The news so far from the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference is Bill Gate’s unintentionally hilarious comment in last night’s show-opening interview, in which he said: “Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.”
Who knew?
NY Daily News: Obama: ‘Assassination’ flap over-rated. “I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Sen. Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make,” Obama told Radio Isla in Puerto Rico, where he and Clinton stumped in advance of the June 1 primary. “And I think that is what happened here.
This really should be the final word. Sadly it won’t be.
Look, we all say stupid things from time to time, even super-smart people like Clinton. Some of the criticism of her remarks, which were kind of weird, is so far over the top that it’s crazy. Yet journalists continue to flog it mercilessly.
Let it go.
The “Publius Project” — essays and conversations about constitutional moments on the Net collected by the Berkman Center — has launched. I have an essay there, along with the writings of many other folks.
Guardian: White House tells court of missing emails from beginning of Iraq war. The White House has admitted in court that it has lost three months of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq war, raising questions about the possible deletion of politically sensitive records.
The disclosure came in a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a non-profit group that specialises in uncovering classified documents.
The archive was told it could not receive emails relating to Iraq, despite a 30-year-old law requiring the preservation of presidential records, because a system upgrade had deleted up to 5m emails.
Given the record of the Bush White House, a better bet is that these folks deliberated deleted the material to prevent anyone from knowing what was going on inside the administration. Naturally, Congress won’t even try to find out the truth beyond the normal handwringing.
But the alternative is that the administration deliberately violated the law requiring retention. Who’s going to prosecute? You already know: nobody, because these folks don’t do that sort of thing when they’re the lawbreakers.
I have a particular disdain for people who park SUVs in spots marked “Compact” — especially when there are bigger spots 50 feet further away.
Here’s my Parking Jerk of the Day, on level 4 of the Yahoo parking garage.
At UC Berkeley’s Journalism School tomorrow evening, there’s a Screening of “Citizen McCaw”:
the new documentary film about the journalism ethics battle and meltdown at the Santa Barbara News Press. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the state of journalism with former News Press Editor Jerry Roberts, “Citizen McCaw” director Sam Tyler and San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Page Editor John Diaz, moderated by journalism school professor Cynthia Gorney.
“Meltdown” is an understatement for what has happened at the Santa Barbara newspaper, a once-respected journal that has fallen under harsh times during the Wendy McCaw ownership.
If I were going to be in California tomorrow I’d be at this screening. If you’re in the neighborhood and have the time (and nontrivial but $50 admission going to the legal defense fund of people who were kicked out of the paper), please consider it.
At a conversation site where I spend some time, someone noted a Twitter posting from earlier today — well worth repeating:
“What I like about April Fool’s Day: one day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.”
For a number of reasons I’m now using a Blackberry Curve as my main phone. But its email system is beyond dreadful for anyone who’s not locked into a Windows-Outlook-Exchange environment.
Mainly, the Blackberry IMAP connection is pathetic, a kludge that is almost worse than nothing. It doesn’t understand folders. It doesn’t reflect answered messages on the server. All this is because Blackberry pretty much makes you go through its own servers to use email, and because its maker is only seriously interested in working with Exchange.
So I’m looking for an acceptable IMAP mail client for the Blackberry OS, one that connects directly via the Internet to my personal mail server and others. I don’t need fancy, just usable — and I’ll be delighted to pay good money for it.
Send me an email if you know of anything useful.
I hope some of you can join us May 15-16 at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society for the Berkman@10 Conference: The Future of the Internet. This gathering, marking the center’s 10th anniversary, is shaping up to be an extraordinary affair.
As a Berkman Fellow the past several years, I’ve had a chance to spend (not nearly enough) time with some great people who are doing some of the best work on understanding the Net’s already powerful impact on our lives. The May conference will, in part, offer a summary of where we are and where we may be going. As the conference home page asks: “In tracing the trajectory of the past and attempting to lean into the future, what are the contours of the moment we find ourselves in? What are the most important questions that will propel us into the next decade?”
Among the many, many great speakers will be our lunchtime keynoter on Friday, May 16 — someone who’ll need little introduction to regular readers of this blog. He is Joshua Micah Marshall, founder and editor of Talking Points Memo and several related political blogs. What he and his team do each day has become essential reading for people who care about politics and policy, and he recently was honored for his work with a truly high honor in journalism, the George Polk Award.
I’ll have the honor of introducing Josh Marshall. He has been a touchstone for my own work, and has shown one way forward for the journalism “by the people, for the people,” in which I so fervently believe.
Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Biz Editors Defend Mortgage Crisis Coverage. Did the growing mortgage credit crisis, which took a huge turn with last week’s collapse of Bear Stearns, get enough early coverage from newspapers? Top business editors at several of the nation’s major papers say yes, although a few admit some of the more complicated elements may not have been broken out enough for readers.
What tripe. The newspaper industry almost totally failed to do its job, and the public got screwed once again.
Citing a story here and there, as several editors do in the E&P piece, is not evidence of newspapers doing their job. It’s quite the opposite.
When an economic catastrophe of this sort — and entirely predicable one — is building, journalists are failing to do their jobs when they don’t harp on it.
As I said in a previous posting, newspapers and broadcasters were raking in billions in advertising from the real estate and banking industries as this bubble inflated. I do not believe this is a coincidence. I also don’t believe it was deliberate malfeasance; but you just don’t see lots of tough coverage in media of the people and companies paying the bills.
Many if not most papers have special weekly real estate pages or sections where you would find little hint of the potential for trouble. I know I looked for it in the papers I read. That’s where the discussion belonged — as well, of course, as Page One — not solely in the occasional business page stories. Hundreds of references to bubbles, most in the past year and not when there was a chance to slow down that train, were dwarfed by comparison to the buying advice that dominated coverage of real estate overall.
Oh, sure, there were extremely infrequent stories containing warnings in a few publications — and occasional quotes from skeptics in the prices-just-keep-rising stories that overwhelmingly dominated the coverage. But the reality is that journalists mostly didn’t have a clue, or didn’t want to have a clue. I don’t know which is worse.
Some bloggers, and some economists, did shout warnings. They were ignored, or worse, insulted by wishful thinkers and (I suspect) people who stood to gain from the continuing bubble.
Again, from a previous post, here are some questions the media all but ignored until too late:
Where were the stories we should have been seeing, noting that “buyers” — a word that is ludicrous in context –were running headlong toward a financial cliff? What happened to the coverage of a housing market that fewer and fewer people could afford to enter except with no-interest or no-down-payment loans, where home prices were so far out of sync with the economy that there was no precedent for such imbalance?
Where were the stories pointing out that the secondary (and far beyond) mortgage markets were salting hugely risky debt all through the American economy? You think your bank or pension fund doesn’t have some of this garbage somewhere in its books? Think again.
The media also bungled by not fingering the makers of this bubble apart from foolish “buyers” who proved to be such suckers. This boom was fueled by people who knew it couldn’t last: brokers, bankers and, above all, Wall Street’s ever-clever wizards who risk other people’s money for gigantic fees.
This is another journalistic scandal. It’s not quite on the order of the bended-knee, pre-war coverage — stenography of government officials’ lies and deceptions — that helped steer America into the Iraq war, but only because it’s not killing people in large numbers.
It’s a massive enough scandal, though. There’s plenty of pain left in this deflation, possibly including an outright tanking of the economy.
The journalism craft should take a long, hard look at what it’s failed to do, yet again, in the housing bubble. It has failed to warn — as loudly and incessanty as it did in promoting the housing bubble — that a financial crunch was on the way.
There’s plenty of blame to go around in this mess. The finger-pointing has barely begun. But when it gets going for real, I hope that journalists who do some of that pointing will at least look in a mirror.
