Category: Business

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.

Bienvenue sur Emmanuelle.net reports on Matt Welch’s crabs:

I don’t know when men started boiling crabs and cracking their legs but Matt has a special connection with these bellicose and strange-looking animals.

Happy Birthday, dude.

Op-Ed columns are supposed to represent the point of view of the writer, and not that of the paper in which they’re published. They’re a primary vehicle for broadening the scope of newspaper’s editorial pages, and for bringing voices into the public policy dialog that wouldn’t otherwise be represented. This isn’t the case at the New York Times, however, where editors require Op-Ed contributors to alter their messages to conform to the paper’s point of view. Here are two recent examples, the first from “The New Though Police” by Tammy Bruce, recounting her ordeal in trying to place a pro-Laura Schlessinger Op-Ed with the paper:

… [I] faxed it cold (without a contact) to the editorial desk of the New York Times. Within an hour, an editor from the op-ed page called to say yes, it was a good piece and they?d love to run it. Voila! Back in the real world, with a newspaper that knows how to make a decision.

My Times liaison on the piece seemed sincere and hardworking; she checked in with me occasionally over the next few days for clarification on one point or another. It gradually became clear that there were several people involved in ?editing? and ?clearing? my piece. E-mails and telephone calls to me, however, consistently expressed the editor?s intent to publish, despite an increasing delay.

Eventually, I was e-mailed an ?edited? version of the piece that bore little resemblance to what I had originally submitted. It was now replete with sentences I never wrote and moved in a direction that was arguably anti-Laura.

In the past, none of the edits on any of my opinion pieces had been such as to warrant a protest, but someone at the New York Times had actually added the line, ?Not everything Schlessinger has to say is offensive.? This was so contrary to the intent of the piece that I asked for the line to he removed. The editors refused. Rather than let myself he positioned as some sort of apologist for comments I deemed to he offensive, I once again withdrew the piece.

A more recent example arose out of an Op-Ed critical of the UN Human Rights Commission’s stand against Israel and in favor of such notorious human rights abusers as China, Syria, Libya, and Cuba. The author is Professor Anne Bayefsky, a professor who represented the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists at the Durban Conference. Here’s a log of her e-mail dialog with the Times, over a piece you can read as written here.

This piece was originally submitted and accepted by the New York Times on 8 May 2002. After acceptance, editorial demands resulted in the submission of six new drafts, four additional drafts with smaller changes and corrections, seven drafts from the editors and 6 hours of editing by telephone. A piece, ultimately published 22 May 2002, was only accepted on condition – not only that the dynamic be significantly altered – but that the following words (in bold) be specifically omitted:

Its [UN Human Rights Commission] members include some of the most notorious human rights violators in the world today: China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Those countries prefer devoting UN funds, (22% of which are from the United States), to criticizing Israel – lest attention wander too close to home.

Human Rights Watch rushed out a report on Jenin and a critique of Israel, while a report on suicide-bombers operating for the past 20 months is still coming. Selectivity, as the UN calls it, is not just a governmental problem.

But one regional group remains outside the target range. The Asian group (including China and the bulk of Muslim states) has no regional human rights system. These states strenuously avoid international human rights scrutiny and are largely successful in their efforts. No resolution has ever been passed at the UN Human Rights Commission concerning China or Syria, for example. At the just-completed Commission session, the Special Rapporteur to investigate human rights violations in Iran was deleted after six years of denying him entry into the country.
Narrowing the gap between international right and remedy means confronting not only the double-standards advocated by states, but the slackening of standards advocated by NGOs. Their buzz word is listening to the ?voices of the victims?. This was the tack of Amnesty International at the Durban World Conference Against Racism. The glitch is that voices say all kinds of things. Like South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu who recently said in Boston: ?People are scared in this country [the US] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful.

Well, so what?…Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin…were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.? Human rights protection is not about the self-selection of the most extreme, the loudest, or best-funded of the mob. It is about universal standards and remedying legitimate claims.

That individual?s [the High Commissioner] chance to make a positive impact on the international protection of human rights will depend on his or her…willingness to confront the UN?s internal resistance to professionalism and transparency…
Negotiations between myself and the editors over the one sentence specifically relating to Israel, included the following exchange:

Original:
?…Those countries prefer devoting UN funds…to criticizing Israel – lest attention wander too close to home. The strategy of diversion has been wildly successful. Fifteen percent of Commission time and one-third of country-specific resolutions over thirty years are directed at this one state.?

Editor?s revision (15 May 2002)
?It [the Human Rights Commission] was, not surprisingly, toughest on nations that didn?t have seats on the commission this year, and especially tough on Israel (which is both politically offensive to many member states and very weak at the United Nations) and Cuba.?

Following my objections, the editor?s next revision (16 May 2002):
?The annual Human Rights Commission session…was able to agree on resolutions concerning just 11 of the 189 member states, and with its customary disproportionate focus on Israel.?

Only after continuous objection on my part, did they allow the one sentence on Israel in substantially the same terms as originally proposed.

The reference to anti-Semitism at the Durban World Conference was also the subject of interminable negotiation. Every draft received from the editor prior to the penultimate version, omitted any reference to anti-Semitism and refused to provide specific examples of the failings of human rights NGOs. In the end result, the language allowed was deliberately general and omitted the specific reference to those NGOs? one-sided concerns in Jenin. As such, it opened the door to a response from those same NGOs challenging the allegation of their selective human rights interests. Predictably, such a letter to the editor was in fact sent to the Times by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and was printed a few days later. When I inquired about writing a letter in response, which would have included the substance of my originally-accepted piece, I was informed that editorial policy did not permit authors of op-eds to respond to any criticism.

So it’s all the news that’s fit to print, but only the views that conform to The Times’ view of the world.

hasn’t stopped Salon from selling subscriptions to services it probably won’t be around long enough to provide. The latest is a blog hosting service, provided in concert with the charming Dave Winer, a guy who’s been blogging almost as long as I have. The first Salon blog is Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment, by the Salon managing editor, who writes:

Blogs have become an Internet trend story — probably because there are so few other Internet trends right now, and most of those are too depressing to dwell on. Trend stories work best when reporters can drum up some conflict. Thus we have the War between the Bloggers and the Journalists.

Rosenberg understands trends. He engineered Salon’s acquisition of The Well, an on-line cult founded and shaped by refugees of Stephen Gaskin’s The Farm cult in Tennessee. Rosenberg has been a member of The Well since 1990, according to Katie Hafner’s account of the bizarre shenanigans that have taken place among the Wellberts for lo these many years.

Like Gaskin, Winer is a powerful and polarizing figure, and Rosenberg loves to bask in the glow of such people. Unlike Gaskin, the Well’s spiritual founder, Winer doesn’t seem to have too many nefarious plans, bastard children, kidnapped children, or suicidal corpses lying around him, so the worst aspect of the Winer/Wellbert partnership is what happens to subscribers when Salon finally goes out of business, which many suspect will happen in a few weeks. Presumably they can continue blogging on Winer’s iron, but Salon hasn’t clarified this to their potential customers.

Incidentally, I tried The Well for a few weeks, but they banned me for being a cult-buster, and banned my wife, a long-term member, for being married to me. Strange group, the Wellberts. Some of them are blogging now, but they don’t get much traffic, fortunately.

Double incidentally, I recommend Katie Hafner’s book The Well to anyone interested in the dynamics and power-relationships characteristic of cults.

— Your latest old media take on blogs is at Just Another Cultural Co-Op? / Blogging hits the mainstream, for better or worse.

“People mostly compare their favorite bloggers to the boring and predictable columnists on the op-ed pages,” says Matt Welch, one of the writers behind LA Examiner. “It sheds light on what newspapers have gotten progressively worse at doing: giving readers lively and relevant personalities to read and interact with.”

They quote Matt Welch, Ken Layne, Billy the Quick, and some other folks. It’s pretty much a “just the facts, ma’am” piece, but it does highlight the personality vacuum in big media that created the need for blogs.

— With WarLog: World War III by Jeff Jarvis back from hiatus, it’s starting to look like old times again.

— KEN LAYNE is back on the web:

OK, the site looks good enough for me. The news-blogging will start once I’ve had 50 hours of sleep. Good night.

Thanks to those who helped him make bail.