Category: Media

For fans of The Amazing Race, here’s a couple of comments that the charming Flo posted on the Television Without Pity message board and subsequently deleted:

florinka
posted December 12,2002 11:36:11 AM EST

I have been trying not to read anymore but after last night’s episode I decided to register and respond to some of the cruel criticisms. I would just ask that you consider the stress of the race at this point and the fact that I am clearly a competitive woman who just wants to win this race. I am happy to explain and even apologize for certain behaviors but I have frankly had enough of reading this garbage and not standing up for myself.
florinka
posted December 12,2002 11:54:02 AM EST

Look-I did not go on a reality tv show not knowing that I would judged by a bunch of people without anything better to do – However, since you spend so much time watching and commenting on television programs did you consider that perhaps editing is involved here and while I concede to giving the editors some material to make me the “bitch” on the show- I may infact have redeeming qualities and moments that you do not have the pleasure of seeing. I understand that I put myself out there for all to critique- but unless you have been on the race you can’t really understand the impact that it can have on a person. I am really shocked to see myself reacting like I do in some situations- I am lucky that Zach and I were together 24 hrs a day and that I hopefully was able to make up to him for the times that I hurt his feelings. However I will say that regardless of how weak and whiny you all think I am I know how valuable of an experince this was for me and I look forward to defending myself to some extent in the near future.

It seems to me you can judge the impact of a show’s pressure by watching how all the contestants react to it — if one stands out as the most obnoxious person in the history of reality television, there’s your Vassar girl.

Asymmetrical Information’s stars are having Tivo troubles.

Anono-blogger D-squared Digest — A fat young man without a good word for anyone tore into Mr. den Beste and Eric Raymond recently:

But anyway, people like Stephen den Beste, author of the turgidly unreadable and unsettlingly technocratic attempts to recreate neoclassical economics without the benefit of reading a word of the literature which populate USS Clueless (he has a fine line of shite in talking about mobile phone standards too), regard the absence of moderate Muslims lining up to claim that numerically the majority of their religion is made up of horrendous halfwits and ogres, as a sign that Islam is an intrinsically warlike, barbaric and horrible religion. I’m using his piece on this subject as the example because I happen to have just read it, and as an associate of the dreadful Eric Raymond, he’s a target of opportunity.

The attack failed to get a rise out of den Beste, except in the comments section where he fairly well rips the anono-blogger to shreds. D-Squared, whoever it is, is a disciple of Max Sawicky, which tells you all you need to know.

Ken Layne and Dr. Frank are both blogging again. Hallelujah!

Nick Denton has discovered a blogger so vain and pedantic he makes Anil Dash look like a free-speech hero:

Tom Coates, a rather pedantic British blogger whom I met in person this week, is appalled by those he considers warbloggers. So, does he try to persuade them, and their readers? Nope. Coates’s latest contribution to web culture: he proposes blocking undesirable visitors to his site. I mean, if they got through, he might actually win them over. On second thoughts, no.

Coates moans about the role he fantasizes playing in enabling warbloggers:

I don’t know how to say it in any other way except to say that as an episode in web history, I personally believe that Warblogging has been shameful, horrific and a stain on us all. The escalation of warblogs is a disaster for development of personal publishing, and a crippling blow to the individual integrity and worth of weblogs and weblogging. This whole media – a media which was supposed to be about freedom of expression, allowing everyone to have a voice and a space to talk openly and honestly – has turned increasingly into the worst kind of soapbox punditry, witch-hunting and as a platform for violent warmongers and nationalists. And I’m afraid I feel partly responsible…

I don’t know what’s more hilarious, Coates’ attempt to smear everyone who’s not a simpering appeaser with the label of “violent warmonger and nationalist” or his fanciful belief that he had anything at all to do with creating any of the technology that’s made free speech on the web possible. Either way, the man’s directly responsible for the funniest excuse for soul-searching I’ve ever read.

Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Briefing makes some cogent observations about the tendency of certain members of the blogging public to take themselves too seriously:

Then we have the good ole’ arguments. Person A says something on his blog, Person B rebuts and then it’s just rhetorical tricks and nonsense after that. In the middle of these arguments you will always find terms like “Straw Man”, “ad homonem”, “fallacy” and a host of other words no normal person ever uses. It’s like a debating match, and IIRC the debate club was populated by a bunch of geeks who argued over shit no one ever really cared about. It’s like the old maxim: There are two types of people. Those who go out and do shit, and those who sit around arguing about the people who are out doing shit. Bloggers are people who, when they aren’t arguing with each other, are just spouting off about people who are out doing shit. That’s rather pathetic on the face of it, but it only becomes sad when the parties involved become so damned humorless about it. We’re not exactly deciding the fates of nations here, people. I doubt Rumsfeld is loading up Daily Pundit for policy advice.

Daily responded to Sarge, and we’re off.

I never saw a pissing contest I didn’t like, well, with the possible exception of the one Tony Pierce started over the failure of War Bloggers to take Sean Penn seriously. Tony must have swallowed the worm if he thinks Madonna’s ex- has anything to offer the President. The moron is Barbara Lee’s biggest booster, after all.

We had about 5,000 page views Saturday, thanks to an off-hand Instapudit link to “Fortney’s Complaint”, which is about triple the norm around here.

Mickey Kaus notes a correction in the New York Times necessitated by the paper’s false claims that the economy is in recession and that speeches by Bush and Cheney caused markets to drop:

If a NYT editor, or reporter, is so blinded by animosity toward the Administration that they automatically believe these false things are true, what else do they automatically believe is true?

This follows on the heels of an exquisite analysis of stories by Nina Bernstein on the Times front page about “child only” welfare cases which spin bureaucratic attempts to circumvent time-limits as evidence of widespread starvation.

The Times has always had an axe to grind, but I don’t remember it being quite so shameless in the past. Apparently this new anti-administration jihad is the result of Howell Raines’ stewardship. It’s a damn good thing we still have a respectable paper in the Washington Post.

Scott Rosenberg, a Salon co-founder, blasts media corps that lost money on the Bubble in a book review on Salon.com today. One of the more bizarre claims Rosenberg offers concerns the bamboozling of investors:

So we know who got bamboozled. But who did the bamboozling? There really are no culprits — aside from one sad account of software hustlers actually defrauding the folks at the Hollywood talent agency CAA. Mostly, the media barons bamboozled themselves; the fear of losing turf to a new generation of technology, and later, the lure of quick Internet riches, motivated them to make costly decisions out of ignorance — to invest in Web ventures that any observer who actually used the Internet could see were poorly conceived and doomed to fail.

Salon raised millions of dollars from investors, through venture capital and an IPO, all gone now that their stock trades for pennies a share. But Salon didn’t bamboozle these investors, and in fact Salon “gets the Internet” in a way that media don’t. OK, Scott, if you say so.

Rosenberg gushes over “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” by Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Dave Weinberger, the thesis of which is that the Internet is personal, not corporate. While Weinberger’s quaint view of the ‘Net as a collection of cottages is charming, it’s just as misguided as media’s idea that the Net is just another outlet for advertising.

Would any sensible person mull over the question of whether the telephone is a personal or a corporate medium?

The immediate precursor of the Internet to the ordinary civilian was the telephone answering machine. Once he got used to leaving messages on a machine, it was a quick step to upgrading the machine to a fully interactive computer that does its messaging with text and graphics. So all the television/print/interactive shopping stuff about “convergence” is on some parallel track that remains to be assimilated on a large scale, and will stay that way until there’s a compelling reason for it.

Television, thanks to Replay and Tivo, is becoming less interactive, not more. Shopping on the Home Shopping Network sucks compared to web shopping at stores or at E-Bay. And print is just a source of blog starting-points these days. So actually, Rosenberg is right to blast the author who said:

“Web content is dead,” “digital dreams have been deferred for ‘broadband,'” and “AOL Time Warner will dominate.”

Actually, the Internet never stopped growing despite the collapse of the Bubble: user demand for broadband connections remains high, spurring a 20-30% annual growth rate; e-mail is a part of everyday life for both business and personal communication, everybody surfs the web, and one day soon, everyone will have a blog. Corporations still use the Net for customer service and to provide product information, and they’ll continue to do this.

But the Bubble was most certainly the work of a group of people who did in fact bamboozle millions of individual investors out of billions of dollars. Until this fact is recognized, and at least some of them are held accountable, the Tech market is not going to recover, and a cloud will remain over Internet-related tech businesses. One of the reasons these people were able to pull off the swindle was that the press didn’t do their job of criticizing the Bubble’s evangelists, because they were on the bandwagon themselves. There’s the story I’d like to read a book on.

One of the best examples of shameless distortion you’re ever going to see concerns the new Florida adoption law. Simply put, the law says that a mother can’t put a child up for adoption without the father’s consent. The law is both necessary and fair because fathers already have the obligation to pay for the child’s and mother’s support, and it was mandated by a US Supreme Court case, Stanley v. Illinois that’s been settled law since 1972.

The spinners are up-in-arms about a publication provision that’s an obscure part of the consent requirement. Florida’s Sun-Sentinel reports:

When background searches don’t work, a birth mother must place legal notices about the adoption in a local newspaper where the baby was conceived.

Read the first few words carefully. The mother has to publish a list of possible fathers in a legal paper only if she can’t otherwise find the man whose DNA matches the child. She would only come to this pass if: a) she had sex with so many different men she couldn’t keep track of them all; or b) she deliberately tried to conceal the existence of the baby from its father. I don’t think either if these scenarios shows the mother in a sympathetic light.

The publication provision mirrors the law on legal service: if you need to serve somebody with legal papers, in some cases you can do so through the mail, and in other cases you have to serve them personally. If diligent efforts to locate the party fail, you can serve them by publishing a notice in the paper, but you have to be prepared for all kinds of foolishness if you do that. It’s best to fess up to the authorities and avoid the unpleasantness, girls.

The spin campaign on this law is nonetheless taking flight: Hardball had a segment on it with Jerry Falwell and NOW’s Kim Gandy both drooling agreement that it was a bad law, based on things the law doesn’t actually do. The law’s author failed to make it clear, probably because he was so blown away by Barnicle and Gandy’s shamelessness. Welcome to big-time politics, dude, where the truth is the first casualty.

The blog discussion of this law is at Blogatelle, Joanne Jacobs, Spleenville, and Daily Pundit. Not too many folks are getting it.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish also commented on this law on her blog; she’s evidently upset on the encroachment on maternal sovereignty that has NOW excited.