News and/or Media
More News Cataloging
Friday, April 7th, 2006OK, so let me see if I get this straight:
Former Ambassador, Joe Wilson, criticizes the Bush administration over the Iraq war. In response, the administartion declassifies portions of a secret National Intelligence Estimate, which provides (or so they say, anyway) historical context for why we went into Iraq. The President, via the Vice President, authorizes Lewis “Scooter” Libby to release this newly declassified information to Judith Miller of the New York Times. This being the same Scooter Libby who is accused of leaking the name of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, to the same Judith Miller of the (same) New York Times.
What a fantastic opportunity to news catalog: we can write about this story and attribute signifigance to it by mentioning it along side a story that’s already been established as important (the Valerie Plame leak), and it will wind up on the front page of most major newspapers.
Here’s how we do it: First, we describe the facts of the story. Then, we summarize the facts of the Valerie Plame story, pointing out that many of the same people are involved. Then, in paragraph SEVEN, we say this:
The court documents did not say that Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Plame’s identity.
After that, we can quote a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jane Harman, who calls the president the “leaker in chief.” Leaving press secretary Scott McClellan to point out that there’s a huge difference between the President declassifying information and someone leaking classified information to the press (as was the case with Valerie Plame, and also, as McClellan points out, with the information about the NSA wiretapping program). McClellan says:
“Democrats who refuse to acknowledge that distinction are simply engaging in crass politics.”
Which is absolutely right. Of course, he says it in the last paragrpah of the story.
Final result: a large percentage of the people who read this will walk away convinced that George W. Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak Valerie Plame’s name to the New York Times.
Categories: News and/or Media, Political Rantings | 1 Comment »
Da Vinci Code Paranoia
Sunday, April 2nd, 2006I’m in North Carolina on business. It’s 11PM, and I turned on FOX to watch Seinfeld. Except in North Carolina, you don’t get Seinfeld at 11PM, you get Jerry Falwell.
Now I’m not disparaging anyone’s faith here, but I gotta tell you – this show is funnier than Seinfeld. The topic of tonight’s show is “Disparaging the Da Vinci Code.” I can’t type fast enough to actually quote him, but here’s a paraphrase of what he said:
Dan Brown has written a book called the Da Vince Code, which has sold 30 million copies, and Ron Howard has made a movie about it that will open on May 19th. The book claims that Jesus Christ was not God, that he didn’t claim to be God, that he was human, that he married Mary Magdalene and had children with her, and that those children became the kings and queens of France. It claims that Jesus was human, and that Mary Magdalene was divine. This book is allegedly a novel, but we’re wondering if it’s really a mix of fact and fiction, presented in a way that makes one think all of it is true, when really, it’s not true at all. That’s why we’re offering a DVD set for four easy installments of $29.99, that explains all of the things in The Da Vince Code that aren’t true.
So to review: The book CLAIMS to be a novel. But this claim is deceiving, since what it really is is a book that merges facts and fiction in a way that sounds like fact, but really isn’t true. In other words, it’s A NOVEL. It’s almost like they wish Dan Brown was claiming it were true so they could prove him wrong.
One problem: he’s not claiming that. I’ve never read a single thing from Dan Brown or anyone connected to him claiming that the book is true. It was written as a novel and sold as a novel. The only claim that Brown makes is that the secret societies he mentions actually existed, as do all of the architecture, artwork, etc. that he references. None of this is inconsistent with the book being a fictional novel.
Meanwhile, in desperate attempts to counter these (admittedly) false claims, Falwell and friends keep plugging the book and the movie (all the while plugging their DVD set to debunk them).
Mark my words: this movie is going to be the next Titanic. It’s going to make a billion dollars. And the irony is, a lot of its business is going to be driven by these paranoid religious folks who seem so desparate to prove to us what we already know – that it’s just a story.
And what a story it is…
Categories: News and/or Media | 2 Comments »
The Incredible Disappearing Lawsuit
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006Via John Scalzi:
A company called KinderStart.com is suing Google because their page rank dropped dramatically, causing a 70% drop in their viewership.
Scalzi has a lot to say about the merits of the suit, which I’ll skip over here. But check this out: the lawsuit will likely get a lot of press, including online press. You’ve gotta assume that some portion of those articles will include hyperlinks to both Google and KinderStart. Depending on the popularity of the news sources that provide those links, KinderStart’s PageRank will increase, due to the presence of hyperlinks from well visited sites. So basically, as the story gets more coverage, the content of the lawsuit itself diminishes.
Now, what happens if all this attention raises the PageRank to the point where they drop the suit? Then the articles get archived, life moves on, and the PageRank drops. What does KinderStart do then? Sue again?
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
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Experimenting with the Link Exchange
Thursday, September 1st, 2005I got an email from the folks who run The FraudWatcher network. They’ve linked one of my blog entries (What Prevents Crime?) to one of their pages, and have asked me to link back to them. OK, here goes:
Fraud – Crime In Aruba
Description: Fraud Prevention, Information and News about Fraud Online
The page I’m linking to has some formatting issues at best, and at worst reads like it’s written for search engines to find rather than humans (lots of half sentences, no line breaks, etc.). My links is one of 81 links listed at the bottom of the page as “Other Websites.” Also, they want me to “register” my reciprocal link, or they’ll de-link me from their site. On the upside, the e-mail claims they get 1,000 hits a day, and at this point, I’m basically a traffic whore, so I’ll take whatever I can find. If you’re reading this and you came from that site, do me a favor? Drop me a comment on this post & tell me what you think of their site (and mine, if you like). I’m curious if this is a scam or a legitimate operation.
And for the record: I’ve been to Aruba four times in the last five years. The horrible events concerning Natalee Holloway aside, I’ve never seen anything on the island that even comes close to crime, let alone the crime waves and drug problems referenced on the FraudWatcher site. Then again, I spend 100% of my time going from resort complex to resort complex (beach, casinos, restaurants, etc.), so maybe I’d have worse (better?) luck with crime if I strayed off the beaten path a little.
Also, my parents, my wife and I took our kids to Carlos and Charlie’s last year to celebrate Brandon’s second birthday (pictures here – check out the last two for the birthday festivities). We had a great time. And although the restaurant is where Ms. Holloway was before she encountered trouble, and nothing unusual or illegal happened at the restaurant, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to hear that some percentage of people now consider it unsafe. Such is life on the perception/reality continuum.
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Real-time London Tube Disruption Map
Friday, July 22nd, 2005For those who are interested/affected, the London Tube has a map online that shows disruption status in real-time.
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Balancing the Scales: An Example of Bad Reporting
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005Following up on my post about good, balanced reporting from Reuters, here’s an article on the same topic from the New York Times (via Jeff Jarvis). The title, “Some Iraqis Optimistic About Sovereignty,” is encouraging. But then we begin to read:
Paragraph 1:
“When [an Iraqi butcher was] asked what he thought about life in Iraq . . . he responded with a blast of invective as heated as the sunbaked sidewalks [of] Baghdad.”
Paragraph 2:
“What sovereignty are you talking about? How can you even call it sovereignty? We have thousands of occupation troops in this country and you talk about sovereignty? Enough! Iraq is nothing but an American base.”
Paragraph 4:
“Both of those governments have been rubbish. How can you call them governments when they were imposed from abroad? Those governments and their ministers are just puppets. They are all spies, for Iran and the Kurds. I tell you, Saddam did the right thing when he used chemical weapons against the Kurds.”
Paragraph 7:
“[A New York Times survey] turned up plenty of people who bridled over the issues that have eroded support for the American presence in Iraq, from the relentless violence to doubts about the degree of authority vested in Iraqi ministers to faltering supplies of electricity and water and woeful inadequacies in hospitals and schools. There were many, too, especially among Sunni Arabs, who favored a withdrawal of American troops and the resumption of authority by an Iraqi government that is not dependent on foreign troops.”
Perhaps they had the wrong title? Ah wait, here it is. In Paragraph 8:
“But perhaps more striking, considering the huge gap between the hopes stirred when American troops captured Baghdad in April 2003 and the grim realities now, were the number of Iraqis who expressed a more patient view. Among those people, the disappointments and privations have been offset by an appreciation of both the progress toward supplanting the dictatorship of Mr. Hussein with a nascent democratic system and the need for American troops to remain here in sufficient numbers to allow the system to mature.”
The article goes on to quote several folks who strike a very similar tone to those in the Reuters article – we want the Americans to leave, but we’re grateful for what they did and understand why they’re still here. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re improving. etc.
It’s a lesson in strawmen:
Step 1: Take a survey and get surprising results.
Step 2: Interview a somewhat hysterical person (Saddam did the right thing when he gassed the Kurds? Please…) to imply that he represents the norm.
Step 3: Give the results of the survey, and characterize them as a gap between the picture you just painted and what the survey actually shows.
I guess it’s better than just lying about it.
But not much…
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An Example of Good Reporting
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005I was impressed by this Reuters article on the President’s speech last night:
Many Iraqis in the capital, weary after more than two years of bloodshed and economic dislocation, view U.S. troops with a degree of mistrust but also as a bulwark against sectarian violence they fear might trigger civil war if they left.
Grateful, in the main, for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, many are dismayed by what they see as heavy-handed tactics and a failure by the U.S. occupiers to prevent Iraq becoming a new haven for foreign Islamists in the chaos that followed Saddam.
It goes on to quote several Iraqi citizens, all of whom have either rational criticisms of the U.S. (“They didn’t come to Iraq for the sake of the Iraqi people. Their aim was to deflect terrorism from their own country.”) or show a degree of understanding about our purpose there (“Bush and America decided to help the Iraqi people and that is in our interest.”)
It also discusses the insurgency in terms of the violence it’s causing (“Violence has worsened sharply in Iraq since the Shi’ite- and Kurd-led government took power two months ago”), as well as the political effect it’s having (“[A] Sunni leader. . . launched a new political movement, saying he aimed to give a voice to figures from the ‘legitimate Iraqi resistance.’).
All of the hysteria I’ve read on both sides (“The war is a total failure” vs. “the media doesn’t cover things fairly”) lead me to believe that this article probably reflects the actual tone of what’s going on out there, and suggests that the author has no personal or political axe to grind.
I hope to see more like it…
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The Vast Algorithmic Conspiracy
Wednesday, June 15th, 2005Internetweek is complaining once again about Google News:
When America Online announced this week that it would give IM users free email, Google News was all over the story.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with a link to InformationWeek.com were such lesser-known technology news sites as Techtree.com, Netimperative, and Kashar News from Pakistan. At one point in the coverage of IBM’s attempt to simulate a brain, gossip site TheBosh.com got the lead spot over articles from News.com and Forbes. In a real puzzler, Google ran verbatim copies of a “puppy” Linux from five different sources, including in Singapore and Australia, without linking to the original story file on TechWeb.com.
All in a typical day’s work at Google News. The company–so beloved as a search engine for its wide range and knack for always knowing the most relevant Web pages–often does just the opposite when it comes to selecting stories for its news pages. Sources that would be considered authoritative brush up against stories from Web sites most people have never heard of, with no clue about which one is a higher quality than another, or a so-called “expert” site, which Google is so fond of making much of in the pure search-engine side of its business.
Right tool for the job, guys. Right tool for the job.
Google News is not where you go when you want authoritative sources for news. It’s where you go when you want to see a wide variety of sources with a wide variety of opinions. The goal of algorithm-based editing is to eliminate the advantage of the big guys, and show the user the most relevant stories based on content, rather than reputation.
I turn to it when the mainstream media seems to have reached an opinion about a story, and I’m not sure the opinion is universally shared. For instance, reading about Michael Jackson’s recent acquittal in the MSM, one gets the sense that he was really guilty, but got away with it due to incompetence on the prosecutor’s part and/or his status as a celebrity. Turning to Google News (with sources such as Toronto’s Fashion Monitor, AZ Central.com, the London Mirror, and Workers World), I learn that most of the world is focusing on the fact that he’s sworn off sleeping with children, that the prosecutor is having a hard time dealing with the defeat, that the accuser’s family is rumored to be considering a civil suit (where the real money is, I guess – cf. the O.J. Simpson trial), and a discussion about whether MJ can resurrect his music career after the trial.
All of this adds a certain texture to the story that you won’t find on Reuters.com or nytimes.com. I’d encourage you to check out the recent Newsweek hubbub, and the war in Iraq on Google News as well. A lot of the stories/opinions are the same, of course, but there’s definitely a diversity there that you don’t see elsewhere.
Bottom line: most of us are smart enough to look at the article and the source before determining what to believe. And depending on the subject matter, a reporter at the Wyoming News might be more interesting to read than the editor of the Washington Post.
Categories: News and/or Media, Tech Talk | 2 Comments »
Andy Warhol – Nazi Sympathizer?
Sunday, June 5th, 2005James Lileks claims he coined the phrase, “In the Future, Everyone will be Hitler.” I, for one, am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But this page is just a beautiful proof of how right he is…
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News cataloging, Part Deux
Friday, May 20th, 2005OK, so they’ve got pictures of Saddam Hussein in his underwear. Here’s what his lawyer said:
“In our opinion this is a violation of all international agreements and human dignity, therefore we must sue the people responsible and the providers of these pictures, because if you look closely you can see that they were taken from his prison cell,” lawyer Ziad Khasawneh of Saddam’s defense team said.
“This is considered as another Abu Ghraib and we will take the necessary legal actions which we have already started,” he told Reuters in Amman.
Fine. Sue ’em. I hope he wins. Whoever published these pictures was being infantile and gets what he deserves. But this was no Abu Ghraib.
Yes, publicly displaying pictures of him in his underwear is embarrasing. But it’s junior high-school embarassing. He wasn’t being humiliated by his captors like the Abu Ghraib detainees were. In fact, he wasn’t being mistreated at all. What was awful about Abu Ghraib was what they were doing, not the fact that they photographed it.
Nonetheless, Mr. Khasawneh knows that this will only be an amusing side-story unless he can get it lumped into the “America Absuses Prisoners” meme, so it gets repeated over & over again by those who wish us harm.
Categories: News and/or Media | 4 Comments »