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.

Mary Katharine Ham--"Pronounced With an 'Umpty'"

Just had a terrific afternoon visit to XM satellite radio's headquarters in Washington DC, to visit the production facilities for their POTUS '08 channel. It was a pleasure to finally meet Joe Mathieu in person after exchanging weekly emails and phone calls regarding PJM Political, and to also meet his fellow on-air talent, Rebecca Roberts and Tim Farley. (Not to mention spending a few minutes on the air discussing Pajamas and its origins in between the big story of the day.) XM has quite a production facility--on the other hand, in a way, it's also a slightly more compact than you might imagine. Just as today's technology allows individual blogs to punch far above their weight, it also allows a single facility in DC to pump over a hundred channels of audio out into the hinterlands via satellite.

Matt Drudge doesn't make too many appearances in the legacy media, so don't miss this one, in which he quotes Tom Brokaw (or was it Egon Spengler?), who sees print versions of newspapers dead in ten years. Drudge sees the print editions of US newspapers burning out much sooner than their much more vibrant British counterparts.

Matt's response one of the Sky News infobabe's queries regarding the imaginary superiority of the MSM (even after RatherGate, CNN’s efforts to prop-up Saddam and Hillary, Reuters and Adnan Hajj, AP and Bilal Hussein and dozens of other credibility meltdowns) is a classic: "That's a 1990s discussion. We're now in a totally new era where information is information."

The latest PJM Political is online--click here to listen!

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of the Blogosphere, PJM Political, hosted by Bill Bradley, catches up with Colonel Austin Bay in Abu Dhabi, Richard Miniter and Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, and extensive coverage of last week’s BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, including interviews with:

Glenn Reynolds, from An Army of Davids to the limits of the Blogosphere.

Hugh Hewitt on changing lives, one Blog at a time, and A Mormon In The White House.

Ed Morrissey on a talk radio station that’s open to all, and interviewing Rudy Giuliani.

Stephen Green on Vodka, Vegas, Hillary, and Peggy Noonan.

Pajamas CEO Roger Simon looks ahead--next year’s BlogWorld, and to later this month, when he interviews Fred Thompson.

Rick Calvert, the CEO of BlogWorld Expo, on putting it all together.

James Lileks: Will Hillary revoke Wolf Blitzer’s license?

Bill Bradley: Has Elliot Spitzer revoked Hillary’s license?

Produced on location by moi.

Extended versions of several of this week's segments can be found here. Finally, if you missed any previous episodes of PJM Political, click here and scroll through for hours of audio archives.

Yes, I've used that headline before, but it seems appropriate to dust it off again, since Jules Crittenden is celebrating his 366 day in the Blogosphere today.

Billionaire entrepreneur and leftwing film producer Mark Cuban threatens to take on Bill O'Reilly at Blog World.

If you had any doubts regarding the difference between new and old media, merely compare and contrast: In egalitarian Las Vegas: the Blog World Expo convention, in which bloggers with traffic ranging from zero to millions of bytes served could--and did--attend, mingle, ask questions, and learn from each other. Or as Steve Green puts it, "The job here was to meet people, make connections, and make for better blogging."

Concurrently, in elitist Manhattan: "Stark, in-your-face snobbish social inegalitarianism", as Mickey Kaus puts it--which, if anything, sounds like an understatement, in which journalists and their audience maintained a forced distance from each other that was chasm-like in its symbolism.

As Pajamas HQ notes, "What Happens At Blog World Stays At Blog World."

Well, except for any audio I bring back for use on PJM Political, that is!

And you don't have to be Nostradamus (or Criswell for that matter) to know that Number 11 on this list of predictions is an absolute given.

Just click, as it starts making the rounds, as yet another meme rises to the surface from the ground up, rather than the top down. Which is one reason why it won't be incorporated into Hollywood's product anytime soon.

Update: "As Instapundit notes, it beats the hell out of comparing it to this photo."

Tony Snow recently told his audience at the Media Institute that "everyone needs to realize that the days of the old-fashioned newsroom are over. It’s a different world out there – wilder, more competitive, and much less predictable than even a decade ago":

Rather than cursing innovation, journalists need to embrace it. They need to get out of their cubicles and plunge into the task that drew most of us into the business in the first place –the challenge of engaging a chaotic world filled with willful fellow human beings; a world of joy and agony; of triumph and crushing failure; a world united by love and atomized by hatreds and aggression, [sic: comma in original--Ed]

The democratic media provide new tools for examining our world, new competitors for reporting about that world, and new reminders to the press establishment that markets really do work – and people want better than they’re getting.

I come not to bury journalism, but to celebrate and challenge it. It’s a cliché that every crisis presents an opportunity, but it’s true: The democratization of the media is a good thing. We now face competition from all quarters – including from people who have specialized expertise that journalists lack. We ought to welcome the new participants in the game and learn from them. They should do the same with us.

There’s an old boast in the business – that the job of a journalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The thing is, we never realized that we were becoming The Comfortable – with good pay, job security, and access to movers and shakers all around the world. We need to cast off our coziness — venture away from safe stories and presumptions and into the wilderness of new topics, new ideas and new sources of information.
In that quest lies the possibility of fulfillment and joy — and the hope of keeping alive the text and the spirit of the First Amendment.

Read the whole thing. Found, logically enough, via two sources which have done much to speed up the acceleration of the dino-media, Instapundit and Newsbusters.

Greg Beato writes, "type 'best practices for newspapers' into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be":

Are there any other newspapers that can boast a 60 percent increase in print circulation over the past three years? Yet as traditional newspapers continue to lose readers, only industry mavericks like the New York Times’ Jayson Blair and USA Today’s Jack Kelley have looked to The Onion for inspiration.

One reason The Onion isn’t taken more seriously is that it’s actually fun to read. In 1985, cultural critic Neil Postman published the influential Amusing Ourselves to Death, which warned of the fate that would befall us if public discourse were allowed to become substantially more entertaining than, say, a Neil Postman book. Today, newspapers are eager to entertain—in their Travel, Food, and Style sections, that is. But even as scope creep has made the average big-city newspaper less portable than a 10-year-old laptop, hard news invariably comes in a single flavor: Double Objectivity Sludge.

Too many high priests of journalism still see humor as the enemy of seriousness: If the news goes down too easily, it can’t be very good for you. But do The Onion and its more fact-based acolytes, “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” monitor current events any less rigorously than, say, the Columbia Journalism Review?

During the past few years, multiple surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Annenberg Public Policy Center have found that viewers of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” are among America’s most informed citizens. Now, it may be that Jon Stewart isn’t making anyone smarter; perhaps America’s most informed citizens simply prefer comedy over the stentorian drivel the network anchor-mannequins dispense. But at the very least, such surveys suggest that news sharpened with satire doesn’t cause the intellectual coronaries Postman predicted. Instead, it seems to correlate with engagement.

It’s easy to see why readers connect with The Onion, and it’s not just the jokes: Despite its “fake news” purview, it’s an extremely honest publication. Most dailies, especially those in monopoly or near-monopoly markets, operate as if they’re focused more on not offending readers (or advertisers) than on expressing a worldview of any kind.

The Onion takes the opposite approach. It delights in crapping on pieties and regularly publishes stories guaranteed to upset someone: “Millions Participate In Cuban Version Of ‘Survivor.’” “Heroic PETA Commandos Kill 49, Save Rabbit.” “Gay Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years.” There’s no predictable ideology running through those headlines, just a desire to express some rude, blunt truth about the world.

Actually, there may well be an ideology hidden in those headlines, and it may not be the one you think.

(Incidentally, the Onion's online videos are also often both very funny, and have absolutely first-class production values.)

Just keep scrolling. And don't miss the good Colonel's segment with Michael Ledeen on this week's PJM Political show.

I have a piece online at Videomaker today with some thoughts on how to choose which online video distribution sites are right for you, such as YouTube, Brightcove, Motionbox, etc. It's built around a fun interview I had this past summer with Scott Baker and Liz Stephans, veteran television journalists who left Pittsburgh's WTAE-TV to become partners with Andrew Breitbart to form his Breitbart.TV division.

Variety explores the prospect of "A dark latenight ahead" as "Writers strike reality sets in":

While the networks have been repeating the mantra that "screens will not go black," it won't take long for TV viewers to see the impact of a Writers Guild of America strike.

The canaries in TV's creative coal mine are latenight hosts such as David Letterman and Jay Leno, whose monologues and sketches are dependent on union writers. If history is any guide, both shows will almost instantly go dark, as would "Saturday Night Live." Comedy Central's latenight stalwarts "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" would also likely switch to repeats in the immediate aftermath of a strike.

"Boom -- our show just shuts down," said "SNL" vet Amy Poehler. "It's just done. There is no backlog of scripts." (For more on latenight and the strike, log on to Variety.com)

Primetime comedy and drama series will feel the pinch immediately, though the on-air effect will be delayed at least a few weeks for most shows as they air completed segs. Cruelest blows will hit the frosh crop of shows that are just starting to get a toehold with viewers, including ABC's "Private Practice," "Pushing Daisies" and "Samantha Who" and CBS' "The Big Bang Theory."

The repercussions of scribes going out will surely be felt at Hollywood's major talent agencies. It's widely expected that a prolonged strike would result in serious layoffs; some agencies have already sketched out strike contingency plans involving salary deferments and other cost-cutting moves.

Fight it out hammer and tongs fellas; take as long as you need. You'll only be speeding up the migration to here.

"[The Edwards campaign] didn't want us to put it out there. Now, because of you and other broadcast and print reporters, it's everywhere."

Funny how that's often the case...

Dean Barnett is The Plucky Smart Kid With the Fatal Disease--and he has quite a story to tell, in the latest volume from the New Pamphleteer.

Nikke Finke explores the ultimate form of celebrity image control, which is actually smart self-promotion to end-run the drive-by legacy media:

In a savvy bit of News Corp synergy, The Darjeeling Limited's star Owen Wilson tonight at midnight airs his first interview since his September suicide attempt on MySpace.com. This was the result of a marketing brainstorm by Darjeeling's studio Fox Searchlight, which approached fellow News Corp.-owned MySpace.com with the idea for the interview by Owen's friend and Darjeeling director Wes Anderson. It's a 5- to 10-minute pre-taped piece: Anderson and Wilson set the agenda themselves, and Anderson directed, edited and produced the whole thing. Hilariously, there's a really angry article about this on ABC News, which just happens to employ both Barbara and Diane. Headlined, "Tell All Or PR Ploy?", ABC News complains how fallen stars now have a far more appealing option than the ABC interview divas: "Cut the pesky journalist out of the mix and tell all, on their own terms, on the Internet. It's the ultimate form of image control." But ABC News defends the use of journalists for celebrity interviews, claiming the TV newsosaurs have integrity. What b.s.

I doubt Nicolas Sarkozy would argue with that.

Jeff Jarvis:

Roy Greenslade, a fixture of British journalism — former newspaper editor, now journalism professor and newspaper columnist and blogger — writes a powerful post today submitting his resignation to the National Union of Journalists there.

Read the whole thing--it's the 21st century equivalent of the head of United Buggywhip Workers telling his comrades that this newfangled horseless carriage device just might possibly pose a moderate threat to how their industry does business.

Update: So what's the future of news (besides the name of a terrific blog on that very topic)? That's a topic that Michael Malone, ABC's "Silicon Insider" discusses at length with me here.

Or not--as Ed Morrissey writes:

Matt Drudge has announced his acquisition of documents from the Army investigation into allegations of misconduct made by Private Scott Beauchamp, and they make The New Republic look like the Nixon administration for stonewalling. He provides PDFs of the documents as support as well. Beauchamp admitted to investigators that he made up most of the stories, including the most disturbing tale of troops harassing a disfigured woman, as well as running over dogs in armored personnel carriers. Why did Beauchamp tell these lies? He had literary aspirations and didn't mind libeling his comrades to achieve them.

Much more at Hot Air and Pajamas. And while Drudge has removed the PDF files that Ed mentions above, note that Charles Johnson has them available for downloading.

Stephen Spruiell interviews Neil Cavuto on the launch of the new Fox Business Channel:

Cavuto adds, however, that sometimes the controversy works in his favor. “I’ve heard it said that, particularly at Fox News Channel, a lot of people watch simply because they hate us. My response to that is, ‘Do they have a Nielson Box?’”

“So I don’t really care,” Cavuto says, “but I do think that any impartial observer would look at how we’re presenting business information on Fox Business Network and come away with [the impression that] this isn’t about elephants or donkeys. This isn’t about red or blue. This is about green, and helping people make more of it.”

Cavuto says that one reason that Fox News and now Fox Business have drawn so much scrutiny is that both networks are often willing to break from the media consensus. Of the biggest story in the business world right now, the trouble in the subprime mortgage market, he says most of the media’s hysterical coverage isn’t justified by the facts.

“I do think the media have way, way, way overstated the severity of this situation,” he says. “To hear most of the media tell it, you’d think that every mortgage was melting down. In fact, that’s a popular term, to call it ‘the mortgage meltdown.’ It’s an expression I’ve forbidden to use here at FBN, because if you’re going to say ‘meltdown,’ you’d better damn well tell me that every house in America is under lava.

In-farging-deed. More from Cavuto:

“The statistics are quite the opposite,” he says. “Ninety-six percent of all mortgages are still being paid on time. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a great deal of pain out there. There are a lot of folks in trouble, but not all folks. The same thing applies to the subprime mortgage situation. You’d think that everyone who has a subprime mortgage is a delinquent, yet close to 9 out of 10 of them are paying their mortgages back on time. And subprime mortgages, which is a bad name for them, gave young people opportunities to buy homes that, when I was a young guy, would never have been afforded to me in my life.

“So it’s not all bad,” he says, “but the media leave that little part out, because that little inconvenient truth doesn’t fit in with the one that they want to push, which is that we’re going to hell in a handbasket… but that’s the kind of stuff I want to elicit out of my guests. I want to get a timetable of where they see things going, how big a problem this is. I let it be known that I think this issue has been overstated, but guests can come on and argue it with me. Many have. But that’s how the network serves viewers. We want to debate these issues, to get beyond the consensus views and be a little contrarian.”

And as we've seen from the overwrought reaction to its predecessor news channel, even a little contrarianism is too much for many free thinkers to stomach.

To follow-up on my post yesterday about the divergent paths of old and new media, Reason magazine is producing their own videos, which feature high quality production values, and a pretty good anchorman to boot:

The appropriately named RightyBlogs is your one-stop shopping source for hot conservative bloggedy goodness. Stop by today!

Prominent Libertas film provocateur "Dirty Harry" is now also blogging at his own site. Go ahead, make his day!

Jeff Jarvis explores "The real media consolidation: Google":

Bottom line: Google controls nearly 40 percent of online advertising.

Now pair that news with the folding of TimesSelect. Consumers, as we used to be called, won’t support media and journalism with their money. Advertising will. We will become entirely dependent on advertising. And what happens when Google controls the majority of online ad revenue in this country? They’re headed there, for as a TechCrunch commenter points out, Google’s online ad revenue and share of revenue are growing faster than online advertising as a whole.

On the one hand, we should be grateful to Google for enabling the support of much new media. On the other hand, we should fear teh vice in which Google holds our privates. That’s where media power is consolidating — not in old conglomerates (some of which now depend for a good bit of revenue on who? — on Google.)

And yet, for a company involved in as many diverse projects as Google, Zombie notes that it's definition of "diversity" is awfully skewed in one direction:

Google is completely infected by the multicultural bug, and that means they’ll honor anything that isn’t part of the “traditional” culture or power structure: American, Christian, conservative, and so on. I’m neither Christian nor do I consider myself a conservative, but even I bristle at Google’s hubris.

Read the whole thing.

James Lileks channels his inner Hunsecker:

It’s a blogger’s life. You spend the night on the town in your accustomed style, beginning at the club where the maitre d’ waves you to the table from which you can behold the gaudy parade of humanity – and there you sit, entertaining well-wishers, tipsters, publicity agents, starlets, producers, guys on the make with two-buck gossip dressed up as a sawbuck expose. When one o’clock rolls around you collect your hat and walking stick and head over to the after-hours blogger’s club: brandy and Cubans until three. Your chauffeur motors you home as the city sleeps; you draw a bath, put a board over the edge of the tub for your laptop, and type your next post. It has that brisk insouciant patter that makes Winchell look like Henry James with a mouthful of syrup, but really, don’t they all. This is why they read you. This is why they fear you.

Wow, and I thought I was the only one leading precisely this lifestyle!

(And as James adds, "Alas, you wake..." For an actual look at a modern-day equivalent to Winchell and the nowhere near as Runyonesque life he leads, click here.)

Found via Kathy Shaidle, New York magazine does a drive-by profile of Matt Drudge, without the cooperation of Drudge himself:

Phillips and Drudge’s greatest collaboration was the speech he gave at the National Press Club in June of 1998. Doug Harbrecht, then–press-club president, invited Drudge over the objections of many members who wondered how he could invite Drudge “into the sanctum sanctorum of American journalism.”

It was a staggering speech. Drudge was both revolutionary Tom Paine and dreamy populist. “I used to walk these streets as an aimless teen, young adult. Walk by ABC News over on DeSales. Daydream. Stare up at the Washington Post newsroom over on 15th Street, look up longingly, knowing I’d never get in. Didn’t go to the right schools. Never enjoyed any school, as a matter of fact. Didn’t come from a well-known family—nor was I even remotely connected to a powerful publishing dynasty … I would never be granted any access, obtain any credentials … There wasn’t a likelihood for upward mobility in my swing-shift position at 7-11.”

The best line in that speech was Drudge’s statement that “It’s more fun to talk about Godzilla than watch it.” He was introducing the reporters to the new hierarchies of the information age, when events, from Putin to Godzilla, would collapse into so much spectacle for a surfer on the Net. Seriousness doesn’t interest Drudge; phenomena do. As he wrote in his book, “Politics is as Important as Hollywood. Is as Important as Science.” Drudge flattens all hard news into collage, and it is this, more than anything, that angers the old guard.

Indeed it does. Not the least of which is New York magazine itself.

Since Drudge doesn't need publicity from New York magazine, why would he bother being subjected to their snark? In a way, it's sort of reminiscent of the reluctance displayed by William Shawn of the staid New Yorker to be profiled by New York back in the mid-1960s, when the magazine was an insert in the scrappy New York Herald Tribune employing writers such as Tom Wolfe and the young Jimmy Breslin. Nowadays, New York is as much a Tiny Mummy as the New Yorker itself. Both are fighting a rear-guard battle attempting to keep pace in the rapidly changing world of Internet journalism that Drudge helped to usher in.

(Incidentally, tune into this week's edition of PJM Political, either on XM #130 when it's rebroadcast tonight at 11:00 EDT, or tomorrow, when the podcast version will be online, for a few minutes with Andrew Breitbart, Drudge's Sancho Panza.)

Jack D. Lail uses my "Atlas Mugged" article as a jumping off point to explore the future of blogs actually run by newpapers, including a great quote from this Gawker article:

Nearly all newspaper websites mistakenly segregate their blogs off with the other blogs. They're organizing by form, not by content. (The Times does a better job, both promoting blog posts on the front page and integrating each blog's content into existing sections.)

Readers just don't come to a newspaper's website looking for a messy passel of blogs. They come looking for sports, or fashion, no matter what "form" it's in. Old newspaper editors may think blogs are some crazy different variety of publication; readers don't.

Indeed. Here's how to do it right, which, needless to say, has everything to do with the blog's editor than the paper itself, though it would require some work to translate some of the blog's elements to one that was devoted to more serious topics, such as a blog covering the police or fire beat, which would seem a natural for the medium.

National Review Online is all Treked-up this weekend to boldly go where no conservative Website has gone before. K'plah!

Calvin Ross of the Napa Valley Register checks in on Andrew Keen:

Lately many elite journalists have been attacking blogs, especially politically liberal blogs, as "vitriolic," "rabid" and "crude." Keen went to great pains to offer the "real" journalism of the Wall St. Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post as examples of what blogging is not.

He said on the "Colbert Report" last month that "I think we need objective, professional journalists who responsibly collect the news rather than anonymous bloggers often in the pay of corporations and foreign governments.

Go figure: Keen is assuming that responsible readers won't be able to distinguish between bloggers who produce responsible work, and those who manufacture fake news...on a comedy show hosted by an actor who's producing fake news by sending up the typical network anchorman.

Update: Related thoughts on the faux news show where Colbert got his start.

Dean Barnett illustrates the story of the week with an incredible Photoshop. Given where it's running and the iconic movie it's parodying, it can't help but remind me of one of my own Photoshoppery efforts along similar lines from a couple of years ago.

Glenn Reynolds links to a post that contains a quote from 1978 which accurately predicted the death of the printed newspaper as the online world took off.

But long before the dreaded Days of Disco, Arthur C. Clarke made a similar prediction during the Johnson era.

As I wrote in "Atlas Mugged"--and thank you for all of the posts linking to it!--Clarke, Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler had all made predictions as early as the mid-1960s which predicted the demise of the newspaper as a physical medium. And like the quote from the 1970s linked to above, they all went unheeded by the newspaper industry, which is paying the price today.

With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.

For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series:

More blowback to the New Republic in their efforts to save Private Beauchamp--and their own reputation.

(Related item just a few posts below.)

Kathy Shaidle of Replaced Catholic now has a new URL. Adjust browsers accordingly.

The fall Internet television season kicks off with a bang:

Michelle interviews The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb about the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal. We also stop by The New Republic’s office in Washington to see if editor Franklin Foer will talk with us.

Update: Junkyard Blog asks a great follow-up question.

Related: "Army Checkmates The New Republic".

Every man his own TV station: as of the time of this post, you can currently see Breitbart.TV live here. It's sort of America's answer to England's 18 Doughty Street Internet TV channel, and will only get slicker as they continue to roll out past the beta test.

Steve Buress writes, "The coming age of the partisan press will begin with news for the frustrated":

America’s century-old experiment with a one-size-fits-all, supposedly non-partisan press is coming to an end now that Internet content has taught news consumers that it has not been so non-partisan after all. We will be returning to the days when news outlets reflected the personal or market-driven worldviews of publishers (e.g. Greeley, Bennett, Pulitzer), and they attracted specific audiences that shared these worldviews. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Thomas Jefferson never envisioned newspapers as objective truth-deliverers, but instead as diverse voices competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas. Debate, he thought, was the best way to determine truth and, more importantly, the will of a self-governing people.

Partisanship is now entering and dividing the press in the way that it always has in America — through the cries of the frustrated against the powerful. Colonial papers railed against the British. Thomas Jefferson founded his own paper to rail against Federalists like Alexander Hamilton. Talk radio and Fox News rail against a liberal media. And now on the Internet, the advantage is with the left as sites like DailyKos.com rail against a Republican President, united by a common enemy that is unavailable to the right (see Dean Barnett). Ultimately, emerging partisan outlets move in the direction of the mainstream to build their audiences. But if you want to watch the leading edge of our coming partisan press, follow the anger.

It's been building quite a long time.

To paraphrase one of the great early memes of the Blogosphere: we have computers, we can fact-check those asses:

The sheets of paper seemed to be everywhere the lawmakers went in the Green Zone, distributed to Iraqi officials, U.S. officials and uniformed military of no particular rank. So when Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) asked a soldier last weekend just what he was holding, the congressman was taken aback to find out.

In the soldier's hand was a thumbnail biography, distributed before each of the congressmen's meetings in Baghdad, which let meeting participants such as that soldier know where each of the lawmakers stands on the war. "Moran on Iraq policy," read one section, going on to cite some the congressman's most incendiary statements, such as, "This has been the worst foreign policy fiasco in American history."

The bio of Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Calif.) -- "TAU (rhymes with 'now')-sher," the bio helpfully relates -- was no less pointed, even if she once supported the war and has taken heat from liberal Bay Area constituents who remain wary of her position. "Our forces are caught in the middle of an escalating sectarian conflict in Iraq, with no end in sight," the bio quotes.

"This is beyond parsing. This is being slimed in the Green Zone," Tauscher said of her bio

As Cassandra writes:

If you're feeling "slimed" by your own words and deeds, Ms. TAU-sher (rhymes with "her"), perhaps that's because you've done or said something slimy.

That's what Tim Blair is joking in response to Washington Post Radio going off the air:

Washington Post Radio, which brought the newspaper’s journalists to the local airwaves, will go off the air next month after failing to attract enough listeners and losing money during its 17-month existence.

Post Radio, which is broadcast regionwide on 107.7 FM and 1500 AM, was not able to draw even 1 percent of listeners during its first year.

What, you've never heard of it either? Exactly.

At least the Wall Street Journal is smart enough to concentrate on Internet video: Once they purchased their cameras and built their green screen set, their ongoing costs drop like a stone; it's got to be a much cheaper strategy to give voice to their pundits.

That was fast--as a follow-up to my post late last night, the Technorati "About Us" page now reads:

Currently tracking 100 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Sometime in the last hour, the 100,000,000 blog arrived. Whatever its topic (and I wonder if Technorati can track which blog it is), congrats, and welcome to the Blogosphere!

Update: It's a digital quagmire, as the "grim milestone" watch begins!

The Technorati "About Us" page contains the following line:

Currently tracking 99.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

100 million is right around the corner. Remember three years ago (a millennia in Internet time, I know) when six or seven million blogs seemed like a lot?

(And yes, heeding Theodore Sturgeon's best-known aphorism is particularly key here.)

Ed Morrissey's newly redesigned Captain's Quarters site is setting sail--hop onboard and take a look!

Sippican Cottage says:

The New York Times et al., like to tell people that the internet is killing their business. Please. I can't be the only one that noticed that the front page is the editorial section now, and the editorial page has the quality and usefulness of unhinged rants. I'm not really in the market for either. And I'm too young to read the obituaries.

I certainly do get my information in glittering pixels every day. But as usual, they're either fooling themselves, or trying to fool you. I buried you, Mr. Newspaper, in a shallow grave, a decade before I saw that magnificent arial text on that tiny little 486 intel computer over a modem. And I'm not interested in whether they're fooling themselves, or trying to fool me, trying to blame the internet.

Meanwhile, Ace runs roughshod over the L.A. Times' latest anti-blog screed by Michael Skube. (Just add it to this pile and light the bonfire.) Ace adds that it "Seems an odd time for the MSM to lecture bloggers about the need for 'the patient fact-finding of reporters'":

No one -- no one -- ever got into the media to report on local car collisions or new and exciting federal farm subsidies.

What they got into the media to do was to tell people how and what to think, and its that prerogative of the Intellectual Aristocracy, and not the unglamorous business of information collection, collation, and dissemination, that they're crying about losing.

Note that they do not dare actually state their belief that they are specially qualified to do the thinking for the American public. They can't say such a thing. The public would laugh at their presumption -- some idiots went to a one year finishing school (and not a particularly academically demanding one besides) and now they have the special privilege of deciding what the public should think about each and every issue?

So instead they have to make the argument dishonestly -- whining about a job that isn't seriously threatened in order to preserve the job they really fret about losing, but a job which no one ever asked them -- let alone beatified them -- to do. How reporters got conflated with analysts and general-purpose experts without portfolio is anyone's guess. But that conflation having been made (at least in the minds of some, particularly their own), they'll be damned if they're going to give that gig up now.

Reporters seem to think they sell the news at 75 cents a copy -- and they tell us all how to interpret and analyze that news at no additional charge.

They think they're being generous by offering us their scary talents in this regard for free.

The above headline is a quote from Ace, but Jeff Goldstein, as usual, places it into added additional ironic context:

In his New Republic book review of Lucy Riall’s Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Alexander Stille writes:

Riall does not overemphasize the modernity of Garibaldi; she recognizes that he is not quite our contemporary. One of the interesting cultural differences that separates us from the culture of the Garibaldi cult is the almost willful use of wholly invented stories and details in the vast majority of Garibaldi biographies that circulated at the time. Even though there was plenty of dramatic and novelistic material from the real life of Garibaldi to draw on, writers seemed to go out of their way to fabricate stories and details. As Riall observes, conforming to the canons of contemporary romance and melodrama was much more important than any notion of journalistic accuracy and historical verisimilitude. “One of the most striking features of this script,” she writes, “was the apparently seamless blend of fact and fiction, of novelistic fantasy and political truth, and this blend…seems to have been at the heart of Garibaldi’s public success.”

[my emphasis]

Perhaps that separation of cultural conventions is no so complete as Mr Stille would pretend it to be. Or maybe it’s just that someone forgot to tell Franklin Foer.

For you lawyers out there, tell me: can one get a cease and desist order letter against a rather delightful example of situational irony…?

Speaking of which, Randall Hoven of the American Thinker (it was great to meet Thomas Lifson, his publisher, on Saturday at BFW, BTW, to discuss key TLAs) updates his list of media fabulists to include over 80 prominent members: "It's Not Just Scott Beauchamp (II)".

One of the elements of the Blogosphere that’s often a feature, not a bug--especially in retrospect--is that if you don’t write about something fast enough, somebody else will. And often he’ll come up with a better take than you would. So for a quick summary of Saturday’s event, I urge to stop on by Jeremayakovka’s blog for his thoughts on Blog*Fest*West, our gathering in San Francisco this past Saturday. And note the photo in which I appear to have Karl Rove’s mind-control rays, or maybe simply frickin’ lasers--really, is that too much for me to ask for, people?--burning through my eyeglasses. (Or maybe I’m just eyeing the Guinness.)

I will add though, that in addition to my co-conspirators, Cinnamon Stillwell and my wife Nina (who organizes parties the way that von Braun plans moon landings), the handful of major league hitters who bravely signed up for this test flight were a particularly nifty line-up.

There was Roger Simon, the co-founder of Pajamas Media, who attended along with two of his trusted lieutenants, Neil Spolin and Aaron Thies. Joanne Jacobs, who virtually invented education-themed blogging in early-2001. And Mickey Kaus, whose pioneering Kausfiles Blog/E-Zine is what inspired Glenn Reynolds to start blogging. Which in turn, chances are, inspired your blogging--or at least blog reading--addiction. Combined, you’ve got a pretty good running start towards assembling the folks who originally brought you the center-right side of the Blogosphere in the days immediately after 9/11, in one room.

Blogging, like most forms of writing, is a solitary task--which in a way, makes perfect sense. No matter how big your readership, it’s purely a one-on-one relationship with each individual reader, whether it’s via the printed page or the page click. But it’s great to get out and mingle with others in your field. I’ve been to a few previous blogger gatherings, including a Denver Blogger Bash in 2004, early conspiratorial neo-pajama-con planning in the mountains over looking Silicon Valley, the subsequent November 2005 wild & crazy pre-launch party in the bowels of the Seagram Building, and the actual launch of Pajamas the next day high atop Manhattan in the Rainbow Room.

But ever since I started blogging in early 2002, I’ve been on the lookout for something like what we eventually dubbed Blog*Fest*West out here. Fortunately, so have lots of other folks, and it’s a safe bet that Saturday is merely the first of an ongoing series of get-togethers. Needless to say, we’ll let you know when the next one is happening--and hope you can drop by for a handshake. And maybe some Guinness.

One of the my favorite relics from the mid-1990s, back when the promise of the Internet carried with it a gleaming aura that combined Buck Rogers with Marshall McLuhan, was Wired Style, Wired magazine's attempt at creating an AP Stylebook for a brave new switched-on world. Its definition for "Web" began thusly:

Call it the Web, the World Wide Web, or W3, this is the place where your money, phone calls, and email may soon live.

Along with every aspect of your news, whether print, audio, or video, according to The Future of News.

Just press play--the punchline is a scream:

Thoughts on the above clip, and the much more diversified--and fun--British media from Steve Boriss.

Well, Rupert Murdoch's mom, I guess, as The Future of News predicts the "Wall Street Journal vs. NY Times fight will go three rounds and end in a knockout."

Tomorrow's fisking today--Ellen Goodman* of the Boston Globe decries the lack of women in the Blogosphere. Everything I wrote two years ago when this same theme appeared in a Newsweek article applies today. Just click here to read it.

Found via fellow Neanderthal patriarchal oppressor Ed Morrissey, whose thoughts on Goodman's column are also well worth reading. As are those of Ann Althouse, that apparently rarest of breeds, the woman who blogs.

Read More »

The Future Of News writes that most of the usual suspects who complain about “fewer choices for information" due to consolidations in Big Media ignore the elephant that's been in the room for over 150 years:

In fact, the mother of all media consolidations — the formation of the Associated Press — is the reason that all of our mainstream outlets run just about the same stories. It began in 1848 as a clever and benign arrangement in which NY newspapers pooled their transportation and telegraph resources to get news from across the Atlantic faster and cheaper. But, it soon degenerated into a collusive, anti-competitive scheme. The AP papers shrewdly signed an agreement giving Western Union exclusive rights to their telegraph business in exchange for higher telegraph fees for all other news providers. Then, AP bylaws were redrafted to give members veto power over admission of would-be competitors in their local circulation areas. In desperation, the fledgling Chicago Sun took the AP all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1945 found it to be in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

But, bylaws or no bylaws, the damage was done, and we continue to suffer from the AP’s improprieties. Today’s papers are collaborators, not competitors. Through their membership in the AP, they share news with each other, and use precious column inches to reprint the same, single set of national stories — space that could be used to provide more choices of information. In fact, the reporting costs are so low when papers work through the not-for-profit AP that no one can make a profit by launching a paper with alternative information. Now you know why not a single, financially self-sustaining metropolitan daily newspaper has been founded in more than 60 years.

Hey, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps! You really wanna do something about media consolidation? Move your Board seat from the FCC to the FTC, forget about Big Oil, Big Pharmaceutical, and Big Tobacco, and break-up the corporate conspiracy that has sharply limited our choices of information and greatly harmed our democracy — “Big News.”

It'll never happen, but clearly, the Blogosphere and other market forces have at least diluted AP's influence somewhat. Meanwhile, The Future Of News believes that the future of news may be visible now amidst the fog and rain in Seattle.

(Via Galley Slaves.)

Congratulations to Glenn Reynolds, who's celebrating his sixth anniversary on Instapundit. And while he links back today to what he was writing about in August of 2001, his current site lacks one of the most important elements that made his unique prior to 9/11: the Blogger.com button. You can see it here, on this page archived by the Wayback Machine.

When my local neighborhood finally recieved broadband around 1999 or so, I began reading some of the same big boys I knew from my previous dial-up days: Drudge, National Review, Reason, and World Net Daily amongst them. There was also the Brothers Judd, in its pre-blog, book review-dominated early days, which seemed like massive self-publishing project.

Eventually I discovered e-zines, including, I believe Mickey Kaus, maybe Andrew Sullivan, and definitely Virginia Postrel, since Reason, which she was then doing a superb job of editing, frequently promoted her personal Dynamist site. But e-zines seemed like a fair amount of work to me to maintain, based on my HTML skills--or lack thereof--back then: they had to be designed, new pages had to be FTPed up at least daily, lest the site start to develop cobwebs, and the whole thing seemed like the technological equivalent of custom tailoring: a lot of hard work and individual craftsmanship.

I knew there were also blogs, but those seemed like an entirely an entirely different kind of flying altogether, as Ted Striker would say. (Who’s this Shirley he keeps referring to? What's her blog's URL?) Or as I wrote a couple of years ago:

Prior to discovering InstaPundit, rightly or wrongly, I thought of Weblogs as being online diaries for teenagers to describe their latest trip to the shopping mall. It was only because Glenn used Blogger's software at the time that it began to dawn on me that a Weblog could do much more than simply be a daily personal diary for the world to see. I think I had a reaction similar to a young Woody Allen seeing Mort Sahl for the first time, and realizing there was a different form of humor than just one-liners and shtick, or a young musician hearing Charlie Parker and thinking, "Wow--there really is more to jazz than swing...!"

And I imagine a lot of people had the same thought, as they began to discover the Blogosphere on or shortly after 9/11, and eventually realized how flexible the medium of blogging could be.

Of course, the dinosaur media had the inverse reaction, but that's not all that surprising. Despite being in the business of reporting news, they're often the last to notice any kind of technological change. Once they do notice, if its one that threatens their livelihood, and especially, if it threatens their status, they'll attack it no end.

Patrick Ruffini writes that conservatives established a very healthy foothold on the Web in the late 1990s, but technologically, some of those sites are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, if you'll pardon the mix of anatomical metaphors:

When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes.

The problem with this angle is that most of the conservative institutions online emerged in the late Clinton Administration or immediately after 9/11. At their peak, they were larger than Daily Kos, and arguably some still are. And they rarely receive any scrutiny because they don’t fit the frame. From a macro movement-building perspective, the left catching us to us is being covered as a need for us to catch up with something the left has invented anew.

And despite how unfair that narrative is, there’s something to it. The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years.

Read the rest for Patrick's examples.

On Bloggingheads.TV, David Frum of National Review and Eli Lake of the New York Sun discuss Robert Novak (hence the above headline), and the hell of the 1970s, amongst many and other sundry topics. Tune in to watch here.

With a headline like "Mary Katharine Ham On Better Living Through Bathroom Etiquette", that's your cue that this is must-see DIY video journalism:

In the Philadelphia Inquirer Claudia Rosett writes, "Free men and free markets have just combined to produce a buyout by Rupert Murdoch of the Wall Street Journal":

We're now seeing a lot of hand-wringing over what might happen to a newspaper that has been for decades an American icon. Will it change?

Sure. But the imperatives have less to do with Murdoch per se than with the ways of a fast-changing marketplace. What so often gets downplayed in discussions of the news trade is that even the fourth estate is a business, serving customers - and trying to discern what they want to buy. And both journalists and their readers inhabit a world in some ways quite different from what it was even 25 years ago.

This is a terrific anecdote about the slow old days:

This sale has stirred memories of the whopping changes I've witnessed since walking into the Journal's Chicago bureau in 1980 to serve a brief stint as a lowly intern.

In those days, we banged out stories on manual typewriters, and revised them with scissors and tape (not paste). If you had an urge to communicate with people in Mali or Mongolia, you pretty much had to hope that someday you'd become a correspondent important enough that the paper would buy you a ticket. By the time I arrived at the Journal's New York headquarters, in 1984, there were computers to write on, but if you wanted to look up old news stories, you went to the in-house library - once known in news jargon as the "morgue" - and paged through folders of yellowing clips.

In those days, whatever the scoops from Wall Street, global business news moved to a slower beat. There was no weekend edition, let alone online updates. I still prize the memory of a lunchtime conversation in 1986, when one of my colleagues leaned across the table to ask a Page One editor - it was a Friday - "So, what stories are you keeping cryogenically alive till Monday?"

Heh. On the day of his radio show's 19th anniversary yesterday, I thought Rush Limbaugh made a surprisingly good observation about the MSM's overblown reaction to the Journal's future:

The New York Times are having a cow. The rest of the Drive-Bys are having a cow. I'll give you some examples here as the program unfolds, some of the headlines, some of the stories. They're all worried what he's going to do to this venerable institution. Oh, no! How will he destroy it? And, of course, if these people were honest, if they really think he's going to destroy the Journal, they'd be happy, wouldn't they?

As Rush notes, "the New York Times set the agenda" for much of the rest of the legacy media:

in an interview in 2005, Rupert Murdoch was the asked about the New York Times, and he said, you know, the problem with the New York Times is not really the New York Times. It's the rest of the media. The rest of the media adopts the New York Times agenda. Whatever is on the front page of the New York Times is what television cable news networks decide is news -- at least the networks, CBS, NBC, CBS, the liberal networks. The New York Times always was called "the paper of record." Stories on the front page throughout the front section ,determine what the agenda is in the press. In fact, when I moved to Sacramento is the first time I learned this. When I moved to Sacramento in 1984 to begin the program there that eventually became this program, the news director out there -- consultant, actually, who had hired me, was also consulting the station. I remember my first day there, he went strolling through the newsroom one morning, and all he found was the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He blew up. He started shouting, "Where's the New York Times? You can't do news anymore without the New York Times!"

The newsroom had to have the New York Times because the New York Times set the agenda. So Murdoch was making this point. He said that means that there is a whole market out there for a different way to do news and treat news, and he started talk in this interview in 2005 about the Wall Street Journal having the infrastructure in place to do that.

Sounds like a great way to reset the Parliament of Clocks.

Baldilocks notes that Columbia Journalism Review's Paul McLeary, in his attempt to both defend the New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp and denigrate his attackers (which are now legion) apparently doesn't realize that the word "milblogger" is a portmanteau that combines of the words blogger and military:

Apparently McLeary's Ivy-honed intellect didn't help him to deduce that milbloggers=military bloggers. Nor did that "superior intellect" lead him to discover that all military officers have an undergraduate degree, at minimum, and that half of enlisted men/women have obtained the same.

He denigrates the military bloggers then has the nerve to quote Andrew Sullivan approvingly in the next sentence. :::shakes head:::

I hope that he came to my blog, saw that "101st Fighting Keyboarders" link on the top right and got fooled. What a clown.

Sounds reminiscent of the Boston Globe's Alex Beam being taken in by libertarian Bjorn Staerk 's 2002 April Fools' Day Stalin parody. Too bad that McLeary didn't stop for a moment to read Baldilock's bio page.

Update: Here's a somewhat related item regarding a veteran journalist who's definitely on the other side of the aisle from the CJR: "So That's Why Novak Hates Blogs!"

More: Dan Riehl compares CJR's coverage of Beauchamp with their thoughts on Scooter Libby:

It seems, according to CJR, what Beauchamp himself published on the web should be left alone and kept private. In the Libby case, third party letters are fair game, mock away, it would seem. Given the particulars, this goes beyond simple hypocrisy, or a double standard. It's just plain biased.

Huh--go figure.

Kesher Talk keeps score: "Thomas Lipscomb - 0, Milbloggers - 1"

Nonetheless, when Robert Fisk declares, “The bloggers are winning", it's a sure sign not to get cocky.

It's not quite Tarkenton meets Staubach, Dylan meets Lennon, Prince meets Morris Day, or an even better Minneapolis-themed metaphor that's eluding me, but James Lileks is interviewed by Pajamas' own Austin Bay on this week's Blog Week In Review podcast to discuss the current state of the New, New Journalism.

Tune in here--no iPod required; virtually any computer with broadband can stream an MP3 file.

Related: Maybe Brian Williams should take a listen!

Ed Morrissey interviewed the senator (fresh off his all-nighter earlier this week) today on the good Captain's Internet radio show. Click here for an archived podcast.

In an essay on the hypocrisy of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine", Victor Davis Hanson writes that "There is a sort of irony in the debate over talk radio":

Of all our media, it is perhaps the most populist. A radio host requires neither a journalism degree nor political connections. He just needs sheer talent. The unforgiving market - judged by how many turn the dial to your show or call in with questions - alone adjudicates success. Liberals who profess affinity for the little guy should welcome this prairie-fire revolt against the more highbrow New York Times, CBS News or NPR.

Absolutely. Just like they've welcomed an even more populist prairie-fire revolt against Big Journalism.

(Via Beyond The News.)

NOTE (3/3/08): If you're clicking in on March 3, 2008, you may be looking for this story, as the photo and story below concern an explosion from last July.

Bloomberg (the wire service, not the mayor) reports:

An explosion was reported near the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 41st Street near Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, the New York City Police Department said.

There was an underground explosion of unknown origin, possibly a manhole or transformer, said Sergeant Reginald Watkins. Officers are en route and he no additional information at this time. Watkins didn't have any information about a building collapse, deaths or injuries.

"Officials said it was not terrorism related", according to AP.

More as it comes in.

Update: Here's a CBS report:

Fire and emergency crews responded to the scene of a suspected steam explosion near Grand Central Station in Manhattan on Wednesday during the evening rush hour, officials said.

There were no initial reports of injuries, reports CBS station WCBS-TV in New York.

The New York Police Department said a steam pipe exploded, and it does not appear to be terrorism-related.

A large column of gray smoke poured from the vicinity of a building near Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building, and the air near the site was filled with ash.

The explosion occurred at 43st Street and Lexington Avenue.

Thousands of commuters evacuated the train terminal, some at a run, after workers yelled for people to get out of the building.

Witnesses reported that their buildings shook.

Photo above via the San Jose Mercury News.

Update: Pajamas has addtional links, and notes that CNN has a live internet video stream covering the event. Meanwhile, Breitbart.tv has a CNN Headline News clip titled, "Hundreds of People Running Down Third Avenue", which initially blames the explosion on a faulty transformer near the Chrysler Building. "It sounded like an earthquake"..."an enormous hole in the middle of the street"..."billowing smoke".

Update: K-Lo writes, "A Lexington Aveneu-er who was there six years ago comments: 'NYC people still remember — though you'd never know it on a normal day. but Lexington has been lined with people stopping and looking with those same faces from a few years back.'"

Last Update? Hot Air's Allahpundit channels his inner Mike Gravel and posts the perfect video metaphor of his thoughts on the story's lack of newsworthiness. From what I've read in his book, I think Drew Curtis of Fark.com probably has a similar take.

But what the heck. Since I'm in for at least a penny on this story, speaking of video, Wired's Danger Room has this impressive video clip:

And the explosion is also a reminder of something that Nicole Gelinas of City Journal noted late last month: Manhattan's physical infrastructure "desperately needs renewal".

More: Last update? Who am I kidding! Reader Peter Malloy writes in, "Ed, you seem to be the aggregator of the hour for the explosion in NYC. I thought I would pass along my eyewitness account":

I was in a conference room on the 31st floor of a building at 43rd and Lexington, with windows looking directly over the incident. At first we heard a very loud rumble. It was not an explosion per se, but a very loud protracted rumble. Our building shook and the lights flickered on and off. We went to the window to see what it was, and saw a cloud of what appeared to be smoke engulf the building nearest the incident. The smoke or whatever it was was at our height and rising. There was a palpable moment where no one said a thing but all knew for a certainty that it was the destruction of that building which could only be caused by one thing. The persistent rumbling was clearly the building falling to the ground and the mushrooming smoke and dust (vapor actually, but we did not know it then) was all too familiar. Then someone said "Lets get out of here" and we moved to the elevators and evacuated the building along with everyone else in it. It happened orderly and without panic - clearly some lessons had been learned. We exited onto Lexington Avenue, took one look south at the seeming inferno and quickly headed north. Being the cynical New Yorker that I am, I had become a little tired of the NYFD hero act. However, as what seemed like all of the east side moving uptown on foot, I could not help but be moved by the fire trucks with firefighters in it rushing south into the mess, not knowing, like the rest of us, what exactly had happened but suspecting the worst.

One person is dead and 20 injured, according to this report.

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl posts a photo of onlookers along with a key detail:

Everyone is taking video, or snapping photos with their cell phones.

I imagine they easily outnumber the journalists doing the same.

That won't make Brian Williams happy.

Update: Ron Coleman has some thoughts on Dan Riehl's post

Yes, we’re all on board — journalism is something you do, not something you "are," i.e., not a privileged caste.

Exactly. Though that's not something that a caste whose privileges are slowly ebbing wants to hear, which helps to explain all of these cranky responses to the people they now share their turf with, however reluctantly.

Glenn Reynolds writes, "The Purges Begin!"

Joe Lieberman might argue that they began some time ago.

But chances are you will: David Harsanyi of the Denver Post launches Nanny State, a blog accompanying his new book. Both keep track of "an invasive band of do-gooders who are subtly and steadily stripping us of our liberties, robbing us of the inalienable right to make our own decisions, and turning America into a nation of children."

Stop on by--before the Fairness Doctrine returns...

Like T-1000 in Terminator 2, the L.A. Times' hit piece on Fred Thompson begins to morph--but unlike James Cameron's seamless digital effects, this transformation is spotted by various bloggers. No wonder the Times thinks of the Blogosphere as "Informational Vermin".

As you'll discover if you click here and scroll through all of the posts contained within it, "The Newspeak Dictionary" has been the name of one of this site's organizational categories for a while now. And this post by "Gagdad Bob" will add many more items to its list.

(H/T: The latest edition of the "Carnival Of The Insanities", which is also well worth your time.)

Just to add more item to the Newspeak Dictionary, courtesy of the LA. Times, bloggers get yet another new name: "Informational Vermin". Add it to all of the existing epithets they've already been dubbed by their calm, enlightened betters in Old Media.

After getting some background on Breitbart.tv for an upcoming article, I realized that its proprietor (who’s also been Matt Drudge’s Sancho Panza for over a decade) would be a perfect guest for Pajamas’ Blog Week In Review. Fortunately, Austin Bay agreed, and the result is a great, fast-moving show. If you're curious about where online journalism is headed, and why it's been eating old media's lunch for the last decade, this is the podcast for you!

(No iPod--or even iPhone--needed; virtually any computer with a broadband connection can tune in and listen.)

...And wonders just how much fabulousness $1,250 can actually buy.

Related: EDWARDS LIED, PEOPLE DYED!!!!

One man versus 1,700.

Related: "Bin Laden's vision of globalization vs. the West's".

Update: "New Video From Al Qaeda Number Two".

In an interview in the Washington Times, Andrew Breitbart documents the rise of the Blogosphere and new media sites such as his own and the Drudge Report:

I think that, a lot of times, before the Internet, people ended their education when they graduated college. They stopped reading, that's when their assumptions would stop, and people would close their minds, and just go along with the rest of their lives.

Part of the Generation X thesis back in the '90s was political apathy. OK, well, that's a crazy notion now, to me, because the Internet has created an environment where you've got your DailyKos and your FreeRepublic and your Lucianne.com and your HuffingtonPost. Now, everyone seems to have an opinion, and a strong one, at that.

So we went from a period of raw apathy to hyperawareness of the political realm, without the mainstream media covering that radical transformation. And the reason why is because, in the past, the old media wasn't doing its job. It bored people to tears. It was conventional wisdom for the sake of conventional wisdom, and because they were in control, they were happy with it, it was a profitable business for them. Well, the Internet has created a wonderful environment of competition for the powers that be. And now they're going to have to figure out how to give the people what they want. And the people want new information, they want fresh information, they want accurate information, they want unbiased information.

I think that in 10 to 15 years of the Internet, one thing that's for certain and absolutely, the New York, left-of-center tilt of the media had not been completely -- it was always the talk of the right wing -- but that notion is now self-evident. The Internet exposed who the reporters are. Before, people didn't know who the bylines were, now we know who they are. We know their histories. When they write something on Tuesday, we know what they said last Wednesday.

There's such a high level of accountability out there, that the very people who were criticizing the online world because there's not accountability, because there's no gatekeepers, because there's no editors, were in fact wrong. Errors were allowed to live an exceptional life in the Old Media without debunking. In the New Media, a lie cannot get out of the door before it's waylaid.

Meanwhile, an member of Old Media, posted anonymously by Glenn Reynolds, though it's a name "you'd recognize" he says, provides a snapshot of his industry's mindset:

Yon's story [of Al Qaeda atrocities doesn’t get media attention] because it is humiliating.

It is humiliating because it is obvious that we media – and our allies in the state department, the legal trade, the NGOs, the Democratic Party, the UN, etc., - can’t do squat about such determined use of force.

Our words, images, arguments and skills can’t stop the killing. Only the rough soldiers and their guns can solve the problem, and we won’t admit that fact because the admission would weaken our influence and our claim to social status.

So we pretend Yon’s massacre – and the North Korean killing fields, the Arab treatment of women, the Arab hatred of Israel, etc. - doesn’t exist, and instead focus our emotions and attention on the somewhat-bad domestic things that we can ‘fix’ with our DC-based allies. Things such as Abu Ghraib, wiretapping, etc. When we ‘fix’ them, then we get status, applause, power, new jobs, ego, etc.

Please don’t be surprised. We media are an interest group not much different from the automakers, the unions, and the farmers.

Tough to argue with that.

James Lileks' appointment as Blogger In Chief at the Minneapolis Star Tribune is paying huge dividends, as he's actually giving readers a reason to read a newspaper's blog without gnashing their teeth. (Fancy that.) Something tells me that the Strib hasn't run anything this much fun--not to mention patriotic--since about 1965:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Obligatory exit question: in addition to his multimedia skills, is it safe to assume that Lileks knows his way around fireworks infinitely better than these huckleberries?

Dean Barnett writes, "Some nostalgists like Trent Lott even yearned for the good old days of the Fairness Doctrine. But, as we saw in the past, Trent Lott is nostalgic for some pretty weird things".

In contrast, Fred Thompson sounds infinitely more laissez faire in regards to media.

Cost:

DV tape cassette: $4.95
12 pack of Diet Coke: $3.95
Confusing the hell out of the WSJ? Priceless.

As I wrote a couple of hours ago:

Speaking of Big Media, oh to be a fly on the wall in this newspaper's editorial boardroom.

Today, the Journal writes, "Just who sponsors Hot Air’s ad, and other similar ads popping up across the Internet, is unclear".

Allah highlights their multimillion dollar production values; Mickey Kaus could not be reached for comment.

Update: "Maybe it will help the WSJ to be owned by Murdoch". Heh--but don't tell these guys that.

Just got off the phone with Andrew Breitbart, Liz Stephans and Scott Baker on the nuts and bolts of Breitbart.TV and video hosting in general for an upcoming article. They also alerted me to their 18 minute video interview with Drew Curtis of Fark.com on his new book, It’s Not News, It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News. And lord knows there's plenty of that.

Here's Jim Geraghty on May 18th:

Two words for anybody who thinks this immigration bill is a done deal, and there's no way enough opposition builds:

Harriet Miers.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Score One For Alt-Media: Immigration bill fails".

Mark Krikorian looks at all of the forces that Alt Media was up against:

Today's defeat of the Senate amnesty bill was more than a run-of-the-mill legislative victory, representing as it did a self-organizing public's defeat of combined force of Big Business, (some of) Big Labor, Big Media, Big Religion, Big Philanthropy, Big Academia, and Big Government.

Speaking of Big Media, oh to be a fly on the wall in this newspaper's editorial boardroom.

Update: Welcome Jim Geraghty's Kerry, Hillary Campaign Spot readers! Please look around; there's sure to be a few other things here you'll also enjoy.

Byron York has a great post on how the Web has helped to shine a light on the shady backroom machinations to get the amnesty immigration bill passed:

Here’s something new. The first true Internet-Age presidential campaign was in 2004. The first major Internet-Age Supreme Court nomination was Harriet Miers, in 2005. Now, in 2007, we’ve got what is arguably the first truly major down-and-dirty Roberts-rules-of-disorder parliamentary battle fought under the searchlight of the blogs.

The Internet was critical to the immigration bill’s first failure. If not for the blogs, the bill’s deceits and flaws would not have been so well or quickly exposed, and "comprehensive reform" would probably otherwise have passed within a couple of days. Now we’re at yet another new level. The public is being exposed to a basket of legislative tricks–of a sort that are rare in any case, and surely of a kind that have never been subjected to mass and rapid-fire public exposure. The undemocratic character of all that is happening here is being conveyed to the public in short order and with clarity–often through the medium of Senate aides themselves.

Do the Senators now called "Masters of the Universe" understand this? Presumably, senate aides, who certainly read the blogs, have communicated to their senators how dangerous it is to be exposed in this fashion. But maybe some senators still don’t get it. They seem to think they can get away with backroom maneuvers in an era when blogs are serving as virtual fly-on-the-wall cloakroom cameras.

Earlier today, in "Off the Table," I argued that passing this bill is not going to make the immigration issue go away. On the contrary, the blogs-eye-view we’re getting of all this sausage making is going to be frozen in the public memory for a very long time. It’s going to inspire new campaigns, and it’s going to haunt the Masters of the Universe–and the Amnesty 8, too. I still don’t think they quite realize this. In fact, the Masters’ false belief that quickly passing this bill is going to somehow get this issue off of their backs is the method behind this their deceptive madness. They don’t seem to realize that they’ve already been caught with their pants down.

"Masters of the Universe" tend to have a fairly short-lived stay on Mount Olympus. Certainly, nobody's used that title to describe bond traders in a long, long time.

Update: "I have only my intuition to go on. My intuition tells me that it is impossible to be cynical enough about what is transpiring here".

I think Bob Parks is safe if the left succeeds in reviving the "Fairness Doctrine"--cross-cutting Al Gore's words on Iraq from today and the 1990s certainly has all sides of the issue covered:

(Via Tim Blair.)

That's the opening announcement to each edition of Tammy Bruce's radio show. And it certainly sums up her hot new photographs as well.

Greetings from the command center itself--Pajamas HQ in El Segundo, where Burt Prelutsky is channeling Criswell:

Moreover, I predict that whoever hosts the Oscars will feel compelled to tell us that Jack Nicholson is the epitome of cool for no apparent reason other than that he wears sunglasses indoors, and for some unfathomable reason, is always smirking.

And, finally, gazing into my crystal ball, I predict that no matter how many troops we have left in Iraq, so long as a Democrat wins the presidential election in 2008 the mainstream media will not say a single word about a quagmire or ever mention an exit strategy.

Hey, that just wouldn't be hip.

Last year, Jonah Goldberg wrote, "Here's a short rule of thumb for how to tell who is a 'respectable' conservative in the eyes of liberals: any conservative out of power or not seen as supportive of those in power":

An even shorter rule of thumb would be: conservatives are respectable if they are useful to liberals. Pat Buchanan became respectable, even adorable, among a loose coalition of liberals leftists, from MSNBC's Chris Matthews to Ralph Nader, when he turned on the GOP establishment. Kevin Phillips, David Gergen and John Dean have been "real" Republicans — though rarely conservatives — for decades because they are willing to confirm the assumptions of liberals. An even more telling example would be the "neocons." Before the Iraq war, neocons were the nice conservatives, the good conservatives, the idealistic conservatives the un-racist conservatives, according to academics, The New York Times and others. This is not to say that they aren't nice, good, idealistic and un-racist. Rather, it's to point up the way in which conservatives become evil as they become influential, relevant, or otherwise inconvenient to liberals. John McCain was touted as a good choice for president by The New Republic and other liberal voices. Today, McCain is increasingly villified by many of these same voices because, it turns out, he's actually a Republican.

Similarly, William F. Buckley is suddenly the voice of humane and decent conservatism, according to liberals. A more humane and decent man, you'll never meet. But it's doubtlessly true that if WFB had the president's ear, the same voices cheering him would once again be calling him a fascist. And, needless to say, if Bush governed on Pat Buchanan's playbook, Chris Matthews would lose his crush on him awfully fast.

A year later, Ace of Spades notes that those same basic liberal media rules also apply when they report on their collective arch-nemesis--conservative blogs.

Last week while in New Jersey, I met Iraq War blogger extraordinaire (and one of the few not named Michael!) Bill Roggio at a secure, undisclosed location a local restaurant we both knew well near his home. He appeared yesterday on the Hugh Hewitt Show; click here and scroll to about ten minutes in to listen.

Glenn Reynolds has a fascinating take on how the rise of identity politics on the left has caused politicians such as John Edwards to appear increasingly phony--even to a fellow lefty like Paul Krugman:

In his latest column -- link here for Times $elect subscribers -- Paul Krugman complains about the cult of "authenticity" in politics, and how it makes people like John Edwards come across as phonies. FDR was a rich guy who cared about the poor, he says, so why can't John Edwards be?

Well, John Edwards is no FDR. But the answer to Krugman's complaint is found in the post 1960s political zeitgeist. Back before identity politics, and the notion that "the personal is political," the idea of a rich guy representing poor people was entirely plausible. He could be rich, but still have ideas about poverty, and care about them. But now that we have identity politics and the like, that's impossible: If only a woman can represent women, only a black person can represent blacks, etc. -- Barbara Boxer even suggested that Condi Rice couldn't understand mothers because she was childless -- then obviously only a poor person can represent poor people. And since there are no poor people in American political office, poor people perforce go unrepresented. Thus, the "progressive" causes of identity politics and personalization mean that the progressives' key clients can't get "authentic" representation. This is probably bad for the country, but it's certainly a bed that the progressives have made for themselves.

Of course, maybe Krugman's column on how Really Rich People can authentically Care About The Poor is just a stealth defense of the New York Times' advertisers:

Did anyone else read the NYT magazine this weekend? It was all about poverty and income inequality. Some articles were better than others, and I didn't read them all, but the hilarious part wasn't in the articles. It was in the ads. On page after page, the magazine hawked luxury condos starting in the 8 figures. Pictures of these glorious $10 million-plus pied-à-terres with 24-hour doormen, room service and Master of the Universe views of Manhattan were punctuated with ads for financial advisers and garish jewelry — and, oh yeah, essays on what to do about the poor. There was an almost Edwardian irony to the whole thing; a magazine for the New Aristocrats discussing the poor and how they live with a mixture of dispassionate, almost academic, bemusement and charity ball passion.

It's all making sense, now . . . .

And yet, something that Patrick Ruffini wrote during the time of the Oscar Awards still holds very much true, I think:

Liberals get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones -- just look at the sneering at "Faux News" and Rush and homeschooling and values voters. In Hollywood as in mainstream media, there is a price to be paid when an institution decides to leverage its prestige to push a political position where none is warranted; it's a price that is paid in viewership, influence, and profit -- in this case, a 30% falloff in viewers.

That was only two years ago, and it's safe to say that liberals still continue to "get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones". But given the near universality of identity politics and related "absolute moral authority" claims amongst the left, should they really be that surprised when a group of voters seek media (whether it's news or entertainment) that they feel best represents their own identity?

One of the themes of Virginia Postrel's terrific The Future And Its Enemies is that for many, top-down control of markets can seem awfully reassuring. There are still lots of people who preferred the simplicity of the days when AT&T was synonymous with telephone, because of how simple and universal it made things. But never mind that rates for a long-distance call were much, much more expensive before AT&T was broken up. Similarly, many people long for the days when men wore suits when flying, even though an airlines ticket cost a heckuva lot more before the industry was deregulated to the casual masses.

As Glenn Reynolds writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (and at least for a time, a frequent contributor to Pajamas Media, ironically enough) waxes nostalgic for the days of mass media:

Keen's thesis is that talent is rare and that worthwhile products - whether we're talking about news reporting, music composition or filmmaking - can be produced only if that talent is nurtured at great length and filtered to a great extent. Only a long and expensive process of refinement can dispose of the common dross and produce the pure gold of quality work.

This argument would be more impressive if the "quality work" from the big media organizations he describes were, well, golden. Keen references Bach and the Beatles as examples of quality music, but when he complains about the music industry's current travails he doesn't note that today's record industry isn't giving us Bach and the Beatles - it's giving us Britney. Likewise, he blames Internet piracy for declining movie attendance when the cause appears to be elsewhere: a recent Zogby poll found that people are going to the movies less often because they think the films stink and, in a more literal way, so do the theaters.

Likewise, Keen decries the decline of the news business, invoking Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, without mentioning that today's top newscasters include Dan "Forged Documents" Rather, Katie Couric and Geraldo Rivera. A lesser breed, by any standard. Keen even complains about declining radio listenership leading to financial problems for Clear Channel broadcasting - a chain many people regard as having ruined radio in America through its imposition of rigid formatting and too many commercials. What Keen sees as a tragedy, many will see as just desserts.

And that's the story of Keen's elites overall. The Golden Age of mass culture didn't end just because the Internet let people do their own thing. It ended because people looked at the low - and steadily declining - quality of mass-marketed television, radio, news, films, and music and concluded that they could do better. And they are often right, not necessarily because the amateur productions are so terrific (though sometimes they are), but because the big media productions are so often dreadful.

Like U.S. car companies in the 1970s, the television networks, movie and record studios, newspapers, and radio stations grew comfortable in their protected positions, and forgot how (or just didn't bother) to make good products. Now their market shares are declining, as people find substitutes. And while people in the 1970s had to look to Japan or Germany for substitute cars, they have only to look to the Internet for substitute sources of news and entertainment - sources that are often, Keen's assertions notwithstanding, just as good as their traditional versions. (Amateur embedded bloggers such as Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Bill Roggio or Bill Ardolino, for example, are producing some of the very best reporting from Iraq, supported by ads on their blogs and donations from their readers, not by big media organizations.)

Remember when films like Rollerball and Network hyped the dangers of a world controlled by a handful of big corporations? That's exactly the mid-20th century mass media model that Keen prefers.

Sturgeon's Law is an absolute in the sense that if, as Theodore Sturgeon quipped, "Ninety percent of everything is crud", then today's explosion of information and entertainment on the 'Net produces an exponentially greater amount of crud then the mid-20th century, when there were only three television networks, a handful of movie and TV studios and record labels, and only one or two newspapers per big city. So it is that much more difficult to mine the gold from the dross. But I'd rather have many more news and entertainment choices to pick from then less, (plus the option of creating in these genres myself) particularly when today's legacy medias, despite more competition than ever before, continue to underperform.

Bill Quick, who gave the Blogosphere its name, believes that its starboard side was crucial in sinking--for now at least--the near-universally reviled immigration bill:

And I have to say that the right blogosphere as a whole did an excellent job of revealing and mobilizing this sentiment. First, we exposed the crudely hacked polls that claimed amnesty was overwhelmingly favored by those they polled. Second, we publicized the polls that showed the true state of affairs - that Americans hated this travesty - and thus gave folks who thought they were alone in their opposition the comfort of knowing that, far from being a lonely minority, they were part of a whopping majority. Third, we turned up the heat on congress, and kept it on flambe until the bill was toast. Fourth, we exposed the bill itself to public scrutiny, so that voters understood what was being attempted supposedly in their name. Fifth, we acted as instant response teams to the lies being told about the bill by the hacks, flacks, and whores desperate to pass it on behalf of the special interests they fronted for.

Ten years ago, this bill would have been passed and signed by the president before most Americans were even aware that it existed. Those days are over.

The right blogosphere has put many notches in its belt - Dan Rather, Trent Lott, Ports Dubai, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales (for SCOTUS), the destruction of the GOP congressional majorities, and now the Bush/Kennedy/McCain amnesty plan. This one was the biggest yet.

Pat yourselves on the back, folks. And welcome to the big leagues.

On the other hand, Politico writes that it's not over yet.

Michelle Malkin dons her Planet of the Apes mask to go Beneath The Planet Of The Wall Street Journal.

In other movie-themed news from the Blogosphere, Don Surber wonders if Keith Olbermann is Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. But who would be Andie MacDowell in that scenario?

Or gets a bucket in his Buzz, or something like that. In any case, the Strib definitely hired the right man to oversee its nascent blog.

Plenty of boobs of all types exposed at Jules Crittenden's Forward Cleavage, err, Forward Movement.

The Mark Steyn-Seth Rogan connection, revealed!

It sounds like the Minneapolis Star-Tribune came to its senses (which doesn't happen all that often, or they wouldn't be in the straits they're in), and won't be subjecting one of its very,very few nationally-known writers to covering sewer commission and planning board meetings after all.

(Speaking of an entirely different kind of bucket, my flight got into Philadelphia safely, needless to say. But with the usual delays that make you pray that your flight finally takes off rather than simply worrying about it crashing.)

Don't be entirely surprised if Michelle Malkin is wearing Pajamas in her next "Vent" video at Hot Air...

Jules Crittenden joins the Dark Side of the Force.

In their regular Bloggingheads-style video debate, Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart have quite an interesting conversation on what makes Robert Novak tick.

And speaking of Bloggingheads, Glenn Reynolds and Conn Carroll debate the new, new and old, old journalism in general.

A few months ago, we celebrated our fifth anniversary in the Blogosphere; this week Power Line celebrates theirs as well, as Hugh Hewitt writes:

Powerline's trio are thus the most significant citizen journalists of the first age of internet journalism, and wold be even had they not toppled Dan Rather. Like it or not --and those on the left won't-- their coming into being and their writings and associated endeavors will be studied far into the future. They didn't just occasionally make the weather in American journalism over the past five years, they changed the weather patterns. They set a standard, delivered a product, and obliged MSM to change how it dealt with citizen journalists and their work. They were aided in this by tens of thousands of other bloggers, of course, but to a degree not yet even remotely appreciated Powerline's authors had an enormous and lasting effect on American journalism.

If that sounds like hyperbole, remember that Mary Mapes, CBS's erstwhile producer who, along with Ra^therGate's namesake, foisted the scandal on the public, later admitted that she hadn't even heard of Power Line--nor any other Weblog on the starboard side of the 'Net. And prior to both parties' presidential conventions in 2004, when the TV networks had to fill hours of time somehow and interviewed bloggers, and then Ra^therGate itself, the general public as a whole had never really heard of blogs. For the previous three years, I felt compelled to explain in query letters to editors and publishers just what the heck a blog was. After 2004, there was no need to.

I think a big part of the credit for Ra^therGate should also go to Charles Johnson for his famous "throbbing memo" gif--once it hit the 'Net, the countdown officially began on both Dan's reputation, and his career at CBS--and of course, Buckhead of the Free Republic forum for initially noticing that there something seemed amiss in the documents that CBS uploaded to attempt to support their story. But beginning with "The Sixty First-Minute", there's no doubt that Power Line did much to advance the story--and in doing so very much helped to put the Blogosphere as a whole on the map.

Not that there are a whole lot of other blogging parodies out there of course. But this is exactly what my day looks like--including the moment when the scale model of stonehenge.blogspot.com descends on wires.

Run at 78 RPMs, and it would be exactly what the Professor's day looks like.

(Via Katie Favazza and Outside The Beltway.)

Blog Week In Review is celebrating its first anniversary with three quarters of its original line-up: Austin Bay, Glenn Reynolds, and Tammy Bruce. (Sadly, Eric Umansky had a scheduling conflict, but promises to return sometime this summer.)

From my point of view in the producer's chair, I think the sound quality on this one is the best yet; I've been very fortunate to have the time to experiment and fine-tune things. So please have a listen, here.

In the L.A. Times, Richard Schickel discovers the Blogosphere. I used to really enjoy Schickel when he wrote movie reviews for Time magazine 30 years ago (including the article behind one of my favorite Time covers for obvious reasons; note the poster in my den). But with a reaction that's much like my Bing Crosby-worshiping father hearing Led Zeppelin for the first time, Schickel does not like the successors to his genre.

At all.

But then, no one in a legacy industry likes to come face to face with his successors.

Update: Not surprisingly, "Dirty Harry" of the heavily trafficked group film criticism blog Libertas takes umbrage with the screedy Schickel. I'm kind of surprised that apparently, no one at Blogcritics has yet posted anything about Schickel's rant, as Eric Olsen's pioneering site did much to create a salon for Blogospheric criticism from perspectives much more diverse than the monolithic LA Times.

To be fair to Schickel, the ability to instantly self-publish does not immediately make someone H.L. Mencken, of course. There’s lots of dross in the Blogosphere—but then, there’s lot of dross everywhere; Sturgeon’s Law is inviolable. But it most assuredly includes newspapers and magazines, as well. Readers have long since known that the “halo effect” that was provided by being chosen to be in print by gatekeepers such as editors and publishers has faded badly over the last several decades. That's one of the reasons why newspapers are being abandoned in droves (as the circulation figures at Time and the LA Times help to illustrate) as readers seek alternatives.

"I'm against torture. I'm also against moralistic, dishonest, self-righteous preening about torture".

--Glenn Reynolds on Andrew Sullivan.

(And for a hip reference to one of the Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones' more off-the-wall tracks in reference to illegal immigration, click here.)

James Lileks' first local beat story for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is now online.

There are a lot of moving parts under the surface of the brief clip above. Bob Krumm writes:

I don’t know what’s the best part of this video response to Michael Moore’s publicity stunt: the cigar, the appropriate disdain, the lecture, the humor, or the quickness of the response, but what I do know is that Fred Thompson is the first politician anywhere to understand how the speed of the internet can change politics.

This is something that should alarm Fred’s opponents–both Republican and Democrat. In certain military circles there’s this concept known as the “OODA Loop.” OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The late Colonel John Boyd, a Korean War pilot, came up with the concept to try to explain why American pilots were so much better than their opponents in dogfights. He determined that through a combination of training, aerodynamics, and cockpit design, American pilots and their aircraft could more quickly observe a stimulus and respond. It allowed them to react and act again and again so quickly, that at some point, the American fliers were an entire decision cycle ahead of their opponents. It’s called “getting inside your opponent’s OODA loop.”

Somewhere I recall reading that one of the (many) things that sunk George Allen's reelection campaign after his "Macaca" gaffe was the in-fighting amongst his staff for the proper response of a potential presidential candidate (ahh, hubris) such as Allen to being hammered endlessly by the Washington Post. Similarly, I can't imagine Hillary knocking off a quickie YouTube clip such as Fred's without having to go through at least a dozen different handlers, advisors, and speech writers.

And note the timing of it:

By the way, Thompson’s response to Moore will have a much greater impact on the presidential campaign than anything said at this little shindig tonight. It’ll be seen by many more people too.

Plus a soundbite such as the above clip is infinitely more digestible than having to wade through 90 minutes or so of debate, particularly this early in the race.

As Mickey Kaus adds:

More important, I think: quite apart from its advantages as a campaign tool, the video is itself evidence of Thompson's actual presidential qualifications. You can't make a quickie spot like this unless a) you know what you think (or have a really fast pollster) b) you can react to new situations quickly, and c) you have some sense of theater. Those are all extremely important things for a president to have.

George Bush was reelected in part due to New Media, which discovered CBS's Ra^therGate scam and acted as a force multiplier to the Swift Boat Vets' ad budget. But I'm not sure how much the Bush team fully understood the dynamics of the Blogosphere. (Remember, prior to both parties' 2004 conventions and Ra^therGate itself, blogs were far from a household world--and note that a certain former CBS producer later said that she hadn't heard of any of the big players on the right until after the fact. Thanks again, Dan!)

It's too soon to fully gauge the impact, but we may just be witnessing the first Republican presidential candidate who actually knows what he's doing in the world of New Media.

Update: Welcome Bob Krumm readers; Krumm notes that Moore brought a knife to a gunfight: "While Michael Moore wrote a letter, it was Thompson who bested the 'film maker' on film"--even better: digital video, on the brand new Breitbart.TV.

More: "This stuff matters. And Thompson's damn good at it."

"If she does the tongue thing, I will scream like a little girl".

It isn't even Saturday on the West Coast yet, but thanks to the difference in time zones, the Anchoress already has tomorrow's links today!

Mark Tapscott has some kind words about my piece in Tech Central Station yesterday on 18 Doughty Street:

As if it's not bad enough that executives and shareholders at ABC, CBS and NBC have to deal with continuing decline in their audience numbers, Tech Central Station goes and publishes a glowing piece on the old broadcast model's executioner.

Tapscott writes:

It's much the same set of factors that are driving traditional newspapers to move from dead-tree-only products to internet-based news and related content products and services. The internet-based news entity can dispense with the printing press, the circulation department, the costly staffs that man both, as well as lots of other traditional positions throughout the organization.

Similarly, the internet-based entertainment and news network has no need of broadcast towers and associated equipment, nor the expensive lobbying staff in Washington to keep the FCC from getting troublesome.

In short, the economic model is fundamentally changed and the price of entry is dramatically lowered. And when the price of providing a service or product drops, the number of providers of that service or product increases, as does the spectrum of consumer choice. Competition is the consumer's best friend. Government-sanctioned monopolies granted to myopic big businesses are the consumers' biggest enemy.

Competition also makes it more difficult for peddlers of ideological bias to disguise it as legitimate news. In short, 18 Doughty Street and the technologies that make it possible is among the best developments in years for advocates of informed public policy discussion.

I disagree with only one element of that--whereas Mark writes, "Competition also makes it more difficult for peddlers of ideological bias to disguise it as legitimate news", I'd argue that increased competition allows consumers to get their news with a worldview that matches their own. That doesn't mean the end of liberal bias, as, I believe, Mark is inferring. In fact, as the favorite "COD-piece" of the Strib's Jim Boyd told Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

Jonah Goldberg: I think there is a certain irony here. I have argued for a long time that I think a lot of newspapers need to move in the European direction, where they just are honest about their biases, because one of the things that drives normal readers nuts is when these newspapers pretend to be objective when they’re not.

HH: Right.

JG: And at least in the British press, the press says hey look, this is our perspective, this is where we’re coming from. The irony here is that I think a liberal paper could actually do well if it were honest about it. But because a lot of these papers, they’re dishonest about it, and they pretend in this sort of arrogance that they’re speaking from the voice of God about how the world really is, it drives a lot of people nuts, and that’s what I sense is part of the problem with them.

As I think I wrote in the Doughty Street piece, because (partially due to governmental regulation) airwaves were originally so scarce on both sides of the pond, radio, and then television, had to maintain a veneer of objectivity simply to get a license to get on the air.

The Doughty Street model proves that the Internet can recreate all of the broadcasting that traditional local television station does--everything else (the content of the shows, where and how they're videotaped) is a matter of scale. And thus any group can build the Internet-equivalent of a TV station that fits their worldview perfectly. So that could very well be the Internet video equivalent of Town Hall--and the Internet video equivalent of Air America.

On Hugh Hewitt's radio show recently, James Lileks mentioned that when he wants commentary regarding the Middle East, he doesn't bother with the wire services, he checks out The Three Michaels: Michael Yon, Michael "Faster, Please" Ledeen...and Michael Totten, who's this week's guest on Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast, featuring Austin Bay, and produced by yours truly.

Hey, you got television on my Website! Hey, you got Web content on my television!

At TCS Daily, I explain how the Tory British Web/Video convergence has managed to put all of the New Media pieces together, making them the model for future multimedia Websites.

While the intricacies of British politics may be somewhat off-putting to the average American viewer tuning in for the first time from across the pond, the convergence of media is very much the message here. Expect somebody smart in the US (on one side of the aisle or the other) to emulate 18 Doughty Street's combination of long-form C-Span-style video programming and "traditional" Web articles and blogging in the not-too-distant future.

Last month in Tech Central Station, I interviewed Robin Aitken, the former BBC journalist, about his new book, Can We Trust The BBC. Today, Mark Steyn has a review of the book on his own site, which recently ran in The Wall Street Journal.

Hugh Hewitt promises the closest he gets to "A Three Hour Rant Re: Lileks" on his radio show today, which starts in just a few minutes.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds and Robert McChesney debate the future of media in the L.A. Times.

The answer to that would be a definite emphatic "No!" based on James Lileks' latest post. Lileks writes that rather than creating synergy between his handsome, sprawling, ever-growing personal site and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the paper's new owners chose to assign him write straight news copy, thus ending his daily humor column in the Strib:

There’s been some talk that I might leverage my mad web skillz into a tech beat, reporting on the Internet. But a local beat about the Internet? How many stories can do you about six guys in a loft coding a hot new start-up? And heaven forbid we have to illustrate them, because then you get the inevitable geek-by-the-screen shot. Look! He’s customizing the drop-down location menu so it defaults to the United States instead of Afghanistan!

I don’t want to write about the Internet. I want to write on the Internet. I’d rather develop content than report about content developers. It’s that simple, and it’s also a matter of recognizing my failings: I am not Biff Deadline, Ace Reporter. I can do long stories with lots of color, all aslosh with subjective opinions, but writing straight news - clearly, simply, briskly - is a skill I lack, and I take off my hat to those who've mastered that discipline.

My column will end a week from this Friday. (There’s a series of pieces I can’t wait to write.) After that, it's just-the-facts-ma'am - and I'll no longer be telecommuting, either. This means I will start burning my share of hydrocarbons like a good American. Hell, I may leave the vehicle running all day outside the building just to make up for lost time. Maybe I will put a green roof on the car to balance things out. Some turf, some switchgrass. It's murder on the paint but we all must do our part.

Would it matter if you contacted the paper? It very well might. Here's the reader's rep's page.

If I can get my column back and / or a nice big Online gig, that would be a satisfactory conclusion. Reporting on internet start-ups as opposed to joining an internet start-up – eh, not so much.

This would read like yet another moment in this newspaper's de-evolution in the face of ever-more competitive information technology, if it weren't, you know, actually real.

Update: More thoughts from "See-Dubya", and from Hugh Hewitt, who calls the Strib's decision "a New Coke order of blunder". Exactly.

More: "Union rules may make the Star Tribune unmanageable. James's announcement makes it a joke".

Still More: Speaking of which, this scenario makes the most sense:

You’re fat, and the paper is on a crash diet. They don’t really want you to be a reporter; they want you to quit. They’re just making sure you’ll be in a mood to do so when, in a number of weeks or maybe months, they offer you a buyout to leave. Take it. There’s no guarantee the next staff reduction will be voluntary.

Considering who else at the Strib's old guard is getting the same offer they can't refuse, apparently this is how you clean house in a union shop with minimum risk of getting sued.

VodkaPundit's Will Collier has some thoughts for whoever becomes Lileks' next employer.

Michael Yon was the special guest of the Blog Week In Review podcast yesterday, as he and Austin Bay discussed the Surge and the--hopefully stillborn--ban by the Pentagon on milblogging.

Still in Nothern Iraq, Michael Totten has a video interview with Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga Colonel Salahdin Ahmad Ameen in his office in Suleimaniya, Kurdistan:

He also told us about the notorious Abu Ghraib prison – where he was beaten and tortured by the agents of Saddam's regime – about the Peshmerga's doctrine of human rights during war time, Henry Kissinger's betrayal in 1974, why the Kurds have not yet declared independence from Baghdad, and what may happen if the United States withdraws its armed forces from his country. 'Eight times, eight times the American people have disappointed us. I ask the American people, not make it nine times," he says.

What say you, George Clooney?

Tim Blair tells all:

Here’s how blogging works. First you run a site for four or five years, then one day John Malkovich turns up at your house.

Click over for photos. Apparently, the Pope--or at least his personal haberdasher--visited Tim as well on the same day.

To borrow from the Apple campaign of a few years ago, Southwest proves that it's possible to "Think Different", even in a field as staid and heavily-regulated as domestic commercial aviation. They’re not only sympathetic to their core market’s Red State sensibilities; the airline understands the Blogosphere as well. And in an age of increasingly morose stewardesses, their flight crews are some the friendliest I've encountered.

As Hugh Hewitt suggests, perhaps a much older mass industry could learn something from Southwest's ability to prosper in a tightly competitive marketplace.

Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters interviews Day By Day impresario Chris Muir on Ed's Blog Talk Radio show.

For our profile of Chris a few years ago in Tech Central Station, click here.

Marvin Olasky makes a great point, writing that the death of David Halberstam in a Bay Area traffic accident on Monday may be looked back upon as a chapter in journalism closing. Olasky compares it to Buddy Holly's death signifying the end of 1950s-era rock & roll, even if the echoes of that style of music would linger on until 1964:

These days, reporters regularly gather to bemoan the demise of old journalism and the rise of blogs. Future historians will peg Monday's death of David Halberstam, 73, in a California car crash, as a signpost of the old era's end.

Halberstam was the first big-time journalist with whom I ever had dinner, in 1969 or 1970 when I was a college student. My fellow leftists and I venerated him for winning a Pulitzer Prize on the back of anti-Vietnam War reporting that had gained the ire of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. As William Prochnau, author of "Once Upon a Distant War," later noted, Halberstam in his reporting of those he distrusted ''didn't say, 'You're not telling me the truth.' He said, 'You're lying.'"

Compare that with fellow Jurassic journalist Marvin Kalb, who wouldn't commit to saying on the air yesterday whether or not he thought Bill Moyers and George Soros are on the left. More from Olasky:

We loved that -- Halberstam wrote like a god -- but four decades later, the epigone of Halberstamism is found in books like Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Unlike some of his successors, Halberstam was a hardworking reporter who didn't grab for sneering laughs, but his 1965 book about Vietnam, "The Making of a Quagmire," has inspired journalists for four decades to look for a quagmire as soon as the first American soldiers set foot on sand. [Sometimes before they set foot on sand--Ed]

Halberstam's perceptiveness and blindness were both evident in an interview he gave to the San Jose Mercury News in 1993. He said he was worried about journalism's future because "The public perceives us as being too powerful and too arrogant." But he went on to state his version of the problem: "We give a jarring perception of reality to people." Journalists knew reality, and people weren't strong enough to handle the shrink-wrapped truth.

Cue Nicholson's nostril-flaring "You can't handle the truth" riff.

Halberstam was the best and brightest of the old journalistic era, which will not be resurrected. He elegantly wove tales of government and corporate mendacity. He orated brilliantly about oppression. He worked hard, gained disciples and received not only numerous honorary degrees but something more important -- articles upon his death with headlines like "Halberstam was my journalistic hero" and "Saying goodbye to a mentor."

According to song, the day Buddy Holly's plane crashed in 1959 was the day the music died. When a car broadsided the one Halberstam was riding in, he died almost instantly as a broken rib punctured his heart. The journalism he was the heart of, one where reporters claimed to possess gnostic wisdom, is also dying. We've entered an era of citizen journalism, where everyone has a camera and YouTube replaces You Believe What I Write.

I think it's safe to say that to a man, the Marxist and socialist elite journalists of Halberstam's era believed in Marx's 19th century smokestack-era theories that eventually, the workers would own the means of production and enjoy the full fruits of their labor.

When the information revolution finally came (surprisingly peacefully--we simply all went down to Best Buy and bought PCs and cable modems), the workers not only had an infinitely greater variety of news sources when compared to, say, Halberstam's 1965 quagmire mass media three TV network salad days. They could make their own news and opinion if they wanted to. And the men of Halberstam's era hate this new era--really, viscerally hate it.

It's the new reality. But I guess some legacy journalists just aren’t strong enough to handle the shrink-wrapped truth.

Rush Limbaugh tells his audience today:

Ladies and gentlemen, we are not going to play the audio of the Virginia Tech shooter on this program. It's airing constantly on cable. I think Fox News finally just suspended all video, both on their website and on the network. But the repeated replay of this stuff is literally nuts. You know, sports networks (well, the big networks that televise sports), refuse to televise some idiot that leaves the stands and runs around nude on the field or whatever. They don't do that because they don't want to encourage copycats.

Gosh, you don't say.

As Glenn Reynolds recently wrote, "You know, for all the talk about bloggers not doing original reporting, it seems to me that lately the Blogosphere has had more people reporting from Iraq than all but a handful of MSM outlets".

One key example of that development is Michael Totten, whose latest dispatch from Iraq (Kirkuk to be specific) is online.

Dan Gilmour has some thoughts on what the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre in both the Blogosphere and the legacy media says about the current states of each media:

The democratization of media is not just about creation, though that has been the most notable aspect so far. Putting the tools into everyone’s hands has produced an explosion of media creation, as blogs and sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr show us.

Traditional media think of distribution: making journalism or movies or programs and sending them out to consumers. This is inverted in a democratized media world, where we all have access to what we want, as well as when and where.

I didn’t turn on my TV yesterday except in the evening, to watch a national network’s news report. I wanted to see a summary of what a serious journalism organization had to say about what it knew so far.

Instead, during the day, I used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases.

It’s also worth noting that the citizen media component of this terrible event is not a new to the digital era. When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas back in 1963, Abraham Zapruder caught the gruesome killing on a home movie camera — footage that became an essential part of the historical record. But the difference between then and tomorrow is this:

In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

That is different.

Remember, too, that the passengers aboard the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, were making voice calls to loved ones and colleagues with mobile phones. What if they’d been sending videos to the world of what was happening inside those doomed aircraft?

We will still need journalists to help sort things out. But the “burning city” words from 2001 revealed something.

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.

Related thoughts here.

(Via Pajamas Media, which has been providing extensive coverage of the VT massacre.)

In the latest edition of City Journal, Adam Thierer writes that this is "America’s Golden Age of Media"--and it could all be over soon:

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society—or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.

While the far left seems bent on knocking out talk radio because they can't otherwise establish a foothold there, it's worth noting that Democrats didn't need the medium to retake Congress in November.

Beyond radio, call me a Pollyanna, but I can't help but think it's going to be awfully difficult putting the genie back in the bottle. There are now RSS feeds to shape content and blogs and podcasts to publish it. (Technorati was tracking 60 million blogs last time I checked, a mammoth growth from about seven million blogs when I wrote this piece in 2004 for TCS.)

As I wrote last week:

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station.

Napster in its original form was killed by the recording industry at the start of the 21st century, but the concept of file sharing and downloading individual tracks of music is the law of the land. Similarly, YouTube has demonstrated how millions want to get their TV.

It's certainly a far cry from the days when mass media meant three TV networks and one or two monolithic (usually institutionally liberal--and arguably worse, deadly dull) newspapers per city.

One downside to today's media cornucopia though: is our readers learning?

Check out the graph that Bill Hobbs has posted of blogger Katherine Coble's traffic since she was sued by JL Kirk Associates. Mutual fund managers would kill to have a mountain chart that looked like that.

To wildly paraphrase Zero Mostel (yet again), they're the best possible actors. If you have any disagreement with them, you can always rip their heads off, and they won't utter a, umm, peep:

In other words, Mary Katharine Ham's latest HamNation is up.

Not surprisingly, Don Imus loses his CBS radio gig in addition to his MSNBC cable TV simulcast; veteran magazine editor Myrna Blyth has a piece in NRO today on the power to bully the legacy media grants to those it gives airtime:

I have never listened to Imus, and the only times I’ve seen him have been when I was flicking through channels in a hotel room, trying to find the morning news. But what struck me the few times I did watch him was his amazing arrogance. And, while I know we’re not supposed to criticize people for their appearance, this funny-looking guy in a funny-looking cowboy hat sure does get a lot of power when he’s sitting behind a microphone. David Frum in his Diary gives an example of Imus’s arrogance. For years, right up to this current fracas, he has been able to freely use his power to sneer at others and get the audience to laugh along. Imus, quite simply, is a bully, and he’s made that pay big. And like a bully about to lose a fight, he has started sniveling and proclaiming what a good and generous guy he really is.

The other great bully on TV right now is Rosie, who has her daily soapbox on The View. It’s her schoolyard bullying tactics, which she so effectively employs on that girlie show, much more than her crackpot conspiracy theories, that I find most objectionable. Day after day, like a true grade-school tyrant, she shouts down anyone who disagrees with her, steps on any applause another opinion might elicit, and, like Imus with his sidekicks, gets the other women on The View to agree with and support her.

Rosie is also an expert at playing the victim and making excuses for herself. As she constantly explains, she suffers from depression and her mother died when she was young — and she is very generous, too. Of course, Rosie, in true bully fashion, is afraid to have anyone on the show who might have the power to say, “Hey, Rosie, put up your dukes,” and then, through argument, win a fair fight with her.

Maybe the next media tempest will be when Rosie goes too far. Although she is very well protected, it probably will happen, and the pundits will once again have the chance to talk about the one thing they all agree upon — the enormous power those in media now have.

A couple of weeks ago, Libertas had a great post on A Face In The Crowd, Elia Kazan’s's seminal late 1950s movie about a populist figure given a national platform by television who quickly becomes a demagogue. When I saw the movie for the first time on TMC or AMC in the late 1990s, Andy Griffith's performance in the lead role (which instantly put him on the map in Hollywood) reminded me instantly of James Carville; some might instead see Rush or O'Reilly in it. But it really is a dramatic foreshadowing of how today's media both invents public figures, lets them run fast, loud, and out of control, usually until its too late, and then quickly pulls the plug on them, and is well worth your time on DVD or next time it's on cable.

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station. But considering how well a fifty year old movie still depicts today's events, the medium may change, but not the urge to demagogue it.

This flowchart looks about right to me.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

Clive Davis writes:

Until I dropped into Jackie Danicki's, I wasn't even aware that Web pioneer Dave Winer had just celebrated his tenth anniversary. This is what "the longest continuing running weblog on the Internet" looked like, more or less, in April 1997.

It's sort of along the lines of James Lileks' early Bleats in terms of first generation home-rolled HTML craftsmanship, though much more link-oriented than longform prose.

And incidentally, we celebrated five years worth of blatherifics ourselves last month. Here are some overly exuberant thoughts on the subject a few anniversaries ago.

Update: "The site sure was ugly back then. I think we've grown up a lot in ten years". Courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, here's what TownHall.com looked like a decade ago in version 1.0 mode.

"I'm not saying that you defend it. I'm just saying that it goes politely unnoticed a lot of the time."

--As Newsbusters notes, kudos go out to Mary Katharine Ham, "who went up against three liberals by herself"--not surprising on CNN--"and did quite well" discussing the topic of female blogger harrassment, (and specifically technology blogger Kathy Sierra) alongside Arianna Huffington, Joan Walsh of Salon, and Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz himself.

(Back from Vegas, incidentally.)

Update: Here's video of MKH on CNN.

More: Jeff Jarvis has related thoughts on how the Blogosphere works--versus how some wished it did work--that are well worth reading in their entirety.

Elsewhere: Mary Katharine Ham comments on her CNN appearance.

No, seriously, please do.The group blog's slogan is, "In loving memory of Cathy Seipp and the World she let us play in", and her daughter Maia is one of the participants there. This seems like a great place to start.

That's what the headlines would read if newspapers treated their own comments sections the same way they do those on blogs.

In the Claremont Review of Books, England's best conservative journalist reviews the latest book by Canada's best conservative journalist: "The Gelded Age--Theodore Dalrymple on Mark Steyn's America Alone".

Very much apropos of the territory that both of the above men frequently explore, James Lileks recently wrote:

I drove home listening to Bob Davis on KSTP; he was revisiting one of his favorite topics, one that mirrors exactly something I’ve felt for some time: the lack of any prominent cultural direction, and the strange incoherent sense of anticipation that lack produces. It’s as if the culture is treading water, with nothing truly new to give it focus and purpose. That’s not exactly a good thing when you’re competing with cultures that have both, in large quantities, and a sense of historical momentum the West has lost. I grapple with this from time to time, usually in the morning; it’s the odd suspicion that the West is exhausted. Not done or over or dead or resigned, but simply exhausted. We live in the end stages of the application of the Enlightenment, at least as applied to our own culture; what now? If you’ve ended debate on the great issues, you’re left with smaller ones, like 720 vs. 1080i; you concern yourself with indistinct dreads and assign to them a moral component; you luxuriate in the hot springs of partisan politics and redefine the issues so the gap between left and right looks like Gog v. Magog territory.

Near the end of his review of Steyn's book, Dalrymple has one response:

The welfare state has sapped all will to what is often mocked as la gloire; but without a notion of glory, without a notion that there is something in human life more worth striving for than universal central heating and television, no great thing is ever achieved. That is one of the reasons why the public architecture in Europe is now so awful: once you have lost the habits of taste, taste itself disappears even when money is available for its exercise.

This is a very urgent book, but I am unsure whether I want to be around to see whether Steyn's pessimism is entirely justified.

Given that Steyn's forecast is surprisingly short-term, I'd like to think I will be around then. But unlike earlier glitteringly technology-oriented forecasts by Clarke and Toffler, I'm also not sure if I'm looking forward to checking how closely Steyn's infinitely gloomier profile of the future ends up becoming reality in a couple of decades.

At the end of a long detailed post describing how he became an independent journalist in Iraq, Michael Yon writes:

I’m finally starting to understand what so many Vietnam Veterans have told me. One overarching message from the front is that our combat forces are overwhelmingly good to the Iraqis and extremely accommodating to media, but there is a deeper substrate. We simply cannot beat the terrorists if we do not learn how to embrace media realities. With all the focus on training Iraqi Security Forces, it might be worth considering training our own team, too.

Yet trapped here with Dr Strangelove, while some commanders undermine the media war, it bears frequent reminding that General Petraeus has won complex battles before in Iraq. He is extremely open with the media, and nobody with PhD from Princeton would invite a bunch of writers to document an historical fight he plans to lose. He’s invited press to a process he aims to resolve. I’d planned to watch the surge unfold in and around Baghdad and focus on that, but haven’t had much of a chance with Brooks and Gang playing musical chairs.And so that’s a brief of the route here, and the struggle with some commanders to stay and report on your friends, loved ones, and your war. Because, like it or not, this is YOUR war.

In closing, I’d like to suggest a pact with new readers. This site is 100% reader supported. Not a dime comes from FOX, and clearly I am not getting paid by the Army, cots and MRE’s notwithstanding. To maintain independence, there are no advertisements on my site. It all comes down to you, the reader. If you keep reading, I’ll keep writing the Good, Bad, and Ugly, but I definitely will still need the high-cover that comes from high visibility; truth has a stinger that some seem particularly sensitive to.

As the Professor, who interviewed Yon recently, would say, read the whole thing.

"Let's send Ernie home": Be sure to read this on "the general that has just threatened to kick Michael Yon out of Iraq".

Cathy Seipp passed away at 2:05 PM today, according to Lewis Fein.

Susan Estrich puts partisanship aside for a warm remembrance.

Update: More from Luke Ford.

On her Dynamist Blog, Virginia Postrel has had an interesting couple of posts on whether or not it was worth it for her to appear on BloggingheadsTV, mainly regarding the technical complexity of arranging the two camera/mic set-ups required to record the interview.

But the format must be working in one sense, as its the obvious prototype for a new videopodcast with NRO's Jonah Goldberg and New Republic's Peter Beinart.

Adding onto David Strom's take on Edwards' boycott of Fox News, Jonah Goldberg has some further thoughts on where the fallout could eventually lead:

Fox’s biggest critics don’t appreciate why Fox News exists in the first place. It was created because vast numbers of Americans — including many Democratic voters — saw the mainstream media as too liberal and too elitist. Proof that Fox’s creators were right can be found in its enormous ratings success. In response to that success — as well as conservative talk radio’s - liberals have become obsessed with creating their own alternative media. The most famous example, Air America, has been a giant failure, and maybe that explains part of the left’s mounting frustration with Fox. It just seems so unfair that viewers like Fox but don’t really want to watch Al Franken whine about Dick Cheney all day.

Regardless, the Edwards Maneuver ratchets this whole cycle up to a new level. Already, conservatives are mumbling that their politicians shouldn’t appear on liberal networks. That’s hardly surprising. After 40 years of bashing the media from the right, conservatives are unlikely to get one-upped now.

This process of media balkanization may well be inevitable. I’ve long argued that we’re heading toward a European-style press where newspapers and networks are more honest about their ideological biases. But in an age where the press and many politicians decry this division, it’s worth pointing out what we’re getting ourselves into. [Or going back to--Ed.]

For example, Edwards was tactically very smart to do what he did. But he’s also the guy who decries the “two Americas” and hopes to unite them. It’s a dumb metaphor, but by Edwards’s own standards, Fox speaks to one of those two Americas. And boycotting Fox isn’t going to help close that gap.

Hey, it's not like he's running for president or something.

Moving tributes to Cathy Seipp, in both text and (via Tim Blair) video.

As James Lileks writes of Cathy, "Read the words and remember the name: in the end it's all an author can hope for. I hope she knows that we did, and we will".

Update: Via Matt Welch, check out Cathy in better days stylin' and profilin' (probably literally, since her reporter's notebook is out) with Bill Blass.

Speaking of new media pioneers, Cathy Seipp has been hospitalized and apparently is in rather grave condition, a thought which puts all of the Coke/Pepsi, Drudge/Malkin, GOP/Dem "wars" into sharp contrast.

Back when most people we're still figuring out how to connect their 14.4 kbps modems to AOL, Matt Drudge arrived on the Internet and became the 'Net's first household-name journalist, much to the chagrin of every journalist dining in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons whose last name wasn't Ailes. Drudge got to the 'Net first, established a mighty beachhead, and was the source of breaking news (and a fair amount of gossip) before the Blogosphere began.

Drudge of course is famously prickly when called a blogger. And while it's fair to say that Drudge himself is not a blogger based on his site's format, in the past he's a bit more open-minded about those who followed in his wake, telling an interviewer in 2005:

They tried calling it “Me-Zine” before, that was the word they were going to do, which also was offensive, as if the editors of the papers don’t make their own decisions and it’s their own version of a Me-Zine, as if Bill Keller doesn’t make the decision what is on the front page - that’s HIS Me-Zine.

I just don’t like these negative terms. They’re individuals on the internet, living out their dreams.

But if their dreams also include video, apparently that's a technology too far for Drudge:

Maybe we’ll do, uh, uh, a commentary on the Internet like Michelle Malkin. Maybe I’ll stand in front of like a blue screen and hold a banana and start talking into the Internets. (Sneering tone) ‘This is Matt Drudge reporting on Hot Air.’ Agggh. You know. It’s ridiculous. Looks like, you know, Captain Kangaroo time, Michelle. Get real.

That seems an incredibly cheap shot to me. As Libertas writes about indy filmmaking, "If you’re going to make a no-budget film anything that has nothing to do with budget must be executed perfectly...What doesn’t cost money, you must excel at". And the videos produced by Michelle's small Hot Air team do just that.

Don't believe me? If you're new to the technology, try making one yourself with the same production values: this isn't someone borrowing his family camcorder for a blurry unedited spittle-flecked rant to upload to YouTube. Michelle's videos, even setting aside their often well-written content, are extremely slickly produced, and could easily be cut into a nightly news program with no loss of quality, and that speaks volumes about how technology has leveled the playing field between billion dollar networks and (comparatively speaking), a shoestring operation.

There's no doubt that Drudge deserves an enormous amount of credit from being both a prominent early adopter, and an even more visible target for elites fearful of their status. And yet, faced with an ever-increasing new media environment, Drudge certainly seems to spend a lot of time looking over his shoulder, and risks turning into a new media version of the very same dinosaurs whose hermetically-sealed media world he up-ended.

Compare Drudge's quotes to those of the man who helped put another Internet news format--the Blogosphere--on the map, and has not only linked to those who've been inspired by him, but to whole lists of them. Since increasing competition is inevitable, that seems to be a much healthier attitude.

Update: Welcome Drudge Podcast readers! Umm, listeners...err, readers...Let's try that again: Welcome Drudge fans!

You won't see it on the nightly news (and certainly not in this depth), but Hot Air has video of this weekend's Gathering Of Eagles event.

Good to see that Hollywood is finally raiding the Blogosphere for new talent:

And it's astonishing that YouTube selected the apex moment of the trailer for its random screen grab!

(For the real thing, click here.)

I'm not sure if that stands for HamNation News Network or Henson News Network, but after this recent self-inflicted debacle, Mary Katharine Ham assembles "a crack news team that might meet the Dems' standards. They're fairer than Katie Couric. Fairer than Jon Stewart. Fairer even than Dan Rather:"

(And to paraphrase Zero Mostel only slightly, they're the best possible reporters. If you have a disagreement with them, you can always use them to wash your car.)

Steve Frank of California Political News And Views asks, "Is The Mainstream Media In The Midst Of Its Demise?"

Readership of newspapers is down 3% in a year. Viewing of ABC, NBC and CBS is down, in total. Do you know anyone that watches Katie Couric?

Cable TV, blogs and online newsletters and web sites are believed more than CNN could hope for.

Apologists for the Left are down to blackmailing Democrats NOT to debate, because the debate is sponsored by Fox News. This type of action is what you would expect in Cuba, not a free society.

The Age of Cronkite is over. People talk back to Wolf Blitzer, challenge The NY Times and cancel the Washington Post.

As Bob Dylan would say, "the times, they are a’changin". When Hillary claims to be anti-war, her votes are brought up. When she claims she supports the troops, her votes are brought up. Obama claims to be a moderate and his bill in 2003-4 to impeach President Bush, as a State Senator, is brought up. These are never written about in the SF Chronicle or talked about by Brian Williams, it is the new media that reminds us of the truth, not the press release fantasy of these Leftists.

No thanks to the mainstream media, but the facts are getting out and they are inconvenient to the Left.

It looks to me, by words and deeds, the mainstream media is causing its own demise.

You're not the only one, Steve. But as I wrote at the start of last month, the sheer vested power of the legacy media means that they're not very likely to go away soon. I do wonder though, where all of their recent credibility meltdowns will lead them, while simultaneously, their power becomes increasingly diluted by the growing Long Tail of the 'Net and the Blogosphere since 9/11.

In early 2006, just as YouTube and Google Video were first making their mark, I wrote about the intersection of the Internet and television first for TCS Daily, and later, on the topic of IPTV for The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine. (Not on the Web at the moment, unfortunately, and somewhat ironically.) While there have been a number of great Websites that incorporate video clips (and the production values of Michelle Malkin's daily "Vent" segments on her Hot Air site are first class), from what I've seen of it so far, England's 18 Doughty Street Website, with its slick-looking evenings' worth of longform programming has really managed to put all the pieces together in an exemplary fashion. In a recent post, Jeff Jarvis explains what makes them tick.

As IPTV allows for full-length programs to be downloaded into television set-top boxes via broadband, expect many more channels like this. If I was an angel investor looking to fund the TV station of the future for the Web and/or IPTV, 18 Doughty Street, its format, and especially its production values, is the model I'd crib from as carefully as possible.

David Horowitz writes:

This is what is unforgiveable in the campaign that Democratic leaders have conducted against the war in Iraq and therefore against the war on terror. They were the first to identify the post-Gulf War Saddam regime as a national security threat, specifically because of his determination to build and eventually use weapons of mass destruction. This little video says it all:

Just click.

Update: In contrast, Jules Crittenden looks at those most rarefied of journalists: "Media who get it, and bring it to you".

From the man who brought you "beclowning", a new meme is born.

Neo-Neocon has a new URL: www.neoneocon.com. Adjust bookmarks accordingly.

"France Bans Citizen Journalists from Reporting Violence".

Update: Helen Thomas sounds like she'd be happy with the French government's decision.

Last week I linked to Hugh Hewitt and Newsbusters' negative impressions of PBS's "News War" Frontline miniseries; as conservatives, it's not at all surprising that they'd have a beef with a PBS show. But while Jeff Jarvis is much closer to the demographic that PBS targets, he's also not very much impressed with their efforts:

I just watched the third part of Frontline’s News War and found it utterly unsurprising and profoundly disappointing. It delivered the obvious narratives it wanted to deliver: a war between mainstream media and the rabble of citizen bloggers, a cultural and quality line between old media and new, and a moral battle between the business and editorial sides of the news business, as illustrated by its lionizing of deposed LA Times editors John Carroll and Dean Baquet and its demonizing of Tribune executive and now LA Times publisher David Hiller. I was part of it, briefly, to fulfill their blogger-v-MSM storyline; here is more of what I said to them. I remain disappointed that they didn’t investigate the future of journalism, the opportunities and possibilities. Instead, they played the themes we have heard again and again, as if on a Top 40 radio station: tsk-tsking the tackiness, fretting about the news that the big guys are sure we need, evil Wall Street, looney citizens. I could sit down and fisk, as we say, all its cheap shots and lazy analysis and incomplete reporting but, frankly, I don’t find it worth the effort.

Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly tells his viewers "journalism in this country is at a low point":

And it comes right before one of the most important presidential elections in history.

Much of the mainstream media now invested in promoting ideology at the expense of providing honest information.

* * *

We in the press have been granted special privileges by the Constitution. Those privileges are now being abused by corrupt editors and TV executives.

If "The New York Times" and NBC News can explain why they didn't cover the ACLU debacle, I'd like to hear it. If not, all Americans should turn away from them.

But they won't of course--at least not in numbers that generate any immediate attention from the legacy media, whose reaction to its slow erosion of viewers and readers ranges from surprising sanguinity to utter cluelessness. Which is why I've been wondering what--if anything--will happen as a result of what's been bubbling up for the last six months or so in the Blogosphere.

In addition to Your Humble Narrator's interviews with Austin Bay and Adam Bellow, this week's Blog Week In Review podcast has hidden within it breaking news--The Manolo's first publication is due in March from Pamphleteer Press.

Mary Katharine Ham puts it all into perspective:

You know, when you live in D.C. and among the blogs, it's easy to forget you're really weird-- that not everyone knows that Andrew Sullivan's dramatic shift from pro-war ideological conservative to strident war opponent based mostly on a single social-issue disagreement with the Bush administration may have lessened his credibility as a pundit.

Yep, you're weird. I was working on a special project this week, one of the topics for which was, "Do Pundits Matter?" so I took to the mall to find out. Aside from getting, err, questioned about our filming several times by mall security, all went smoothly for Katie and me, and we met many nice folks who, oddly, have no preference for Eleanor Clift or Tony Blankley.

Yeah, I couldn't figure it out either.

Wow, they don't even know that the refs (read: the powers that be at The Atlantic) seem to have called the fight between the Ali and Frazier of punditry.

I didn't watch the debut episode of Fox News' Half Hour News Hour, but Libertas writes, "The numbers are in and that thing you’re tasting now my friends, is victory:

How would you like to be Stephen Colbert right now? How would you like to be the media darling of 2007 who’s spent years building an audience only to get your behind waxed by the very first airing of a conservative comedy news show (On FOX!)? And how would you like to be Jon Stewart right now? How would you like to be the guy treated like the icon of all things funny and cutting edge only to find that the very first episode of a conservative comedy news show (On FOX!) almost waxed your behind? Methinks the lovers of irony aren’t enjoying this bit o’ it.

Read on for the actual ratings numbers.

Speaking of language and slang, the Word of the Year arrives early this year, courtesy of Tim Blair.

Chris Sprow of The Chicago Sports Review writes

KC Johnson is a 38-year-old bowtie-wearing Brooklyn College professor with a Harvard degree. He has a passion for American history, and he enjoys the classroom. And due to his own peculiar mixture of annoyance and curiosity, he might be the most oft-cited source for those looking for coverage of what could formerly be called "The Duke Rape Case."

That it was ever dubbed "The Duke Rape Case" as opposed to "The Duke Investigation" or "Allegations in Durham" is part of why he exists as we know him. He's a common story in New York and Durham. Kurt Andersen has written about Johnson's work in New York Magazine, and calls him "heroic." The exceptional legal writer Stuart Taylor Jr. has written about him in Slate. Many others have, and some will surely follow.

And yes, old-media lovers, he's a mere blogger; a word that our Microsoft Word still holds in contempt, an underlined outsider.

My copy of Word doesn't--it only takes a keystroke to keep it up to date. Speaking of which:

He's also further evidence of how, even inside a newsroom, it's long not been a debate whether the "web logger" has changed modern journalism for the better, no matter how much it can sting us in the old school…To. Print. That.

Just because you come from the old school of dead-tree journalism doesn't mean you can't keep up to date with the new.

In the body of the interview, Johnson states:

there's a tendency among activist-left in the academy to just brand anyone who disagrees with them as a right wing-nut. It works, and it's hard for them to give up that stance. … Put it this way: before this case started I had never seen defending civil liberties as a right wing position.

As Glenn Reynolds rebuts, "It all depends on whose civil liberties, K.C."

Drinking Guinness with Christopher Hitchens and the Anchoress? Sounds good to me--I'll even bring the keg.

A month ago, I linked to the Newark Star Ledger's nascent video blog site devoted to all things New Jersey (designed by Sekimori, who previously overhauled this site's graphics), and wrote:

Hopefully TV Jersey will have plenty of South Jersey video coverage in addition to Newark and the rest of northern New Jersey.

While the project is being launched by a large metropolitan newspaper that's seeding the site's early video clips, there's no special sauce here. Anybody with a camcorder and editing software, along with a broadband connection for access to YouTube and Blogger.com could put something like this together for their region as well.

David Corrigan wrote me yesterday about his own video blog, a well-produced site whose name says it all: South Jersey Video Magazine.

Here's a recent sample, with footage of an impressive snowbound tiger and other critters "enjoying" a typically harsh New Jersey winter. Sadly, no sloths involved, but I can't tell you how representative the interviewed veterinarian’s accent is of the region I grew up in.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a statement by early blogger Ken Layne became a rallying cry to the nascent Blogosphere, much like "Go West Young Man" was to an early generation of Americans (or "Food Fight!" to a newer one, to borrow Roger Ebert's riff). Layne's original quote went like this:

It's 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass. And you, like many in the Hate America movement, are no longer able to dress your wretched "reporting" in fiction. We have computers. It is not difficult to Find You Out, dig?

In the course of massive repetition, Layne's statement was boiled down to its essentials:

We have computers. We can fact-check your ass!

But 2001 and the spirit of the early days of blogging is increasingly receeding further into the distance, as this passage near the end of Howard Kurtz's new profile of Michelle Malkin illustrates:

Sometimes, though, Malkin seems to use the same howitzer against every provocation. After she started crusading against the "Girls Gone Wild" culture as a "liberal assault on decency," the satirical site Wonkette received -- and posted -- a picture of Malkin's head on the scantily-clad body of a college student, whose image had been plucked from the Web. Malkin denounced what she called the "hate-filled cowards" at Wonkette's parent company for "repeatedly smearing and attempting to humiliate me."

After being contacted by Malkin's lawyer, Wonkette ran a snarkily worded semi-retraction. The site's West Coast bureau chief, Ken Layne, says he doesn't know or care whether the picture is real and calls Malkin "incapable of getting a joke."

"People send us dumb stuff all the time, and if it makes us laugh, we post it," he adds.

As Ann Althouse wrote last year:

People blog for lots of different reasons, and blogging is still burgeoning and developing. Don't cave into nostalgia for a Golden Age, especially one that got its golden glow from the horror that was 9/11. Things were bound to change and shake around, and some bloggers that you liked then may put you off now. But there are always a million new bloggers, and blogging is a beautifully fruitful format.

If not always a beautifully truthful format, of course. But these days, what media is?

Between the politically-fueled Grammys, the death of Prozac-fueled Anna Nicole Smith, and the hydrogen and liquid oxygen-fueled past of Lisa Marie Nowak, the timing couldn't be better for the debut of GlossLip, the gossip-fueled blog of Dawn Olsen, wife of Blogcritics founder Eric Olsen. "Celebrity Gossip From Our Lips To Yours", is their slogan.

It's all off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush, to borrow from Sid Hudgens' old slogan.

(And if you simply can't get enough of Anna Nicole Smith's trainwreck life and death, don't miss this recent post by Cathy Seipp on "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Bimbo".)

Infoworld reports:

Yahoo Inc. has launched a service called Pipes designed to let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups," a process that so far has required programming knowledge.

Pipes features a drag-and-drop interface that the company hopes non-technical users will find simple and intuitive as they manipulate content syndication feeds to combine data in new and useful ways.

An example of a Pipe is this one , which meshes listings from Craigslist with data from Yahoo's local search engine to display apartments for rent near any business, Yahoo said.

Another one collates news about topics chosen by the user from a variety of sources.

"Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application," reads Yahoo's description of the service , posted Wednesday night.

While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google Inc.'s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps Web site.

As if they didn't need it, this is yet another reason for Pinch & crew to be scared: it's now a breeze to build your own newspaper out of the best bits of information sources from around the world.

Forty years ago, Arthur C. Clarke, with a film he co-wrote called 2001: A Space Odyssey about to be released the following year, was asked to speak at the annual meeting in Manhattan of the American Institute of Architects. Among the many futuristic predictions he offered were these glimpses that sound astonishingly prescient in retrospect:

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.

That was in May of 1967. This week, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger of the New York Times finally got the message, according to Hugh Hewitt:

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care, either," said New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to Haaretz Tuesday.

We don’t care either. The “we” are the one time loyal readers of newspapers. “We” are the “market.” And the market doesn’t “care” about carriages driven by horses, ships with sails, or the Pony Express. The market cares about demand, and demand for newspapers is drying up.

In his latest op-ed, Hugh wonders if the efforts to complete the newspapers' move to the online world will also involve a strategic re-think of what information is delivered. Or will the newspapers will continue to try to pretend that it's still 1967, delivering the same sclerotic content on a CRT instead of pulpwood? As one of Hugh's readers emails in:

Enjoyed this column. You touch on an important, underdiscussed part of daily papers' problem: They assume they are their readers' primary source of news. Hence the insipid game summaries in the Sports section (when, as you said, everybody who cares about the game grabbed all the info they need from ESPN and the Internet 8-12 hours before the paper hits their driveway). The same goes for Yesterday's Big Vote in Washington - it's ancient, but every paper feels compelled to cover it.

This is an important flaw because its root is - ta da! - hubris. Arrogance. An unwillingness to live in today's world, where by the time a newspaper is delivered, I've read thousands of words of analysis at the Corner, Powerline, Michael Barone's blog, HughHewitt.com, etc.

As Hugh responds, it's a matter of steam versus sail.

As a follow-up to our post on February 1st, Greg Gutfeld, simultaneously Arianna Huffington's main man and bete noir, has a late night show debuting tonight on Fox News at 2:00 AM EST.

James Lileks typically has lots of fun by tweaking the nostalgia of the past with joyful irony. (As opposed to joyless irony, which has been an infinitely more common currency for the last 30 years or so.) But to celebrate ten years of The Bleat--if not the earliest online diary, then certainly one of the earliest that's still going strong and read by a huge audience--Lileks applies the irony beam on himself, and reminds us what the first Bleat looked like in those Jurassic Internet days of 1997.

So what came before the Jurassic period? This.

Greg Gutfeld maybe getting his own late night talk show on the Fox News Channel.

The sounds of HuffPost readers' heads exploding will be audible nationwide if this happens.

Err, no that headline isn't quite what it sounds like at first glance: Austin Bay, host of Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast, has an excerpt from his new pamphlet in a recent edition of the L.A. Times.

(Bugmenot works well of course, if you'd like to read the article without registering.)

Between Vent, Blog Week In Review, and now Mary Katharine Ham's latest HamNation video, I guess it's multimedia day in the Blogosphere. MKH writes:

The distance between the communities "defended" by environmentalists against development and the communities themselves is often large, both philosophically and literally. Filmmakers and journalists, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have made a documentary that highlights these environmental battles and the exaggerations, fibs, and sometimes outright lies that keep some of the world's poorest cultures from developing. "Mine Your Own Business" is an entertaining, moving and sometimes humorous look at a side of the environmental movement we don't often see—the dark side.

McAleer traveled to Rosia Montana, Romania several years ago to cover a story for the Financial Times—the story of Toronto-based mining company Gabriel Resources forcing people from their homes, planning an environmentally destructive mine, and ruining the pristine countryside of that remote Romanian village, all against the wishes of its residents. Only, when he got to Rosia Montana, he found a different story.

"I pretty much found that everything the environmentalists were saying was either false, exaggerated, or just a plain lie," McAleer said in a telephone interview Monday.

Residents told him they had sold their land for good money. Mining company representatives told him they planned to clean pollution left by now-deserted state-run mines that were built before environmental standards were in place and modernize housing and plumbing for residents. Locals told him the pristine rivers were actually running with cadmium and zinc.

Environmentalists claim that 80 percent of the people of Rosia Montana are opposed to the building of the mine. When McAleer and his wife toured the streets and homes of Rosia Montana, they found many who spoke in favor of it, and who wondered why so many outsiders were interested in stopping it (a letter signed by the people of Rosia Montana is here).

As I wrote in 2006:

Last year, Matt Welch described a similar sentiment amongst equally leftwing and reactionary tourists to Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there's no annoying electronic scoreboard!

Val Prieto, who frequently blogs on Cuban issues at his own Babalu Blog dubs it "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome".

Sort of like the propagation of SARS, it appears to be spreading beyond travelers to one nation, into a global meme. And it's worth noting that a variation of it was the dominant theme of the 2002 U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where numerous Gulfstream Transnationalists such as California's own Jerry Brown urged--for the sake of the global environment, if not local civilizational ruins--that the Third World remain as backward and shackled as possible.

Recently, the Libertas film blog explored the one-meme-fits-all state of documentaries and wrote:

Brave would be a documenatry filmmaker who took the Jesus Camp approach to Islam; who took the Iraq in Fragments approach to what we’ve done right in Afghanistan and Iraq: who took the Inconvenient Truth approach to extremism in the environmental movement. That would be diverse. That would be provoking. That would be brave.

That would get you blacklisted.

By Hollywood, yes. Fortunately, there are increasing alternatives, a topic explored, coincidentally enough, in this week's Blog Week In Review.

"Who needs journalism when you've got booty and disco beats?"

Michelle Malkin, whose Hot Air Website produced a series of first class videos shot on location in Iraq, checks in on Big Journalism's state-of-the-art online video efforts.

Steve Green returns to the Blogosphere by live blogging the State of the Union speech--"Cocktail-enhanced, of course".

Cheers!

Update: Allah writes:

I’ve never understood the fuss, particularly given that it’s Bush. By my count, he’s delivered exactly four memorable speeches in the past six years and only one of them is still remembered fondly: the address to Congress after 9/11, the “axis of evil” SOTU, the “Mission Accomplished” speech, and the second inaugural address. We’re looking at an hour of energy-policy wonkery, global-warming alarmism, and shopworn bromides about how crucial victory in Iraq is. What’s left to say? If it’s worth watching at all, it’s only to see at which key phrases Hillary ostentatiously rolls her eyes.

Vodka and vermouth seem like a necessity at this point.

(Particularly to get through this, which Allah translates tersely as "lose faster".)

As I wrote yesterday, over to you, AP's Kathleen Carroll.

(Additional links here.)

Just back in the US from Iraq, Michelle Malkin writes:

Well, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior says disputed Associated Press source Jamil Hussein does exist. But at least one story he told the AP just doesn't check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as "destroyed," "torched" and "burned and [blown] up" are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.

Note the photos that Malkin and colleague Bryan Preston took of those mosques, as well, on Michelle's site. (Video is apparently coming tomorrow.)

Over to you, AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll.

Commentary magazine has added a new group blog, titled "Contentions". Click the link and give a look.

Ever wonder what would happen if Lee Ermey wrote Wired magazine's "Jargon Watch" column? No, me neither, until now. Because that's the tone of Austin Bay's new pamphlet, Embrace The Suck, published by Adam Bellow's new Pamphleteer Press.

As Austin writes in his introduction:

Warrior slang accepts suffering as inevitable. It also says, “Buddy, you ain’t in this alone.” Take the acronym “MARINES.” The wry definition is “Many Americans Running Into Never Ending Shit.” (That addresses a “corps” identity issue.) The Operation Iraqi Freedom phrase “embrace the suck” is both an implied order and wise advice couched as a vulgar quip.

Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz went to war when he was 12 years old. Over the last two decades, critics have argued that his treatise On War is a bit dated in terms of theory. However, everyone with military experience agrees that Clausewitz understood “the suck.”

He called it “friction.”

“Everything in war is very simple,” Clausewitz wrote, “but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.”

“Embrace the suck” isn’t merely a wisecrack; it’s a raw epigram based on encyclopedic experience. Face it, soldier. I’ve been there. This ain’t easy. Now let’s deal with it.

This pamphlet should be made an appendix of the AP Stylebook--nobody would benefit more from it than journalists. But at a mere $4.00 a pop, which includes both a physical hard copy, and an immediately downloadable PDF file while you're waiting for the mailman, there's no reason why you shouldn't pick up a copy yourself.

Jules Crittenden has a handsome new upgrade to his blog's appearance. If you haven't stopped by in a while, take a look.

I lived in New Jersey for over 30 years, so I'm happy to see Newark's Star-Ledger launch TV Jersey:

New Jersey needs a television station to call its own. Programmed by New Jerseyans, for New Jerseyans. TVJersey has no broadcast towers, no satellites. It doesn’t even have a studio. But it has you. And what you produce, we’ll promote. Just tag your videos on youtube with tvjersey, and we’ll find them. (We’re going to start using some other services soon.) We might find them even if you don’t. And you can always send us ideas and links at video [at] tvjersey dot com. Together, we’ll build the TV station we deserve.

And there's no reason why other sites can't join them, if Jersey-centric Websurfers detect a bias or tone they're uncomfortable with, or aren't happy with the site's amount of coverage. And speaking of which, hopefully TV Jersey will have plenty of South Jersey video coverage in addition to Newark and the rest of northern New Jersey.

While the project is being launched by a large metropolitan newspaper that's seeding the site's early video clips, there's no special sauce here. Anybody with a camcorder and editing software, along with a broadband connection for access to YouTube and Blogger.com could put something like this together for their region as well.

Update: Further thoughts from Jeff Jarvis; interesting comments as well, immediately below them.

Matt Drudge writes, "Threatened By The Internet, Time Magazine Slims Down":

TIME magazine, which has been coming out every Monday for over 36 years, hit the streets last Friday instead.

"I believe that getting the magazine on newsstands on Friday helps us set the news agenda," explained Richard Stengel, the managing editor.

NEW YORK TIMES media columnist David Carr takes the opportunity to rain on TIME's first weekend parade:

"At the end of the month, there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division... In the last six months, the huge rate base of Time magazine has been cut by almost 20 percent, the street date has been moved, and at the end of the month, the standard editorial model -- a centralized, well-paid cadre processing every bit of copy that comes in the door -- will be kaput..."

Carr explains: 'A tremendous amount of effort has been expended on TIME's new Web site, which makes its debut Monday."

Carr knocks the print magazine: "In its current state, a thin weekly on increasingly thin paper, TIME magazine is not much of a thing to behold."

Not that the New York Times is the picture of health of course, either financially or in terms of flawless journalistic credibility. The Feiler Faster Principle and the Long Tail of the Internet have both radically reshaped the media environment that both of these two old liberal warhorses compete in.

James Lileks once described how that world used to work:

The News was a venerable symbol of childhood’s World of Authority, like Life magazine and those boring but somehow important “White Paper” documentaries on TV. The news was handed down, not passed around. The news was bestowed, not shared.

The news wasn’t out there 24-7, swirling around, waiting for you to open a window; it came in predictable intervals in varying portions. The radio news in the morning came at eight, brought to us by Northwest Orient (gonnngggg) Airlines; nothing happened in the world for the rest of the day. Paul Harvey summed up the general pith of the global gist at noon, but he rarely broke news. (He will, nevertheless, outlast them all. Because he's radio.) The paper came at four. It was a careful, measured thing, having had all day to think about matters. Then came the evening news: black and white, bare sets, Authority Men in grey suits with black glasses and the sober look of judges who had left the robe at home for a day. Nothing happened for the rest of the night; the ten o’clock news managed to squeeze the entire world through the tiny aperture of All Things Fargo. The world, in general, kept its distance – thanks to Cronkite and the AP wire.

In this context, a Special Bulletin would make you soil your drawers. They didn’t break in for anything. When you heard the words “We interrupt this program,” the best you could hope for was an assassination.

The news was like oil – pumped from select locations, refined by a few big companies.

Unless you're in the demographic that's utterly frightened by the Internet (and you're not, since you're reading this), that's not at all how you get your news these days, is it?

Of course, it's not like these trends haven't been continuously predicted since about forty years ago. But as I've noted before, the mass media seems utterly resistant at times to new trends. But in the 1990s, as the rate of media change began to dramatically accelerate, the legacy media seemed to think that attacking newcomers to the information sphere was a better plan than actually preparing for the current environment.

Update: Related thoughts from Mickey Kaus:

Page C5: The NYT sells moneymaking TV stations to refocus on "synergies" between its struggling newspapers and "digitial businesses." .... "Synergies." Where' did I hear that word recently, in a media context? ... Now I remember. ... P.S.: Stock down 14%. Sell off of profitable assets. We're only just beginning to glimpse Pinch's visionary plan for victory! ...

In the meantime...

Well, eventually, at least. Kathy Shaidle writes:

There's plenty wrong with blogging: the fanboy kiss-assery; the me-too-ism; the wholesale adoption of clunky, unimaginative catch-phrases; the military "experts" whose firsthand experience under fire amounts to having yelled "You sunk my battleship" at their cousin in the rec room; the blogs that are nothing more than too-eager auditions for party hack employment; the rush to denounce unseen movies, unread books -- and to publicize outrageous incidents that turn out to be figments of someone else's imagination.

None of those real problems can, should or will be solved by some stuck up, dues-collecting, members-only acronym.

But look at how much the guild mentality has done for elite journalism!

Well, the Blogosphere world at least; Richard Fernandez has a superb, Den Beste-esque post on the topic at The Belmont Club.

For my own takes on the subject, follow the links, here.

The BBC kicks off the new year by inventing a new meme:

Lawrence Pollard (host): Hello, I'm Lawrence Pollard, and welcome to a very special edition of Culture Shock: four leading experts in the fields of technology, business, marketing and trend-prediction are here today to tell us what 2007 has in store for us. Our four prophets will give us a glimpse of the future, and they'll tell us each what they predict will be the defining trend of the next twelve months.

And without further delay, let me introduce our council of experts. ... Tim Jackson is also here in London. Tim is a business entrepreneur and writer, recently selected as one of the 100 Global Leaders of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum in Davos, no less. In addition, Business People in the New Economy recently voted him one of the most important people they would like to have in their contact book. He's in house, he's here. Tim, Thanks for coming. Again, briefly, what do you think will be shaping 2007?

Tim Jackson: I think the biggest trend is going to be something which I call "zombietiming." And it's exceptionally bad news for journalists, because it's a trend in which people out there on the Web will be checking facts of television, radio and newspapers, and hauling people to account when they get them wrong.

Not surprisingly, the audio of the show is at Zombietime itself.

This week, Austin Bay has an extended, one-on-one interview with Claudia Rosett on Kofi Anan, the Oil For Food Scandal, and the UN in general. It's great stuff, and very much worth a listen, particularly if you're not up to speed with incredible spadework that Claudia has performed to bring sunlight to the trainwreck that is the United Nations.

Hugh Hewitt writes:

My question is whether there is even one MSMer currently reporting from Iraq who was an Iraq or Afghan War veteran? Even one?

And why aren't there a hundred such veterans-turned-reporters?

And have the journalism schools bothered to track down the accomplished and returned warriors and ask them to lecture the journalists-in-the-making on how to cover the war?

One guest suggested MSM will not hire veterans because such a skills set will not produce the sorts of stories that advance the MSM's agenda, which is an anti-Administration, anti-war agenda. Perhaps he is correct.

But it is undeniably true that there are ways to cover the war well --to "flood the (war) zone"-- and to avoid the trap that that General Mattis describes the MSM as having fallen into.

There does not, however, seem to be the inclination. For in depth reporting on Iraq --and the war's many other fronts-- we will have to continue to rely on new media.

Absolutely. Only a stasist would say that information diversification is a bad thing.

I'm in the Admiral's Club at D-FW waiting for my flight back to San Jose, California; watch for regular blogging to resume tomorrow. In the meantime, Betsy Newmark and Pajamas have lots of thoughts and links regarding President Ford's death at age 93, and Hugh Hewitt has a devastating Socratic evisceration of the Wall Street Journal's anti-Blogosphere Joseph Rago, who fits Virginia Postrel's definition of a Stasist to a T.

Opinion Journal, which, of course, publishes a superb blog-style daily update written by James Taranto, has a screedy, ill-tempered attack on blogs up today written by Joseph Rago, an assistant editorial features editor at Opinion Journal's parent publication, The Wall Street Journal:

Blogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg's press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.

The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there's more of it, because anybody can chip in. There's more "choice"--and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Yes, there's no escaping Sturgeon's Law, is there?

What I don't understand is the attack on the format itself. A Blog simply refers to a Web-based format that allows for instantaneous and automatic uploading of new post; its contents are as varied as can be imagined, from superbly logical 10,000 word essays from Steven Den Beste in the mid-naughts, to the video-oriented content of sites such as Hot Air. (All the way to the day-in-the-life fair that originally inspired the name "Weblog", of course.)

Surprisingly, Rago is a man who sees bloggers as being virtually identical clones, despite working for a publication such as the Wall Street Journal, which published op-eds from early pioneer Glenn Reynolds during the 2004 election season. Ironically, though, Rago's piece is little indistinguishable from the the themes that tie together seven years worth of hit pieces on Internet-based journalists that I assembled last year.

Update: Further thoughts on Rago's piece, media bias in general, and a reminder that diversification isn't just for mutual funds anymore, from Ed Morrissey.

This week's Blog Week In Review podcast is now online:

This week’s program is a Blog Week special, with John Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson of Power Line. They talk about how and why they created their successful blog; the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report and its historical perspective as compared with Pearl Harbor, whose 65th anniversary was commemorated last week, and they predict next week’s events. As usual, Austin Bay hosts and moderates; Ed Driscoll produces.

Click here to listen!

Zombie Speaks! Shortly after witnessing the debacle outside the gates of San Quentin during Tookie Williams' much deserved execution in February, I dusted off Tom Wolfe's meme from The Right Stuff of the press as a hypocritical Victorian Gentleman and wrote:

To easily see the Victorian Gentlemanly style in action, pick up a copy of a paper like the San Francisco Chronicle. (Or scroll through their Website of course, but it's even more obvious "on dead tree".) Read their coverage, of say, the protests outside the gates of San Quentin during Tookie Williams' execution. Then peruse the photos of the same event at Zombietime.

I'm not sure if in the strictest definition, Zombietime is actually a blog, but it's very easy to say that Zombietime is one of the great additions to the Blogosphere. Its proprietor is interviewed here. Needless to say, read the whole thing.

"Fox News: 'You Report, We Repeat' -- Without Attribution"

He's the mystery man of the hour (well, half-hour, actually) on this week's Blog Week In Review, with Richard Fernandez, Glenn Reynolds, and host Austin Bay.

At the beginning of last August, Ace of Spades brilliantly predicted the scandals involving Jamil Hussein, and his immediate predecessor, Adnan Hajj, Reuters' bumbling would-be fauxtographer:

The American media is setting itself up for a massive scandal. One day, it will in fact come out that they are guilty of willful blindness and a deliberate avoidance of asking their stringers tough questions to maintain their own plausible deniability.

And they'll have to answer some hard questions, such as, "If you're so vigilant against being 'used' by the American government for its 'propaganda,' why are you so blithely nonchalant about being worse-used by America's enemies?"

Many of Steven Glass' colleagues looked back and wondered how they'd been fooled by his fabrications for so long. Apart from the outlandishness of some of his stories, he also had an uncanny knack for getting the Killer Quote that tied together a piece or summed it up in one pithy, bullet-point sentence. We should have known no one gets that lucky so consistently, they said later.

The American media seems to be an employing a possible Army of Steven Glasses, and yet they're more than willing to pretend they don't know what's going on so long as those suspiciously-dramatic front-page pictures keep coming back from the foreign stringers.

Click on this week's podcast to explore the latest development in the MSM's faux journalism from the Middle East.

TigerHawk is taking credit for being the source of the well-linked Mark Steyn/Ralph Peters Thunderdome rumble this weekend, adding:

Read TigerHawk today to anticipate the intramural blogospheric struggles of tomorrow.

Fair enough!

James Taranto explores the Mark Steyn/Ralph Peters smackdown yesterday and writes, "Think about this: Peters is predicting a rebirth of European fascism, possibly including genocide--and he's the optimist of this pair".

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "If you're in London, Jackie Danicki could use your help with a photo identification".

It's a race to the bottom in a special NASCAR HamNation!

One recent trend in the music software industry is the creation of development blogs, which, at their best, allow for interactivity with readers, describe new features of an upcoming product, and of course, build promotional interest before its launch.

Two recent development blogs have been for TC-Helicon's Harmony4 plug-in, which we reviewed in a lengthy post that was a recent Blogcritics' Editors' Pick of the Week, and Cakewalk's upcoming Project5 Version 2.5. We discussed an earlier version of Project5, here.

Cakewalk is also promoting their products via YouTube, such as this explanation of their Sonar recording program's ability to work with the 64-bit version of Windows, and its benefits:

As Hugh Hewitt discussed a couple of years ago in Blog, there's no reason why any industry couldn't adopt either of these promotional ideas to introduce new products to the marketplace--and there's no doubt, smarter companies will increasingly be doing just that.

David Brooks believes that the era of The Big Book that shapes discussion about society and where it's going is no more. Nick Schulz disagrees, and over at TCS Daily, counters with a list of recent books that have shaped the national conversation--including one by Brooks whose meme was so significant, we named a whole category after it.

In an article for The American, his own dramatically retooled magazine for the American Enterprise Institute, publisher James K. Glassman writes of James Webb, "Billed as a moderate, the new Virginia senator sounds more like an old-school leftist":

Webb was widely portrayed as a centrist in a race in a state that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964. But such terms--left, center, right--mean less and less. Virginia Postrel, in her superb 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies, distinguished between dynamists, who, with realism and enthusiasm, welcome the opportunities of a new world of technology and global exchange, and advocates of stasis, like Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, who fear and rail against the changes.  Writing in the journal under the headline "Class Struggle," Webb reveals himself to be a member of the latter group--a chip-on-the-shoulder populist whose framework of analysis is an obsession with class and power relationships.

Or as Jacob Weisberg recently dubbed them, "The Lou Dobbs Democrats".

Read the rest of Glassman's essay.

In a post yesterday, I noted that we can't count out the MSM and its power. But the new media is making remarkable strides. In the latest Blog Week In Review, Austin Bay interviews fellow Pajamahadeenites Andrew Marcus and Richard Miniter on their use of tiny videocams to cover the midterms. And Miniter in particular discusses covering Washington--where the mindset concerning the Internet is very much like Larry King's--for an online new agency.

The Anchoress, Fausta, and (of course) Pajamas are loaded with links to keep you busy while waiting for the voting machines--whatever kind they are--to open.

And in the exact opposite of those posts--Bill Whittle is back with another long, long post, with very, very few links: he's written 8,497 words; read every one of them.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt writes:

I will be up early looking for the first wave of Beltway-Manhatten media machine reports of doom for the Republicans and waves for the Democrats.

Don't believe a word of it.

And there will be many, many early words tomorrow, and no doubt, more than a few exit polls (real or imagined, ala 2004's election day) leaked, despite the networks' best promises to the contrary.

The Pajamas Blog Week In Review election preview podcast should be up later today at this link. If the anticipation is too much for you and you need an additonal 10ccs of pre-election political podcasting while you're waiting, tune into my interview with Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayward over at TCS Daily, or this podcast with Lorie Byrd of WizBangBlog.com, John Hawkins of RightWingNews.com, Scott Elliott of ElectionProjection.com and Richard Ross of ConservativeswithAttitude.com.

(Found via Betsy Newmark.)

This just in: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but our releasing of the details of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program could benefit Iran.

If that doesn't sound internally consistent to you at first glance, you're not alone. But that seems to be the big November surprise from The New York Times, which Jim Geraghty makes sense out of. Certainly more sense than Times does; as Geraghty writes:

I think the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a "Boy, did Bush screw up" meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down the "there was no threat in Iraq" meme, once and for all. Because obviously, Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh... al-Qaeda.

The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivous to it.

The antiwar crowd is going to have to argue that the information somehow wasn't dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous posted on the Internet. It doesn't work. It can't be both no threat to America and yet also somehow a threat to America once it's in the hands of Iran. Game, set, and match.

Read the whole thing.

As John Stephenson writes, "The New York Times confirms that in 2002 Saddam Hussein’s 'scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away:'" Which hands a nice "See I told you so" moment not just to President Bush, but to to Rick Santorum, though it may be too late for his campaign to benefit from it.

Update: Ed Morrissey adds, " So I Guess The FMSO [Foreign Military Studies Office] Documents Are Legit":

This is apparently the Times' November surprise, but it's a surprising one indeed. The Times has just authenticated the entire collection of memos, some of which give very detailed accounts of Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations. Just this past Monday, I posted a memo which showed that the Saddam regime actively coordinated with Palestinian terrorists in the PFLP as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On September 20th, I reposted a translation of an IIS memo written four days after 9/11 that worried the US would discover Iraq's ties to Osama bin Laden.

Read the rest.

More: If--and that's a big if--this story does indeed occur before the election, hasn't the Times rather nicely paved the way for it?

"Glenn, you describe a man that's simultaneously trapped in the past, and simultaneously stuck on stupid. Is that a fair assessment?"

"Yeah".

--Austin Bay and Glenn Reynolds, discussing the American military's favorite senator, in this week's Pajamas Media Blog Week In Review podcast, coming tomorrow.

Update: Tammy Bruce, the third participant in this week's podcast, and one of the great Bellicose Women, to borrow from one of Glenn's phrases, is not at all surprised at this development, though Senator Kerry probably would be.

Blogcritics has undergone a dramatic facelift. Click here for the new look; click here to peruse my occasional contributions to the site, which date back to its humble start back in 2002--a millennia in Blogosphere time!

Michelle Malkin interviews Mark Steyn on America Alone.

Mary Katharine Ham goes video:

Funny, slickly produced, and an utterly charming hostess: how long before this gets slapped with a warning label by YouTube?

Austin Bay, whose "Blog Week In Review" podcast I produce, has a great review of Mark Steyn's new book, America Alone, over at Town Hall.com:

Mark Steyn notes in his new book, "America Alone" (Regnery Publishing), "The end of the world's nighness isn't something you'd want to set your watch by. "

Steyn provides a collection of the dire predictions made by "Chicken Little's eminent successors."

Steyn's list includes:

-- 1968, in "The Population Bomb," distinguished scientist Paul Ehrlich declared, "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

-- 1972, in "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.

-- 1976, Lowell Ponte published a huge bestseller called "The Cooling: Has the New Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive?"

-- 1977, Jimmy Carter confidently predicted that "we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade."

"None of these things occurred," Steyn writes. "Contrary to the doom-mongers' predictions, millions didn't starve."

Steyn, however, isn't against gloomy prognostications, per se. In fact, "America Alone" is a doom book of a peculiar sort -- it's insistently witty and trenchantly written. Both are achievements, given the core subject matter: American demographic success and vitality (fecundity, folks) compared to the demographic decline of other democracies and modern, industrialized nations.

That's a topic that Steyn explores further on his own Website, in a timely excerpt from his new book, and if you haven't listened to it yet, click here for my own interview with Steyn over at TCS Daily.

Incidentally, this week's "Blog Week In Review" will have an interview with the author of another important book on the War On Terror, whose theme has a decidedly different slant than Steyn's. Watch for details here and the Pajamas mothersite.

Hollywood Reporter reports that when Cory Lidle's private plane "crashed into an Upper East Side apartment building on Wednesday, Fox News Channel delivered early live video to its viewers from the crash site using a hand-held mobile phone souped up with streaming video".

Around 2000, long before anyone heard of the Blogosphere, I actually did an article on the future of news gathering for a short-lived magazine for cell phone users in England. Click here for a reprint.

Dean Barnett looks back on his time with former Miss America, Vanessa Williams.

(Unfortunately, Ms. Williams could not be reached for her thoughts on Mr. Barnett. Or if she has any.)

Surely this development is all Bush's fault, and no doubt, Kofi Annan is deeply concerned, as yet another player in the global arms race goes nuclear. Well, the Blogosphere's arms race, at least...

Reponding to pressure from McCornthyism, Roger L. Simon comes clean...

Update: The Anchoress outs herself as well, using words that begin with F and--gasp!--even H--in the process!

Sorry for the lack of posts today--we recorded the Pajamas Blog Week In Review show early today, and I'm the process of assembling and mixing it down. Watch for it to go live tomorrow--and tune in for one lively show.

On August 28th, 2004 I contrasted how Kerry and the Swift Vets viewed the modern demassified media enviroment. First up, a look at the ol' Winter Soldier:

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?

In contrast, while they were refighting the 1972-era Kerry's battles against America, the Swift Vets had an infinitely better command of the modern media world than the Senator's campaign team:

Ironically though, while the Swift Boat Vets have been fighting Kerry over the events of Vietnam and immediately afterwards, they've demonstrated that they understand how the new media works far better than his campaign does. The anonymous staffer that Charles quotes above is quite right: initially, the dino-media didn't have the nerve to go after their man with these charges. But they've lost their role as information gatekeepers. And the Swift Boat Vets seem to understand that intuitively.

"The Fix", The Washington Post's politics blog agrees that the Kerry Camp simply didn't understand today's decentralized media world:

While Kerry's foibles have been well-documented, Harris and Halperin propose that the man most responsible for the Massachusetts senator's defeat was not the candidate but rather Matt Drudge -- founder of the widely read Drudge Report.

Harris and Halperin call Drudge the "single most influential purveyor of information about American politics" and go on to add: "Drudge, with his droll Dickensian name, was not the only media or political agent whose actions led to John Kerry's defeat. But his role placed him at the center of the game -- a New Media World Order in which Drudge was the most potent player in the process and a personifications of the dynamic that did Kerry in."

How was Drudge so influential? By serving as the online platform for carefully planned leaks of damaging information -- some of it personal, some of it professional -- that effectively defined Kerry negatively in the eyes of the voting public.

Example: Kerry got his haircut at a pricey Washington salon? First reported by Drudge.

One more: Negative comments by Kerry about the city of Dubuque? First reported by Drudge two days before Kerry made his first visit to Iowa as a presidential candidate.

Harris and Halperin write: "Presidential campaigns are about storytelling. A winning presidential campaign presents the candidate's life story to voters. A losing campaign allows someone else to frame that story."

Wise words for any candidate considering the 2008 race.

While Drudge's role as a media hub shouldn't be undersold, Harris and Halperin themselves don't seem to grasp the Long Tail of the Blogosphere: between hundreds of bloggers, and the Swift Vets' ability to use the Internet to end-run the legacy media, Kerry suffered a death by a thousand cuts, because he was severely damaged goods long before he won the nomation. As I wrote earlier in August of 2004:

This isn't Bill Clinton's shadowy Whitewater dealings and other murkiness from his salad days as an Arkansas governor. Then-Naval lieutenant Kerry led a remarkably well documented--and even audio and videotaped life in the early 1970s. Didn't he think this material would surface if he chose to run for the presidency? And if so, why did he choose to run so much on his four months in Vietnam, and only spend 26 seconds(!) on his 20 years in the Senate in his acceptance speech at the DNC?

As Glenn Reynolds wrote yesterday about the swift boat vets' ad, "Kerry played right into this with all the stuff about Vietnam and medals".

To have been as high profile, inflamatory, and as well documented as Kerry was in the early 1970s, and not expect it to be used against you if you ran for the presidency seems like an astonishing lack of understanding of the New, New Journalism, to coin a phrase.

Update: Of course, it isn't just presidential candidates and their aides who don't get the Internet. Stephen Spriuell, who runs National Review Online's Media Blog, patiently explains to befuddled journalists assigned to cover the Foley scandal how the Internet works, a subject they haven't understood since, well, the early days of The Drudge Report. Spruiell writes:

I sympathize with reporters who have to explain complicated stories in a small amount of space or time. But seriously: How hard is it to explain the difference between an e-mail and an IM?

Ask Mary Mapes: she didn't even know who the players were on the Internet during the 2004 presidential election, let alone the difference between emails and IMs. And as Spruiell has witnessed firsthand, she's far from the only cyber-clueless member of the legacy media.

The last sentence of this is a classic:

Ten years after he created Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes says he still avoids mentioning his place of employment in certain circles.

"It's just not worth going through the hassle at an elite party," he says. And: "The only reason I know we're doing the right thing is that we're widely criticized." And: "I've never felt out of the mainstream in America. I've felt out of the mainstream at Le Cirque."

Via Stephen Spruiell, who has more thoughts on Fox's tenth anniversary, as does Betsy Newmark.

And incidentally, I think Jonah Goldberg had a great take on Fox a couple of years ago, when he wrote, "at least one of the things that has made Fox News successful isn't that it's right-wing, it is that it's populist." The channel openly roots for the U.S., which, frankly, is more than you can say about the other television news networks.

(At least at the moment.)

In Tech Central Station article titled, "Mediamorphosis", Alvaro Vargas Llosa looks at how poorly newspapers have handled their transition from a dead tree to a digital medium:

I remember sitting round a table in my capacity as op-ed page editor for one of the Knight-Ridder papers in the early 1990s, listening to Tony Ridder, the chief executive, explain that technology was rendering newspapers as we knew them obsolete. We needed to adapt to the coming revolution: digital, interactive, customized information flows. Twelve years later, Ridder is the victim of what he so eloquently predicted. Forced by Private Capital Management, an important shareholder, he had to agree to the sale of the empire after trying all the options -- cutting costs, buying back shares, dumping a few papers. And off went Knight-Ridder, with its 32 papers and a combined circulation of 3.7 million, to the McClatchy Co.

With exceptions such as China and India, the (slow) decline of the newspaper business is a worldwide trend. The big mistake that newspapers in America, Europe and Latin America have made in response to the new environment is to treat this trend as a financial and a technological challenge rather than a cultural phenomenon.

The newspaper industry's response over the past decade -- and Knight-Ridder is a good example, but not the only one -- has consisted mainly of two things: restructuring finances and providing online versions of print products. Everything else -- including the creation of new businesses under their famed brands or going into cable TV -- was intended to salvage the traditional way of providing news. The result is, well, the "whodunit" yell.

The cultural change taking place with regard to information amounts to a decentralization of power. Steve Greenhut of The Orange County Register in Southern California put it nicely when he wrote that "this is the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation for the media, where every man can become his own pope, or in this case his own publisher.''

Matt Drudge's debut instantly made dead-tree newspapers (and television news) a legacy medium. Which is why it wasn't at all coincidental how viciously dead-tree reporters attacked* the first of their successors. And even though Drudge's politics (more or less conservative) were very different from theirs, it's worth remembering that the media devoted very little--if any--space in their pages to discuss the long-term ramifications of what his debut signified.

* Note careful avoidance of the D-Word!

Peggy Noonan praises the freedom of choice that demassifying mass media has brought us, while simultaneously exploring its downside:

Forty and 50 years ago, mainstream liberal media executives--middle-aged men who fought in Tarawa or Chosin, went to Cornell, and sat next to the man in the gray flannel suit on the train to the city, who hoisted a few in the bar car, and got off at Greenwich or Cos Cob, Conn.--those great old liberals had some great things in them.

One was a high-minded interest in imposing certain standards of culture on the American people. They actually took it as part of their mission to elevate the country. And from this came..."Omnibus."

When I was a child of 8 or so I looked up at the TV one day and saw a man cry, "My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse!" He was on a field of battle, surrounded by mud and loss. I was riveted. Later a man came on the screen and said, "Thank you for watching Shakespeare's 'Richard III.' " And I thought, as a little American child: That was something, I gotta find out what a Shakespeare is.

I got that from "Omnibus."

Those old men on the train--they were strangers, but in the age of media a stranger can change your life.

And because the men on the train had one boss, who shared their vision--he didn't want to be embarrassed that his legacy was "My Mother the Car"--and because the networks had limited competition, the pressure to live or die by ratings was not so intense as today. The competition for ad dollars wasn't so killer. They could afford an indulgence. The result was a real public service.

Now the man on the train is a relic, and no one is saying, "As the lucky holders of a broadcast license we have a responsibility to pass on the jewels of our culture to the young." In a competitive environment that would be a ticket to corporate oblivion at every network, including Fox.

TV is still great, in some ways better than ever. Freedom works.

And yet. When we deposed the old guy on the train, it wasn't all gain. No longer would the old liberals get to impose their vision. But what took its place was programming for the lowest common denominator. Things that don't make you reach. Things you don't want to teach. Eating worms on air-crash island with "Jackass."

I spoke with a network producer a few weeks ago, an old warhorse who was trying to explain his frustration at the current ratings race. He wrestled around the subject, and I cut with rude words to what I thought he was saying. "You mean it's gone from the dictatorship of a liberal elite to the dictatorship of the retarded."
Yes, he said. And it's not progress.

When liberals miss something in the media, that's what they should be missing. Not a unity that never existed but standards that were high. When conservatives say there's nothing to miss, they're wrong. We lost some bias, but we lost some standards, too.

Betsy Newmark asks, "Why be angry at Fox News"?

But even if you grant that Fox is unequivocably conservative, they're a small, small part of the overall viewership of nightly news. And, I suspect that Noonan is quite correct - the people who are watching Fox regularly are the ones who are already going to vote Republican. So, why should liberals in New York City be so outraged by their watching a conservative news channel? Could Peggy be right that they just resent having had to give up their monopoly on news dispersal to talk radio, Fox, and the internet? They're just ticked off that the mainstream media's barricades have been breached.

In the previous post, I noted the elite media's derision when Matt Drudge arrived on the scene as the first journalistic star created solely via Internet popularity. But I've always found their astonishment at the time so strange. Or as I wrote a year ago:

It's weirdly ironic--despite the fact that they're in the news business, the media are often the last to spot a realignment of their own industry. Witness how the Big Three networks never expected cable TV's rise in the early to mid-1980s, the first in a series of (to borrow Alvin Toffler's word), demassifications. The next was Rush Limbaugh and talk radio's rise during the same period the following decade, equally unexpected. Witness how Matt Drudge took newspaper journalists all by surprise, even though he shouldn't have: the Internet had existed since 1969, the World Wide Web, which runs on it, since the early-1990s, and it was due for a media celebrity of its own. And others were destined to follow, as Weblogs make self-publishing a breeze.

Liberals have had a commercial television medium that suited their biases for 50 years--a medium which titled further and further to the left beginning in the late 1960s as they did, and whose on-air representatives derided President Reagan's election in 1980 as they did, and the Republican Congress' Contract With America in 1994, as they did. Why on earth should they be so surprised that (a) conservatives would want at least one channel that reflected their worldview as well, and (b) someone was finally willing to give them one in the 1990s, once he saw an opportunity to make a profit?

A few years before the Blogosphere took off, Matt Drudge arrived on the scene as its harbinger. He was of course, instantly reviled by elite liberal journalists, who were feeling--at least subliminally--the ground shifting under their feet. But there was even earlier one-man news gatherer whom they did respect, immensely. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in January of 2000:

I’m thinking of a journalist who works alone, without editors, accountable to no one. Many feel he has an ax to grind, but he is read furtively by government workers and journalists. Often, he levels wild accusations against public officials of broad conspiracies he cannot prove. He lifts much of his material from other publications and adds his own interpretation. He calls the mainstream press "collaborationists" with the President.

Can you guess? Most people today would say Matt Drudge, the Internet columnist. But Drudge evokes nothing but scorn from the establishment press, while the guy I’m thinking of was called a "journalist’s journalist" by ABC’s Peter Jennings. The Los Angeles Times hailed him as "the conscience of investigative journalism." The New York Times’ Anthony Lewis praised him as "the reporter who taught us to penetrate the squid-ink of official truth."

His name was I.F. Stone (1907-1989), and he won fame editing, writing, and publishing I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Unlike Drudge, Stone was a man of the Left, labeling himself a "Jeffersonian Marxist."

A new biography of Stone by Myra MacPherson, reviewed in the New York Times weekend, labels Stone as a willing dupe of the KGB. Or as John Podhoretz writes:

A dozen years ago Stone's reputation was rocked when a retired KGB officer seemed to finger Stone as a paid agent of the Soviet Union. MacPherson evidently went to great pains to disprove this charge, and in her book she triumphantly claims to have done so. But, as Paul Berman explains in a fascinating review of her book (and a new collection of Stone's writing), MacPherson "seems not to notice that in her ardor to rescue Stone from his enemies, she has yanked the rope a little too firmly and has accidentally hanged the man."

* * *

So Stone didn't work for the totalitarian government in Moscow. He merely "performed tasks" for the Soviet Union for free, out of conviction. I confess that in the past, I have described Stone as a paid agent. That wasn't true. What he was, though, was every bit as despicable.

Read the rest.

Update: A Cornerite comes to Izzy's defense.

Another Update: "Of course, everyone is allowed to change his mind. What was missing from Stone during his lifetime was some candor about what made him swerve so radically from one view of Israel to another. But when we think back on Stone's Soviet boosterism, even during the worst of Stalin's crimes, we are reminded that candor was not always his strong suit."

Senator Joseph Lieberman sits down to a video (and audio) podcast with maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon.

Hugh Hewitt and Ed Morrissey are defending Keith Olbermann--and I agree with them.

The Anchoress's recent thoughts on civility are well worth re-reading; maybe someone should email a link to them to The New York Post.

Update: The Post's comments are even more despicable than at first glance: Ed Morrissey updates his blog with a reminder that the Post itself was victim of an anthrax mailing in September of 2001; one of the paper's mailroom employees required treatment in a nearby hospital.

Another Update: In another example of dogs and cats blogging together, the Pajamas motherblog is praising Olbermann's network for its recent series of advertisements honoring our soldiers in Iraq.

INDC Journal highlights the Pajamas Media panel at DC's National Press Club:

A blogger from the New York Times shot the panelists some skeptical questions, one asking if blogging increased partisanship because people could "choose news" that fit a worldview. Best counter-argument**:

"Like the people who read the New York Times?" -- Val Prieto.

Heh, as the panel's precision-opticalled antennae-less moderator is wont to say.

The Anchoress has a brilliant idea for a post: using President Clinton's appearance on Fox this weekend as a metric for assessing the power of two mediums: the legacy media and its successor:

Blogs have made inroads, but not enough, and all of their fact-checking amounts (in the eyes of the MSM) to little more than soundwaves in the echo chamber. “One side” of the partisan chasm has the whole story and sits nearly impotent with it, while the other has the “preferred story,” accredited and promoted by the “mediating intelligences,” who still (and will for the foreseeable future) hold the largest sway over public opinion, by sheer dint of their control of public knowledge.

The blogs did an incredible job of fact-checking Clinton - they were quick and accurate - they found files of articles from the NY Times and the WaPo utterly dismantling Clinton’s assertions. They floated the video from NBC News (not a known right-wing establishment) suggesting we had OBL more than “in our sites.” But it will be to little effect, I fear. In subsequent news reports, the “mediating intelligences” have not picked up a bit of the analysis, have not used any of the facts easily available on hundreds of blogs.

Not the right story, you see. Clinton is not the right president to prove a “liar.” The press wants desperately to bring down a president, but Clinton is not the one. And so, facts-schmacts, the only facts that matter are the ones the master can pull out of thin air.

And if that doesn’t demonstrate, more than anything, that we are living in an age of diabolical disorientation, where up is down (the excellent economic news is bad) and right is wrong (men who served with John Kerry know nothing about him) and truths are lies, (US policy from 1998 on was regime change in Iraq, but only until we did it) I don’t know what can.

I feel no great thrill here to see Clinton in a purple rage, nor to see how brilliantly some parts of the blogosphere responded, because in the end our limited audience is still been trumped by the vast and attention-span-challenged audience of the MSM, who click on, absorb a thirty second “Clinton good, others bad” sound bite and click out, certain they’ve got the information they need.

The blogosphere is growing in effectiveness. Blog commentary is increasingly dependable, professional and penetrating, and the fact-checking is above reproach, but our effectiveness is still limited.

I think that's exactly right, and the Achoress's denouement dovetails nicely with some thoughts Peggy Noonan had this past summer, when she compared the strength of Democrats currently in office to the infinitely more powerful strength of Democrats permanently manning newspaper op-ed pages.

Update: Here's another metric for the health of the Blogosphere: the Senate Majority Leader praises "the bipartisan citizen journalism of the blogosphere" for its role in passing the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act--a.k.a., the Porkbusters Act.

All sorts of doings on this week's Blog Week In Review show; we apparently were Mark Steyn's first-ever podcast; he discussed his new book America Alone as special guest this week.

The book itself is exceptional, and I've been devouring my review copy. As Hugh Hewitt suggests, it's one of a handful of essential books for understanding the War On Terror, why we're fighting it in such a polite, reserved-style when compared with previous wars, and, as the title suggests, why America--along with, currently, a handful of staunch allies--is increasingly on its own in an ever-more appeasement-crazed world.

The other big news is that Blog Week In Review is now sponsored by Volvo. But does this mean we risk being named in Bill Lockyer's lawsuit against seemingly every automobile manufacturer on the planet...?

Update: Bumped to top of the page.