Archive for 2003
October 21, 2003
OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: Bring back the 1970s! And get rid of that ugly specter of patriotism that’s haunting America!
WELL, THE DoS ATTACK seems to have been dealt with, for the moment at least. There are a bunch of posts on the backup site — instabackup.blogspot.com — so check those out.
Winds of Change has multiple posts on this topic, and thinks that there will be more of these attacks. So bookmark the backup sites and be ready.
A.N.S.W.E.R. is planning an antiwar protest [I thought the war was over! — Ed. Yeah, go figure.] for Washington this weekend.
The folks from ProtestWarrior plan a counterprotest.
There’s more on A.N.S.W.E.R. here, here, and especially here. See if the media coverage of the protests notes the true nature of their organizers.
KATIE ALLISON GRANJU looks at Generation-X parenting, in Salon. One key point: people want flexibility in their work schedules, and they want it badly enough to make major sacrifices in other areas to get it. That seems right to me.
Generation-Y parenting, which I’m seeing more of from my law students, is kind of interesting. They seem to be having children earlier. A pregnant law student was almost unknown when I was starting out in the early 1990s. Now there are always several. It’s easier, they note, to take a year out from law school than to take a year out when you’re up for partner. And they often observe that women who put off childbearing too long have more problems. I don’t know if this is a national trend, but I wouldn’t be surprise to hear that.
CONCERNS ABOUT THE VALIDITY OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES are being met by:
1. Opening up the entire systems to external scrutiny, so as to ensure trust and reliability;
2. A heartfelt dedication to improving the systems;
3. A public-relations campaign.
Guess which answer is correct.
DAVID HOGBERG is deeply unhappy with Paul Krugman’s latest.
UPDATE: Scott Wrightson is unhappy, too.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Robert Musil is offering historical and political perspective.
OXBLOG has firsthand reports from Kabul and Paris. Both places are reportedly calmer and safer than many might suppose.
TOM MAGUIRE REPORTS that the Plame affair is growing more complicated, and the CIA’s role in it more suspicious.
WEBLOGS AND BIG MEDIA: Jeff Jarvis has some interesting thoughts and observations.
ANOTHER DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACK aimed at HostingMatters last night. That’s why the site was down for a while.
October 20, 2003
EUGENE VOLOKH points out this quote from Madeleine Albright:
This is playing with fire. In the Balkans, signs of impatience can be misinterpreted as symptoms of weakness. We cannot afford that in a region where weakness attracts vultures. . . .
We will not achieve our goals in Southeast Europe if our eyes are always on the clock and our focus is solely on what others do. We are more than bookkeepers and spectators. We are leaders, and our fundamental objective in Southeast Europe is not to leave. It’s to win.
That was in 2000. Too bad she’s changed her tune nowadays.
Of course, Albright was a failure then, too. I lost confidence when I saw her respond to hecklers in Dayton with a deer-in-the-headlights stare, and stammers. “This is a Secretary of State?” I thought. “Paralyzed by a few hooting protesters with multiple piercings?”
Now she’s doing the hooting. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I guess.
UPDATE: It was my mistake — the protesters were in Columbus at Ohio State, not Dayton. Thanks to reader Robert Schwartz for the correction.
THE NEW REPUBLIC has posted a statement on Easterbrook.
A BIT MORE ON EASTERBROOK and media concentration over at GlennReynolds.com, where I note that “even if you think it’s OK to fire people for criticizing their boss, you may not want Michael Eisner to be everybody’s boss.”
Meanwhile Mickey Kaus weighs in on why he thinks ESPN was wrong to fire Easterbrook.
Meanwhile, a reader wonders if the blogosphere is right to be rallying around Easterbrook. I don’t know — I confess that I tend to side with bloggers, even bloggers I disagree with about everything else, against the outside world. But as I said earlier, if The New Republic had fired him I might have been surprised, but it wouldn’t have struck me as unfair. His post may not have been evidence of antisemitism, but it was, as I say over at GlennReynolds.com, “crappy.” But the ESPN thing just seems like overreach.
And, yeah, they had the legal right to fire him, I think. But, you know, Disney has the legal right to issue Heaven’s Gate: The Extended Anime Version, and bundle it with a claymation remake of Gigli. That doesn’t mean that bloggers shouldn’t criticize them, or call their decision stupid, if that’s how we feel.
UPDATE: Canadian reader John MacDonald emails:
If there is too much concentration, independent journalists will have a media”chill” similar to a libel”chill”.They’ll reflect what the boss reflects or they can be “downsized”, nice euphemism for getting canned.In Canada most of the converged media are in a few hands where they don’t want to rock the boat too much because they are beholden to the government for renewal of broadcast licences.Whether on the left or right, it’s not healthy having 50%+ concentration for a vigorous press.No matter how much the media financial spindoctors want to dress it up-if not checked , it will become a pac man game with most media gobbled up until it’s in few hands.Seeing how most of the Canadian media are afraid of their own shadows and give the government an easy walk on important issues, I don’t think a vibrant U.S. media should end up in few hands. Not in the best interests of the public or good government. That’s one reason I’ve been reading U.S. media for years.They dig out stuff, here they just gloss it over , next to the ads which is the most important function, it seems, of the media.
Yes.
SUSANNAH BRESLIN’S Reverse Cowgirl blog disappeared a while back and I wondered what she was up to. Turns out she has a book out (and a novel in progress). She’ll be reading from her book at the New Orleans Book Fair, in The Dragon’s Den, 435 Esplanade Avenue, on Friday, at 7pm. If you go there, you can see if she’s really as tall as she claims. (And if she still had a blog, she could be promoting her book with it, now. . . .)
UPDATE: Here’s an article, with a photo. She sure looks tall.
INSTAPUNDIT READER BRUCE BATISTA has obtained a retraction from a columnist who repeated the “imminent threat” canard:
Generous as they are, my editors are not about to put their money where my mouth is, especially since they, and presumably Mr. Batista, have access to the same on-line newspaper database that apparently does not contain any direct reference by the president to an “imminent threat” from Saddam among hundreds of references by others to an unspecified “imminent threat.”
To the contrary, in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, according to alert reader Pedro J. Diaz, the president went out of his way to say that the threat from Iraq was not imminent. These were Bush’s words:
“Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, all recriminations would come too late.”
So, Mr. Batista and others who rushed to their keyboards to correct my “journalistic malpractice” or “outright fraud” can claim the high ground.
Indeed they can.
The columnist, Tom Brazaitis of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, then falls back on the “but Bush implied it!” defense. Except that, as he’s just admitted, Bush didn’t imply it, but expressly disclaimed it.
What the “Bush implied it” claim really amounts to is an astonishing admission that the corps of journalists and pundits who cover national politics, and who pride themselves on their sophistication in doing so, got the story wrong
What’s more, they got it wrong in the face of explicit statements from the President, and others.
That’s far more humiliating than any retraction. It’s an admission of outright professional incompetence. These guys claim to be able to get to the truth when the President is lying. Meanwhile, they can’t even get to the truth when he’s explicitly telling the truth. How pathetic is that?
UPDATE: Reader Gerry Canavan sends this link to an item from InstaPundit last March, when I wrote:
A LOT OF PEOPLE SEEM TO THINK that Bush’s comments last night about Iraq being a threat to the United States and its neighbors were merely policy justifications.
But they’re also laying the groundwork for justifying an attack on Iraq, even without Security Council approval, as self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.
Yeah, but that’s dated March 7, 2003 — many months after Congress passed its authorization to go to war, which doesn’t really support the “Bush lied to get his war approved” argument, does it?
VIRGINIA POSTREL once told me that I should remind people of the tip jar regularly. I do everything that Virginia tells me to, so consider yourself reminded. It’s more of a donation than a tip, really. But think of it as a way to stand up against corporate media!
Or not. Whatever.
LARRY LESSIG thinks that the Easterbrook firing is more evidence of the dangers of media concentration:
If ESPN fired Easterbrook because it overreacted to his comment, then that’s an injustice to Easterbrook, and a slight to society.
But it it fired Easterbrook because Easterbrook criticized the owner, that’s an offense to society, whatever the injustice to Easterbrook — at least when fewer and fewer control access to media. No doubt, anti-semitism has done infinitely greater harm than misused media mogul power. But if firing your critics becomes the norm in American media, then there will be much more than insensitivity to anti-semitism to worry about in the future.
Indeed. And that’s why I think that ESPN firing Easterbrook for dissing the head of its parent corporation is different from, say The New Republic firing Easterbrook for anti-semitism in the pages of TNR — which, interestingly, TNR has shown no disposition to do.
UPDATE: Reader Hunter McDaniel makes a good point:
If Easterbrook had worked for Fox and taken a shot at Rupert Murdoch, I don’t think anyone would have been surprised to see him fired. Notwithstanding its formal status as a public corporation, everyone knows that Murdoch’s empire is a family business.
The same is not true of Disney now, 40 years after Walt’s death. Eisner is just a hired hand, and for him to enforce a cult of personality within the business he has been entrusted to run is way out of line. This is as much about proper corporate governance as it is about free spech.
Indeed.
STEPHEN GREEN has a festival of interesting links.
I’M ALL FOR JEAN CHRETIEN BEING SNUBBED, but this story seems to have a key point wrong:
Bush has yet to visit Canada in the almost three years since he was sworn in as president.
I guess that Quebec, where Bush attended the “Summit of the Americas,” isn’t part of Canada.
UPDATE: Reader John MacDonald notes that Bush also visited Alberta for the G-8, but suggests that what the writer meant to say was that Bush hasn’t undertaken a formal state visit to Canada, as such.
Quebec reader Kevin Germann says something similar:
Technically speaking, attending a summit that happens to be in Canada is not visiting Canada. A traditional visit would focus on bilateral issues and perhaps involve the President addressing the Canadian parliament. The diplomatic tradition has been that the President’s first foreign visit has been to Canada, acknowledging the importance and closeness of US-Canada friendship. Bush has indeed snubbed Chretien, and deservedly so, in my opinion.
Well, okay. So why didn’t the Toronto Star say that? Apparently, the Star feels it should have, because another reader forwarded me an email from its ombudsman, promising a correction.
IN LIGHT OF THE EASTERBROOK/EISNER CONTROVERSY, Politica Obscura has declared that Clarence Thomas is no longer black:
If it is unfair to cite one’s religious background in trying to hold that person to a higher standard, then certainly it should also be unfair to cite one’s race.
Oh, yeah, that’s going to happen.
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS, a collection of business and economics related blog posts, is up. Read and enjoy!
EVAN COYNE MALONEY’S NEW VIDEO, When Protesters Attack (from the Palestinian rally at Rutgers where there was officially no violence or disorder) is up. View it and judge for yourself.