CRICKET.

A MUSLIM LAWYER’S defense of publishing the Mohammed cartoons.

ED CONE: “Was the terrifying incident at UNC yesterday an act of home-grown terrorism? Nine people were struck by a Jeep driven by a man who is alleged to have said he was avenging American treatment of Muslims. Fortunately, injuries were minor. Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar is reportedly being charged with nine counts of attempted first-degree murder and nine counts of assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury with intent to kill.”

BOB OWENS LOOKS AT The Big Truth.

MICHAEL MALONE POSTS a lengthy review of An Army of Davids at ABC’s Silicon Insider. Excerpt:

I cannot think of a better book for the average reader to understand just how the Web and other digital technologies are reversing the polarities of modern society — restoring many features of daily life lost with the Industrial Revolution, while at the same time inventing powerful new cultural institutions. And for those of us who make careers out of watching this transformation, no book to date so well summarizes all of the diverse trends in a single narrative.

It’s a great review, and I have no complaints. But I’m a bit frustrated — with myself — because Malone doesn’t see the connection between the final chapters of the book (on nanotechnology, space, and the Singularity) and the earlier chapters on more contemporary phenomena. That’s my fault, not his. I thought I had a pretty clear story arc, starting with events today, then explaining how nanotechnology will represent a vast intensification of current trends, leading to vastly (and to a degree, dangerously) empowered individuals, with worries that we’d see either explosive chaos, or a global police state (I invoke Larry Niven’s A.R.M., and note that it’s actually a rather benign vision of such things) — with the space bit appearing to explain why we need the safety factor of dispersing people beyond earth, and how the new space frontier will protect values of individualism. I quote Bob Zubrin on that point. (I also discuss the X-Prize, which has a real Army-of-Davids character.)

It seemed clear to me, but Malone’s not the only one to miss that, which makes it my fault. Maybe I’ll add a few paragraphs to the next edition, if there is one, to make that point clearer.

UPDATE: Comments on my response.

BLOGS, THE SLUTTY ONE-NIGHT STANDS OF THE MEDIA WORLD?

I meet new blogs all the time, through word of mouth and serendipity, and we have some nice moments together. But I don’t usually crave a second date. Life is too short.

But it’s nice to get together with someone who’s doing it for fun, not for the money.

A BEAT DOWN IN HELL TOWN: The Lukashenko regime in Belarus lives up to the title of Europe’s Last Dictator:

When one of the candidates challenging Mr Lukashenko in this month’s presidential election tried to get into the People’s Assembly, he was knocked to the ground by plain clothes officers and beaten.

Alexander Kozulin was then dragged off and taken into custody.

Outside the police station, a number of his supporters and journalists were detained, too. One newspaper photographer at the scene was beaten up by police. He received concussion and a broken nose.

Later another presidential candidate from the opposition had problems.

Alexander Milinkevich attempted to hold an election rally in the city centre. But the authorities declared it illegal and sent in the security forces: hundreds of riot police blocked off the roads and dispersed a crowd of several thousand Milenkevich supporters.

“The authorities saw that the popularity of the opposition is growing rapidly,” Yaroslav Romanchuk of the United Civil Party told me. “That’s why they are now trying to block the opposition from campaigning. This isn’t an election. It’s a sham.”

I have seen two very different pictures of Belarus here this week. The first – on a TV screen, painted in pomp and ceremony, depicting Belarus as a haven of stability with a leader adored by the nation. And a second Belarus – an unofficial one, not intended for live broadcast and public consumption; a country where political rivals are beaten and detained by police.

Much more at the B23 Blog.

A LOOK AT THE KATRINA RESPONSE AND AFTERMATH from Lou Dolinar.

JOHN HAWKINS has more thoughts on Jim Geraghty’s “Tipping Point” theory.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

PR AND BLOGGER ETHICS: I talked to a reporter about blogs and PR — I won’t spoil the story, but the gist is that some PR people have been sending stuff to bloggers, and some bloggers have apparently reprinted some of it without attribution.

I think that’s bad, but as I stressed in our interview, it’s not as if this supports a “bloggers lack the standards of mainstream journalism” conclusion. In fact, here’s a bit from The Appearance of Impropriety on that topic:

Thirty-five years ago Daniel Boorstin wrote of what he called “pseudo-events,” and noted that much of what passes for news is actually made up of items manufactured by public relations flacks and distributed to the public by way of news organizations. The news organizations, he wrote, go along with this sort of thing out of a need for material, and out of laziness: it’s just easier to take predigested material and reprint it than it is to come up with real news. In tones of dismay, Boorstin reported that the National Press Club in Washington was equipped with racks holding the handouts from press conferences throughout the capital, in order to save the reporters the trouble of actually attending. As Boorstin went on to note:

We begin to be puzzled about what is really the “original” of an event. The authentic news record of what “happens” or is said comes increasingly to seem to be what is given out in advance. More and more news events become dramatic performances in which “men in the news” simply act out more or less well their prepared script. The story prepared “for future release” acquires an authenticity that competes with that of the actual occurrences on the scheduled date.

The practice Boorstin described has not gone away: it has expanded into new frontiers. Technology in the early 1960s was primitive, and favored live or minimally-produced television news; as a result, that medium acquired a reputation for realism and immediacy that print reporting lacked. A print story could be made up, but an image on television was real. But nowadays, when many high schools have network-quality television studios, and when videotape is sold at convenience stores, that has changed. Although a “video news release” is still more expensive to produce than a standard paper press release, they have become much more common. According to a recent poll, seventy-five percent of TV news directors reported using video news releases at least once per day.

These releases, with their high quality images and slick production, are produced by companies and groups who want to get their message across, but don’t want simply to purchase advertising time. They are designed so that television producers at local stations or (less often) major networks, can simply intersperse shots of their own reporters or anchors (often reading scripted lines provided with the release) to give the impression that the story is their own. Their use has been the subject of considerable controversy within the journalistic profession, although some commentators have claimed that they are used no more often, or misleadingly, than written press releases are used by the print media.

A recent scandal in Britain involved network use of a video news release produced by the group Greenpeace that some considered misleading. But of course for every video news release, or VNR as they are called in the trade, that comes from an environmental group there are hundreds that come from businesses or government organizations. Though a keen eye can usually spot a VNR (hint: the subject matter wouldn’t otherwise be news, and it usually involves experts and locales far from the station that airs it) most viewers probably believe that today’s story on cell-phone safety or miracle bras is just another product of the news program’s producers – and hence, implicitly backed by the news people’s public commitment to objective journalism. The truth, however, is different.

It is fair to say that the wholesale use of others’ work is a major part of modern journalism. But news officials are quick to distinguish that from plagiarism. In a mini-scandal at the San Diego Tribune, a reporter’s story was cancelled when editors noticed that it looked very much like a story that had already appeared elsewhere. At first, presumably, it was thought that the story had been taken from the other publication. Then it turned out that both stories were simply near-verbatim versions of a press release. According to the Tribune’s deputy editor, that wasn’t plagiarism. “If you look up the definition of plagiarism, it is the unauthorized use of someone’s material. When someone sends you a press packet, you’re entitled to use everything in there.”

Certainly this statement seems to capture the attitude of many in the journalistic professions. One public-relations handbook explains it this way:

Most reporters aren’t scoop-hungry investigators. They’re wage earners who want to please their editors with as little effort as possible, and they’re happy to let you provide them with ideas and facts for publishable stories. That is why most publicity is positive for people and their businesses.

You’re still not convinced? Go to the library and glance through a few days’ issues of several newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and some local papers. You’ll discover that the same stories appear over and over again. That’s because they were initiated by the companies being covered, not by an eager young reporter looking for a scoop.

An experiment by a group of journalism students at the University of Tennessee demonstrates just how willing reporters can be to accept facts and story ideas that involve little work. The students concocted a fictitious press release from a group opposing “political correctness” and mailed it to a number of newspapers. Most did not run it, but quite a few did — and none checked the details one way or another. One newspaper even embellished the story with additional details that were not included in the original press release. When word of the experiment got out, journalists were predictably outraged, with one even saying that it violated the bond of trust (!) between journalists and public-relations professionals. A more likely explanation for the outrage is that the experiment uncovered a pattern of shoddy work that its practitioners would have preferred to keep unexposed. Not plagiarism, perhaps, but something that in many ways is worse.

Every successful system attracts parasites. The blogosphere is a successful system. That doesn’t excuse bad conduct, of course. But I hope that nobody will try to pretend that this sort of thing is new or unusual, even if the setting is.

UPDATE: A confession:

It is far easier to repackage (or sometimes quote verbatim) what someone else is saying, rather than doing the reporting yourself. I fess up to being guilty of this when I interned with a couple airline magazines a few years ago. They basically handed me a bunch of press releases, asked me to hit the Internet, make a couple phone calls, and then craft an article from it.

Trudy Schuett, meanwhile, has thoughts on the subversive potential of republishing press releases while labeling them as such.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Galvin defends the PR industry in a lengthy missive. Click “read more” to read it. I don’t deny that PR is valuable, actually. My point was simply that journalists rely a lot more heavily on PR than they admit, and that pointing a finger at bloggers in this case without acknowledging that fact (in a “see, you can’t trust bloggers because they lack our journalistic standards” fashion) would be deeply unfair, even dishonest.

(more…)

SHOP and awe.

BAD NEWS for Air America.

WHO ARE THE GUANTANAMO DETAINEES: Professor Bainbridge takes a look, and doesn’t like it.

DON SURBER IS defending Robert Byrd.

HOLD THE CONSPIRACY WORRIES: A blogger reports on being unable to find a copy of An Army of Davids at bookstores. Remember, it doesn’t officially come out until Tuesday, even though some places are stocking it and Amazon is starting to ship early.

UPDATE: Even if you can’t find it, you can read a short excerpt from the book here, courtesy of The New Atlantis.

CARTOON WARS UPDATE: Manan Ahmed reports that they’re blocking blogspot in Pakistan to keep the dread cartoons out.

Pathetic.

CORRUPTION AT THE CIA?

The stunning investigation of bribery and corruption in Congress has spread to the CIA, ABC News has learned.

The CIA Inspector General has opened an investigation into the spy agency’s executive director, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, and his connections to two defense contractors accused of bribing a member of Congress and Pentagon officials.

The CIA released an official statement on the matter to ABC News, saying: “It is standard practice for CIA’s Office of Inspector General — an aggressive, independent watchdog — to look into assertions that mention agency officers. That should in no way be seen as lending credibility to any allegation.”

Stay tuned. Between this and the leaks investigations, there’s likely to be a fair amount of action at CIA headquarters.

RAND SIMBERG HAS A SUGGESTION: Replace “Boondocks,” which is going on hiatus, with “Day by Day.”

Sounds good to me!