MORE SCENES FROM A MALL: My TechCentralStation column for this week is up. And Megan McArdle has a piece in TCS today, too.

PROBLEMS WITH ELECTRONIC VOTING: Marc Rotenberg has a piece in Technology Review, noting:

Back in the real world, however, the evidence is mounting daily that a lot more work needs to be done before the vote counting process—truly the kernel of democracy—is turned over to devices that lack adequate auditing and operate in secret. One recent study conducted by Johns Hopkins University and Rice University found that the high-tech voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems allowed voters and poll workers to cast extra votes, and also that cryptographic keys, the basic element of system security, were not properly managed. The governor of Maryland has called for an investigation to determine whether the state’s $54 million purchase of these so-called direct recording electronic (or DRE) systems was a wise move.

Another report finds that during San Luis Obispo County’s March 2003 primary in California, absentee vote tallies were sent to an Internet site operated by Diebold several hours before the poll closed. According to election law, officials may not release tallies until voting is completed. An MIT-Caltech study found that regular test forms, which allow for verification, provide higher accuracy than DRE. Considering how much money will be spent in the next year to select the president of the United States, it is remarkable that more money is not being spent to ensure that the new technologies for vote tabulation actually work.

There’s a certain amount of conspiracy-theorizing on this topic (not in Rotenberg’s piece, but in general) but the fact is that electronic voting systems just aren’t up to the job. I don’t know enough to offer an opinion on whether they ever will be, but it seems pretty plain that they aren’t right now.

Here’s more from Salon’s Farhad Manjoo, though you’ll have to sit through an ad to read it if you don’t subscribe. There is a solution, of course. But will public officials be brave enough to endorse this technology?

THE FBI WANTS NOAH SHACHTMAN’S NOTES. He mentions the Vanessa Leggett case — here’s a piece I wrote about that case for the Wall Street Journal last year.

SPACE ELEVATORS: Arthur Clarke has been pushing this idea for years. Now it’s getting some support.

HUGO CHAVEZ IS REFUSING TO RECOGNIZE IRAQ at OPEC. I rather suspect that this will backfire.

NEO-SECESSIONISTS — in the north?

These are The Crazy Years.

MARK GLASER HAS A COLUMN on the whole should-blogs-be-edited question.

Meanwhile, Matt Welch writes that ombudsmen are worthless, and Iberian Notes is close to war with the ombudsman from La Vanguardia, a Spanish newspaper.

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner has evidence that the Bee ombudsman needs to sort out some issues. Jeez.

Drezner also has some questions for journalist blog-readers as part of a blog-study he’s doing.

FRANK J. HAS FOUND SOMETHING more exciting than poking fun at me — he wants to set up a blog devoted to publishing emails and letters from troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that people can hear their voices along with those of the Big Media types.

JAMES MORROW’S BLOG HAS MOVED (AGAIN) to this URL.

HERE’S SOMETHING FROM BUSH’S U.N. SPEECH that doesn’t seem to be getting that much attention:

There’s another humanitarian crisis spreading, yet hidden from view. Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world’s borders. . . .

We must show new energy in fighting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.

If you’ll follow the link, you’ll see that Bush spends rather a lot of time talking about this.

UPDATE: A reader sends a link to this National Geographic article on the subject. Excerpt:

There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach—and in the destruction of lives.

I’m for legalizing drugs to deal with the evils of the “illegal drug trade.” That approach won’t work for slavery, obviously.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Racansky sends a link to Antislavery.org for more information.

ANOTHER MAJOR BLACKOUT, this time in Denmark. Are we actually seeing more of these, or are they just getting more attention?

JOSH MARSHALL FINDS THAT THE TRUTH HURTS. He’s not happy about Democratic Congressman Jim Marshall (whom Josh originally misidentified as a Republican) saying that negative media coverage is getting our troops killed. But Marshall the Congressman, and a Vietnam vet, was there, and thinks negative publicity is encouraging the Baathist holdouts to believe that they can pull a Mogadishu and get the United States to pull out. Marshall the pundit might want to ponder the possibility that reflexive media negativity, counted on by our foes to advance their plans, might actually, you know, advance their plans.

It’s not the reporting of criticisms or bad things that’s the issue — the first-person accounts I link below all have criticisms and negative information. It’s the lazy Vietnam-templating, the “of course America must be losing” spin, the implicit and sometimes explicit sneer, and the relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones that’s the issue. It’s what the terrorists are counting on, and it’s what too many in the media are happy to deliver, because they think it’ll hurt Bush.

And it doesn’t get any lower than that.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Aubrey emails: “Do you think the journalist Marshall might want to explain what, factually, is wrong with Rep. Marshall’s statement?” I hope he will.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Henry Hanks observes:

Jim Marshall could very well run to replace Zell Miller in GA and could also very well decide who controls the Senate in 2004… Democrats would be well advised not to drive him too far away…

Especially when he’s, like, right.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan comments, and praises Howard Dean:

In fact, one of the good things about Dean’s campaign has been his clear statement that we need the Iraqi liberation to work.

I agree.

HERE’S ANOTHER FIRSTHAND REPORT FROM IRAQ featuring a lot of stuff we’re not hearing from the big guys.

UPDATE: Read this, too:

There is a sea change going on, right now, and CNN will be the last place to learn about it.

Remember that story early in the war about the Iraqis attacking an Al-Jazeera van and destroying it and wounding its crew? CNN barely covered it, but the Iraqis I have spoken to recently said they are sick and tired of the “old” Arab media (which strangely enough includes Al-Jazeera to them) reporting only the negatives and ignoring the progress they’ve made and the fact that for many, things are better…they see this as other Arabs trying to stir up trouble in “their” country. And they resent it.

They want Al-Jazeera and Manar out of there, and they want to get on rebuilding their country themselves, thank you very much. They don’t need those guys making it worse by running erroneous and unretracted stories like the one a few weeks back about US soldiers raping Iraqi girls– and thereby bringing even more violence. They want a new country.

And here’s some support here for what he says about Iraqis’ dislike of Al Jazeera.

UPDATE: Reader Elizabeth King emails:

I’m not surprised that the media coverage of Iraq is now being reported as unduly negative. I could tell back in June that this year would be the Summer of the Iraqi Quagmire, much as last year was the Summer of Kidnapped Children, and 2001 was the Summer of Shark Attacks.

Like mad dogs and Englishmen, the media spend too much time in the heat of the day … and it shows.

I think they’re spending too much time in hotel bars with former Baathist minders, actually.

HOWARD LOVY has some interesting observations on science journalism that are occasioned by a story on nanotechnology, but that are applicable to lots of other subjects.

UPDATE: His permalinks are busted now. Here’s the site link — just scroll down.

IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T HEARD, the 9th Circuit, en banc, has reversed the panel decision, so the recall is on. Here’s the opinion.

Larry Solum has a big roundup post with comments, quotations, and summaries of the opinion.

ARNOLD KLING HAS AN INTERESTING LOOK at the United Nations and American politics.

YOU KNOW, WHO NEEDS TO BASH THE MEDIA when they’re so busy doing it to themselves?

Convicted child killer Joel Steinberg has a job as a television producer waiting when he’s released from prison next summer after serving 17 years, his attorney said Monday.

Steinberg will work for “New York Confidential,” an interview show on a local cable station, attorney Darnay Hoffman said.

“He has contacts in prison,” Hoffman said, explaining that Steinberg, a disbarred lawyer, knows some of the state’s most notorious criminals. “He knows how to go into a prison and get a story.”

Steinberg, 62, is completing an 8-to-25-year prison term for manslaughter in the death of his illegally adopted daughter, Lisa, and is expected to be released next June.

Coming soon: Eric Rudolph on the women’s-health beat.

SPEAKING OF THE MEDIA AND IRAQ, the University of Tennessee’s Howard Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy is having a rather impressive symposium on the subject, to judge from the guest list, and it’s being webcast. You can stream it live from this page.

THE IRAQ MEDIA-BIAS STORY has hit USA Today. There’s a survey of reporters with different views on how things are going, which leads Virginia Postrel to observe that “There’s good news and bad news, not a single coherent narrative. . . . All of which explains why I don’t, from my perch in the United States, opine on the ‘real’ situation in Iraq.”

And neither do I, of course. But what has been obvious from here is that the bad news has been consistently overplayed and the good news consistently underplayed, as demonstrated by the mismatch between the very coherent “quagmire” narrative from the Big Media and what we’ve heard from returning members of Congress, federal judges, touring musicians, military bloggers, returning servicemembers and — now, finally — members of the press.

To make an Amartya Sen sort of point, what’s unfortunate about the slanted (and lazy) nature of most of the reporting is that it doesn’t point out real problems in ways that can let them be fixed, and that will bring them to the attention of people who can fix them. When the coverage continues to come from the same tired Vietnam template, applied to a very different situation, it’s not terribly useful and I suspect that it’s largely tuned out by folks in the White House who assume (more or less correctly) that it’s intended to hurt them.

But that means that they have to rely on the reports of people in the chain of command, who have their own agendas. The press is supposed to be a check on that sort of thing, but it’s fallen down on the job in postwar Iraq. Fortunately, the Internet has taken up some of the slack, and is (I’m being hopeful here) spurring the Big Media folks to take a second look at what they’re doing.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has some comments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Susanna Cornett offers perspective.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Kevin Drum thinks that I can’t tell if the reporting is biased because I’m not in Iraq. Huh? When the media reports are contradicted by the reports from all sorts of other people in the region, and when even the reporters admit that they’re not telling the whole story, and when Dan Rather is freakin’ apologizing, and when we’ve heard the same “quagmire” stuff in the past only to have it turn out bogus, I think I can tell. (And Kevin doesn’t let his own distance from Iraq stop him from offering his own opinion on what’s going on there, in the very same post.)

The defensiveness that the left is showing on this issue suggests to me that it’s hit a nerve. The “quagmire” political strategy is looking like a loser — again.

STILL MORE: And here’s another firsthand report:

On the ground in Iraq, I’ve caught wind of and read recent news articles back in the states. I figured I could clarify some things. As usual, the news media has blown some things way out of proportion.

The countryside is getting more safe by the day despite all the attacks you are hearing about. Imagine if every shooting incident or robbery committed in Los Angeles was blown way out of proportion. This is a country where most of the Saddam Hussein thugs are being chased around like scared rabbits by coalition forces. It is literally open season on them! We hunt them down like animals.

We just keep hearing things like this.

GERMANS TO BUSH: “Hey, buddy, we sure could use some help!”

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED: It’s France and the U.N. in a corrupt arms deal! Go figure.

CHIEF WIGGLES IS COLLECTING TOYS FOR KIDS IN IRAQ. There’s an address. I think I could find a spare Barbie or two around this place, if I look, well . . . anywhere, actually.

UPDATE: Yeah, I know. The Chief says no Barbie dolls. Just wishful thinking on my part.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, it’s obvious what we should be sending.

JAY ROSEN: Editors Rock Who Let Weblogs Roll. I hope they read this piece at the Bee.

MORE DEMOCRATIC MEMBERS OF CONGRESS are calling press coverage of Iraq unduly negative:

Journalists are giving a slanted and unduly negative account of events in Iraq, a bipartisan congressional group that has just returned from a three-day House Armed Services Committee visit to assess stabilization efforts and the condition of U.S. troops said.

Lawmakers charged that reporters rarely stray from Baghdad and have a “police-blotter” mindset that results in terror attacks, deaths and injuries displacing accounts of progress in other areas.

Comparisons with Vietnam were farfetched, members said.

Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee’s ranking member, said, “The media stresses the wounds, the injuries, and the deaths, as they should, but for instance in Northern Iraq, Gen. [Dave] Petraeus has 3,100 projects — from soccer fields to schools to refineries — all good stuff and that isn’t being reported.”

Skelton and other Democrats on the trip said they plan to reach out to all members of their caucus and explain what they observed. . . .

The lawmakers said they worry that the overall negative tone of American press outlets’ reports did not do justice to the progress being made by an occupying force reconstructing a country after years of neglect and in the face of remaining hostile elements that profited under the old regime.

There’s plenty of criticism of the Administration’s postwar policy, but it’s constructive criticism, not faux-Vietnam cut-and-paste carping.

UPDATE: This post by Jay Rosen seems fitting somehow:

Many journalists have stopped kidding themselves about their ability to remain completely detached. But this thought is rarely developed because it might lead to asking: what kind of attachment to the republic—or local community—should journalists be developing today, given everything going on around them? Existing press think does not cover this ground, which is more important than ever. You can call the press a player, but what you cannot do is ask: what’s it playing for?

(Emphasis added.) Criticism’s fine. It’s even useful, when it’s specific and factual rather than atmospheric and theatrical. But as Lileks notes, you’d just like to hear ’em say “I hope we win.” Or at least not sound like they hope we lose.

UPDATE: Here’s a John Leo column on the media and Iraq, too.

MARK GLASER’S ASKING ME about the Weintraub/Bee affair, and whether my MSNBC site is “muzzled” since it has an editor. That’s a fair question (even if I suspect it was inspired by my cheap-but-accurate shot at most “journalistic ethics” rules, below), and the answer is, well, yes and no.

I’m not “muzzled,” since nobody slapped an editor on me in response to inhouse PC complaints, as was done with Weintraub — something that’s got to have a chilling effect, I’d think. On the other hand, the MSNBC publishing platform, which imposes a substantial delay between writing and editing, and which makes updates a pain, certainly costs in terms of immediacy. (This is exacerbated by the time-zone difference, since I have to email the posts to them, and somebody in the Pacific Time Zone then has to recode them and post them. If I send one late at night, it usually isn’t up until at least noon the following day. I’ve got one editor — people back him up when he’s on vacation, but there’s not 24-hour coverage with people sitting by the computer waiting for me to mail stuff in at any hour.) I much prefer the kind of on-the-spot posting and editing that Movable Type allows, but apparently integrating that with a gigantic, sprawling web platform like MSNBC isn’t easy.

I’ve dealt with that by doing more op-edish posts for MSNBC: things that are halfway between a blog post and a column, I guess you’d say. That works fine for me, as I can just post different sorts of pieces in different places (short stuff here, longer stuff there), with pointers back and forth as needed. Sadly, Weintraub doesn’t have the same ability — and I rather doubt the Bee would be enthusiastic about him maintaining an independent blog on the side.

UPDATE: Meanwhile Stephen Bainbridge is defending the Bee. Well, sort of:

Yes, I know it’s a newspaper. Yes, I know a lot of people (including journalists) blather on about newspapers being a quasi-utility vested with a public interest. But that’s just the nonsense they use to justify a unique constitutional privilege to libel people and invade their privacy. In the real world, newspapers are for-profit businesses.

Well, with defenders like these. . . . But although Bainbridge is right that the Bee is perfectly within its legal rights to do whatever it wants to with things it publishes, the Blogosphere is perfectly within its rights to criticize the Bee and to point out that the Bee is behaving with all the commitment to public discourse that we’d expect from a big corporation like Enron or Disney. Also, I think that Bainbridge is wrong to claim a contradiction between bloggers’ criticism of the BBC’s lax supervision of Andrew Gilligan and bloggers’ criticism of the Bee’s suddenly-intrusive supervision of Weintraub’s blog. Weintraub is an opinion writer, who hasn’t been accused of getting facts wrong. He’s accused of stating political opinions that some people don’t like. That’s hardly the same thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has some comments.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Bainbridge has responded to my response to his . . . oh, never mind. There’s more at his post. In partial response, something that Kevin Roderick notes: Weintraub (like a lot of other print reporters and pundits) “represents” the Bee in TV and radio appearances all the time without a Bee editor being interposed, even though a lot more people see those appearances than read a blog, making the “danger to the brand” much greater. I continue to blame jealousy and discomfort with new technology. I think those factors play a much bigger role than business considerations.

STILL MORE: Meanwhile, on the underlying merits (Weintraub’s un-PC comments about Bustamante), reader Jonas Cord notes that this Rik Hertzberg piece in The New Yorker basically says the same thing:

Cruz Bustamante is an affable mediocrity who has drifted upward on a combination of term limits, opportunism, ethnic ticket-balancing, and luck. Harold Meyerson, of the L.A. Weekly, calls him “the least charismatic and able of the state’s Democratic leaders.” Bustamante, whose grasp of substance often seems shaky, has been almost as unwilling as Schwarzenegger to subject himself to sustained questioning, and he has not yet demonstrated any discernible appeal for independents.

Cord notes: “Seems that the famously un-PC, right-wing, anti-Latino staff of the New Yorker agrees with Weintraub. If only they had an ombudsman to call!”

And, in answer to Glaser’s original question, what I like about a Movable Type-powered blog like this one is that you can produce a post like this, bit by bit, over an hour or so as new stuff happens. I don’t think you could do that with an editor involved, and certainly not if you had to email in each incremental addition. Especially after the editor has left for the day.