31 May 2005 @ 10:54AM >> For the first time in history, a cell-phone ring tone tops a major music singles chart. I have no idea what to make of this, but that won’t stop me from declaring it some sort of significant cultural shift.

Prediction: The near future will be littered with scores of low-fidelity re-renderings of yesterday’s icons.

26 May 2005 @ 11:01AM >> A number of people have been asking about the follow-up to Brainwashing 101, the 46-minute documentary on political correctness released as a preview last fall. By the end of this year, On The Fence Films will complete Indoctrinate U, the feature-length follow-up to Brainwashing 101. When it’s out, you’ll be able to see why I’ve been threatened with arrest on multiple campuses, including my own alma mater, Bucknell University. More >>

22 May 2005 @ 9:02PM >> In a New York Times article entitled “Believe It: The Media’s Credibility Headache Gets Worse,” Patrick D. Healy unintentionally illustrates precisely why the media’s credibility is in tatters (emphasis mine):

Almost like clockwork, each new month seems to usher in a new controversy over journalistic competence or integrity - the latest being the retracted May 9 article in Newsweek, about a report that American interrogators flushed a Koran down the toilet, that has been linked by the White House to at least 17 deaths during anti-American protests that followed.

Actually, Mr. Healy, it was the rioters themselves—or, as you put it, “protesters”—who carried signs criticizing the alleged Koran desecration that Newsweek reported. The Muslim rioters conveniently rendered their signs in English, knowing that the establishment press would gladly pick up and broadcast the message to the English-speaking world. So the link wasn’t drawn by the White House, it was explicitly stated up front, from the very beginning, by the rioters.

By blaming the White House, Healy is engaging in a little intellectual sleight-of-hand. The way he reports it, the reader is left to conclude that the there was no connection between the riots and the Newsweek report until the White House suggested it. In other words, according to Healy, the link was nothing more than White House opinion. The only way to reach that conclusion is to completely ignore what the rioters themselves said in their signs. With this logic, Newsweek is cast as a victim of White House spin. This media-as-victim tactic is telling, considering an analogy drawn by Healy earlier in the article:

[...] Johnson & Johnson proved that credibility, not to mention market share, could be regained after scandal - in its case, a series of deaths caused by cyanide-laced [Tylenol] capsules some 20 years ago. Part of the strategy was to portray the company as a victim in its own right.

[...]

Compared with the news media outlets, Tylenol may have had it easy. It would be hard for the media to pitch itself as a innocent victim of its own shortcomings.

It can’t be too hard, apparently, because that’s exactly what Healy does by implying the White House concocted a connection that the rioters themselves claimed quite openly. Maybe asking a Times reporter to look at the photographic evidence is too much. Either way, there’s one assertion Healy has right: “American confidence in the news media is at an all-time low.”

19 May 2005 @ 5:48PM >> Terry Moran, the Chief White House Correspondent for ABC News, admitted the anti-military bias of the media in an interview with Hugh Hewitt:

There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it’s very dangerous.

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

19 May 2005 @ 5:32PM >> Ann Coulter:

When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.

When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey’s nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.

When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones’ accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff’s then-employer The Washington Post — which owns Newsweek — decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.

So apparently it’s possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.

[...]

Newsweek seems to have very different responses to the same reporter’s scoops. Who’s deciding which of Isikoff’s stories to run and which to hold? I note that the ones that Matt Drudge runs have turned out to be more accurate — and interesting! — than the ones Newsweek runs. Maybe Newsweek should start running everything past Matt Drudge.

Andrew McCarthy, National Review:

Here’s an actual newsflash — and one, yet again, that should be news to no one: The reason for the carnage here was, and is, militant Islam. Nothing more.

Newsweek merely gave the crazies their excuse du jour. But they didn’t need a report of Koran desecration to fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers, to blow up embassies, or to behead hostages taken for the great sin of being Americans or Jews. They didn’t need a report of Koran desecration to take to the streets and blame the United States while enthusiastically taking innocent lives. This is what they do.

The outpouring of righteous indignation against Newsweek glides past a far more important point. Yes, we’re all sick of media bias. But “Newsweek lied and people died” is about as worthy a slogan as the scurrilous “Bush lied and people died” that it parrots. And when we engage in this kind of mindless demagoguery, we become just another opportunistic plaintiff — no better than the people all too ready to blame the CIA because Mohammed Atta steered a hijacked civilian airliner into a big building, and to sue the Port Authority because the building had the audacity to collapse from the blow.

18 May 2005 @ 6:20PM >> It’s good to see Jeffrey Dvorkin, the ombudsman of NPR, thinking about diversity. In his latest column, Dvorkin asks, “shouldn’t NPR sound a little more like its listeners?”

Sounds nice, right? It would, if Dvorkin weren’t being so literal. Yes, he’s actually worried that the accents of the voices on the network aren’t diverse enough. Not in terms of perspective, but twang:

When it comes to aural diversity, NPR sounds, well... like NPR. That is, not very diverse at all.

Listeners say they can always tell when they are tuned to a public radio station. They say they can tell by the sound of the voices, the cadence of the delivery and the intonation of the reporters and announcers.

Jeff, you’re working at a taxpayer-financed radio network that routinely gives short-shrift to the views held by a majority of Americans (if we’re to judge by election results), and you’re worried that there aren’t enough different regional accents on your network? While you’re at it, why don’t you bean-count all the different shirt colors worn by the NPR hosts, just to be sure that mauve isn’t underrepresented.

There are less superficial categories that Dvorkin could be getting worked up about. Intellectual diversity counts for something, too. Who cares if everyone on NPR has different accents if they’re all saying the same thing?

18 May 2005 @ 12:39PM >> The end result of Europe’s blind multiculturalism and feel-good tolerance:

In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity.

Where are the so-called women’s rights activists on these issues? Their hands are tied, because—like most good little liberals—they can’t break free of the politically correct notion that all cultures are inherently equal. If you believe a culture that encourages “honor killings” is no better or no worse than one that doesn’t, then you have no basis for criticizing the environment that gives rise to these vicious murders.

17 May 2005 @ 6:14PM >> Recently, Newsweek erroneously reported that military officials guarding al Qaeda detainees at the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. The report was later picked up by Al Jazeera and was ultimately repeated by radical Muslim leaders in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The reports sparked violent riots that led to at least 17 dead and hundreds injured before Newsweek finally retracted the story. Many have been covering this story thoroughly over the last few days, so rather than rehashing everything that’s been said elsewhere, here are a few observations:

• In 1998, Michael Isikoff, the reporter behind the retracted Newsweek report, was also the guy who almost broke the Monica Lewinsky story. I say almost because as we all know by now, Matt Drudge broke the story. Drudge was given an opening because Newsweek’s editors pulled the plug at the last minute. Was it a case of Clinton favoratism? Or was it a need for more thorough fact-checking? If it was the latter, why didn’t Newsweek apply a similar standard in this case?
• Newsweek’s original report referred to “sources” corroborating the Koran-flushing story. The “s” at the end of “sources” indicates more than one source. But, as we now know, Newsweek had only one source for the story. So why lie to readers that way? Even if Newsweek couldn’t be certain of the original report, the one thing they could be absolutely sure of was how many sources reported the story to them. Was Newsweek trying to make us think the story was more legitimate than it turned out to be? Or is this standard journalistic practice? Inquiring minds want to know!
• Has anyone actually tried flushing a book down the toilet? It isn’t easy! You need either a really big toilet or a really small book. Even my copy of the diminutive The Wit and Wisdom of Al Franken jammed up my commode.
• Since the beginning of our War on Terror, the media has reported unsubstantiated allegations from al Qaeda detainees. The mere reporting of these charges serves to legitimize them, whether or not they were backed up by any evidence. In fact, al Qaeda training manual advises captured operatives to “complain of mistreatment while in prison.” Making unfounded charges is part of the playbook of our enemy! So, it would be nice if the media, which prides itself on skepticism, would treat the statements of al Qaeda prisoners at least as skeptically as they treat those of our leaders.
• After Enron and the other financial scandals of the last decade, newspapers and pundits from sea to shining sea declared the importance of regulating businesses. Submitting corporations to outside accountability, we were told, was the only way corruption and fraud could be stopped. Well, we now have 17 dead and hundreds injured in riots around the Middle East. Why? Because Newsweek’s screw-up left our enemy with a propaganda victory. Yet, for some reason, I don’t hear any journalists calling for their own industry to be regulated. (I’m emphatically not arguing for it, by the way; I’m just noticing a hypocrisy.) People lost money because of fraud at Enron, and executives ended up in jail. People died and a foreign policy nightmare was created because of bad reporting at Newsweek, and the magazine issues a weak apology. The real-world consequences of Newsweek’s negligence might be far worse than Enron’s, but Newsweek itself doesn’t seem to be facing any consequences other than a tarnished name.
• Newsweek didn’t kill anybody, radical Muslim lunatics did. Still, it would be quite helpful if our media remembered that these same lunatics would kill every non-Muslim to bring about their global Caliphate if given the chance. Reporters might not feel a duty to act in the best interests of their country, but you’d think that self-preservation would at least require that they not act as extensions of our enemy’s propaganda apparatus.
• For all the times that I’ve seen liberal commentators compare Christian conservatives to Muslim extremists, I do not recall anyone getting killed when Andres Serrano got government funding to put a crufix in a beaker of urine and call it art. I don’t recall any riots after Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on live TV. Yet, our media repeatedly transmits the message that “our fundamentalists” are no different from “their fundamentalists.” We can’t defeat an enemy if we perceive ourselves as just as bad—if not worse—than they are. But that’s exactly the message the moral relativists in our media broadcast time and time again.

Other coverage of the Newsweek fiasco:

• The London Times: “Newsweek sparks global riots with one paragraph on Koran”
• The London Times: “Incendiary Koran claim may be false, editor admits”
• CNN: “Newsweek backs off Quran desecration story”
• Reuters: “Newsweek says Koran desecration report is wrong”
• Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post: “Newsweek Apologizes”
• Newsweek: “How a Fire Broke Out”
• Newsweek: “Did a report in NEWSWEEK set off a wave of deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan?”

15 May 2005 @ 12:32PM >> David Clemens, a professor at Monterey Peninsula College, wrote in to comment on the recent discussion on Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus:

Hi, Evan,

The Roget’s synonyms for “liberal” and “conservative” reveal a sloppy methodology.

Dictionaries and thesauri are either “descriptive” (telling how a word IS being used) or “prescriptive” (telling how a word SHOULD be used).

The good Dr. Kipfer seems to have adopted a “descriptive” approach, simply creating a somewhat incoherent laundry list of associated words based on what she thinks people mean by them. Her synonyms for “liberal” and “conservative” probably derive from how people use them . . . on her hallway at Greenwich University. The result is that we can now say that liberals, who favor ecological and energy conservation, are “obstructionist, bitter-ender rednecks.”

The semanticist S. I. Hayakawa famously declared that no words are truly synonymous. (He actually said that the only synonymous words are “furz” and “gorse,” two names for a kind of grass—he was being funny, but then he was Canadian, eh?)

I thought I would generate an alternate list of descriptive synonyms based on my own experience:

conservative: rational, well-mannered, respectful, protective, sober, modest, patient, judicious, moral, pious, patriotic, virtuous, polite, gentlemanly or ladylike.

liberal: relativistic, tribal, hyperbolic, ends justify the means, fearful, authoritarian, do-gooder, self-righteous, utopian, dogmatic, patronizing, licentious, Orwellian.

As Glenn would say, heh.

Dave

13 May 2005 @ 8:25PM >> NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen praises the 18-month tenure of the very first public editor of The New York Times, Daniel Okrent. I’m inclined to agree. Okrent was the very first Times insider to admit the paper’s bias. And he did so in a matter-of-fact way that was not snide, not defensive and not dismissive of those of us who’ve been pointing out the bias for years.

By being the first to speak the unspeakable truth about the paper, Okrent made it that much easier for similar honesty to prevail in the future. As a business, that would be very healthy for the Times. Conservatives will read liberal papers. But fewer conservatives will read liberal papers that insult our intelligence by pretending not to have the perspective that they do. If Okrent’s legacy lives on, the Times might be able to lure back some readers who find the newfound candor refreshing.

13 May 2005 @ 12:12AM >> A new net-based software service from the BBC aims to revolutionize the way online news and media are distributed. “BBC Backstage” gives software developers the ability to extract, reorganize, repackage and display content in new ways:

backstage.bbc.co.uk attempts to encourage and support those who have provided most of the innovation on the inernet - the passionate, highly-skilled & public-spirited developers and designers many of whom volunteer their time and effort.

In the past the BBC has not always encouraged such “amateur innovators”, however public-spirited their intentions and products. backstage.bbc.co.uk aims to foster a newly constructive and open dialogue with the wider development community using BBC content and tools to deliver public value.

Sounds promising. I hope other media firms will consider similar experiments.

12 May 2005 @ 10:39PM >> The New York Times reports on its “Preserving Our Readers’ Trust” report. We can quibble about whether the “preserving” in the title of the report should be replaced with “regaining,” but if the Times implements some of these suggestions, then it will have taken an important first step towards regaining some credibility.

The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye writes:

In order to build readers’ confidence, an internal committee at The New York Times has recommended taking a variety of steps, including having senior editors write more regularly about the workings of the paper, tracking errors in a systematic way and responding more assertively to the paper’s critics.

[...]

The committee, which was charged last fall by Bill Keller, the executive editor, with examining how the paper could increase readers’ trust, said there was “an immense amount that we can do to improve our journalism.”

As examples, the report cited limiting anonymous sources, reducing factual errors and making a clearer distinction between news and opinion. It also said The Times should make the paper’s operations and decisions more transparent to readers through methods like making transcripts of interviews available on its Web site.

The report also said The Times should make it easier for readers to send e-mail to reporters and editors. “The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a responsible human being,” the report said.

[...]

One area of particular concern to Mr. Keller at the outset was the relentless public criticism of the paper, amplified by both the left and right on the Internet, that peaked during last year’s presidential campaign. The paper was largely silent during those attacks, and Mr. Keller asked the committee to consider whether it was “any longer possible to stand silent and stoic under fire.”

The committee asserted that The Times must respond to its critics. The report said it was hard for the paper to resist being in a “defensive crouch” during the election but now urged The Times to explain itself “actively and earnestly” to critics and to readers who are often left confused when charges go unanswered.

This would be good. One of the problems with media bias is that its very existence magnifies the perception of itself. Sometimes errors are the result of incompetence, not bias, but when the slant of the incompetence matches the prevailing slant of the media’s bias, people tend to assume it’s all bias. If the media cleansed itself of actual bias—assuming it is even possible for humans to do that—it would find itself under much less assault for the honest reporting and honest mistakes that are often perceived as bias.

Speaking of mistakes, the report highlighted the paper’s astonishingly high error ratio. (Alex Rodriguez, eat your heart out!) On any given day, the paper corrected an average of nearly nine errors:

As for errors, the report noted that the paper printed 3,200 corrections last year and proposed a system to track errors to detect patterns to try to prevent them from recurring.

Of course, this error rate would be even higher if the paper issued corrections for minor infractions like doctoring quotes.

The committee said the system would not be used to compile error rates of individual reporters, noting that using raw numeric counts as part of a reporter’s evaluation “would breed resentment.”

Resentment on whose part? The people screwing up? What kind of politically correct management worries that keeping metrics of your employees’ performance might upset them? Sounds a bit like the schools that prevent teachers from using red pens over worries that the color might hurt kids’ feelings. Maybe a lax management philosophy is what led to such a high level of mistakes in the first place.

Other perspectives: Media insider Jeff Jarvis likes what he sees in the Seelye article, while blogger Ace of Spaces dug through the report and detects an admission of bias:

Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.”

We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives. We particularly slip into these traps in feature stories when reporters and editors think they are merely presenting an interesting slice of life, with little awareness of the power of labels. We need to be more vigilant about the choice of language not only in the text but also in headlines, captions and display type.

[...]

In part because the Times’s editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic. Both inside and outside the paper, some people feel that we are missing stories because our staff lacks diversity in viewpoints, intellectual grounding and individual backgrounds. We should look for all manner of diversity. We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.

This isn’t the first time the paper has admitted its bias, but still, the Times should be commended for its honesty. There’s nothing wrong with a liberal paper that owns up to its perspective, as long as opinion is not presented as news. It may take a while for the culture within the newsroom to embrace the suggestions of this report, though; the evidence is, they haven’t yet.

11 May 2005 @ 10:46PM >> Wisdom from The Tao of Glenn Reynolds:

“The criticism bloggers make of journalists is they make mistakes they could fix with five minutes on Google. The criticism journalists make of bloggers is they make mistakes they could correct talking to someone for five minutes.”

11 May 2005 @ 10:20PM >> Duncan at Parrot Check directed me to a post on Preemptive Karma dissecting my earlier comments on Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus edited by Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD. I know I’m going against recent advice by engaging a critic in debate, but isn’t that what separates the blogosphere from the one-way megaphone of the establishment media. If a criticism is written that’s worthy of a response, why not engage?

Kevin at Preemptive Karma makes some very good points, and I’m inclined to agree with him. The problem is, he’s arguing against a point I didn’t make. I was discussing the impression left by a set of words, not the precise definitions of the words in the set. To make that point, I wrote:

If you didn’t know what the words meant, how would these Roget’s entries mold your perception of each word?

Try it out, do a simple word association game. Go back and look at the synonyms listed for the word liberal. Do the entries for the word liberal evoke positive feelings about that word? Now look at the list for conservative. How do those synonyms make you perceive the word conservative?

Kevin also takes issue with the fact that my comparison that mixes political and non-political words:

[T]hose synonyms were improperly compared to “conservative” by Evan and those rightwing blogs who referenced his story.

So then when we take another look at Evan’s compilation of synonyms for “liberal” we see that many of them don’t even belong there!

Again, no dispute there. I guess my disclaimer might have been easy to miss, considering the font size was exactly the same as the rest of the post:

Obviously, the terms liberal and conservative have meanings beyond the political. Still, from the inclusion of the word left in the liberal entry, we can tell that politics was at least considered by the editor when compiling these entries.

Kevin may feel I’m comparing apples and oranges; I’m actually comparing two different bushels. Dump all the liberal synonyms in one pile, all the ones for conservative in another. Compare the two. Which is rendered more favorably?

This is just simple deconstruction. I learned it in college.

10 May 2005 @ 6:48PM >> Just got done reading Glenn Reynolds’s latest article on the blog world vs. the establishment media over at MSNBC.com. At the end of the article, I noticed two enticing videos taken from the CNBC show Kudlow & Company. Larry Kudlow—a particular favorite of mine—had interviewed Reynolds, Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson (of LittleGreenFootballs.com) about their new Pajamas Media blog venture.

So, as a man in my position might reasonably do, I clicked the link to watch the video. Much to my dismay, I was greeted with a message saying that my operating system was not supported. Oh, the humanity!

As a Mac user, I am apparently a second-class citizen at MSNBC.com. But why? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but just to prove that I can weave a conspiracy theory with the best of ‘em, here goes: the MS in MSNBC stands for Microsoft. Macs use an operating system far more elegant than any Microsoft offering, so perhaps the snub is some form of technological jealousy and/or calculated effort to make Macs appear “less compatible” than Windows-based PCs. Microsoft’s history in this regard is certainly less-than-stellar.

Why do I assume Microsoft is the perpetrator of this cyber-lockout and not the latter 60% of the acronym? Simple: MSNBC.com showcases NBC’s two cable news properties, MSNBC and CNBC, both of which have such dismal ratings that they can ill afford to erect artificial barriers between themselves and potential viewers.

The strange thing is, Microsoft has the technology to allow its videos to play on a Mac; my Mac has a program on it called “Windows Media Player” by a company named Microsoft. And I know it may sound shocking, but I’ve even managed to play Windows Media videos with it!

MSNBC.com shouldn’t require visitors to use Microsoft’s player at all, much less require that they also run the Windows operating system. They have every right to do so, of course, but it’s strikes me as short-sighted from a business standpoint. The incompatibility certainly can’t be a technological hurdle. After all, if a two-bit punk like me can figure out how to set up a website that serves QuickTime, RealPlayer and Windows Media files to Macs and PCs, Windows and Linux alike, surely the mighty Microsoft can get it done. So why doesn’t it? That’s a good question...

9 May 2005 @ 12:08AM >> Last week, NPR’s Jeffrey Dvorkin worried that taxpayers (in the form of bloggers) were undermining his taxpayer-financed radio network by expressing their opinions about its content. Here’s another revealing quote from Dvorkin in this Wall Street Journal article (subscribers only) by Jacob Laskin:

NPR “comes under attack quite frequently for its apparently left-wing bias,” [Dvorkin] explained, “but most of these criticisms come from media organizations that are openly conservative. So I take those kinds of criticisms with a certain amount of salt.” Mr. Dvorkin also noted that liberal bias, far from being a problem, should be seen as an occupational quirk among journalists: “There is some kind of liberal empathy on the part of some journalists, because their curiosity about how other people live tends to involve a certain liberal stance,” he said.

Let’s enumerate Dvorkin’s logic:

1. Charges of bias against NPR are not to be believed because they come from conservatives, and
2. Journalists are naturally liberal because curiosity is a job requirement and curious people tend to be liberal.

Doesn’t his second point prove the bias that he denies in his first point? I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what Dvorkin’s message is here. If he’s saying that NPR doesn’t have a liberal bias, then it must be because NPR has a bunch of uncurious (i.e. not liberal) reporters. And if NPR does lean left, then that’s okay, because those uncurious conservatives are not suitable to be decent reporters anyway.

How pervasive is that thinking in the media, I wonder? If the folks responsible for hiring reporters shared similar views, then isn’t it possible that it would affect hiring decisions? If conservative is just a synonym for uncurious, then wouldn’t a conservative candidate for a job in journalism be at a disadvantage? After all, who wants to hire uncurious reporters? NPR might, depending on which of Dvorkin’s statements he wants us to believe.

8 May 2005 @ 4:20PM >> In response to my previous entries on Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus, a reader suggested checking out Roget’s synonyms for liberal. There are three different entries; here are the the highlights:

advanced, altruistic, avant-garde, beneficent, benevolent, bighearted, bounteous, bountiful, broad-minded, charitable, enlightened, exuberant, flexible, free, generous, good Joe, handsome, high-minded, humanistic, humanitarian, impartial, intelligent, interested, kind, left, lenient, magnanimous, open-hearted, philanthropic, rational, reasonable, Santa Claus, tolerant, unbiased, unbigoted, understanding, unprejudiced

Compare that verbal fellatio with this, from the word conservative:

bitter-ender, fearful, fogyish, fossil, fuddy-duddy, inflexible, obstructionist, old fogy, reactionary, red-neck, stick-in-the-mud, timid, uncreative, undaring, unimaginative, white bread

Obviously, the terms liberal and conservative have meanings beyond the political. Still, from the inclusion of the word left in the liberal entry, we can tell that politics was at least considered by the editor when compiling these entries.

So, go back and read each entry—liberal and conservative—and tell me whether you detect some sort of value judgment there. If you didn’t know what the words meant, how would these Roget’s entries mold your perception of each word?

6 May 2005 @ 8:46AM >> Britain’s Labour Party won re-election in Parliament, which ensures that Tony Blair will continue on as Prime Minister. Already, the media is spinning the election as a terrible rebuke for Blair over the Iraq war. Setting aside the fact that this terrible rebuke resulted in Labour winning its third consecutive election for the first time in history, the numbers simply don’t bear out the media’s contention.

As of this writing, the election results show that the Conservatives have gained 33 seats in Parliament, while the Labor Party lost a total of 47 seats. In other words, over 70% of the seats lost by Labour were picked up by the other major party that supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. This hardly seems like a stunning victory for the anti-war side.

I’ve noticed that even Tony Blair seems to be pinning Labour’s reduced majority in Parliament on the Iraq war issue, saying, “I know too that Iraq has been a divisive issue in this country but I hope now that we can unite again and look to the future there and here.” But remember, it is in the Labour Party’s interests to pin the blame on Iraq, an issue that is in the rear-view mirror for many people. It would be much more tricky for Labour to admit that its lower margins resulted from domestic issues; those issues are likely to still be on the minds of voters at the next election, whereas Iraq may not.

6 May 2005 @ 1:15AM >> Last year, I noticed that the version of Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus used by thesaurus.com listed conservative as a synonym for bigoted.

I contacted the editor of the thesaurus who assured me that it was merely an oversight and would be corrected in a future version.

Well, apparently the bigot who runs Brain Terminal was successful, because I checked recently and saw that conservative is no longer listed as a synonym for bigoted.

It looks like there’s more work to do, though: conservative is still listed as a synonym for intolerant (right after communist, oddly) and narrow-minded, while under the entry for conservative, these choice synonyms are among those listed:

bitter-ender, fearful, fogyish, fossil, fuddy-duddy, inflexible, obstructionist, old fogy, reactionary, red-neck, stick-in-the-mud, timid, uncreative, undaring, unimaginative, white bread

Thanks, Roget’s! My compliments to you, too!

My call to editor Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD had some effect last year, but given the amount of work that remains to be done, it looks like I’ll need reinforcements.

5 May 2005 @ 1:03AM >> NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin discusses a Pentagon report issued in the form of a PDF file that was insecurely redacted (blacked out). The insecure file made it possible to retrieve the hidden information, which some people did and then posted online. Dvorkin uses the occasion to smear the entire blog world. So, following in his spirit of painting an entire segment of society with a broad brush, I will engage in Dvorkin’s game.

[T]he blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules. The consequences for misbehavior are still vague.

As opposed to what? CBS News? The consequences for misbehavior there are hard to determine, since the head of CBS News is firmly in place, and an aging Dan Rather was allowed to keep his job for six months after airing a bogus report and then defending it for days. The only people who paid consequences were the no-name, relatively low-level hacks who did the grunt work. The people in charge of the actual vetting process, the professionals that supposedly separate the trustworthy establishment media from the fast-and-loose, wild west world blogging paid no price at all.

Actually, even though none of the honchos paid a price, CBS News did, and paid dearly: the damage to the network’s reputation will persist for years. And in the news media, where the only lasting currency is trust, that’s really the only consequence that counts. The thing is, the exact same rules apply in the online world. Get busted doing something bogus, and good luck getting your reputation back. The guilty have nowhere to hide in the world of Google searching and historical caches like the Wayback Machine.

The possibility of civic responsibility remains remote. It is a place where the philosophy of “who posts first, wins” predominates.

Again, as opposed to what? The establishment press places a premium on breaking news and getting exclusives. And when they make mistakes, they often blame it not on ideological bias (despite the fact that I rarely recall liberal Democrats getting burned by sloppy reporting) but on a rush to get a story out first. That’s apparently what led a New York Times reporter to promise one side of a story that nobody from the other side would be contacted: in order to get an exclusive.

Despite the shoddiness and complete unprofessionalism of the blogosphere, Dvorkin cites an odd example to bolster NPR’s blog cred:

Even one of NPR’s newest programs, Day To Day is collaborating with Slate.com, the online magazine.

Hey, look, kids! Daddy-O is hip to the scene, man! He listens to all the grooviest music like The Monkees.

Excuse me for cluing in the square guy, but online, you can’t get much more establishment than Slate, a web magazine funded by Microsoft and founded by current L.A. Times editor Michael Kinsley. Nor does the Slate association help NPR’s case as far as perceived bias goes. The closest fixture Slate has to a conservative is self-described Democrat (and must-read) Mickey Kaus.

The appeal of the blogs? Humor seems to be the biggest attraction. Ironic detachment from the news, an ability to deflate egos and refreshing, undisguised opinion are also valued.

Whereas in the establishment media, disguised opinions seem to be valued...

American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each.

Hahahahahahahaha! Pardon me while I wipe up the coffee I just spat all over my monitor.

The blogs entertain, they provoke, and they are not constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.

Has Mr. Dvorkin been sleeping for a few decades? Journalists don’t seem “constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.”

At least the blogosphere doesn’t claim to be something it isn’t. The establishment media constantly assures us of its fail-safe editorial processes and vigorous fact-checking, yet we still see example after example where journalists have let their opinions drive their coverage of the news. Blogs are being honest about shoveling opinion, whereas the professional journalists continue to issue shopworn platitudes about a pristine objectivity that’s probably not even possible in the first place.

Perhaps these younger people will outgrow these youthful informational indiscretions and come to their senses — and back to media that can serve them best...

And while you’re at it, remember to buy from Amalgamated Buggy Whip. Don’t believe Henry Ford’s hype! Those so-called “automobiles” are absolute death traps. Why pour some putrid exploding liquid into a hard-to-understand machine when you can motivate your stately equine conveyance with one of our nice-smelling leather cords!

Dvorkin closes his column by quoting some big media editors who apparently hate getting e-mail. Here’s a solution: if you in the establishment media think you’d be better off by ignoring your customers, stop giving out your contact information. Step back even further from the people who consume your product. Go ahead. I dare you.

2 May 2005 @ 8:34AM >> Patterico reports that the Los Angeles Times recently removed crucial information from a reprinted Reuters wire story. The story, covering the March shooting of a car carrying Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena by U.S. forces in Iraq, was doctored by the L.A. Times so that key information supporting the claims of the U.S. military was removed:

An important contested issue in the controversy was the speed of the car as it approached a U.S. checkpoint. Sgrena has maintained that the car was traveling at a “regular speed” — no more than 25-30 mph. Americans have said that the car was traveling at least 50 mph.

[...]

As presented in the L.A. Times, the question of the car’s speed is a “he said, she said” issue, with no definitive evidence that would resolve the disagreement.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The L.A. Times story is actually an edited version of a Reuters story that appeared on the news service yesterday afternoon. The Reuters story reported that investigators using satellite footage of the incident have conclusively determined that the car was speeding, just as the U.S. has always maintained.

[...]

[T]he Reuters story reported that there is definitive proof that the car was speeding towards the checkpoint — critical information that tends to justify U.S. soldiers’ decision to fire on the car. But in the version appearing in the L.A. Times, editors cut out the passage reporting that proof.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the editors of the L.A. Times respond to this one.