently because of bandwidth issues. If you've had similar problems, that video is now up on my YouTube page. (The higher res, higher bandwidth version is still available here.)

And if you received a DV camera in your stocking today and want to put it to work, I have an article that recently went live on Videomaker magazine's Website on the rudiments of videoblogging titled "Medium Cool: Launching Your Own Video Blog."

This just in: "Americans prefer news from Web to newspapers: survey."

The enormous readership of Matt Drudge (where I found the link) proved that to be the case a decade ago, which is why he was so initially despised by those he made obsolete.

Even as newspapers are shedding staff and hemorrhaging money, Roger L. Simon spots "The Great Byline Strike Of '08" amongst journalists at the Associated Press:

I read with amusement that reporters and photographers for the Associated Press are staging (via the Newspaper Guild) a 'byline strike.' Say what? To stage a such a strike people have to have heard of you, but practically no one is more anonymous than a writer for a news service. It almost comes with the job description. You are the "Associated Press," not yourself. The AP is not exactly where you find the next Norman Mailer. News service reporters are not even as well known as bloggers. I mean whose names are more famous to the general public at his point -- Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin and (yikes) Markos Moulitsas or [insert any Associated Press writer here]?

Not that I don't have some sympathy for my AP colleagues. These are trying times for all in the media. But they made a choice by joining a news service and that choice was for a form of literary facelessness. Also, they opted for a form of homogenization, since the AP and other news services are by mission supposed to be uniform in style and content.

And therein lies the rub. Of recent years the uniformity of the Associated Press in publishing a kind of bland, accepted liberalism of the most uninspired (and sometimes distorted) sort may be the root of their business woes - not the presence (or not) of bylines or even the current economic situation, although the latter certainly plays a part. I would suggest to the writers and owners of the AP that they consider opening up their company to people of different biases and opinions. They are supposed to be a news service, after all, not a ideological distribution center. People on the more extreme right love to compare them to Tass. That's not fair. The AP is nowhere near as bad as that. But they are pretty bad. And they are failing economically. And when you're failing economically, you're supposed to do something. [Maybe they're waiting for a TARP bailout.--ed. I'd rather drive a Buick.]

As that sage philosopher of Springfield, H. J. Simpson once told his daughter, "Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way."

And from that perspective, the staff at AP have been doing an exceptional job of alerting readers of poor working conditions there for years.

John Hawkins makes his list here.

There are lots of great blogs on John's list who are well worth your time. Personally though, I'd like to find a blog that cranked out a weekly show on Sirius XM radio that also featured others in the Blogosphere, and regularly uploaded new videos on topics of interest to conservatives, in addition to blogging every day.

I know it's out there somewhere.

PJTV subscribers can watch Evan Coyne Malone's 88-minute Indoctrinate U video here.

For my 2006 interview with Evan on DIY video, click here.

Mort Kondracke, a man of the moderate center left writes, "How can the Republican Party rebound? The first step would be to quit letting Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham set its agenda."

John Hawkins notes correctly that in terms of the GOP's candidate in 2008, talk radio didn't set the agenda:

Then there's the perfectly ridiculous idea that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham set the agenda of the Republican Party. Really? That's funny, because I remember a guy named Bush in the White House -- who bent over backwards to cooperate with the Democrats, expanded the size of government, ran large deficits, and tried to push the Dubai Port Deal, Harriet Miers, and amnesty for illegal immigrants -- over the loud protests of people like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Ingraham.

I also seem to remember a fellow by the name of McCain -- you know, older gentleman, served in Vietnam, white hair -- who won the nomination even though people like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Ingraham said it would be a disaster. You know who did like him though? The Mort Kondracke and David Brooks wing of the Republican Party that was thrilled that they finally had their champion running as the party's nominee. Then, after eight years of big government Republicanism and John McCain, these same people want to blame the very people who pointed out the political pitfalls the GOP was stepping into almost every step of the way?

Please. Give. Us. A. Break.

McCain and Rush have had a pretty vocal Louella Parsons/Hedda Hopper feud for ages (or a Tom Wolfe/Norman Mailer-style feud for something more macho sounding); when McCain was nominated, my first thought was, "This should be interesting to watch: how does a Republican win the White House when he hates Rush Limbaugh--and the feeling's mutual?"

The answer of course was that he couldn't. And as John writes, it's quite a stretch that believe that Rush is what's wrong with the GOP when he had zero impact on whom the party chose for its nominee.

Ed is getting a definite DuffMan! vibe from the new VodkaTwitter page.

(With Lileks and now Steve Twittering away, Ed is wondering how long it is before he's absorbed into the Twitter collective himself.)

Scroll down to the bottom of IowaHawk's recent "Lemon" post for an unlikely six degrees of environmental separation, as two great Blogospheric satirists exchange notes over one of the first electric cars.

Details at Zombietime:

"Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web"--Well, it probably does boot quickly on a 56k modem, given its Web 0.0 aesthetic.

Or maybe it's a Windows 1.0 aesthetic:

While Matt's pioneering Internet status is a given, it's definitely for his content, not his visual style.

Considering he was at least as tall as Romney, I wouldn't want to call him Mini-Mitt, but the gentleman whom Jim Geraghty pointed out to me during the National Review cruise as looking like Mitt Romney's stunt double is actually a blogger at Red State, and he has a terrific round-up (complete with video) of the cruise: "If we're going to have a nuclear holocaust, I'm going to the buffet first."

(You can read my immediate impressions of the cruise here.)

Zombietime proffers a new holiday: Victory in Iraq Day, November 22, 2008:

The moment has come to acknowledge the obvious. To overtly declare a fact that has already been true for quite some time now. Let me repeat:

WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ
And since there will never be a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York for our troops, it's up to us, the people, to arrange a virtual ticker-tape parade. An online victory celebration.

Saturday, November 22, 2008 is the day of that celebration: Victory in Iraq Day.

What do you need to do to participate? Simple. Just make a post on your blog on Saturday, November 22, announcing that the war is over, and declaring that day to be Victory in Iraq Day. That's it.

If you want to write a short post (or a long essay) analyzing the nature of our victory or cheering the troops for a job well done, great; but if you just want to make a simple announcement of the victory, that's fine as well. Anything will do. Just come and join the celebration to mark the day.

Works for me--especially since we'll never see the folks who were forgainst the Iraq War acknowledge their 180 degree pivot in 2003.

Just received my copy of the December issue of Videomaker magazine, which contains my Camcorder Buyer's Guide 2008--complete with a cameo appearance by James Lileks, fresh off documenting hecklers at the GOP convention for the Strib.

(For what to aim those camcorders at--besides protests and hecklers--click here.)

Both my prerecorded Silicon Graffiti video blog and PJTV, Pajamas' live Internet TV coverage out of L.A. use virtual sets, and this new article of mine at Videomaker magazine explains how they work. (This demo reel for Adobe's Ultra 2 product is a pretty good video intro in and of itself.)

Of course, first you need a green screen--but that's a topic I explored at Videomaker last year.

I let out an audible gasp when I read the news a few minutes ago, even though I knew he had been ailing: Dean Barnett dead at the far-too-young age of 41.

You can hear my interview with Dean from last November, here.

Update: The Weekly Standard has a round-up of blogger and pundit memorials to Dean, here.

Scott Johnson of Power Line --part of the "monster" that Mary Mapes, inadvertently helped to create when deliberately cooked the books at CBS in 2004 (back when viewers were still surprised that such things occurred), has some thoughts on her post this week at the Puffington Host. He reaches a conclusion similar to my take from Friday.

As to Big Media in 2008, the Professor and his readers have some thoughts on the state of "Blue Journalism."

Mary Mapes, the woman who brought you RatherGate, wrote yesterday at the Huffington Post:

Americans aren't responding to the old plays -- the fake fears, the faux outrage, the conservatives who yell "Communist" at the news cameras, the pompous right-wing bloggers who once held such sway. I know all too well how scary and effective these old tactics were in 2004. Today, they are toothless. Ha, ha. Nothing makes me happier than seeing once swaggering players like Powerline, Free Republic and Little Green Footballs forced onto the sidelines, left to limply watch this campaign pass by like a parade in which they play no meaningful part. They just don't matter anymore.

Mapes' post is titled, "The Monster is Dying"--so "conservatives who yell 'Communist' at the news cameras" are declasse, but attacking conservatives as a monolithic "monster" on a Weblog is reasoned nuance journalism. Charles Krauthammer, call your office!

But behind each of those "monsters" was at least one person who in one form another said, "I don't know how many people will actually listen, but why shouldn't my voice be heard as well?" (Just as the founder of the Huffington Post presumably said as well at some point.) Much like a certain Ohio tradesman with entrepreneurial dreams who is now called "the now infamous Joe the plumber," on over 500 Webpages. Or as another journalist with the same initials as Mary Mapes wrote today:

So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

And calling one half of the Blogosphere "toothless" because their presidential candidate isn't an effective purveyor of the same message as they are seems awfully disingenuous to the other side--I don't think the bloggers at, say, the Daily Kos would take kindly at being called, by extension, toothless in 2004 because John Kerry was such a feckless candidate. It also fails to take into consideration that pundits supporting the out-of-party are able to go on the rhetorical offense, something that the right-hand of the Blogosphere will likely have ample opportunity to do so over the next four years.

But if indeed "The Monster is Dying", what a run! In September of 2005, a year after RatherGate broke, Mapes admitted that she had never heard of any of the blogs that she quotes above, even as she was a working TV producer at a corporation which billed itself at the time as "America's Most Watched Network", and hence, presumably, had her pulse on the nation's political scene:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

And accurately so, of course.

But hey, from cat food eating pajama-wearing navel gazers to a journalistic "monster" in the space of seven years after 9/11 is a pretty amazing growth cycle--and something tells me that the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't going away anytime soon, no matter how much Mary wishes it were so, and no matter what the outcome on November 4th.

Young'ins today (or younglings, for you Revenge of the Sith geeks) just don't know what it was like back in the old days, when we had to walk five miles in the snow just to snail-mail out our query letters hoping to impress an editor high atop a far off office tower to maybe--just maybe--publish our wares. Of course, "the old days" means as late as about 2002, so I can absolutely vouch for what Robert Stacy McCain writes here:

Politically, Andrew Sullivan is erratic, and his attacks on Sarah Palin have been wildly irresponsible, but in two sentences of his latest article for The Atlantic Monthly, Sullivan makes a huge point:

If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you'd find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Younger people -- i.e., those under 35, who have started their careers since the online explosion of the mid-1990s -- have no appreciation for how instantaneous Internet communication has transformed the world of the professional writer, of which blogging is the ultimate example.

I'm 49 and Sullivan's 44, so we both began our careers when there were no Web sites, when the Internet was something known only to academics and technogeeks, when editorial "gatekeepers" stood squarely between the writer and the reader, and when the only way to gain access to mass readership was to present yourself and your work to these gatekeepers, in person or via mail (I would say "snail mail," but that term did not exist).

Of course, Sullivan started his career at a much higher level -- I used to read his articles in the New Republic when I was a staffer at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune -- but in recalling the limitations of journalism in the pre-Internet age, he echoes my own memory.

Applying for a staff position, you would "send clips and resume" or, if you were a freelancer, mail out manuscripts in hope of finding a publisher. It required the commitment of an enormous amount of time and energy, with a lot of time spent waiting for replies, if any. Mail out a clips-and-resume package on Monday, which might be delivered to the editor on Thursday or Friday, and if you were lucky you might get a phone call the next week.

On my desk is a book, The Proud Highway, a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters from 1955-67. Reading it, you get some sense of the difficulties a writer faced seeking assignments in the Bad Old Days. The young Thompson was a genius (and arrogantly aware of it), but had to spend an enormous amount of time pitching articles to editors, at a time when that meant typing letters on a manual typewriter, and most of the time getting rejected.

All this tended to limit a writer's career mobility. If you got a staff position, you tended to stay wherever you were and work your way up (rather than hop from job to job, as many young journalists do now) since the process of applying for jobs was so laborious. And once a freelancer found an editor who'd publish one of his articles, he would keep pitching that editor, trying to establish a regular outlet for his work. For example, Thompson regularly freelanced for the National Observer, and when he sold a feature to the national men's magazine Rogue in 1961, he kept pitching them for future assignments (without luck).

Though I'm not sure, as Robert writes above, that "blogging is the ultimate example"--or at least text blogging. Because the Internet has also opened up podcasting and video blogging, allowing anyone to do his own one-man radio or TV show, in addition to traditional text-based journalism. It goes without saying that not everyone will alchemically fill those vessels with brilliantly transcendent content (just poke around YouTube for 30 seconds or so)--but the platforms are readily available to virtually anyone. Which is why those with aspirations of becoming the next fill in the name of your favorite superstar pundit here are well advised to read the whole thing.

Power Line has a spiffy new look, and even more power under the hood. Stop by and take a look!

As Allahpundit is wont to say...Duuuuude!

(Jerry Carroll could not be reached for comment.)

Ed Morrissey writes that the great Soxblogger "is currently in the ICU with a terrible attack of his cystic fibrosis"--and could really use your prayers and good wishes:

So often in this business, we become friends with people whom we've never met face to face. That's certainly true of Dean Barnett of the Weekly Standard. I've long admired his writing, and Dean has always been kind enough to request me as a guest whenever he guest hosts for Hugh Hewitt. He calls me his "crazy uncle", a humorous reference to Jeremiah Wright.

My friend Duane "Generalissimo" Patterson tells me that Dean has had to be admitted to the hospital and is currently in the ICU with a terrible attack of his cystic fibrosis. I'd like to ask Hot Air readers for their prayers for my friend and his family. I know they will appreciate the support.

After exchanging numerous emails and a phone call or two, I finally met Dean at the first Blog World in November of 2007, and interviewed him there for last year's Thanksgiving edition of PJM Political. The interview appears about 23 minutes into the show; we discussed his then-new pamphlet, whose gritty title is The Plucky Young Kid With The Fatal Disease: A Life With Cystic Fibrosis. Dean's whole life has involved four decades worth of beating the odds; here's hoping that this current episode is no exception.

"Since I had the misfortune to become ensnared in the Canadian 'human rights' racket, I've come to appreciate more and more the comment one fellow left on an Internet post somewhere or other, remarking that he was in favour of free speech, because the alternatives 'were just too weird.'"

That's a brief excerpt from Mark Steyn's article-length introduction to Pete Vere and Kathy Shaidle's new book, The Tyranny of Nice, on Canada's "Human Rights Commissions", and their patented show trials to purge all doubleplusungood thoughtcrime from Airstrip Canada.

How weird do those trials get? And could similar such weirdness be coming to the US? Tune in to my 40-minute long interview with Kathy and Pete over at Pajamas Media.

Mark Sheldon of IlliniPundit writes, "I got a call yesterday from Steven Gray, a reporter for Time magazine who was in town today doing an article on student voter registration":

He left a message on my voice mail asking for ten minutes of my time. I didn't get back to him so he showed up in my office today. He asked for five minutes, no doubt noticing how busy I was and I politely said no. He comes back with..."come on, just five minutes?"

I told him no, because first, I was busy, and two, I really had no idea what he would do with the video he was planning to shoot of me. He gave a little roll of the eyes and so I asked if I could have an unedited copy of the entirety of what he taped of me. He said "No one does that!" That was the end of the conversation.

He seemed like a nice guy and I have no particular reason to doubt his integrity as a reporter. Except for his instant negative reaction to my request.

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, has suggested that everyone bring their own cameras to interviews. I was a little busy to try that stunt, so I went with the next best thing. I wasn't surprised that the reaction was negative, if for no other reason than I expect my response was pretty much out of the blue.

Not doing the interview is probably a good career move. After all, if Time does you right, you get 15 minutes of fame. If they do you wrong, you get a lifetime of infamy on their website.

No hard feelings Mr. Gray. Next time I won't ask for the tape, I'll take Reynolds' advice and bring my own camera.

I guess it's a form of progress that Gray's reply was simply a startled, "No one does that!", because a decade ago, our sensitive legacy media considered taping your own interview "intimidation", as former CBS journalist Bernard Goldberg wrote in Arrogance, his sequel to his first inside the trenches book on media bias:

You know the old saying "They can dish it out but they can't take it"?

In October 1999 the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 was about to air a story on a man named Michael Ellis, the founder and CEO of a company that markets a controversial weight-loss pill. It was the kind of investigation that doesn't always end well for the person on the other end of the camera, the one being interviewed. So, fearing his comments might be taken out of context and that the interview might be edited to make him look bad, before the 20/20 piece aired Ellis took the unedited transcript and video of the entire interview-which he'd recorded on his own-and put it out on the World Wide Web.

This made people at ABC News very angry. In fact, one vice-president told the New York Times, without a hit of irony, that "We don't want other people attempting to get into and shift the journalism process." [Things were much more fun for the legacy media when they had a monopoly--Ed]

Next to be heard was former ABC News Vice President Richard Wald, now teaching young journalists at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Wald called the CEO's strategy, "a not-so-subtle form of intimidation".

Got that? When the media disseminates information about "other people", it's news. When "other people" disseminate information about themselves, it's intimidation.

It didn't take long for the tsunami to reach CBS News, where its president, Andrew Heyward, put out the following in-house memo. I share it with you now, in its entirety.

You can read Heyward's memo at my original blog post on the topic from 2005. Bernie doesn't mention if CBS typed it up on the 1973 edition of Microsoft Word or not, though.

(H/T: IP)

For a sneak preview of today's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, check out the podcast of the blogger round-table recorded immediately after Tuesday night's debate, featuring:

• PJM Political host Steve Green--fresh off his usual soiree into debate drunkblogging, plus:

• James Lileks.

• Glenn Reynolds.

• Jennifer Rubin.

• Produced by your humble narrator and multimedia maven.
  

As John Dickerson writes in Slate, "The 41st president's run-in with Ponytail Guy left such a mark that it haunted his son throughout his campaigns":

I remember watching a town hall during the 2000 campaign in which George W. Bush consistently refused to call on a man waving from the middle of the crowd like he was trying to flag a rescue plane. Bush pretended not to see him but let on afterwards that he'd seen him and avoided calling on him for fear of creating a moment. In 1996, when Bob Dole was given the chance to attack Clinton's character in a town-hall debate, he demurred, saying the debate should be about the issues.

This year's campaign shows how partisans on both sides go after the journalists who ask questions they don't like. During the Democratic primaries, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, and George Stephanopoulos were all savaged for the questions they asked and how they asked them. Last week, Gwen Ifill was attacked for a book she hasn't written about a subject she isn't addressing. [Say what?--Ed]

"Real" people (by which I mean people who don't do this for a living) who are asking the questions may be harder to rough up. Or maybe not. On Tuesday night, if Son of Ponytail Guy asks a question, he can rest assured that he will receive a thorough going-over in the blogosphere. So I suggest all prospective questioners Google themselves, make sure they're on good terms with their co-workers, and wipe clean their Facebook page. If they don't--or even if they do--they could become the story very quickly.

Indeed--Michelle Malkin suggests that bloggers carefully check the flora and fauna in the bleachers of tonight's town hall debate. Specifically, the wide array of plant life that's likely to be sprouting up amidst the whichy thickets of the audience.

Update: I was just talking about this post at the top of today's edition of PJTV--subscribers can tune in here to watch. (And if you're not a subscriber--what are you waiting for? Click here!)

The great conservative filmmaker and film blogger "Dirty Harry" reviews David Zucker's new movie on his blog. And tune in here for a recent edition of PJM Political featuring audio interviews from Glenn Reynolds, Roger L. Simon and myself with stars Jon Voight and Robert Davi, and screenwriter/executive producer Myrna Sokoloff recorded during the film's premiere at the GOP convention in Minneapolis.

As Glenn writes, "If An American Carol does well this weekend, it'll make it a lot easier for the next film of its type to be made." As someone who's enjoys--on one level or another--the starboard side of the Blogosphere, you can help ensure the film's success; check here for times and theaters near you.

Update: Much more on the film from Kathy Shaidle, at Examiner.com.

Right Wing News posits that it as unfortunate as Obama forgetting the name of the soldier on his bracelet was, it was the tone of his response that created the takeaway moment of last night's debate:

And from yesterday's debate: "I've got a bracelet too." A lot of conservatives want to give Obama heat for the fact that he couldn't remember the name on his bracelet, but I actually find that forgivable. Obama was in the hot seat and, at moments like that (at least if you're me), names are the first thing to go. The sin wasn't the memory failure, the sin was that he made the statement in the first place.

Let's start with some context: In connection with his belief that there is no peace and honor without victory, John McCain told the moving story of the moment Matthew Stanley's mother gave McCain Matthew's bracelet and asked him to wear it and, more importantly, to honor and give meaning to Matthew's death by making the Iraq War an American defeat, not an American victory.

Obama, had he wanted to, could have scored some substantive points by immediately saying that we don't honor one man's death by creating more dead, or some such argument. That seemed to be where he was heading, but I tuned out because I was so overwhelmed by his actual response: "I've got a bracelet too."

What is this? Kindergarten? Could anything show more clearly what a selfish, self-centered, shallow man Obama is. McCain is talking about real people, and he's talking about how the beliefs he shares with those real people drive him to his understanding that, both for the good of the nation and for the honor of her troops, America must leave Iraq as a strong, viable nation. It breaks faith with both America and her troops to slink away as Obama so wants to do. This is a deep substantive argument. The bracelet wasn't the central point. It was simply a human-interest lead-in to that point.

And what does Obama say? "I've got a bracelet too." What that means, translated, is "I can't think of an original argument, I don't have a deep emotional story, I don't have sound policy justifications for abandoning Iraq now that we're trembling on the verge of actual and complete success but, 'Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah -- I've got a bracelet too.'" The attitude and ignorance behind the statement was appalling.

If this was just one example, it would be bad enough, but we've seen this before. When Hillary, the darling of huge chunks of American women, self-deprecatingly (and rather charmingly) acknowledges that she grates on some people, Obama snaps back with the condescending "You're likable enough." If I'd been Hillary, I would have marched across the stage and bitten him. So, I suspect, would all of her female followers.

And then when Palin comes on the scene, this man of Indonesia, Hawaii and Chicago suddenly discovers his inner Southerner and, when speaking of Republican policies, comes out with an old Southern expression: "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." At that moment, the remaining chunk of American women who aren't Obama acolytes lunged for their TV screens, teeth bared.

The MSM, no doubt recognizing how damaging this statement, is going to downplay "I've got a bracelet too" in the hope that it doesn't enter the pantheon of memorable moments in debate history. It's therefore our responsibility to make sure that this telling moment into Obama's character does not vanish into the abyss.

Elsewhere, Roger L. Simon explores Obama's Kissinger Blunder.

And Newsbusters opens up the Memory Hole: "Media Fail to Correct Obama's Claim of No Al-Qaeda in Iraq Before Invasion."

Update: Related thoughts here.

More: Biden's gaffe slowly begins to permeate the cocoon: the L.A. Times' campaign blogger writes, "Barack Obama: We'll never forget what's-his-name."

While this weekend's edition of the annual Blog World Expo was all about the ongoing revolution in electronic media, Mr. Gutenberg's pioneering analog blog format isn't going away anytime soon, of course--which is a good thing in my book. (Hey look--a pun!) While Barnes & Noble had a large display in the convention hall selling several existing books on blogging and new media, there were two new books of note discussed at Blog World:

Austin Bay gave me the galleys of his upcoming Fourth Edition to A Quick And Dirty Guide To War--right after Steve Green was done holding up the book, Brian Lamb Booknotes-style, during his interview with Austin for PJM Political on XM and PJTV on, err, PJTV. This is a sprawling (the galleys are over 600 pages) overview of the current wars of the world, and what could come in the future, written by two authors who also review what they accurately predicted--which was quite a bit--over 20 years ago. (Here's the Amazon link to an earlier edition of the book; the new edition is scheduled to hit the streets later this year.)

At the start of the month, I had interviewed Scott Ott for PJM Political. Scott is the proprietor of, and chief satirist in residence at Scrappleface, on the floor of the Republican convention (while Joe Lieberman was performing his sound check on stage in the background). He's contributed a chapter on politics and journalism (Scott, not Joe) for the upcoming book titled, The New Media Frontier, edited by John Mark Reynolds and Roger Overton, whom I interviewed on Sunday at Blog World. Their book, featuring an introduction from Hugh Hewitt, debuts at the end of the month. My very early first take? If you can picture a book aimed at Christian Americans that combines Hugh Hewitt's Blog book with some of the broad 3000 mile "medium is the message" overview that Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have provided, you get a sense of The New Media Frontier. I'd even suggest it to the non-religious, who can skip the more proselytizing chapters, for a pretty nifty look at the ability to use the Internet to build broad social networks and virtual communities.

Finally, speaking of books, Stephen Michael Kellat of a Website geared towards libraries and librarians stopped by the booth and interviewed Steve and I about Pajamas Media and PJTV as part of their weekly podcast. I haven't a clue why a library-oriented podcast wanted to talk to us, but hey, we were there and happy to talk to anyone who stopped by, including those who stuck a mic and digital recorder in front of us.

Tune in here to listen; Steve and I appear about 15 minutes into the show, which requires no iPod--or library card!--to hear.

(And click here to see a slide show featuring about a babillion photos of the exhibitors (including Pajamas) and the weekend's events.)

I just recorded a brief segment for PJTV's September 11th show. I had tons of notes prepared, since I didn't know how long I'd be on, so I'm reprinting some of them here in the form of a blog post on 9/11's impact on the culture war:

9/11 changed the culture quite remarkably, but it did so in ways that may not have been expected. Back in 2004, the great Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece in which he referred to "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The pressure was released during the 2004 election cycle, but when John Kerry lost, it mutated further into a virulent strain that was only fully released after Katrina. As Mickey Kaus very presciently noted, Hurricane Katrina gave the media a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq:

I'm not saying Bush and the Feds don't clearly deserve major grief for not getting today's National Guard aid convoy into downtown New Orleans a couple of days earlier. Some people are probably dead as a result. But the commentators on Washington Week in Review seemed a little too happy when proclaiming this a "debacle" that will damage Bush politically for a long, long time. And I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And 'if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can't we [tk] in our own South?' They aren't being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the "inner smile."

In a very real sense, 9/11 also created the Blogosphere and the idea of partisan journalism--and I don't mean that in any sort of pejorative sense--which began with Matt Drudge and Fox News in the mid 1990s, and Rush Limbaugh's national radio show nearly a decade earlier, and began to become an increasingly accepted element outside of the conservative media.

In 2004, the New York Times admitted what was obvious to all concerned--that it was a liberal publication; and a year prior, Eason Jordan, then of CNN, admitted that his network had shilled for Saddam Hussein. The pressure cooker that Krauthammer refers to led directly to some incredibly sloppy thinking, such as Dan Rather's MemoGate at CBS, and the rise of MSNBC, an openly hyper-partisan division of an otherwise staid establishment liberal news operation like NBC. This morning, MSNBC nobly ran the videotapes of The Today Showfrom 9/11, when all was chaos and uncertainty except for the two towers and the Pentagon being hit. But yesterday, as Kathryn Jean Lopez noted, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC said:

The television networks were told that the Convention would pause, early in the evening, when children could still be watching, for a 9/11 Tribute, and they were encouraged to broadcast it.

What we got was not a tribute to the dead of 9/11, nor even a tribute to the responders, or the singularity of purpose we all felt. The Republicans gave us sociological pornography, a virtual snuff film.

In addition to hyper-partisanship, 9/11, also fueled (if you'll pardon the carboncentric pun) the rise of environmentalism in the media. Julia Gorin, whom I've interviewed for PJM Political on XM, had a piece in the Christian Science Monitor in 2006 in which she talked about environmentalism as a sort of Freudian displacement for the War On Terror:

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

That's why in 2004 we got "The Day After Tomorrow" - so we could worry about junk science that may or may not kill us in 1,000 years instead of the people who really are trying to kill us the day after tomorrow.

While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that's coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront "climate change," which only requires spending trillions of other people's dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees - they think money grows on them.
Why are these people so worried about the environment, anyway? It's not like they're living on this planet. Speaking of which, scientists have recently discovered global warming on Mars. See that? Martians need to stop driving those darn SUVs!

Notice that the undercurrent in all the doomsday rhetoric is America as chief culprit in the axis of enviro-evil (just as it is in all the world's turmoil). Having found a warm and fuzzy cause to snuggle up against in this big, bad, scary world, the enviros pick a fight with the one guy they're not scared of: America.

Such displacement also helps to explain the conspiracy theories and "trutherism." For a very long time, ABC had no problem running someone like Rosie O'Donnell as part of their daytime programming, who in the course of five years went from publicly claiming support for President Bush in the early stages of 9/11 to literally telling ABC viewers not to trust what they had just heard on Good Morning America and other news shows.

The events of the morning of September 11, 2001 have changed the culture in ways that few could anticipate that morning, and will continue to do so, no matter who wins in November.

Thank God that ABC lets its hosts of The View blog. Back in 2006, there was the sophisticated and nuanced prose stylings of Rosie O'Donnell, and successor Whoopi Goldberg is proudly upholding the same commitment to high-quality journalism that has made Big Media what it is today. In both cases, the 21st century medium of the Blogosphere allows them to share with us insights into their personalities--and dare I say it--views, that simply cannot be boxed into the tubercular blue small screen of television alone.

Such as the fact that Whoopi Goldberg doesn't know the difference between "succeed" and "secede", and sees in Sarah Palin, a conservative tax-cutting pro-life candidate with libertarian leanings, the return of a hard left racially driven socialist agenda governmental leviathan bent on euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.

Or as Tim Graham puts it, "Whoopi Goldberg: Palin Sounds Pro-Nazi, Wants to 'Succeed' From U.S."

(And speaking of secession--I guess this means that the left has finally come to their senses on the Akaka bill, whose author has said could eventually lead to "outright independence" for Hawaii, and is supported by Barack Obama.)

Well, out of control of old media, that is. In the Washington Times, Matthew Sheffield explains, "Candidates use Web for cheap, edgy ads". Your friend and humble narrator is mentioned here, right after Matthew discusses McCain's "The One" ad, which pokes fun at a certain obscure young Chicago community organizer's rapid rise to the dizzying heights Hollywood stardom:

Besides demonstrating how the Web can be cost-effective, "The One" phenomenon is illustrative of another way the Internet has become useful for the presidential campaigns: helping them spot organic political themes that they can help develop into larger ones. The inspiration behind the ad is straight out of the conservative blogosphere where it has proven enormously popular with center-right readers long dissatisfied with the elite press' love affair with Mr. Obama.

That inspiration isn't restricted to just online ads, either. Just this week, the McCain camp released an ad that looked astonishingly similar to a parody ad created by blogger Ed Driscoll, which combined Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's famous "3 AM" ad with a second segment telling viewers that Mr. McCain also could be relied upon to respond to a crisis situation.

It's highly likely this will continue to happen, Mr. Driscoll told me in an e-mail.

"While a campaign still has to spend large sums of money buying advertising time on TV, as the older generation still glued almost exclusively to the television tube begins to fade away, watch for the Web to continue to grow in power as the political advertising venue," he said.

He's exactly right. It's simply a matter of time.

Matthew was of course instrumental in organizing the sprawling Newsbusters blog. He emailed me yesterday afternoon alerting me that the above article would be online today, and asked me if I was in St. Paul. I wrote back that indeed I was--and was immediately following him on C-Span in this online video shot on Wednesday.

...Minneapolis audiences are the best audiences in the world!

Special thanks to Roger L. Simon for allowing me the last word on this week's PJTV coverage from the convention. As maiden voyages go, this one was surprisingly smooth sailing--though not without a surprise or two of a different sort.

I can second what Danny Glover writes here:

Word on the cable networks this morning is that Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is a superstar because she delivered her rousing speech at the convention here last night despite a broken teleprompter.

MSNBC reported that tidbit. So did Fox News, with an aide to GOP presidential candidate John McCain talking about the teleprompter woes. Now the blogs are running with the story.

Don't believe the myth. I watched the speech from the area to the left and behind the stage in the Xcel Center and had a perfect view of the teleprompter. It worked fine. I have the footage to prove it.

Because of the positioning of the PJTV booth, I had a clear view of the teleprompter as well, and it never conked out. On the other hand, I also noticed that Palin's hilarious "What's the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom" line--and she may have been the only person on the planet to successfully sell such a joke--was an improv; it wasn't on the teleprompter.

(H/T: IP)

Update: Ed Morrissey (who's my kind of community organizer!) deflates the Palin speechwriter meme--with a little help from Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Somehow the caffeine, adrenaline, brain and mouth were all wired correctly together last night to give a full-tilt promotional boogie for PJTV in the booth when a C-Span cameraman appeared to discuss bloggers at the convention. I'm on right after Matthew Sheffield:

Sound advice under any and all circumstances; we should print up a copy in huge type and tape it to the PJTV green room.

It beats having to issue these sorts of addendums.

Rick Moran is far from the first person to ask the above question, but he frames his query in terms of a media that the GOP should embrace as tightly as possible:

What's the problem with the Republican party and bloggers?

We've been pretty happy with our Mission Control-like PJTV booth, but Rick notes that in contrast Bloggers' Row in 2004, "The dungeon that the GOP has put bloggers in this time around would be familiar to Torqumada and his buddies who made the Spanish Inquisition such a great party."

Pajamas TV's second night--both at the convention, and it's existence as a streaming Internet TV site--is on the air right now. Click here to tune in!

You can watch the interview that Glenn Reynolds, Roger Simon and I did with Jerry Seib of the Wall Street Journal yesterday from the convention hall right here. Among the topics discussed were several questions I asked Jerry regarding John McCain and his YouTube operation.

Capt. Ed writes:

CNN reports that the thankfully moderate impact of Hurricane Gustav will mean that the Republican convention will get back to business. At this point, they have no article with specifics, but apparently their sources indicate that the Gustav-imposed restrictions on campaigning in St. Paul will be lifted. The schedule will return to normal, and the speakers originally slated to speak tonight will do so.

As for Monday's events, you can watch a full recap on PJTV for free, several segments of which feature yours truly.

Maximum Pajamhadeen Roger L. Simon did a Herculean effort supervising the Army of Davids it takes behind the scenes to make PJTV's ability to debut live on location (which I'm not sure if a traditional TV network ever tried). He then switched seamlessly into host mode--and even blogged about it in the midst of the action:

How was it? Well, to be honest, in sixties parlance, it was a trip. There I was (only 75% befuddled) sitting in the high director's chair passing the baton to Cindy McCain and Laura Bush on stage, trying to sound suitably solemn about the hurricane and glad I was on with Glenn Reynolds, Ed Driscoll, John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson and James Lileks - all gentlemen who know how to move their mouths... because let me tell you you run out of ideas fast. This is especially true because, as the world knows, this is a convention in temporary postponement. Luckily for us we are only streaming about three hours today. Coming up... some intereviews I did with American Carol director David Zucker and Jon Voight (who plays George Washington in the film). These guys are members of the Friends of Abe (FoA), a Hollywood organization started by Gary Sinise for the folks in the entertainment industry who think the battle against Islamic facism might actually be worth fighting. This org was supposed to be hush-hush but the cat has now gotten far out of the bag. (Yes, I'm member - though we don't have cards.), so Zucker and I talk about it. Anyway.... tune in on our convention coverage and let us know what you think. But be gentle, dear reader.

Roger's being remarkably modest. It was difficult to get a sense of how the complete package looked to viewers from the snippets I saw on various monitors in the booth. But Nina and I watched a good hour of the coverage late last night back in the hotel room, and the finished product, which includes not just the remote from Minneapolis, but also the virtual studio back in L.A., a video feed from the convention floor, and several pre-recorded segments, looks incredibly smooth for an opening night's effort.

An addendum to the last post: Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler issued an apology for his Wolcott/Moore-style joke rooting for Hurricane Gustav.

As Glenn Reynolds writes:

What's interesting is that the apology came before the story was picked up by the traditional media. It was just blogs and Drudge, but it forced a public apology.

200,000 or so unwanted YouTube views within the span of a couple of days will do that to you.

Greetings From Minneapolis! I have arrived; the convention may now proceed. Unless of course it doesn't.

But if it does (and hopefully that means that Hurricane Gustav's force will have greatly diminished before hitting land), this clip should aired on the Xcel Jumbotron in prime time and referenced by several candidates in their speeches:

Ed Morrissey asks:

This also prompts a question of ethics, which all of us should consider carefully. Should private conversations between politicians get videotaped surreptitiously like this? If so, then perhaps Fowler and many, many others should take better care about having a laugh at the misery of others, even among friends.

Plenty of traditional liberal journalists have turned off the record remarks of politicians and celebrities into major stories. (Which is ultimately part of what earned them their "drive-by media" sobriquet from Rush.) As Roger Ailes noted several years ago:

Jimmy Carter's famous confession that he sometimes had lust in his heart for women other than his wife was uttered to a Playboy magazine journalist as he was leaving Carter's home at the conclusion of the formal interview.

And there are numerous additional examples of such moments, a few of which are described in the above link.

But as is its wont, the Internet amps these sorts of moments not up to 11, but 1100. George Allen's Senatorial re-election in 2006 was sunk by his "Macaca" gaffe, which was part of a coordinated effort by the left to videotape Republican candidates during every possible appearance (and then some), waiting for any sort of gaffe that could be turned into a YouTube clip and exploited by a friendly news organization such as the Washington Post, which ran over 100 stories on Allen's gaffe in the space of about less than three months, in which he apparently mispronounced his campaign staff's nickname of the young mohawk-haired James Webb campaign operative assigned to tape him.

Whatever the explanation, Allen's gaffe, given massive exposure from the Washington Post and other quarters in the MSM ended his senatorial career, which ultimately lost GOP control of the Senate, and sank Allen's presidential ambitions. In its wake, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos gleefully wrote:

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.

All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It's about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them.

The "tape 'em all, let YouTube sort it out" philosophy began on the left, but its eventual boomerang was merely a matter of when, not if.

Austin Bay interviews Steve Green, Glenn Reynolds, Jennifer Rubin, and--live from Denver International Airport--James Lileks. In a half-hour interview recorded by yours truly earlier today, they look back at the then just recently announced Sarah Palin pick by John McCain, Barack Obama's speech last night, and the gestalt of the Democratic Convention in Denver.

Tune in here to listen!

When we last left Team Obama, they were attempting to get the above video banned from TV. (More on that here.) Now they're attempting to smear NRO journalist Stanley Kurtz for attempting to report the story, thereby bringing maximum attention to it, as Ben Smith of the Politico writes:

Barack Obama's campaign hasn't advertised this a great deal this week, but the campaign's "Action Wire" has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons' Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers -- including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.

And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station's telephone number and the show's extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he's a conservative, which isn't in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.

"It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies," it continues.

Andy McCarthy of NRO describes the results thusly:

The pro-Obama callers on the Milt Rosenberg show are a riot.

In the last few minutes, two called to scald Milt for having Stanley on without having an Obama rep on to give the counterpoint. Milt explains, repeatedly, that he contacted the Obama campaign (he gave the name of the campaign official his producer spoke with) and the campaign -- the HQ of which is about a quarter mile from the studio where the show airs -- declined to come on. They were offered the opportunity to have someone there with Stanley for the entire two hours, and they said no.

Another pro-Obama woman called and, after accusing Stanley of slander but of course not citing anything he said that was slanderous, stated, "We want it to stop." Milt asked what she wanted stopped, and she replied, "It's just not what we believe as Americans." Milt tried again, asking what she didn't believe. She responded that it was someone saying bad things about Barack Obama and, again, we just want it to stop.

Very compelling.

Earth to Obama supporters: no one is claiming guilt by association -- though willful association with an admitted terrorist would be worthy of noting in a presidential candidate. Obama and Bill Ayers had a working relationship. Yet, Obama claimed Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and has otherwise minimized the relationship. Aside from the fact that Obama is not telling the truth, which itself is important, the details of the relationship are important. If the press was doing its job, we'd have those details already. Finally, the media's job is being done ... by Stanley. He should be saluted, not smeared. If the Obama campaign has a substantive response, let's hear it. If all they can do is smear a good faith critic, they are strictly bush league ... and it comes as no surprise that their guy thought Bill Ayers was someone worth cultivating.

We're still in the early rounds, but this is playing out remarkably like John Kerry and the Swift Vets all over again. As I wrote right around this time four years ago:

Kerry's massively invented narrative ("swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant"--as Steyn describes him--turned brave defender of soldiers' rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry's leftist anti-American beliefs.

But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry's story, and his "reporting for duty" edifice has crumbled.

Is that fair? We'll, we're deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can't survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an "obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands", is he someone who should be trusted with this power?

The 1972-style media seems to think so.

And a year later, John O'Neill of the Swift Vets gave an interview in which he said:

TAE: Were you surprised when Senator Kerry focused so much on his Vietnam record at the Democratic Convention in late July? How do you account for this when he clearly knew you were out there?

O'NEILL: I think he thought that he had good control over the mainline media, that they were sympathetic, that they would kill the story. And I think he was very confident that was the case with the New York Times and the three major networks and CNN, and that he could intimidate the portions of the media not already friendly to him. And so he thought the story would never come out. That had been his experience over and over again in Massachusetts.

TAE: Everything changed in early August, after your first ad.

O'NEILL: All of a sudden, Kerry and the media were faced with an ad that was actually showing. There was a time when they controlled the entire world of communications. That day is over.

Change the name from Kerry to Obama and the state from Chicago to Illinois, and O'Neill's quote is remarkably timely.

Back in 2004, Kerry's brain trust could at least some ignorance in the difference between old media and new--when RatherGate broke for instance, Mary Mapes of the very Kerry-friendly and very old media CBS later claimed, "Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line."

Four years later, what's the Obama camp's excuse? And as John Hinderaker notes:

Obama's suggestion that it is illegal for a 501(c)(4) entity to fund issue ads that are negative toward him appears ludicrous. Here's the real question, though: if Obama is elected President, will he appoint an Attorney General who will carry out politically-motivated prosecutions like the one he is now demanding? I suppose we can't know for sure, but why wouldn't he? If he demands criminal prosecution of free speech that opposes his political interests when he's a candidate, why wouldn't he order it as President?

Revel in the joy and optimism--the hope and change, you might say--that comes from the audacity of litigation.

Update: Don't miss Mickey Kaus's thoughts on this story as well.

Two and a half years ago, I asked, "Will Video Kill The Blogosphere Star?" Now we know: the two parties are about to have a pretty bigtime merger, in beautiful downtown El Segundo.

Say, that new John McCain ad in the above video with a 3:00 AM cameo from Hillary looks awfully familiar--almost as though it was created months ago...

Update: Welcome Instapundit, National Review Online and Riehl World News readers--please look around; there's lots here you may enjoy, both on the blog, and our video page.

If you enjoyed my "Atlas Mugged" article on mass print media and its successor, then you'll definitely want to read this recent piece by Mark Harris on the Wired Website:

For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up.

"People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us."

Detroit and the newspaper industry each thought the same thing--despite numerous predictions from futurists of diversification just around the corner in each industry. Why should Jurassic television be any different? And the Wired article doesn't even get into the next wave of video technology, which is slowly beginning to level the playing surface in much the same way as the Blogosphere did to print.

And speaking of Jurassic and futurists, if you missed a recent edition of my Sillicon Graffiti video blog I did on the topic, I explore what Michael Crichton and Alvin Toffler had to say about the media and demassification:

This is going to be fun:

Little Green Footballs and Pajamas Media are joining forces to send the undead creature known only as Zombie to the Convention, for the kind of exclusive, slightly bent coverage only an undead creature can provide.

We have a full schedule of newsworthy stuff laid out, but you'll just have to keep checking LGF because the Recreate 68 moonbats may act up and change our plans. We'll be staying in touch with Agent Z minute by minute during the circus, through the magic of teh innernut.

Zombie's reports will begin tomorrow, the opening day of the Convention. The reports will appear simultaneously at LGF and PJ Media; here at LGF they'll show up as front page articles just like the ones I post.

We're looking forward to this week; stay tuned to LGF and PJ for the latest.

Of course, plenty of zombies are already in Denver...

Obama finally makes it official that it is indeed Biden, and instead of pointing out the obvious story here--because that would hurt their candidate--AP simply notes:

Barack Obama named Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate early Saturday, balancing his ticket with a seasoned congressional veteran well-versed in foreign policy and defense issues.

Obama announced the pick on his Web site with a photo of the two men and an appeal for donations. A text message went out shortly afterward that said, "Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee."

The real story here is that everyone knew hours ahead of time, via the Weekly Standard, hoary old CNN and AP itself, the Blogosphere and Drudge. Instead of hype such as this, reminiscent of the McLuhanesque purple technoprose so common in the late 1990s (he said, having written tens of thousands of words of just that sort of prose himself back then) when the Web was bright and shiny and new:

It's beautiful.

In one fell swoop, by choosing to disclose his vice-presidential pick directly to voters through text messaging rather than revealing his pick through choice leaks to the press, the Obama camp has given us a momentary reprieve from having to watch smirk-faced pundits gloat about "inside scoops" and "my sources tell me." No "scoops" for the Villagers, followed by anti-climactic press conferences to the people as an afterthought. No "special access" to them, no matter how much they clamor. Technology has allowed the Obama camp to keep all, reporter and regular citizen alike, on the edge of their seats.

For today, the talking heads are absolutely powerless and impotent, staring stupidly at the screen, searching for words to make themselves relevant. For once, they finally feel what we have known all along --that they have absolutely nothing to offer outside of what is selectively hand fed to them.

With all this baseless VP speculation, with their special status and access stripped away, the "insiders" are exactly where we are, inside the cone of silence huddled together in unawareness, exuding palpable excitement, and waiting for what will now be truly breaking news for all but a select few in Obama's circle. Welcome, Villagers, to the land of the regular. I know it's unfamiliar territory, but enjoy your stay. I know I certainly will.

I'll bet. If there were any Obamamaniacs relying solely upon their text messages to find out who the Messiah's veep would be, they were the last to know--and as Robert Stacy McCain noted:

Imagine the reactions of those poor saps getting their text messages: "WTF? Dude. Joe Biden?"

Bob Owens puts it this way:

It's got to be disappointing when you discover that the candidate you helped elect into office lied to you. It must be worse to find out he's lying to you, when he hasn't even nailed down the nomination yet.

The anti-climactic feel of it all, a combination of a perfectly routine choice by a guy who was supposed to bring fresh bold unconventional outside the box thinking to presidential politics, coupled with more than a little techno-overreach by team Obama with the text gaffe is the real story.

Which is why it's apparently not worth reporting by AP.

Having read this article on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's loony return-of-the primitive proposal to put wind turbines on top of apparently everything in Manhattan, I was about to post the usual bloggerific snark, though Rush and GlobalWarming.org have you well served in that department.

But when I looked up Bloomberg's Wikipedia page, I came across this truly bizarre passage:

Bloomberg has on numerous occasions been accused of sexually harassing men under his employment, which he has denied.[24][25] T. Dan Winger sued Mr. Bloomberg for sexual harassment, alleging that he had made explicit comments about his body and encouraged him to spend time alone with him. The lawsuit was withdrawn in 1999.[26] In 1997, a former Bloomberg L.P. employee who became pregnant while employed filed a lawsuit accusing Bloomberg of saying "Kill it!" and "great, No. 16," a reference to the number of pregnant women in the company.[24] The lawsuit was settled the same year for an undisclosed amount of money.

Somebody clearly has gone in and hacked the genders of those in that passage. "T. Dan Winger" is in all likelihood "T. Diane Winger" with a quick, err snip. I took a screen cap to record the weirdness, which will probably be reversed in the not too distant future.

Just another day at the faith-based encyclopedia.

Glenn Reynolds asks:

IS IT JUST ME, or has Technorati become almost useless lately? Seems like half the time it doesn't work, and the other half the time it's days behind. What gives?

I found it to be that way for quite a while, to be honest. I sort of assume if one of their servers crashes, some sort of backup kicks in with old posts, but this seems to be happening at an accelerating rate in recent weeks.

Hopefully it will be back to 100 percent by the end of the summer, as this fall will no doubt be a peak period of usage, for obvious reasons.

Veteran new media videographer Andrew Marcus and Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft have teamed up in order to form a more perfect blog titled Founding Bloggers. (Note proto-very early analog-era citizen journalists displayed on masthead.)

They'll be going on the road to both conventions, so stop by daily!

Forget The Clone Wars--this is the best Star Wars (and Matrix) homage this summer:

(Via the Anchoress.)

As John Hinderaker writes, "Give This Woman A Purple Heart". As a journalist, she's definitely the anti-Katie Couric, delivering a story under intense pressure--not the least of which is the bullet, apparently from a Russian sniper, which grazed her left arm.

As I wrote yesterday, it's obvious that the chief role of the legacy media is keeping news out of circulation, rather than generating it. Matthew Sheffield concurs:

In far too many newsrooms, the question is no longer about serving the public's right to know but protecting the public from things it wants to know. No wonder they're looking elsewhere.

And just to follow-up on my quote on Tuesday from Umberto Eco about the age of outrageous credulity, the legacy media's role as gatekeeper is combined with their utter naivete when faced with a candidate whom they admire, as John Weidner writes:

Everybody who retained any objectivity could see that [John Edwards] was a phony, and were not surprised by this. When a guy talks populism and green-ism while building the biggest mansion in the county, there's a 99% chance that he's a sham. When a guy spends minutes in front of a mirror fluffing his hairdo, there's a 99% chance that he will not resist the sexual temptations available to a celebrity.

And when you make millions as a trial lawyer, it means you are skilled at convincing people of things that just ain't so.

Most importantly, what you are comes out in your life. If you are real, then a presidential campaign will bring lots of stories to the surface, from people who were impressed with the candidate's actions long before they could be helpful in any campaign. If Edwards really cared about that poor little girl supposedly shivering because she could not afford a coat, he would have been spending time working with groups who help the poor. And doing so long ago, before it might gain him any advantage. (And if Shapiro were a real journalist he would have taken note that cheap coats are available at any thrift store, and that people just give old coats away by the ton. The story was always bogus.)

Hey, Sam Kinison figured out that last part over 20 years ago.

Update: Dean Barnett adds:

So is it shocking that such a fellow would cheat on his mortally ill wife while recklessly jeopardizing his political agenda (not that he ever gave a fig about that agenda)? Of course not. The more pressing question is how he was able to get away with such a stunt. Okay, he personally charmed Walter Shapiro so Shapiro gets a pass based on his apparent congenital gullibility. But what of the rest of the putatively objective media that didn't get to bask in Edwards' golden glow over "raw" dinners? Why were only Mickey Kaus and the National Enquirer curious about this fellow who so energetically sought to be the world's most powerful man?

Related thoughts from Mark Hemingway.

Jules Crittenden returns, if only temporarily, from his summer hiatus to remind us that he's not the only writer in his household---his wife has a new book out: "Think CSI on a soul-searching journey in which the protagonist is doing everything she can to look the other way."

The latest edition of PJM Political is online. The newest show features Steve Green, Roger Simon and myself discussing the MSM running interference for John Edwards, Amanda Carpenter on the Washington Post's own journalistic gaffes, and James Lileks and Austin Bay on Russia's invasion of Georgia.

Tune in each week!

Ann Althouse links to a late December edition of Bloggingheads.tv featuring Mickey Kaus discussing this strange story circling John Edwards, much to the chagrin of an extremely skeptical Robert Wright.

As Ann notes, "the only thing interesting to me about the story at this point is how Mickey Kaus will act when he gets back on Bloggingheads."

For a more recent Kausian take on the story in its late undernews stage, tune into my interview with Mickey on PJM Political from July 30th.

News from 2004 reaches Tim Rutten!

Old Media Dethroned
Edwards' admission signals the end of the era in which traditional media set the limits of acceptable political journalism.

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it -- reporting that turns out to be largely correct -- and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.

The whole story of the 2004 election was that the gatekeepers were dethroned--the Swift Vets made their case against John Kerry by doing an end-around old media by running their commercials on the Internet, and Dan Rather's case against George W. Bush was demolished in a tidal wave of distributed information sharing, first via Free Republic, which was joined shortly thereafter in the Blogosphere. Both stories demonstrated precisely how Old Media's role as a gatekeeper was dethroned:

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds reminded us--well, the left, to be precise--of Eason Jordan's admission that he was willing to allow CNN to lie for Saddam Hussein, in order to able to put "LIVE FROM BAGHDAD" on the CNN Chyron. Jordan finally came clean on this propaganda coup for Baathist Iraq in mid-2003 after Saddam fled US soldiers in an op-ed titled, "The News We Kept To Our Selves." Evidently, the L.A. Times thought they kept the news of 2004 to themselves as well.

Mickey Kaus's ongoing victory lap takes him to the virtual studios of PJM Political this week.

As a follow-up to our previous post on Orson Bean, John Gibson, in a clip posted at Johnny Dollar's Place, looks at the calm, nuanced reaction of the left to the news of Bob Novak's brain tumor. Novak was a JFK and LBJ-supporting liberal who made the journey right in the 1970s.

Robert Stacy McCain writes, "Blogging sucks: Women, minorities hardest hit:"

If there's anything in the world I hate, it's women reporters writing "Oh, we're so oppressed" stories in the New York Times:

[M]any women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them. . . .

Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming 3 women on its list of 25.

"It's disheartening and frustrating," said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee. . . .

Ladies, please: If your blog sucks, it's not because of some patriarchal conspiracy, OK? And as for making money, you could almost certainly fit into my living room every independent blogger who earns a full-time living off blogging. Generally speaking, bloggers either have some other job to support their blogging habit, or else they're "blogging for the man" (e.g., the Atlantic Monthly bloggers, the Gawker cartel, etc.).

I wrote my rebuttal to this legacy media perennial three years ago; and it's not as though the Times itself is in the black, as Thomas Lifson and I discussed this week on PJM Political.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

Instapundit notes that GOP has--shocker!--fumbled its battlefield preparations after the 2004 election.

Were they asleep at the wheel? Did they think that John McCain would automatically be The Man, and therefore, his mutual love affair with the media would continue once a Democratic nominee was found? Did they think Rush, Fox, the Freepers, Drudge, and a few dozen blogs and Websites would be enough?

A while back, Patrick Ruffini compared lead pipes and leaky pipes in the two party world of online political media. Certainly a lot more plumbing should have been installed by the GOP immediately after 2004 (which might have prevented the 2006 debacle). Or an even better metaphor that fits into the usual battlefield preparation riffs that I can't think of right now.

Mickey Kaus explores "Edwards and the agony of the MSM", beginning with his paraphrase of a Business Week article on John Edwards by Jon Fine:

Fine notes that "Edwards isn't considered a likely vice-presidential candidate by the press." That's true. But he is a likely Obama cabinet official. Many Dems would like to see him as Attorney-General. That's what's at stake in the love-child coverage. The Enquirer has killed him as a VP candidate. But if the MSM goes into full "protect Elizabeth" mode the damage might yet not quite be enough to stop his confirmation by a Democratic Senate next year. "Protect Elizabeth" = "protect A.G. John."

After a long list of MSM outlets that fail to report the story, Mickey quotes Jim Treacher:

"Which story gets a bigger audience: A story the blogs run with but the mainstream news ignores, or a story the news runs with but the blogs ignore? I'm thinking the news comes out ahead, but just barely. And at this rate, not for much longer."

And it's not like such an MSM bottleneck on a story that everyone knows the basics of hasn't happened before. As Tony Blankley wrote in late August of 2004:

Mark the calendar. August 2004 is the first time that the major mainline media -- CBSNBCABCNEWYORKTIMESWASHINGTONPOST L.A.TIMESNEWSWEEKTIMEMAGAZINEASSOCIATED PRESSETC. -- ignored a news story that nonetheless became known by two-thirds of the country within two weeks of it being mentioned by the "marginal" press.

It was only after a CBS poll showed that Kerry had lost a net 14 percent of the veteran's vote to Bush -- without aid of major media coverage or substantial national advertising -- that the major media outlets began to lumber, resentfully, in the vague direction of the story. And even then, they hardly engaged themselves in the spirit of objective journalism.

According to Editor and Publisher, the respected voice of official big-time journalism: "Chicago Tribune managing editor James O'Shea tells Joe Strupp the Swift Boat controversy may be an instance of a growing problem for newspapers in the expanding media world -- being forced to follow a questionable story because non-print outlets have made it an issue. "There are too many places for people to get information," says O'Shea. "I don't think newspapers can be gatekeepers anymore -- to say this is wrong, and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why."

Now, there are two revealing statements there. First, it is odd to see Mr. O'Shea, an official, credentialed seeker of truth, complaining about "too many places for people to get information." He sounds like a resentful old apparatchik glaring at a Xerox machine in the dying days of the Soviet Union.

The second noteworthy statement is the hilarious complaint that they can no longer merely think a story is wrong and ignore it: "Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why." It apparently escaped his thought process that if he hadn't yet investigated the story, it might not be "wrong." A seeker of truth in a competitive environment might have phrased the sentence: "Now we will have to report it to determine if it is right or wrong."

As Blankley wrote, August 2004 may have been the first time the undernews bubbled straight to the surface, but obviously, it will be far from the last.

"Blew That One."

And on a related note, here's great moments in mastheads.

Roger L. Simon:

John Edwards--he of constructing a 28,000 square foot home while preaching about the two Americas and remonstrating about the environment--is one of the most reprehensible schmucks to appear on the American political scene in some time. And that's saying something. That he played this game while his wife had cancer makes it contemptible beyond words. Now we know why he was always primping in the mirror. It is narcissism unbounded.

Elsewhere, Byron York notes, "Today Is Fitzmas for Mickey Kaus."

Christian Toto sounds like he'll likely be tuning out the latest incarnation of what was once the Siskel & Ebert show:

Doesn't have a great ring to it, does it?

Turns out the folks behind "At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper" already have a backup plan. They'll throw E!'s Ben Lyons and Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz into the balcony once occupied by Siskel & Ebert (hat tip Thompson on Hollywood).

I'm not a TCM watcher, alas. I've become an HD snob and that channel isn't broadcast in high-def on my system. And Lyons seemed affable the times I've caught him on E!, but I can't share any other pertinent thoughts about him.

This could be another Katie Couric moment, although on a less important scale. News hounds don't bother with the network's nightly newscasts anymore, but that didn't stop CBS from throwing tons of money Couric's way.

Do movie fans still wait for "At the Movies" before surfing over to Fandango?

Like the rest of the dino-media, the one-size-fits-all movie critic is going the way of the one-size-fits-all anchorman (sorry, Katie). Movie fans increasingly look for critics with similar worldviews, much the same way that news junkies have long sought out bloggers with compatible mindsets.

Update: Nikke Finke is not amused:

Ugh. The retooled Ebert & Roeper show premiering September 6th will be co-hosted by Ben & Ben -- a Generation Why duo who only got the gig due to nepotism. Ben Lyons is the nobody son of Jeffrey Lyons, the film critic world's biggest hack and quote whore with zero credibility, while Ben Mankiewicz is the slacker host on Turner Classic Movies, whose only claim to fame is that he's a watered-down member of the famous film family. Now, there's a working definition of the death of film criticism for you.

Heh.

Rick Moran writes, "The story of John McCain's discarded op-ed explains why the New York Times is dying":

Someday, when newspapers are a thing of the past and you take your grandkid to the museum where artifacts of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune are on display in vacuum sealed cases to protect the yellowing, brittle paper from disappearing entirely, there will be a special exhibit devoted entirely to the New York Times.

Famous front pages will be featured along with pictures of the Sulzberger family who owned the paper for generations, famous reporters, and the last publisher when the paper folded in 2018--Matt Drudge.

The inscription on the shiny bronze plate below the exhibit might read:

Thought of as the "newspaper of record" for more than 100 years, the Times eventually succumbed to disappearing ad revenue, a catastrophic decline in circulation, and the consequences of a perpetual, unrelenting, obvious and sickening bias exhibited against its political enemies.

The news industry has already built the museum that Rick describes--join us on a video tour!

In less than a year, Ezra Levant not only gets his right of free speech challenged by a Canadian Imam who thuggishly sicked the Alberta "Human Rights" Commission on him, he's now facing anonymous death threats on his blog. Having already witnessed, up close and personal, the failure of Canada's dangerous and incompetent government, as Kathy Shaidle writes, Ezra is "opening sourcing" things--and offering a $1000 reward to anyone who can identify the person who threatened him.

Your must see eco-hypocrisy video of the day, via Americans for Prosperity:

Al was recently quoted in the New York Times (sure, but for the sake of argument, assume they got it right) as saying that:

"The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. "The future of human civilization is at stake."

As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, I'll believe there's a crisis when the people who tell me there's a crisis start acting like there's one themselves.

Though sometimes it's tough to tell which is which. First up, Andrew Ferguson gets "Lost in the Personasphere":

My first glimpse of the personasphere came several years ago at a county fair. It was like all county fairs, an all-American overload of colored lights and hurdy-gurdy noise and questionable smells. I'd always thought it was an experience that nobody could be bored by. Then I saw a gaggle of four teenage girls walking together along the midway. They were yacking away, as teenage girls, you might have noticed, sometimes do-but they were yacking into their cell phones. Walking four abreast, they were huddled in their personaspheres, each in her customized bubble, talking to someone who was far away instead of the friends that plan or chance had placed beside her. They were lost not only to one another but to the noise and color around them.

Since then, the appliances that furnish a personasphere have grown in number and complication. Walk down any city street and you'll see people deploying one gadget or another to construct their bubble, ignoring the nearby in favor of the faraway. Here comes a kid talking excitedly into a cell phone, followed by a businessman calling up a webpage from his iPhone, followed by an office hack scrolling through the messages on his Treo. Meanwhile, life erupts all over the place, unnoticed. If this were a just world, I'd get to see at least one of these busy people walk into a lamppost or fall through an open manhole, the way people used to do in silent movies. They never do, though, at least not while I'm around. This must not be a just world.

But it is a very distracted one-though maybe distraction isn't the fitting word. A distraction is supposed to be something that draws you away from immediate experience, pulls your attention from the matter at hand. The personasphere involves experience once removed, pressed through a piece of hardware; in the personasphere, immediate experience is the distraction, an annoyance that takes you from the now-primary business of texting, phoning, websurfing-being elsewhere. Faced with the real world, we draw our personaspheres over us like a cloak against the cold.

I'm a silver-lining guy, as my friends will tell you, always searching for the upside in any given situation, so I'll mention one nice thing about this cocooning, this withdrawal of everyone into his own personasphere: It has served to prove the techno-utopians wrong once again. From the dawn of the Internet through the coming of the Wi-Fi era, the utopians told us that technology would pull us together and restore a common life to a fragmented culture.

We can see how mistaken they were. Consider the man lost in his personasphere, at dinner, on a bus, in an elevator, scheming into a cellphone or tapping a message on his BlackBerry. If technology has brought him closer to distant friends it has also made it easier to detach himself from those near at hand. As his world expands, it shrinks-roughly to the size of his busy, excitable, unutterably lonely self.

And the flipside? Kyle Smith of the New York Post is about to receive comment number #300 on his review of Wall-E:

As always, I am humbled by the number of people who, upon reading a lukewarm reaction to a cartoon about cute robots, managed to reach down deep and bring up some deeply crazed fury.

To be fair, some futurists, such as Alvin and Heidi Toffler in 1980's The Third Wave, didn't predict, as Ferguson wrote, "that technology would pull us together and restore a common life to a fragmented culture." Just the opposite--it's the technology itself that's atomizing a once mass culture, as we've gone from three national TV networks in 1968 to 112,000,000 blogs in 2008. But within that atomization, there is room for shared bonds to be forged--even if it occasionally involves fending off a crazed Wall-E storm.

The Dow Jones? Of course not. But the Blogosphere's going great guns in this election year. Simon Owens writes that political blog traffic is up an average of 48 percent for first of half of 2008. Owens breaks this aggregate number down for 17 of the biggest blogs.

On the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's home page, James Lileks has been doing a routine where he plays Jimmy Lileks, Ace Reporter, a sort of postmodern parody of '50s-style investigative reporter beamed into the 21st century. In the latest edition, he discovers that Apple has a new product that all the kids seem to rave over called the iPhone! It allows you to make calls without having a phone plugged into the wall and everything!

But Lileks is doing a parody, and one that's aimed squarely at online readers who are technologically savvy and know the news before the paper does. The only excuse the yutz in the clip below has for his shtick is that he's playing to his TV station's base: 80-something year old shut-ins who don't know what an iPhone is either. Watch how huffy he gets when someone in line calls his bluff and correctly asks him, is this really journalism you're doing, buddy? And the ultimate irony? With 158,295 views and counting on YouTube, he's probably gotten more viewers than his station's TV news show gets.

While Charles Johnson has spotted a serious example of fauxtography, and is thus only receiving belated, grudging acknowledgment from the Jurassic media, Ann Althouse looks at fauxtography's lighter side, and asks, "Why is it so hard for a magazine to shoot a decent celebrity cover?":

Some shocking examples of uglification here. My theory is that magazine editors want professional models and are annoyed to by the fact that celebrity faces on the cover help circulation so much that they can no longer do what their aesthetic sensibilities tell them is right. Thwarted, the wreak their revenge. It's passive aggression.

And speaking of fauxtography's lighter side, one of the house bloggers at Yahoo's music blog spots "Jennifer Hudson's Slim Chance" and asks, "Is it just me, or does Jennifer Hudson look, um, DIFFERENT on her debut album's cover?"

Tony Snow, Fox News anchor, frequent Rush Limbaugh guest host, and of course, White House Press Secretary, has passed away at age 53.

By all accounts a remarkably fair and optimistic man; a sunny conservative in the mold of--well, isn't it obvious?--he was much beloved by fellow conservatives and many--but not all--on the opposite of the aisle in the legacy media.

Ed Morrissey has some thoughts here. And the Corner has loads of posts on Snow--just keep scrolling.

Snow's death, comes so quickly after the death of Tim Russert; both men passed at away at compartively young ages, in their mid-50s. News reports and op-eds in the coming days will allow for very interesting comparisons of how the legacy media treats one of their own, versus someone who questioned the conventional wisdom of an industry which pays lip service to multiculturalism and diversity, and yet reflexively leans, and hires, almost exclusively to the left. AP has already gotten their digs in; others are sure to follow.

In an era where media ranging from blogs to magazines come and go with alarming haste, eight years on the radio is a statement in and of itself. We had Hugh Hewitt on Pajamas' XM show yesterday to discuss his new pamphlet, A Letter to a Young Obama Supporter, but he never mentioned that the eighth anniversary of his radio show was occurring today. Many happy returns to the microphone!

Steve Green, the great VodkaPundit, is taking over as host of PJM Political. If you missed this week's show on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel, tune-in here for all of the 100-proof fun, including guests Hugh Hewitt, Evan Sayet, Roger Kimball, along with James Lileks' weekly segment.

As Ann Althouse notes, judging by the tone of his voice, and the laughter that follows, I'm pretty sure McCain is kidding in the above clip, especially when bloggers and new media outlets such as Ed Morrissey and Pajamas were part of McCain's key media outreach strategy when he (a) needed to woo the base during the primaries and (b) was relatively cash starved. And note that McCain's camp has even attempted to reach out--in that patented it won't work but it looks good to squishy undecided voters Maverick style--across the Blogospheric aisle to prominent leftwing bloggers as well.

Frank Gannon notes the recent passing of Clay Felker, the man who brought you the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Matt Drudge notes:

While newspapers and traditional broadcast media are experiencing declining revenues, Limbaugh's golden microphone has turned diamond-laced:

Earnings now pace him ahead of the annual salaries for network news anchors: Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer — combined!

And this is obviously true for Matt as well:

The deal represents a stunning triumph over the establishment by an outsider who connected with and captured the spirit of the nation's heartland.

And both are absolutely hated by those still toiling exclusively in the predecessor medias.

When I was assembling the ancillary B-Roll material for the latest Silicon Graffiti video, I wanted to do a segment that charted the growth of electronic media, from three national television networks in the 1950s, to several hundred at the turn of the century, and then compare that to exponentially more rapid growth of the Blogosphere, from a few million in 2004 to 112 million plus today, according to Technorati.

I had remembered a pretty cool Edward Tufte meets Spirograph chart of the Blogosphere from very shortly after we went online in March of 2002, and used a screen capture of it, which appears at about the 5:05 mark of the video, rotating 360 degrees via a little 3-D animation to add some kinetic energy to an otherwise still photo:

But to the best of my knowledge, the above chart hasn't been updated for several years. I wish I had known about a successor to that format a couple of weeks ago, as I would have surely incorporated it into that portion of the video. It's a somewhat similar map of the Blogosphere galaxy, though the emphasis appears to be on a few hundred of the top political sites. Which makes sense--the Blogosphere is so huge today, it must strain even Google and Technorati's capabilities to map it all.

I'm happy to say that we made the cut--here's our position in the political Blogosphere--center right, but not too far out into the whichy thickets, which makes sense:

And here's a close-up of that quadrant of the galaxy, and some of our neighbors orbiting nearby:

(Found via the expert Blogospheric navigators at Hot Air and Protein Wisdom.)

Bing and Bob are nowhere to be found, but Michael Totten has an amazing assemblage of photos and stories from the road, in a locale that combines Christianity, Islam, and beautiful architecture amidst plenty of Soviet-era concrete monstrosities.

As Kyle Smith notes:

The indefatigable mystery movie blogger Dirty Harry has broken with the right-leaning site Libertas, where he posted tirelessly and well, and struck out on his own. Lend him your eyeballs at his personal site, DirtyHarrysPlace.com. Good luck, DH.

Absolutely--and as Kyle notes, definitely stop by Harry's Website. It's Magnum Force! (Sorry.)

Incidentally, Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, the founders of Libertas are back posting there; as several commenters have noted, no idea why the split occurred, but it could be a win-win for the Blogosphere, if both sites continue to crank out great posts.

Or Fox, to be specific--Keith Olbermann trashes Fox's entire Monday morning coverage of Tim Russert's death, because of remarks made (quite accurately, from our perspective) by one guest, Andrew Breitbart:

The final segment included Breitbart as a guest. "He was the last of an old breed of journalists who came from the Democratic party who felt incumbent of them to be fair to both sides," he said of Russert, although acknowledging Russert was a liberal. Kilmeade and Breitbart discussed some possible options, and Breitbart called out Matthews and Olbermann by name for a "leftward lurch." Then, Breitbart described how Matthews brought up the Iraq war in his initial tribute to Russert, calling it "classless."

Fast forward to Countdown at 8:45pmET last night on MSNBC. Olbermann gave the "Worst Person in the World," award to Fox & Friends. He didn't mention what segment of Fox & Friends he is referring to, or quote any part of what was said, but he seems to take offense to the Breitbart interview.

"You want to do a segment dismissing the late Tim Russert as a member of the liberal media?" he said. "You want to continue to feed the delusions of your viewers that the failures of their lives are the fault of somebody else, like TV news, and not their own responsibility?"

This from a man whose entire Joe Pyne meets Howard Beale routine is built on whipping up a frenzy amongst a couple of hundred thousand hardcore lefties whose entire lives revolve around BDS. (And yet, sometimes even they see through Keith's shtick.)

Andrew of course, runs the great Breitbart.com news aggregation site, and its affiliated Breitbart.tv video aggregation site (and full disclosure, we've met and interviewed all of the players there on several occasions). Between his affiliations with Matt Drudge and the Huffington Post, he's building the successors to a very shopworn legacy media. As Michael Crichton noted 15 years ago:

The American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk.

Much more on that topic in a bit.

Meanwhile, this: "Brokaw says he sometimes feels that he has been cast in the role of hall monitor at NBC News; if so, his charges have kept him busy." Heh.

Remember when television news anchors weren't being compared to unruly high school brats? Yes, I can too, but it's a period of time increasingly in the rearview mirror.

"Paco" has long been one of the more prolific commenters at Tim Blair's various blogging locations through the years, and he now also has a blog of his own, appropriately titled Paco Enterprises. Based on this recent post, we certainly applaud his excellent taste in blog linkage.

Yesterday, I wrote, "Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) gets busted by the Internet Immortality Thesis". The Scranton's Times-Tribune agrees:

U.S. Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski is getting a first-hand lesson in the hazards of the digital age.

For the second time in a month, a clip on the wildly popular video-posting Web site, YouTube, is earning him election-year attention he’d probably rather avoid.

The clip shows him apparently pushing down on the video camera of a man trying to question him about the Iraq war.

The man’s identity, known on YouTube as truthaboutkanjo, remains unknown. An attempt to reach him Wednesday via YouTube’s message system proved unsuccessful.

“I may have overreacted when this person stuck a camera in my face. But I feel like it was one of those ‘gotcha’ moments in politics, and my comments were misrepresented,” Mr. Kanjorski, D-Nanticoke, said in a statement.

I don't know--I'd say the congressman was misrepresented pretty accurately, myself.

Back in February of 2007, as old media seemed to be peddling faster and faster to stay afloat and its tone seemed to quickly become even more hysteric than usual, I asked if the media's Red Queen's Race had begun--and indeed it had. In Slate, Jack Shafer writes that Michael Crichton--who knows a thing or two about dinosaurs facing extinction--predicted its death rattle 15 years ago:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Read the whole thing.

Then, much like a visit to Westworld or Jurassic Park, let's hit the museum!

That was the headline on this May 1st post by Michael Crowley on the New Republic's blog:

More on the Dems and conservative media: Early in the campaign, team Hillary courted Matt Drudge and earned remarkably kind treatment from his Drudge Report website. That changed a long time ago. When Hillary's artifice of perfection was first shattered in that October 2007 debate exchange over immigrant drivers licenses, Drudge led the gleeful pile-on, and he's never looked back.

But more recently I've noticed that Drudge is not only hard on Clinton, he's actually quite good to Obama. He gave this week's Jeremiah Wright flap surprisingly little play, and today he leads with a superdelegate story that is precisely the narrative-changer the Obama camp is pushing hard. (And recall that even when Drudge posted that photo of Obama in African garb, he basically spun it as a shocking Clinton dirty trick.)

One politico I know who watches Drudge closely says that he doesn't play favorites or push agendas (though he clearly has a conservative streak) but simply does what's good for business. I would think playing up the Wright story and a dramatic crisis within the Obama campaign would move the most traffic. But maybe his internal stats show that what people really want is more on the collapse of the Clintons.

Regardless, given Drudge's real (if absurd) influence over TV producers and some print outlets*, it's a welcome development for the Obama campaign. And given Drudge's historic antipathy towards John McCain, it'll be even more interesting to see how he handles the general election.

Obama selling out Rev. Wright's Trinity United (I keep wanting to spell it "Trinity Untied"--an appropriate Freudian slip if there ever was one) would seem to me to be a flashing police gumball story. But I don't recall it ever popping up yesterday evening.

"It's IowaHawk's world; Hillary is just living in it":

From the earliest days of the campaign, the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination has been a hard fought, neck-and-neck struggle. But now, as the race enters its final stretch, it has become increasingly obvious that the eventual outcome is no longer in doubt. With a difficult general election looming, Democrats need to put our family squabbles aside and unite behind the eventual nominee. And so, in the interest of Party unity, and his own health, I am calling on Senator Obama to gracefully accept defeat.

First, let me congratulate Senator Obama and his staff for running a tough campaign. He has been a worthy sparring partner, and one I would have once been happy to consider for my vice presidential undercard, had he not been a constant pain in my ass for the last six months. But even Senator Obama must know at this point that, even if he somehow pulls off a miracle by sweeping the remaining primaries and locking up all the contested superdelegates, he simply cannot escape the inevitable mysterious accident that will clear the Democratic nomination for Yours Truly.

Frankly, there's just no way around the stark mathematics of the situation: Inconvenience(Me) = 1.0 * Accident(You). It is an inescapable statistical fact, as proven over and over again by my loyal team of Karma accountants -- including Sid Blumenthal, Howard Wolfson, and Harold Ickes. Contrary to what some people say, my boys did not learn untraceable poisoning techniques from the Russians. In fact, it was the other way around. And let's face it: even if Senator Obama receives prompt medical attention for his eventual post-nomination accident, voters in the general election will be repulsed by his grotesque and permanent Dioxin scarring. Once again, Hillary Time.

So today Senator Obama faces a clear choice: (a) stay in the campaign through the convention, wasting millions of dollars on primary advertising and expensive food tasters, or (b) withdraw immediately and graciously transfer his war chest to the only remaining Democratic candidate capable of appealing to hard-working white voters, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton. Same outcome either way, with the possible exception of body count.

Though he may be young and inexperienced, I am confident Senator Obama will choose wisely. But to sweeten the pot, I am also prepared to guarantee him a post as Secretary of HUD in my administration, plus a two-year moratorium on plane crashes involving his senior campaign staff and immediate family. Senator Obama is a young man, and if he serves me loyally he will be eligible to run again in 2016. Barring any unforeseen changes to Presidential term limits.

I know this may come as a temporary disappointment to the various misguided Democrats who have supported Senator Obama in the primaries. But trust me, you'll grow up and get over it. We need an electable Democrat on the slate in November, but unfortunately the research shows the wheels on the Obama campaign bus are about to come off.

Possibly due to mysteriously loosened lug nuts.

IowaHawk, May 12th.

Luigi and Dino Vercotti could not be reached for comment.

Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times writes that he's just witnessed "Obama's Sniper Tale":

Is this another Bosnian sniper incident, where a Democratic candidate for president describes a scene involving some personal courage, but later videotape shows that maybe perhaps it wasn't really quite all like that exactly?

Sen. Barack Obama, the leading Democratic candidate for his party's nomination, is very fond of telling receptive audiences the story about how last May he walked right into the automotive lion's den of Detroit and told those industrialists they were going to have to shape up, change the way they do things and start making more fuel-efficient vehicles to protect our environment.

"And I have to say," the straight-talking Obama tells his chuckling followers, "that when I delivered that speech, the room got really quiet. [Laughter] Nobody clapped."

Well, in honor of Obama's return campaign visit back to Michigan this week, someone -- perhaps Republicans, perhaps someone closer to home politically -- assembled videotape of Obama's oft-told tale and spliced it side by side with videotape of that actual Detroit speech.

You'll never guess what. The room wasn't quiet at all. Obama, in fact, got a loud round of applause. And at the end of his address the camera's view of him at the podium is partially blocked because the audience of local businesspeople and automotive executives was rising to give him a standing ovation.

There were no departure ceremonies after the speech because of sniper reports. Far too dangerous for that. It was all he could do then to duck his head and just run for the vehicles. See for yourself below.

While the comparison to Hillary's Tuzla dash into fantasy is one way to look at this, given the setting, it reminds me of the imagined fables of another figure associated with the Clintons: Robert Reich, and a story that Jonah Goldberg tells in Liberal Fascism, based on a Slate article from 1997.

In "Robert Reich, Quote Doctor", Jonathan Rauch reviewed Reich's memoirs of his Clinton years, called Locked in the Cabinet:

Locked in the Cabinet, Robert Reich's new memoir of his years as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, is an engaging policy memoir: insightful, often witty and, what's most unusual for wonk kiss and tells, easy to read, partly because it's told in long stretches of well-written dialogue that add up to scores of novelistic scenes of Washington at work. The book reads like good fiction. Unfortunately, some of it is.

Call me old-fashioned, but I've always believed that there is something special about quotation marks. Whatever is between them, in nonfiction, is supposed to reflect accurately words that some real person actually said. Now, "accurately" leaves room for quibbling, and a memoir will be understood by most readers to be offered on an "as remembered" basis. Reich says, in his prefatory note, that he jotted notes to himself, "usually late at night," and then consolidated them to make the book. People know that Reich is not a reporter, and will adjust their expectations accordingly. Fair enough. Maybe he has a good memory.

So, much like Obama's speech above, Rauch went to the tape to compare what Reich describes with what actually happened, and noticed a slight descrepancy between, as Jonah would describe it, the "Thomas Nast cartoon world" where Reich "is in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly", a world that Obama seems to live in as well based on his above reminiscences, versus that shared consensual hunch we call reality...as documented on videotape:

Or, perhaps most striking of all, consider a set piece in which Reich speaks to the National Association of Manufacturers. He describes himself as being ambushed by cigar-chomping capitalists who hiss at him so loudly that he has to yell to be heard. "They plan to carve me up into small pieces," he writes. "There isn't a lady in the room. All men, in dark suits. They've finished lunch. Some are smoking cigars. Others are quietly smirking, ready for the kill." His speech over, Reich is lambasted by a "John," and Reich's answer elicits an eruption of "Wrong!" "Bullshit!" and "Go back to Harvard!" As Reich speaks, the audience hisses so loudly "that I'm not sure anyone can hear me." The cigar smoke, he says, "is making my eyes water. I feel dizzy." He says, "We're in a boxing arena, John's the champ, and the crowd is loving every minute." Finally, the meeting over, he races "out the back exit before they can pummel me."

As it happens, the meeting was a breakfast, not a lunch. The NAM says the attendance list shows that a third or more of the people present were women (including the NAM representative with whom I spoke). If anyone actually was inclined to light up a cigar after breakfast, he would have been breaking the NAM's no-smoking rule, according to an association representative (who, like another witness I talked to, saw no cigars). Most important, a transcript of the meeting shows a respectful Q and A session, in which none of the comments attributed to "John"--nor any like them--were actually made.

One would hardly expect a roomful of corporate reps to hiss, boo, and shout "bullshit" at a sitting U.S. labor secretary. Sure enough, the transcript shows nothing nastier than sprinkled applause and laughter. I asked Richard Boyd, the professional court reporter who transcribed the session, whether his transcript might have omitted hisses, boos, and imprecations. "I never witnessed anything like that with Robert Reich or anybody else at a NAM meeting," he said. "I'm absolutely certain I would remember it." Reich portrays himself as the little guy standing up to a roomful of abusive capitalists--pure Hollywood. Again, don't take my word for it; click here.

I asked Reich what was going on in each of these cases. In reply, he pointed to his Note to the Reader: "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it." He said that his notes accurately reflected how he felt and what he perceived. In the three cases cited above, he felt varying degrees of hostility. "I am not representing the book to be anything other than it is, which is my account of my experiences, my perceptions, what I saw and heard around me," he said. "That's all I can say."

In effect, Reich is saying that he's not writing journalism or history. He's writing ... well, what? He elides the very distinction between history and myth, memoir and novel, reality and perception. The problem is that those are real people he misquotes, real history he rewrites.

Steve Wasserman, a former Random House editor who now edits the Los Angeles Times Book Review, points out an irony: Books are often viewed as better sources for history than newspapers, but newspapers, which are generally much more careful than the average publishing house about such niceties as checking quotes, are often the more reliable source. Reich's memoir, if that's the proper word for it, is now ensconced between hard covers and will be read for years to come as part of the historical record. That is a shame. Quote me.

That's one benefit of the Internet age: while an experience can be seared--seared!--into our brains, more and more, it's also being uploaded to YouTube, allowing us to verify, before trusting.

Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Robert Asahina and Pia Catton, editors of the New York Sun:

If you haven't seen any of Peter Robinson's terrific video interview series last week with Tom Wolfe, you can watch all five episodes here.

The New TeeVee blog embeds a video uploaded to YouTube taken during the midst of the horrific Chinese earthquake yesterday and notes:

The devastating earthquake in China today is just the latest crisis to showcase YouTube’s role as a primary source of firsthand accounts of breaking news. Last year, the video-sharing site gave us glimpses of the wildfires burning in southern California and of pro-democracy demonstrations in Myanmar. Now a video shot by a student shows us what it was like during China’s earthquake.

Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel adds:

From initial reports, the Chinese earthquake sounds pretty terrible. With magnitude of 7.9, it was 10 times as strong as the 1989 San Francisco quake and, according to U.S. Geological Survey stats (but not the LAT), more powerful than the 1906 quake that leveled San Francisco. And San Francisco, in either case, was much less populous than Sichuan province, which has 100 million people.

As bad as it was, however, the Sichuan quake would have been much worse had it occurred a few decades ago, when China was less open and prosperous and, thus, less resilient. As this MSNBC video points out a weaker 1976 quake killed a quarter million people. Back then, the Chinese government tried to suppress news of the quake, a stark contrast to today. Reading between the lins of this LAT report about local concerns, however, it seems Chinese government officials still don't quite know how to channel the charitable giving that inevitably follows such a disaster. But the Red Cross seems like a good start.

Back in 2001, in the aftermath of an Indian earthquake that killed 20,000, Jonah Goldberg also discussed the comparison between earthquakes in developed democracies and elsewhere:

Modern buildings have a tendency to fall down less than squalid tenements or shantytowns. Especially when you're rich enough to make them quake proof.

So again you ask, why is this relevant?

Well, if you listen to what the anti-globalization protesters are saying at the World Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or at my local coffeehouse, you'd get the impression that they have the best interests of poor people at heart. Of course, it turns out they don' t.

Globalization is generally something rich people are against and poor people are for, which is funny since rich people are supposed to be greedy and poor people are supposed to be content. This is true about both certain conservatives and liberals but for different reasons. Conservative anti-globalists and trade unionists fear what globalization will do to people inside our borders. That creates problems to be sure, but it's not nearly so evil as a certain breed of liberal nostalgia which wants to make the world safe for righteous tours of impoverished lands where noble savages still live in huts and starve with surprising regularity.

Okay so maybe most of them don't live in huts, but they do live in a crushing poverty that so many liberals think is preferable to being forced to eat at McDonalds or drink Starbucks coffee.

Modern buildings are also often a good place to be during hurricanes, much to the chagrin of some on the left.

Update: Via Instapundit on its brand new Pajamas-centric URL, Business Week explores firsthand earthquake blogging. That's something I'll be happy never to do again, and mine was nowhere near as severe as what Chengdu just went through.

Jeff Jarvis spots an interesting stat:

Pew said that in 2007, 53 million Americans “have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online.”

Only 50 million Americans now buy daily newspapers.

The writers are starting to outnumber the readers.

And the readers are reading something else. Pew says that in 2006, 57 million Americans read blogs, more than read newspapers.

More signposts on the road to 2014.

The New Criterion, and their blog, ArmaVirumque (now with added pronunciation key!) have a spiffy new look. Stop on by, today.

Along with Michelle Malkin's "Vents", Bob Parks' "Outside The Wire" videos were a definite inspiration last year as I began assembling the elements that would go into my "Silicon Graffiti" video series. And his latest video is a doozy--two guesses as to the subject of Bob's lead story:

(Via Eyeblast.TV)

Reuters reports that "A Saudi blogger detained without charge for more than four months after expressing pro-reform opinions has been released, a colleague said on Saturday":

Fouad Farhan was detained in early December after running an online campaign over 10 men arrested since February 2007 on suspicion of financing militant groups, but whose supporters say they are being punished for pro-democracy activity.

"I spoke to him and he's in good spirits. He said he was treated really well," said Ahmed al-Omran, who published the news on his website (https://www.saudijeans.org).

"It was surprising. After blocking his website, I thought his detention would go on longer. It's good news."

Saudi authorities blocked Farhan's website (https://www.alfarhan.org) earlier this month.

Of course, for Reuters, one man's extended jail sentence is merely another man's visit to the Breakfast Club.

If you enjoyed my "Atlas Mugged" article last year on the rise of both mass media in the 1920s, and its successor, new media in the late 1990s, and you enjoyed my recent video on the recently-opened "Newseum" in Washington DC, then don't miss John Podhoretz's exceptional article on "The News Mausoleum", which documents the rise and fall of 20th century mass media, and the opening of the granite tomb they've built for themselves in the first decade of the new millennium.

Heh:

Click here for our recent interview with "Day By Day" artist Chris Muir on PJM Political. Incidentally, if Robert Plant is coming back and can't bring Jimmy Page, could he bring Robbie Blunt with him? Those first few post-Zeppelin solo albums before the "Tall Cool One" and Unledded eras were pretty darn nifty.

Rock & Roll has a museum in Cleveland; and Jazz has a de facto museum in Manhattan's Lincoln Center. What does the traditional news industry opening a museum of its own in Washington DC say about its viability in the age of Blogs and the Web?

Complete with cameo appearances by Mick Jagger and Orson Welles, my latest Silicon Graffiti video is online, using old media's recently completed museum honoring--who else?--themselves as a launching point:

The video references the nifty EPIC 2014 multimedia presentation from 2004, which you can view in its entirety on its homepage, and more of my own videos can be found here.

(Bumped to top.)

"Halle-frickin'-lujah", writes Mark Hemingway, "Someone in the mainstream media finally mentions the William Ayers connection" during the Democrat debate Wednesday night:

Obama knows the unrepentant domestic terrorist much better than he's letting on, and Hillary calls him on it. Obama worked with him for years and was even serving on the board of directors of the Woods Fund with him at the time he made his infamous remark in the New York Times about not regretting setting the bombs.

Mr. Cool actually looks angry and flustered. How flustered? At one point, he refers to Ayers' actions "four years ago" when he meant to say forty. Then Obama points out that (Bill) Clinton pardoned two members of the Weather Underground. That little bit of info doesn't help either of them. It is a good night to be Republican.

Speaking of Radical Chic: The Next Generation, as Tom Wolfe has noted in innumerable interviews, when he showed up at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein's infamous 1970 Park Avenue fund raising cocktail party for the Black Panthers, he had his reporter's notebook out and was openly taking notes and jotting down the conversation in plain view for all to see. (Wolfe wrote for New York magazine back then, in that publication's long-bygone era.)

It was only when his article hit the streets that the Bernsteins hit the fan, as they apparently never realized the backlash that would result from their fund raiser amongst people who didn't share their punitive far left politics--which would soon have a name, thanks to Wolfe's article and subsequent book.

Which is very reminiscent to the way that a Huffington Post blogger observed firsthand and recorded the audio that would become known as Barack Obama's Bittergate, as Betsy Newmark writes--and rather than pasting in virtually her entire post, go over and read the whole thing.

Austin Bay goes video, with an extremely slickly produced multimedia piece on the consequences of withdrawing from Iraq.

Dean Barnett writes, "Several commentators have suggested that Obama's moment of sloppy candor repeats the thesis of What's the Matter With Kansas, and thus the book has a new lease on relevance":

In truth, as execrable as it was, Frank's book offered a much more tightly argued position than the one offered by the supposedly brilliant senator who has deigned to lead the American people.

Frank, a native Kansan, insisted that many poor Kansans vote against their economic interests because they're unreasonably preoccupied with social issues. The key additional ingredient to his argument was that conservative
politicians only use social issues to cynically manipulate churchgoing rubes, and really have no interest in achieving any results on matters like abortion. Frank particularly stretched to make the latter point, at one point even stating (without any evidence of course) that Sam Brownback was once pro-choice.

Although hardly identical, Obama's and Frank's sentiments do share critical commonalities. Both evidence an unbecoming condescension to the American people. And both share modern liberalism's assumption that Americans are a bunch of dullards. Perhaps no other trait has so thoroughly harmed the left at theballot box.

Anyone who has ever walked by Harvard Yard has heard the kind of condescending comments that Obama offered in San Francisco. Heck, anyone who has listened to a Michelle Obama speech has heard the same kind of contempt for the American people expressed in unequivocal terms.

If you want to find this kind of smug superiority on the left, you don't have to look very hard. If you're of a mind to do some field research, I recommend you tune into Bill Maher's show on HBO next Friday night. I predict you won't have to wait more than ten minutes before Maher and his panel of Hollywood philosophes agree on what a stupid and ignorant place America is.

Read the whole thing; elsewhere, Bill Bradley explores "The secret story of how Obama's gaffe made its way to the Huffington Post, of all places, and how it might affect campaign coverage from now on."

Update: Mickey Kaus makes a great point, via a comment submitted by one of his readers:

Alert emailer M wonders why Obama is applying a Tom Frank analysis--of working class voters who vote Republican--to Pennsylvania, since unlike Kansas, Pennsylvania is a blue state that "hasn't voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988." And the most economically distressed parts of the state are the most Democratic, despite all the clinging to guns and God that's going on. In short, Obama's explaining something that doesn't happen. ... I suppose one answer is that Obama wasn't explaining why Pennsylvanians wouldn't vote for a Democrat but why they might not vote for him--a black, liberal Democrat. But Obama says he's explaining why small-town Rustbelt voters don't buy the idea that government can help them, which sounds an awful lot like not buying Democratic ideology generally.

It's a false consciousness!

This is a riot:

"Three guys in a garage create YouTube, and we've got 800 people in Chicago who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground!"

Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and other Jurassic-era publications your grandmother still reads because the thought of turning on a computer makes her knees shake.

The NPR article on Zell also includes a subhead titled, "Journalists as 'Overhead'". Which illustrates that the author can't comprehend that unlike a government-subsidized operation, the owner can't force taxpayers to bail him out if readers aren't footing the bill:

"This is the first unit of Tribune that I've talked to that doesn't generate any revenue. So all of you are overhead," Zell said during the late February meeting with editors and reporters for the company's Washington bureau.

Most reporters and editors who cover the government don't consider themselves overhead — they describe themselves as fulfilling a key role newspapers play in a democratic society.

No, reporting the news is a key function in a democratic society. But the medium in which consumers receive that news is subject to change, as other dinosaur media conglomerates are discovering the hard way.

And as that YouTube allusion from Zell highlights, news isn't exclusively a top-down business anymore.

Related: "Will there always be print newspapers? The editor of The Washington Post said he thought so, though others might think he's in denial:

In November 2007, former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw predicted the print edition of The Washington Post would “probably” be dead in 10 years. But Downie disagreed.

“I can’t see that,” Downie said. “Obviously I’m of an age where I can’t see so far out into the future, but I can’t see that.

Arthur C. Clarke could...41 years ago:

Newspapers will, I think, receive their final body blow from these new communications techniques. I take a dim view of staggering home every Sunday with five pounds of wood pulp on my arm, when what I really want is information, not wastepaper. How I look forward to the day when I can press a button and get any type of news, editorials, book and theater reviews, etc., merely by dialing the right channel.

Electronic “mail” delivery is another exciting prospect of the very near future. Letters, typed or written on special forms like wartime V—mail, will be automatically read and flashed from continent to continent and reproduced at receiving stations within a few minutes of transmission.

Meanwhile, this rather less exploratory prediction from Downie is definitely a two-edged sword:

Mid-size market newspapers may be in trouble, according to Downie. The small community newspapers and the newspaper titans – like the Post and The New York Times – will in some part be immune to the evolution of media, as it makes it way in a digital age.

Yes, it seems quite reasonable to assume that the Times will be immune to the evolution of news--that was one of the predictions made in this classic multimedia presentation beamed back from 2014.

Silencing Canadian bloggers into submission, one lawsuit at a time.

Much more from Kathy Shaidle, who's one of the bloggers being sued:

Richard "The Boy Named Sue" Warman has finally filed his statement of claim.

Canada's busiest litigant, serial "human rights" complainant and -- the guy Mark Steyn has called "Canada’s most sensitive man" -- Richard Warman is now suing his most vocal critics -- including me.

The suit names:

• Ezra Levant (famous for his stirring YouTube video of his confrontation with the Canadian Human Rights tribunal after he published the “Mohammed Cartoons”)
• FreeDominion.ca (Canada’s answer to FreeRepublic.com)
• Kate McMillan of SmallDeadAnimals.com
• Jonathan Kay of the National Post daily newspaper and its in-house blog
• and me, Kathy Shaidle of FiveFeetOfFury.com

Richard Warman used to work for the notorious Human Rights Commission, which runs the "kangaroo courts" who’ve charged Mark Steyn with "flagrant Islamophobia."

Richard Warman has brought almost half these cases single-handledly, getting websites he doesn’t like shut down, and making tens of thousands of tax free dollars in "compensation" out of web site owners who can’t afford to fight back or don’t even realize they can.

The province of British Columbia had to pass a special law to stop Richard Warman from suing libraries because they carried books he didn't approve of.

Richard Warman also wants to ban international websites he doesn’t like from being seen by Canadians.

The folks named in his new law suit are the very bloggers who have been most outspoken in their criticism of Warman’s methods.

Read the whole thing--including ways to help.

You can come back baby, because rock & roll YouTube never forgets:

Well except when the powers that be at YouTube pull the video of course; related thoughts here.

I have no idea what the calendrical significance of the current date is, but wow, even Michelle Malkin's Website is going dark today...

Tim Blair spots this amusing exchange:

Porter Berry, Fox News: Ms. Huffington, how are you? I’m Porter Berry from “The O’Reilly Factor.” I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the Web site. Some of the stuff you have on the Web site, some hate speech. One person commented talking about Tony Snow. They said quote, “His cancer will return and he will die a very painful death ..."

Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post: You know what? I think you need to learn something about the Internet. The comments that appear there are taken down immediately.

Porter Berry: This was posted on the middle of February and was up yesterday.

Whoops.

In addition to killing print newspapers, you're killing their ink-stained wretches' favorite watering holes, too!

Of course, it's also likely that the political correctness of the modern newspaper person isn't doing much for saloon keepers: today's journalist on a bender is much more likely to blow through a cube of Diet Pepsi than a fifth of Chivas.

Advice for the tyro new media journalist from John Hawkins, who's been blogging since 2001.

(Hey, that's a year longer than I have! So you know he knows from whence he says...)

Update: Kate of Small Dead Animals adds an 11th item that can also result in a small dead Weblog.

Just when you thought nothing could be geekier than a World of Warcraft LAN party: political bloggers living together in DC.

(Bumped to top--Ed)

In between the audio work for the weekly XM show, here's a short video I shot on the joys of green screen and DIY video, and the groundwork that's being laid for the eventual successors to the stodgy old network news:

For some background, tips on getting started, and links to the individual clips embedded in the video, there's an accompanying Blogcritics article as well.

And if you missed our previous Silicon Graffiti video (focusing on Ezra Levant and the now infamous Alberta Human Rights Commission), just click here.

It was only a matter of time before one of America's most influential former presidents finally joined the Blogosphere.

(H/T: HH and 5'F)

Tim Blair has "A Simple Guide To Avoid Being Fired for Blogging". Just follow Tim's three simple steps, particularly if you work for a stodgy old organization whose name consists of three letters, let's say--just to pick one entirely at random--CNN.

Michael Kolowich, who ran Mitt Romney's online video operation, has some excellent tips for others who will be planning similar campaigns. This one is particularly spot-on, I think:

9. Don’t believe everything you read about clip length. The conventional wisdom is that video clips need to be under 2 minutes to have a prayer of getting watched. But looking over the viewing statistics, we see that many of the most popular clips were complete speeches or events that were as long as 20 minutes or even more. For example, the 21-minute “Faith in America” speech was the third-most-highly-viewed clip on Mitt TV in December and January, and nearly half of the viewers watched every minute of it.

Everything I've read from direct marketing copywriters is that you'll never get anyone who isn't interested to read a marketing piece whether it's one page or a hundred. So you might as well aim your material at those who have the best shot of buying the product, and writing long, detailed, and hopefully passionate copy to help close the sale.

Fortunately on the Web, the same material--whether it's video or text--can be reformulated and repackaged in all sorts of ways, offering both plenty of two minute clips, as well as lots of 20 minute clips.

(H/T: 5'F)

Via Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, who gave him a terrific introduction, here's Mark Steyn yesterday at CPAC:

Read More »

Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard writes (and my fellow Blogway Boy--not to mention Bob Dole--agrees) that Rush has got it bad, and that's not good.

(Of course, MDS is merely a pale substitute for the new and remarkably virulent strain of BDS sweeping the lands--Belichick Derangement Syndrome...)

Glenn Reynolds asks, "Do Blogs Matter In Presidential Politics?"

Last time around, I said they'd probably matter in the primaries -- when it's mostly about a comparatively small number of tuned-in voters -- but not so much in the general election. With the Rathergate affair, that was proved spectacularly wrong as the explosion of CBS's bogus story may well have swung that close election, not only because it shut down a particular anti-Bush story but because it made other, similar stories less likely, and less believable. So who knows? So far I'd say blogs haven't made much of a difference. But the election is nowhere near over.

Meanwhile, does the legacy media matter? Roger L. Simon catches David Broder of the Washington Post claiming, "Few of those voters will have had more than a quick glimpse of the candidates, who have had little time to devote to the entire country since the last single-state contests in South Carolina and Florida." Roger responds:

Como se dice? What country is Broder living in? We have television and the Internet now. Any citizen with the slightest interest in the candidates has been bombarded by them and their minions for months. Most of us are ready to say "Uncle." Yet Broder wants more. Perhaps he missed the 17 or so debates where the same questions were asked several dozen times. Some of us are reciting Hillary's health plan in our sleep... Sheesh.

Finally, the New York Times decries blogs for passing on misleading quotes.

Yes, the same New York Times which led to the phrase "Dowdification". Hey--all the news that's refitted for print.

As a follow-up to my earlier post, which quoted a Washington Post journalist liberally (but of course) when he forlornly pondered, "Does the news matter to anyone anymore?", Kevin D. Williamson writes:

To acquire Yahoo, Microsoft is offering nine times what News Corp paid for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. If you want an indicator of just how much the media business has changed in the past decade or so, that's a good one. And 500 million sets of eyeballs for a struggling No. 2? That's nearly three times the audience of the major network news programs combined.

For more on the merger, don't miss this Jeff Jarvis post, in which he perceptively notes that Yahoo is "the last old media company."

This Washington Post columnist pines for the Good Ole Days, as he mournfully writes, "Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore?"

Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have -- as one, industry-wide -- declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

And which, exactly, is the proper epitaph for the generation that entered newspapering at the very moment when the big-city dailies -- the fat morning papers, those that survived the shakeout of afternoon tabloids and other weak sisters -- seemed impervious, essential and ascendant? Were we the last craftsmen prepared for a horse-and-buggy world soon to prostrate itself before the god of internal combustion? Or were we assembly-line victims of the inert monopolists of early 1970s Detroit, who thought that Pacers and Gremlins and Chevy Vegas were response enough to Japanese and European automaking superiority?

Yes, to the last rhetorical question, of course.

The news matters to many people--but unlike the 1920s through the 1970s, the Washington Post and the New York Times alone aren't the news anymore. They're merely two aggregators of news, with a particular tone that appeals to establishment liberal sorts of readers. The angrier far left have the Daily Kos and other Netroots sites, and conservatives and libertarians, long badly served by the Post have Instapundit, Drudge, NRO, Townhall, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Pajamas, etc. (And sports junkies have sites devoted exclusively to their interests, and the elderly still have television news, of course.)

For the most part, like the Post, all of these sites are packaging up AP, Reuters and UPI feeds, but like the Post, each group repackages that info with a tone and a slant that appeals to their particular demographic. The period in time that one big city newspaper was the source of news will be proven by history to have been a fairly brief one, roughly from the 1920s to about the early 1980s, when the first cable television news networks, and the first online news sources (such as CompuServe and The Source) arrived.

These days, to compete against an endlessly growing Long Tail of information, newspapers must be much leaner to survive than their monopoly period, as Alan D. Mutter writes:

The deteriorating economics of the industry were underscored for the third day in a row this week when publisher Brian Tierney told union representatives of the two Philadelphia dailies that their company will face “a dire situation” by summer if it he cannot cut operating costs by 10%, according to a Newspaper Guild press release.

The Philadelphia meeting was reported the day after Chris Harte, the publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, issued a strikingly similar warning to his staff.

At each newspaper, the story was the same. Profits are being sapped to an unimaginable and alarming degree by rapidly declining advertising revenues and rising expenses for everything from newsprint to payroll.

Tightening cash flow is a particular problem for the Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Tribune Co. newspapers, because each company has been bought within the last two years with vast sums of borrowed money. As such, a great portion of the operating profit at each company is earmarked to pay interest and principal on the newly acquired debt.

Mutter writes, "Worst case, and no one is saying the worst case is upon us, some newspapers could go out of business. Then, where would we be?"

In terms of receiving global, political and sports news--and certainly opinion--no worse off, to be honest. And in terms of local news, hopefully leaner operations will rise up to replace the dinosaurs who never planned on the asteroid arriving.

Linking to a recent AP article, James Joyner ponders why bloggers are being considered a national security threat:

Let me get this straight:

The AP is publishing cyber-security planning scenarios, thus making it easy for the enemy to know what’s not being planned for.

The major papers are routinely publishing reports on highly classified documents.

Bureaucrats and Congressmen who are losing turf battles leak state secrets all the time.

And it’s bloggers that they’re worried about?

Well, I'd be worried about these tyros joining the Blogosphere, myself.

I first met Mary Katharine Ham when I covered a special Senate briefing for bloggers for the second day of Pajamas Media's existence, back in November of 2005. She seemed so fresh-faced and innocent back then. Who knew that just a couple of years later, she would be destined to become.... The Worst Person In The World.

Personally, I blame this tragic denouement on the all-corrosive effects of Las Vegas.

Roger L. Simon: the John Wayne of the Blogosphere?

National Journal's Hotline is releasing a series of well-produced vlogs to their own page on YouTube. Here's their wrap-up of the GOP frontrunners yesterday in Michigan:

(Their preview of yesterday, with hosts Amy Walter and John Mercurio recreating the cold of Motown and the sunny cocktail spirit of Las Vegas via green screen and props is also a fun video.)

Tim Blair, the man who put Australia on the Blogosphere's map, and whom I met at the infamous Pajamas pre-launch party back in November of 2005 writes:

Feeling poorly for some time. Saw a doctor a few weeks ago, who sent me to a specialist, who booked me into hospital for tests.

It’s cancer.

Major abdominal surgery next week. If all goes well, the remaining non-cancerous section of me will be home by early-mid February. No idea yet how long a full recovery might take beyond then. Medical advice is very positive, but that wouldn’t count for much in the absence of care and love from family and friends. I’ve been overwhelmed. I’m lucky.

Luckier than I ever knew.

Usual posting to continue shortly.

It better--Tim's gynormous carbon footprint is all that stands between us and the next Ice Age.

(And needless to say, our thoughts and prayers go out to Tim for a full a speedy recovery.)

About a minute into the latest B-Cast by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV (whom we interviewed a few weeks ago on PJM Political), they casually mention that their previous show attracted about 400,000 views.

In and of itself, that's an impressive number for a newscast. (Any show on MSNBC would be considered a hit if it pulled those numbers.) But consider the extreme economy of scale going on here:

As of 2005, CNN in primetime attracted less than 700,000 daily viewers, but with a budget of zillions of dollars and a ton of real estate, technicians and on-air talent. In contrast, the B-Cast is, I believe, run out of an office in Pittsburgh by two people with one set, a couple of cameras, laptops for the on-air talent (in other words, Liz and Scott) to cue those cameras and YouTube clips, and I guess another computer or two to record the sum of all those parts and upload the show to Andrew Breitbart’s news aggregation site. The hosting of the video itself is supplied by any one of numerous online video hosting sites, which helps to reduce what was once a significant expense: the high-bandwidth, and associated costs, of online video.

As I've written before, watch for more and more micro-TV stations to pop-up on the 'Net, using a variety of formats, from green screen and virtual sets to the Breitbart.TV model, to England's 18 Doughty Street Website, which is Internet TV on a fairly large scale. But still far more streamlined than traditional over-the-air and cable networks.

I wonder if the executives at CNN and other networks are aware of the growth of Internet TV, and if it bothers them? Blogs are much easier to start of course, which is why newspapers are acutely aware of the Blogosphere, and their fear is palpable in their their often hysterical reactions to the Internet over the last decade. But as traditional television ratings hit new lows, and more and online video content goes live on the Web, could we see a similar reaction from the TV networks?

We will when advertisers latch onto online video programming in big numbers. When something like the daily Breitbart.TV show opens and closes with ads from Toyota and Proctor & Gamble, we’ll know once and for all that after sixty years, traditional TV really is just another legacy medium.

Update (1/12/08): Liz Stephans of Breitbart.tv emails, "Scott was referencing the traffic to the site -- Breitbart.tv as a whole", not the individual B-Cast show itself. While we regret the error made above, the basic points remains valid, I think: all those video clips viewed by those clicking into Breitbart.tv means time spent away from CNN, FNC, and traditional television. And a show like the B-Cast is proof that a quality long-form news show can be made, with smart use of the right technology, at a cost infinitely lower than the traditional networks spend.

"Day By Day's" Chris Muir is holding a fundraiser to offset his bandwidth costs. To keep his cartoon going, and its women in various stages of undress, contribute here.

As Michelle Malkin writes:

The deterioration of journalism–from Janet Cooke to Stephen Glass to Scott Thomas Beauchamp to Staged News Galore to Rathergate to Reuters-gate to More Fake News Galore–isn’t the fault of individual MSM reporters, editors, or shoddy journalism schools.

Whose fault is it? The “dean of journalism” Helen Thomas blames bloggers. Damned bloggers!

Business and Media Institute quotes Thomas as saying:

“What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth. There’s a deterioration,” she continued. “Reporters laid down on the job in the run up to this [the Iraq] war.”

* * *

“I think they did a lousy job and we’re making for it now because the questions that should have been asked were not asked and because of 9/11 and the fear of being called unpatriotic, un-American and so forth. We let the country down,” Thomas added.

So if it's all those darn bloggers that caused, as Helen put it, big journalism's "deterioration" back in 2002 and 2003, let's run the numbers and see how are bloggers are impacting its downhill slide today.

Back in early 2004, I estimated the number of bloggers in the US at around 7,300,000 for a Tech Central Station article. That's an impressive number, but less than four years later, my, how quickly the neighborhood has grown! These days, Technorati tracks--say it with me now in your best Dr. Evil voice--over one hundred million blogs. And with Blogospheric growth that exponentially powerful, just imagine how much more intense the suckage of old media is today, as opposed to just five years ago.

Actually, no need to imagine it. Just read their product.

The Bard of Minneapolis travels west to Sin City for his Christmas vacation and dispatches a hilarious and well-illustrated Bleat. I wonder if he'll make it back out this September for the second Blog World Convention?

Simon Owens notices an interesting traffic pattern:

It has long been understood that the largest liberal blogs have generally produced more web traffic than the largest conservative blogs. But I have noticed a general trend over the past few months that I didn’t want to write about until the end of the year. After surveying the traffic stats of many major political blogs, I found that web traffic for several major liberal blogs either declined sharply or stayed the same while major conservative blogs saw a sharp increase in traffic.

Tim Blair suggests it may due to the presidential race: "the Republican nomination contest is relatively open, while at this stage the Democrat contest is a two-horse race. More viable candidates = more debate = more posts = more traffic."

Even as the Blogosphere counts its numbers, Canada's CTV, on the cutting edge of societal evolution, notices that there is indeed this hot new trend called blogging that's just poised to take off!

For a generation that has traded in pens and paper for wireless laptops and PDAs, blogging has become the new journaling, with millions spilling their guts in online forums that are available for anyone and everyone to read.

Geez, talk about news from 2002.

Kathy Shaidle of Relapsed Catholic, and more recently, her Five Feet of Fury blog, has an e-book out:

The year was 1987. My then-housemate, the vegan lesbian stripper/art student, was off to protest the new Witches of Eastwick film as defamatory.

Now, I marched against cruise missiles and CIA mischief every other weekend, but drew the line at picketing Cher.

More details here.

(Richard Miniter's recent post at his Pajamas Express blog dovetails nicely with the theme of the excerpt that Kathy has posted.)

The Website of the great City Journal magazine, published by the Manhattan Institute, has been redesigned with a slick new look. And to kick off the rapidly approaching new year, a lead essay from one of the magazine's more prominent fans--a former mayor of Manhattan who's currently running for president. (And no, it's not Nurse Bloomberg.)

Mickey Kaus has a must-read post that dovetails remarkably well with the Don Surber article I linked to earlier today. Don wrote that the Lewinsky scandal "turned journalism inside out"--and one of the eventual results has been the birth of two very divergent voter classes:

Room Eight's Jerry Skurnick has suggested that the electoarate is splitting into two diverging parts--people who follow politics and people who don't--with the people who follow politics much better informed than the were before (thanks to cable, web, etc.) and the people who don't follow politics less well informed (they used to get at least some information from Walter Cronkite). That certainly rings true to me. And it may, as Skurnick claims, explain some of the new volatility in polling--e.g., when the uninformed majority suddenly discovers, say, that Rudy Giuliani has been married three times.

But there's a second way to divide the electorate that asks how the voters inform themselves. Do they rely on the traditional Mainstream Media (MSM), or do they get their political information from the Web, from cable news, from the tabloids, etc. This division may have once seemed unimportant, but it doesn't anymore--its seriousness is suggested by the MSM's impressive resistance to stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don't meet MSM standards (putting aside whether you regard those standards as high or merely idiosyncratic). "Rielle Hunter"--the woman whom the National Enquirer alleges was John Edwards' mistress--was the top-searched name on the MSN site at one point Thursday, I'm told. Meanwhile, in the traditional mainstream press, 'Rielle Hunter" was mentioned only ... well, zero times.

Of the two ways to divide the electorate, the second is arguably more important. After all, even those who don't follow politics, will eventually inform themselves before the election.** But if the MSM/Web barrier remains as robust as it's been, those who inform themselves from the MSM will find out something different, when they finally tune in, than those who go to the Web and learn both the news and what might be called the "undernews." *** If you're thinking of voting as a Democrat in Iowa or New Hampshire, you might watch NBC and never know about this messy Rielle Hunter business. Or you might read DailyKos know the whole allegation plus the arguments against it plus seven theories about how it came to light. That knowledge might cause voters to vote against Edwards or to vote for him--but either way first they have to find out.

Likewise, TNR's Noam Scheiber suggests that the egghead sector ( "urban, college-educated liberals") of the Democratic party--which used to be less partisan and combative than the blue-collar/labor sector--is now more partisan and combative, because its eggy heads are wrapped up in Kos and other anti-Bush sites, where they absorb the latest undernews about the machinations of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Scheiber argues this is a good development for Obama, who surprisingly doesn't have to become more partisan then he actually is in order to win over non-egghead (labor) Dems.

As Mickey writes (and it's well worth reading the rest of his post), "The 2008 campaign will be a test of the relative strength of these various differently-informed electorates."

Don Surber writes that a key milestone is fast approaching: the 10th anniversary of the Monica Lewinsky story. As Don writes, how newspaper journalists choose to describe how the Lewinsky scandal was broken will say volumes about what they think about their readers:

Now here is the test for readers as they read in the next month rehashes of the Lewinsky scandal: Does the newspaper or columnist view the emergence of Drudge and the Internet as a good thing or bad?

The whiners will complain that no one controls the Internet and that a lot of the information is inaccurate.

Yes. And people soon learn which sites to trust. As bloggers point out, Jayson Blair worked for the New York Times, not Lucianne.com.

Another complaint is there is too much celebrity news now, as if no one paid attention to the trials involving Fatty Arbuckle, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lana Turner's daughter.

The 20th century had at least a dozen trials of the century.

Then there is the complaint that Drudge is a conservative.

But he seldom writes. He links. And the things he links to appear in liberal publications as well as conservative ones as well as middle-of-the-road sites.

He did not become popular by suppressing the news. That seems to be the job of the editors at Newsweek.

Of course, how the legacy media viewed their successors is public record. In their youth, leftwing journalists might have happily sung along with John Lennon in the late 1960s and said they wanted a revolution. But thirty years later, they certainly acted like the entrenched reactionaries they had become when it dared impinge upon their own profession.

The National Journal's "Beltway" blog, which has a blogroll full of conservative and far left sites, believes it's spotted a new trend: "The Return Of The Partisan Press?" (As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Was it ever really gone?" My answer's here, for what it's worth.) The Beltway's Danny Glover writes:

The Washington Independent went online a week ago yesterday (the official launch is next month), but don't let the citizen journalism outfit's name fool you. Politically speaking, it is no more "independent" than sister blogs funded by the Center for Independent Media.

The Washington branch, led by high-profile journalists like former washingtonpost.com editor and writer Jefferson Morley and former New York Times editor Allison Silver, joins a rebranded Independent News Network that includes the Colorado Confidential, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger and Minnesota Monitor. The Washington Independent gets funding from the Better World Fund, Arca Foundation, Open Society Institute, Park Foundation, Quixote Foundation, Rockefeller Family Foundation, Sunlight Foundation and Surdna Foundation.

All five publications in the network are independent only in the sense that they involve bloggers who work independently of mainstream media outlets. According to Wikipedia, the center's mission is to fund sites "that report news from a progressive perspective." In other words, the goal is to train an army of liberal bloggers who can infuse their opinions with actual reporting.

"We agree with CIM's vision of citizen-driven journalism serving as a critical principle of our democracy," Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation wrote at SunSpots. "We have a hunch that the new enterprise might just shake up the media establishment."

It's a novel idea whose concept hearkens back to the colonial days of the American press, when journalism was a partisan pursuit. [As opposed to today?--Ed] The question now is whether the right, always behind when it comes to political and media innovation on the Internet, will try to organize a similar operation or cede this new media battlefield to the left.

I'm not sure if I'm following his point, as the Washington Times has been publishing a conservative Washington paper since 1982. Town Hall, NRO and the Weekly Standard have also been on the Web since the mid-1990s. And since the rise of the Blogosphere after 9/11, loads of journalists have gone on the record to declare their biases, as well as those of their employers.

Liz Stephans of Breitbart TV emails with this link:

While in Pittsburgh on his Christmas Tour, Glenn Beck sat down with Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.tv to talk about having the #1 book on The New York Times Best-Sellers list, the importance of freedom of speech, and his goal of bringing a sense of humor to conservative talk radio.

Video here.

Not surprisingly, Jurassic journalist Helen Thomas isn't too happy about new media.

But then, she's not all that crazy about old media, either: back in 2005, she famously shouted, "I'll never talk to a reporter again!"

No blogs, no reporters. That kind of limits Helen's options, doesn't it?

I guess she can always make her own videos...

Iowahawk goes dumpster diving yet again, this time stumbling over the first draft of Franklin Foer's "epic blamestorm", buried within a dumpster "behind Marty Peretz's townhouse!"

By now, the identity of Scott Thomas is publicly known. He is Scott Thomas Beauchamp, age 24. He first came to our attention nearly a year ago by way of Elspeth Reeve, one of three reporter-researchers who work at TNR as essentially yearlong interns and whose responsibilities include fact-checking and making sure that the break room has plenty of Coffeemate non-dairy creamer. When she sent along a piece from her friend Scott in Iraq, we were intrigued. "Hmm," we thought, intriguigedly, "here is a young man in thick of great tragedy of our time, who will bring readers an introspective view on the day-to-day life of a typical soldier, whether it involves massacres of innocent villagers or a humdrum fragging of a psychopathic sergeant." When, before publication, Beauchamp asked for a pseudonym, we granted it. We felt that a soldier in a war zone could write most honestly about his feelings and experiences under a penumbra of anonymity. In return, we asked for a 25% share of book royalties, with a 10% option on future theatrical film and DVD gross.

His first piece, a Diarist titled "War Bonds" published in our February 5 issue, described the woes of an Iraqi boy named Ali Baba who found a magic lamp from which emerged a bikini-clad Genie, only to be killed when his magic carpet was downed by an insurgent RPG. This first piece didn't receive much attention, but the attention it did receive was positive. In any case don't remember any Hawks bitching about that one.

Several weeks passed before Beauchamp sent us another story--one recounting dialogue between French soldiers along a guard tower, taunting and catapulting cows at British SAS forces, which we rejected. During that time, he took leave in Germany with Reeve. The two had been casual friends at the University of Missouri and resumed a relationship online, which quickly turned into something serious. During Beauchamp's leave, he and Reeve left Germany...

...And the rest is Blogosphere history. Read the whole thing.

As I'm prepping this week's segment of PJM Political on XM, here are two of the more extreme examples of new media round-ups of last week's CNN/YouTube GOP debate. First up, Breitbart TV, which has lots of clips of the more...horticultural...aspects of the debate:

It's great stuff, and Liz and Scott have done their usual thorough job, as they round-up a number of CNN's plants--they're rapidly become the Nightly TV News of the Blogosphere (which, as much as we bash the MSM 'round here, is meant as a compliment, incidentally). But for sheer alternate Virtual Reality, don't miss Frank J's take.

At least, I think it's the alternate reality version...

Pieter Dorsman emails:

Today PoliGazette launched, a new moderate right-of-center news and blogsite developed by Michael van der Galien (Van Der Galien Gazette) Pieter Dorsman (Peaktalk) and Jason Steck (Militant Moderate).

Stop by and take a look, here.

If it seems like the New York Times is the paper your grandmother reads because she doesn't get the Internet, her VCR endlessly blinks 12:00, and if she's heard of videogames at all, she equates them with Pong, there's a reason why: the writers at the Times have a surprisingly similar mindset.

Jonathan Last explores how the New York Times covers videogames--in a word, badly:

This sort of thing drives me nuts because (a) the videogame industry isn't that hard to cover and (b) it's a big enough sector that it deserves semi-serious coverage of its business aspects. But here's Joystiq on a NYT story:

First the Old Gray Lady says Gran Turismo 5 is "a hyper-realistic, high-speed journey, [and] is one of the best sellers for [the] Sony console." One little problem, the game isn't out yet. Next up they say the PlayStation 3 is $299, which would be awesome and perhaps the Times has some incredibly privileged info about Sony's holiday strategy, but we're pretty sure the system is going to be starting at $399 for a while. Oh, but they're not done yet. Did you realize the PS3 and Xbox 360 are both powered by the Cell processor? This is being reported by the venerable New York-freakin'-Times, so it must be true, right?

Goodness knows there's nothing wrong with making a mistake in writing a story. And maybe these errors were inserted by copyeditors and not the reporter. But these errors are so elementary that they suggest that the writer knows very little about the business and is just kind of parachuting in because someone assigned the story to him.

How hard would it be to have one guy on your business staff whose job was to keep half and eye on videogames while he went about his other beats?

And as Steve Boriss and Jeff Jarvis note, if you think the Times' coverage of the video game industry is off the mark, just imagine how it covers the Blogosphere.

National Review Online's in-house warblog, The Tank cooks the books, as Tom Wolfe would say, or more charitably, has a fog of war moment. Ed Morrissey compares and contrasts NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez's quick response versus the stonewalling of TNR's Franklin Foer:

Every publication eventually makes a big enough error to warrant a retraction and an apology. Even here at CapQ, I've had to do it a few times, and believe me, it never feels good. One has to resist the urge to rationalize mistakes and spin enough to avoid admitting error. Just as with customer service, where I often described my management position as "professional apologizer", editors have to bite the bullet and admit error to maintain organizational credibility.

Kathryn Jean Lopez did so here. Notice that she did not blame the critics for pointing out the error or assume that the criticism was motivated by some sort of conspiracy. She didn't, in essence, blame the customer for a faulty product. She took quick action to investigate, found obvious shortcomings, and issued an apology and a detailed accounting of the problem.

Had Franklin Foer done that when the story fell apart at TNR, he could have not just saved the magazine from a credibility collapse, he could have enhanced its standing. Instead of acting professionally, he assumed the Nixonian posture that anyone questioning TNR's product must automatically be an enemy against whom all defenses were necessary. Instead, even in an apology, he couldn't help blaming the customers for a shoddy product.

Much more from Michelle Malkin. As Kathy Shaidle suggests, "The Right should always be open to self-criticism"; it's certainly good for its collective mental health.

Dean Barnett has some thoughts on tonight's GOP YouTube debate. If you haven't already heard it yet, make sure you follow the link and listen to the interview that Dean refers to:

Last night, [Hugh Hewitt] had YouTube's “director of news and politics,” Young Steve Grove, on his radio program. It's an interview that has to be heard to be believed. Young Steve showed an unusual mastery of the new left’s rhetorical tics; he mindlessly repeated his talking points, while evading such simple questions like where he went to school and how old he was.

In a way, it's sad that this most important of Republican debates will descend into demagogic idiocy. Expect the same kind of purportedly heart-tugging rubbish the left faced, e.g. hospital patients asking about health care reform and school teachers inquiring about No Child Left Behind with a brood of smiling tykes in the background. Of course, it will probably be worse than that. Let your mind run wild, picturing wounded vets and grieving widows.

The good news for the candidates is with all this stupidity running amuck and wildcards being dealt, there's a golden chance for some candidate to have a real “I paid for this microphone” moment. Tonight's format will likely reward the bold.

And hopefully tonight will serve as a teachable moment for Republicans regarding technological flash vs. political substance.

We'll be rebroadcasting the audio from Pajamas' recent video interview with Fred Thompson in tomorrow's PJM Political on XM. Near the end of the 16-minute long interview, Thompson thanks Roger Simon for giving him so much more time to discuss the issues (in this case, the GWOT) than the typical ten second soundbite on the evening news. That's the sort of way that technology can benefit the candidates, not video clips of sock puppets asking inane questions.

Besides, doesn't the MSM do that already?

Update: On the other hand, this guy's pretty good--run some of his questions, CNN!

You watched their show, seen their clips from the candidates--now hear how they do it, their thoughts on the YouTube phenomenon and the role DIY video will play in the 2008 presidential channel, as Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.TV sit down with me for a 15-minute audio interview recorded live at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas.