BILL HOBBS WRITES:

Some 37 million U.S. households will have a home network by 2008, four times as many as do now, as people branch out from networking their multiple computers to connecting their networks to entertainment equipment and then, later, to household appliances, predicts Forrester Research. Of course, all of the above will be illegal in Tennessee without the permission of the cable company or telecom that provides your broadband Internet access, if legislation currently moving through the Tennessee legislature passes. Under HB 457 and SB 213, if the cable company or telecom does not expressly authorize you to connect a device to their service, the legal inference is automatically created that you intended to defraud the service provider. What follows could then be civil and/or criminal legal proceedings against you.

Hobbs wonders why this is getting so little coverage from newspapers and TV in Tennessee. So do I. There’s a hearing today.

As I wrote in my TechCentralStation column yesterday, this kind of legislation undercuts FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s argument that the openness of the Internet means that we don’t need to worry about media concentration. If Powell were busy defending the Internet against this sort of intrusion, I’d feel a lot better about his claims.

Here’s a story by Farhad Manjoo in Salon that quotes both me and Howard Bashman on this. We’re both skeptical of Powell’s position. (You’ll have to sit through a short ad for Sid Blumenthal’s book if you’re not a subscriber).

I KEEP READING PEOPLE — Kaus is the latest example — complaining about Howard Kurtz’s alleged conflict of interest in covering media organizations while actually working for them.

But I don’t get it. Maybe this is one of those weird journalistic things that only makes sense to journalists — like, you know, the BBC’s reputation for accuracy, or the idea that Mark Russell is funny — but in law the solution to a conflict of interest is generally disclosure. If you disclose, and the client accepts, that’s enough.

Here everybody knows about Kurtz’s “conflict” — you can’t miss it when he’s on TV and in print and when everyone is constantly talking about it — and when you choose to read him or watch him, well, you’ve accepted.

So am I missing something (it’s not as if I wrote a book on this kind of thing — oh, wait. . . .), or is this just jealousy over his having such a good gig?

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis says I’m right.

JEREMY LOTT WRITES that the New York Times isn’t all that important anymore, and that USA Today is the real paper of record:

In fact, many of the things that critics hate about the Times are almost wholly absent from USA Today. “McPaper,” as it is sometimes derisively called, is the opposite of an arrogant newspaper. While the Times was busy spinning against Bush’s most recent round of tax cuts, USA Today played it straight, noting a surge in public support for them. It continues to provide excellent foreign coverage (witness the recent piece on Col. Matthew Bogdanos, charged with finding looted Iraqi antiquities) and decent financial coverage (tech columnist Kevin Maney is one of the best in the business) and its sports coverage easily laps the Times’.

Ouch.

LILEKS COMMENTS on the BBC’s disgraced Jessica Lynch “expose”:

The Beeb did an expose on the Jessica Lynch rescue. Perhaps you’ve heard this story. Apparently it was all staged. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck led the charge under the command of the DI from “Full Metal Jacket,” and the initial reports that she was beamed up to the Enterprise were utterly false. The very fact that she was rescued alive proves that the Ba’athist regime was the epitome of humanitarian solicitousness. Admit it – when you saw the footage of American helicopters roaring over the hospital blaring “Rock You Like a Hurricane” from their loudspeakers, weren’t you suspicious? Didn’t you think hmmmm when one of the soldiers turned to the camera and said “Ah’ll be back” and did an end-zone spike with the severed head of a Republican Guard commander? Were you not a little bit unnerved when the giant face of Karl Rove filled your TV screen, his forehead tattooed with the Chevron logo?

As it happens, I remember seeing the rescue footage the government released. I TiVod it for the video compilation I was making. No gunfire; no flashbangs; there was a shot of some soldiers going down a stairwell, a grainy green night-vision shot of a waiting room with a portrait of Saddam leaning against the wall, and an outside shot of the stretcher being prepped for extraction. I’ve seen news stories on paintball tourneys that were more dramatic.

So why did anyone believe the BBC story? Why did Robert Scheer take the bait and write an entire column based on an uncritical acceptance of the Beeb’s mad blather?

Unfortunately, here’s where Lileks’ column breaks down. Poor, sweet Lileks just can’t get his mind around the true evil genius of this Administration: the whole thing was obviously a brilliant ploy to sucker Scheer and others into making fools of themselves. This may seem to be a disproportionate use of resources (given the low degree of challenge involved), but that’s just because most people don’t realize how far they’re willing to go!

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is over at Susanna Cornett’s place. Drop by and follow the links, and maybe discover some new blogs you’ll like enough to visit again.

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: An apparently never-ending series.

ABOUT TIME, EH? Damian Penny has moved to a new, MT-powered site.

THE MORE I THINK ABOUT IT, the more I wonder if the Jessica Lynch rescue wasn’t a clever Pentagon disinformation campaign designed to entrap anti-American journalists into revealing their sloppiness, bias, and willingness to report untruths as fact. Then again, why bother? They seem to have some sort of credibility death-wish.

How else could you explain this Robert Scheer column, which takes the BBC story as an excuse to foam at the mouth in classically over-the-top Scheer fashion:

After a thorough investigation, the British Broadcasting Corp. has presented a shocking dissection of the “heroic” rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, as reported by the U.S. military and a breathless American press.

A ‘thorough investigation” that involved unnamed sources making charges that were not checked out, and people saying that the U.S. forces fired blanks, credulous repetition of unconfirmed facts by parties with an interest in lying, and obvious ignorance of matters military, as well as misrepresentation of the coverage at the time, and that has been contradicted by other reports from the scene.

Of course, to Scheer any investigation is thorough if it reflects badly on the U.S. military and the Bush Administration. Scheer even repeats the “firing blanks” claim — one that makes no sense on its face to anyone who knows anything. Too bad for Scheer that he’s been left hanging by the BBC’s own backpedaling on the story.

The L.A. area really needs a new newspaper that will keep an eye on the Los Angeles Times.

UPDATE: BIASED-BBC has more on this, and has preserved the story in case it “quietly changes,” as BBC stories have been known to do. It notes:

What is interesting is that (as of 9.50pm) nearly all of the comments supporting the Kampfner version and praising the BBC story are predicated on the assumption that a Pentagon fraud has been revealed by the BBC. But Kampfner himself says there was no fraud. See the first question and answer of the CNN interview linked to below:

HARRIS: Is it your belief right now based upon your investigation that this rescue of Lynch was in any way a staged event and not real?

KAMPFNER: No.

That wasn’t all his answer, of course. He then goes on to say all sorts of other stuff along the lines of “the US military are spinmeisters” which is true but not the point. The point is that the journalist who started the story when asked whether it is now his opinion that the rescue was faked answered with a unambiguous No. Wouldn’t it be more responsible of the BBC to say this loud and clear?

It would have saved Robert Scheer from looking like an idiot today, anyway.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I was on Hugh Hewitt’s show earlier tonight. It wasn’t my best performance — I took ten minutes out of a Brownies parents’ meeting to do it by cellphone — but Hewitt is clearly on Scheer’s case and is smelling blood. I should note that the Scheer article also treats the Saddam / Al Qaeda connection as bogus, which seems pretty damn bogus itself to me — plenty of evidence of an Al Qaeda connection has come out since the war, and even Robert Fisk was reporting that the Fedayeen were basically Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-style non-Iraqi Arab Islamists.

Meanwhile, Roger Simon says that Scheer is “making an ass of himself” with this, and adds:

I think this is all kind of sad actually (small s) because I’m sure Scheer is fundamentally a good guy and a good journalist. The problem is he’s been reified. Scheer should know that word–it’s pure Sartrean sixties. It means, essentially, objectified as a product for sale. He’s spent so many years as a professional dispenser of left/liberal orthodoxy he’s terrified to see things objectively. He might lose his place in the market.

Indeed.

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA:

New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was booed off the stage Saturday at Rockford College’s graduation because he gave an antiwar speech.

Two days later, graduates and family members, envisioning a “go out and make your mark” send-off, are still reeling.

Guests wanting to hear the author and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter are equally appalled.

And College President Paul Pribbenow is rethinking the wisdom of such controversial topics at future commencements. This is Pribbenow’s first graduation.

Hedges began his abbreviated 18-minute speech comparing United States’ policy in Iraq to piranhas and a tyranny over the weak. . . .

Some graduates and audience members turned their backs to the speaker in silent protest. Others rushed up the aisle to vocally protest the remarks, and one student tossed his cap and gown to the stage before leaving.

More crushing of dissent in Ashcroft’s America, I suppose. Except that I imagine that Hedges was paid a lot to give that speech. He misjudged the audience dreadfully, offended them terribly, and reaped an honest audience reaction.

There are two possibilities: (1) He had no idea the audience would object, which suggests a tin ear that calls his journalistic abilities into question; or (2) he knew they’d hate the speech and didn’t care, which makes him, well, a jerk.

UPDATE: I think it’s “pariahs,” not “piranhas,” — TimesWatch has a partial transcript. It’s a pretty offensive speech (“This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war now of liberation of Iraqis from American occupation”), though TimesWatch also notes that Rockford College should have known what it was getting into with Hedges, who’s on record as thinking that it’s a good thing we lost in Vietnam, yada yada yada.

I think the notion of a lefty speaker being booed off the stage at a college campus is messing with some people’s minds. But all I can say is don’t criticize what you can’t understand, your sons and your daughter are beyond your command, and the times — though, seemingly, not The Times — they are a’changin’. Heck, they walked out on Phil Donahues’s commencement speech.

TimesWatch also asks, amusingly:

A few days ago the Times saw fit to run a captioned photograph of graduates walking out in protest of Republican Sen. Rick Santorum’s commencement address at Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s University. Will the Times consider Hedges’ hostile reception equally newsworthy?

About as likely as their giving front-page treatment to CNN’s video fakery.

But Hedges is more proof that claims that The New York Times is a congenial place for people who take the anti-American side aren’t just blather.

BLOGS: Taking you inside the journalistic sausage factory.

Trouble is, I like sausage. I just want it made in a way that lives up to the promises on the label.

UPDATE: How bad have things gotten? Bad enough that when you compare journalism to sausage-making, people write in to defend sausage-makers! Reader Peter Ingemi writes:

I live 7 doors down from a butcher shop that has been in the neighborhood and one particular family for 100 years. A couple of months ago when I walked in and was making my order I noticed Mike (the butcher) cutting and cubing pork. He seemed to be cutting an awful lot of it, I didn’t see a special on the board so I asked about it.

He reminded me it was Wednesday and that is the day he made all of the different sausages he makes (about a half dozen types not counting chicken and kielbasa) I stood there and watched him making sausages and realized that the old saying about Sausages no matter how true it might be for a plant or maybe another butcher shop it wasn’t true at Romano’s. (I can’t speak for other local butchers but I would bet good money that this is true for other family butcher shops too.)

I think Mike and the other local butchers deserve a caveat.

So noted.

HEY, MAYBE THINGS AREN’T GOING SO BADLY AFTER ALL:

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) – Doorbells and phones went unanswered at the Damascus offices of Palestinian militant groups the United States accuses of terrorism. Instead of veteran campaigners ready to rail against Israel for hours, visitors were greeted by posters of Palestinian “martyrs” on the walls outside – and silence.

All signs pointed to what neither the Palestinians nor the Syrians will acknowledge: Syria has bowed to U.S. pressure and curbed the radicals it has hosted for years.

Palestinians protesting against Hamas, terrorist offices in Syria closed — well, it’s a start!

LARRY LESSIG thinks I got it right in my TechCentralStation column on media concentration.

MAYBE THINGS REALLY ARE CHANGING:

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip (AP) – Palestinian residents of a northern Gaza town demonstrated Tuesday after Israelis destroyed buildings and farms there in a five-day invasion, but in a rare twist, their wrath was directed at Palestinian militants for firing rockets from their property, not at the Israelis. . . .

The demonstrators blocked a main road with trash cans, rocks and burning tires in a show of outrage against the militants. Most of the rockets are launched by members of the violent Islamic Hamas.

“They (the militants) claim they are heroes,” said Mohammed Zaaneen, 30, a farmer, as he carried rocks into the street. “They brought us only destruction and made us homeless. They used our farms, our houses and our children … to hide.”

More, please.

DANIEL DREZNER WONDERS:

This administration has a peculiar pathology. It focuses like a laser beam on a key priority for several months, ignoring any criticism from outsiders. It then achieves its priority, earning plaudits for gutsiness and discipline. Immediately afterwards, however, drift sets in, unexpected complications arise, events beyond the Bush team’s control create new obstacles to policy implementation, and things appear to fall apart.

The policy drift has occurred four times in this administration — after the passage of the 2001 tax cut, after the fall of the Taliban, after the 2002 mid-year election, and, alas, after the victory in Iraq.

What’s going wrong? . . . A troubling hypothesis — is it possible that the message discipline so valued by the Bushies also leads to the suppression of policy adaptability?

Maybe. They seem pretty quick to change approaches when they think they’re not working, but they’re not always quick to figure that out.

One problem, of course, is that the media pronounce pretty much everything they do a failure before it even starts, which makes it harder to figure out what’s really going on.

ANOTHER BLOGGER TAKES THE BOEING: Eric Olsen has a column on MSNBC.

MARGARET WENTE WRITES ABOUT THE “FRUSTRATED MULLAHS” of Iran, and their confrontation with the Internet, and weblogs. Hossein Derakshan is interviewed.

IS THE GLASS HALF-EMPTY? OR HALF-FULL? I guess that depends on whether you’re pouring, or drinking. But to its credit, CNN has admitted it was wrong, and run a correction regarding an assault-weapon related story that falsely suggested that “assault weapons” are more powerful than other guns (they’re not), and that the assault weapon ban had to do with machine guns (it doesn’t). On the other hand, the errors fall into the “unforgivable” category.

So was CNN incredibly ignorant and gullible here, or was it deliberately passing along anti-gun propaganda that it knew to be false?

I’m going with explanation one — if journalists can go to cover a war without knowing that there’s no such thing as a 300 millimeter pistol then they can make this kind of idiotic mistake honestly, I suppose, though it is a bit suspicious that these mistakes tend to wind up supporting gun control every time. And this part is harder to explain away:

In the first of the two segments that aired Thursday, a Broward County detective fired the AK-47 in semiautomatic mode, and the camera showed bullets hitting a cinder-block target. The detective then fired a legal semiautomatic weapon, and CNN showed a cinder-block target with no apparent damage. On Friday, CNN admitted that the detective had not been firing at the cinder block.

Didn’t an L.A. Times photographer lose his job over misleading images? Why is this different? Was it just an accident? Conceivably, I suppose, but why is someone who can make that sort of a mistake working for CNN?

But if they really are that sloppy and ignorant, maybe they shouldn’t do gun stories without knowing enough to get it right. And parroting the latest press release from the Brady Campaign or the Violence Policy Center doesn’t count as research.

The big victim here isn’t gun rights, though. It’s CNN’s already damaged credibility. Because if they make mistakes like this, why should we trust them on anything else? CNN’s final comment was this: “we all stick by John Zarrella and how credible of a reporter he is.”

Uh huh.

UPDATE: A reader who says he used to work at CNN writes:

I’ve worked in news research at CNN. I’m certainly no gun expert, or even a gun fan, having fired weapons only a handful of times in my life. But I can say with absolute certainty that I know more about guns than 99.9% of people working in the newsroom, so it’s not surprising that a reporter or bureau chief would fall into the “incredibly ignorant” category.

However, the cinder block “demonstration” strikes me as nothing more than a willful intent to deceive – by Zarella, by his producer and by the producers of the shows the segments ran on. Someone should have caught this, and Zarella should be asked to step down from his position as bureau chief. Won’t happen, but it should.

CNN’s credibility has taken a well-deserved beating this year, and this particular instance isn’t even explainable by the need to “maintain access” in a closed nation — it looks to be an effort to influence domestic politics, pure and simple.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Hugh Myers emails:

I guess it’s the better part of valor to credit CNN with ignorance of basic firearms terchnology. However, as one who has been following this issue very closely for decades I can tell you that every time I’ve seen or heard the “major media” talk about “assault” rifles, they distort facts. The most egregious cases occurred during the debates in the mid-nineties when EVERY major media outlet ran stories about semi-automatics accompanied by films of rifles firing in full automatic mode.

It is disingenuous in the extreme for CNN to claim ignorance at this late date.

Well, even if it’s true, it’s no excuse. With CNN, it seems that the question is becoming “are they lying, on the take, or just stupid?” far too often. And while “stupid” is the best of those three, that the question keeps being raised is devastating.

THE BBC’S JOHN KAMPFNER IS BACKING AWAY FROM THE JESSICA LYNCH STORY — while, of course, pretending not to do so. Note that he never really answers the question about U.S. troops firing blanks — instead he offers a non sequitur about whether Jessica Lynch was shot.

The new version of his story — even given his spin — is simply that the U.S. military milked the story of the rescue for PR. Well, duh. But that’s not what his original story charged. His original story charged that it was a fake, with U.S. troops firing blanks in a Hollywood-style extravaganza.

This guy has been busted.

The press wouldn’t put up with this sort of spin from a politician. Let’s see if it’s as tough on one of its own. Kampfner says: “Well, I mean, it must be said the British are no more angels than the Americans when it comes to putting out certain messages in the war.”

Well, they’re no angels at the BBC, that’s for sure.

UPDATE: Well, what Kampfner is accusing the Pentagon of doing isn’t nearly as bad as what CNN has admitted doing in terms of misleading video. So will this get worldwide media attention? Hell, will it even get major play on the BBC?

Don’t hold your breath.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Adams thinks this point deserves more stress:

If the American forces arrived firing blanks and playing tapes of explosions to create a great p.r. film, WHERE’S THE FILM? Kampfner complains that the U.S. suppressed the “rushes” and only supplied a “professionally-edited” final tape, but note the complete logical disconnect: that edited tape, the tape the military’s press managers presumably wanted to put out from the get-go, doesn’t show Americans firing wildly in response to explosion noises. So Kampfner’s claim is–what?–that they faked combat in order to the fool the world, but then didn’t show any of the fakery in order to fool the world.

Bill, you’re thinking too small. Actually it was all an elaborate deception to destroy Kampfner’s credibility. Seems to be working. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader writes:

In his non-retraction to CNN, Kampfner refers to the alleged attempt to evacuate Lynch in an ambulance as occurring the day before the rescue raid, but the BBC story he’s defending says it occurred two days before the raid. Just a mistake? Or has he realized that two days before, the hospital was still in Iraqi military hands, making the scenario much less credible?

Hmm.

WHY FCC CHAIRMAN MICHAEL POWELL IS WRONG ABOUT MEDIA CONCENTRATION: My TechCentralStation column is up.

JEFF JARVIS WRITES that Robert Fisk is more creative than Jayson Blair. Hey, maybe he can get a job at the BBC!

HERE’S ANOTHER VENEZUELAN BLOG focusing on events there.

“ALL THE BAD NEWS IS TRUE:” Here’s a firsthand report from Zimbabwe, which has been destroyed by its lousy, corrupt government. But, hey, Mugabe might buy some French airplanes!

DILACERATOR REPORTS on pro-Nazism among Arab immigrants in The Netherlands. He says it’s being covered up. No surprise there.

PAUL SPERRY WRITES that the color-coded terror alerts are obviously political, not real, because the level hasn’t been raised. I don’t know if this is true or not — there’s a good argument that the threat really is lower — but it’s interesting that the Administration is getting this kind of criticism from the right as well as the left.

(Via Protocols).

HOMELAND SECURITY: It’s still a joke.