C'mon already

Anyone else getting sick of the endless analysis of Hillary Clinton's crying jag?

Sure, the reaction to it is an interesting sociological study in gender bias and the politics of projection. And there's a side story about how Hillary is perceived as so controlled that anything spontaneous -- including tears -- is a notable break in the facade.

But c'mon: it's embarassing that grown men and women, supposedly deeply knowledgeable political observers, can aver with a straight face that Hillary tearing up is the reason she won in New Hampshire.

Besides seriously dissing the intelligence and judgment of the average New Hampshire voter, let's try to follow the logic.

Polls showed Obama with a pretty good lead. The undecideds generally weren't big enough to be the swing factor.

So we're supposed to believe that there were a large number of voters who intended to vote for Obama (for instance) but then saw footage of Hillary crying and thought, "Wait a minute! That's the one for me."

Does that make sense to anyone?

As I noted before, the results in New Hampshire were surprising mostly because they contradicted the pre-election polls. But if you hadn't been paying attention to the polling and someone came up to you and said Clinton and McCain had won in New Hampshire, you'd say "Well, duh." Because in their respective primaries they're the closest match to that particular electorate.

There certainly is a story into why the polling was wrong. My pet theory: A bunch of Biden, Richardson and (particularly) Edwards supporters threw their vote to either Clinton or Obama at the last minute, knowing that their preferred candidate had little chance and wanting to influence the frontrunners. Or maybe the polls were just, you know, wrong. It happens.

And I certainly understand why embarassed pundits had to scrap around for something to blame for their poor prognostication.

But putting it down to Hillary's tears is contemptuous of both Hillary and the voters.

Hillary, politics, midtopia

BBC bleeps Shane

The 1987 classic "Fairytale of New York," by the Pogues, is hands down the favorite holiday song at our house -- though we try to keep the kids from listening too closely. It's irreverent and foul-mouthed, but surprisingly sweet, too. And it's a great tune. Really, who couldn't love a song that begins "It was Christmas Eve, babe.... In the drunk tank"?

But I understand why the BBC -- amid a national grassroots campaign to make the tune Britain's #1 song for the holidays -- decided it had to censor the lyrics during radio play.

The word they bleeped -- faggot -- is easily the most offensive word in the song. But there are enough others -- scumbag, arse, "cheap slut on junk" -- that it's hard to imagine the song ever getting mainstream airplay in this country. First Amendment or no, our Puritanical roots tend to put the kabosh on things like that.

Which is why I'm a bit bemused at the torrent of criticism the BBC's decision has unleashed. You'd think the BBC had declared war on Christmas or something.

In the end, the outcry led the BBC to reverse its decision. So a song that couldn't possibly be played uncut in this country is once again being broadcast in full in Britain.

Somewhere, Shane McGowan is smiling and downing his third pint of bitter.

Fun "Fairy Tale" fact: In Britain, when the song was performed live on BBC's "Top of the Pops", producers made the band change the word "arse" to "ass", which they apparently considered less offensive. The reverse, of course, is true here.

music, Pogues, politics, midtopia

Misleading with statistics

The headline on the AP story is breathless. "Army suicides highest in 26 years!"

That basic fact is true; Army suicides are up sharply, just like they spiked during the first Gulf War. The 2006 rate was 17.3 suicides per 100,000, a near doubling of the low of 9.1 per 100,000 in 2001.

But a closer look at the numbers is in order before we start jumping to conclusions.

The 17.3 rate translates into 99 suicides out of a population of about 500,000 soldiers. So it's hardly an epidemic.

And if you compare it to civilian suicide rates, it's even less of an issue. A pair of pdfs here produce the following table:

2004 CIVILIAN SUICIDE RATES (per 100,000 population)
Overall: 11.1
Ages 15-24: 10.4
Males: 17.7

Wait a second, you say. Other than that "males" category, the military suicide rate is clearly much higher than the civilian rates.

But look what happens when we break down the "age" category even further and combine it with gender:

Males, age 15-19: 12.65
Males, age 20-24: 20.84

You can see where I'm going here. Soldiers are mostly males in their early 20s. So a proper comparison of apples to apples shows that the military suicide rate, despite being at a 26-year high, is still lower than the comparable civilian rate. All that in spite of combat stress, the stress of being part of a "stretched" military, and access to all sorts of military-grade weaponry.

People are right to be concerned. The rate has doubled, after all. It's clearly a symptom of strain and each one is a personal tragedy besides. The military should do what it can to reduce those numbers.

But let's not overreact. The problem is small, and soldiers are still less likely to kill themselves than civilians are. This is more an example of shallow and innumerate reporting than it is a sign of serious problems in the military.

media, suicide, politics, midtopia

Making online pay

Rumor has it that the New York Times is abandoning its pay-only Times Select experiment. Let's hope so.

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.

After much internal debate, Times executives - including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.

The timing of when TimesSelect will shut down hinges on resolving software issues associated with making the switch to a free service, the source said.

Personally this wasn't a huge deal, because we subscribe to the Sunday Times and get TimesSelect access thrown in as part of the deal.

But as a blogger it was very annoying, since nobody likes being linked to content they can't read. That led to three options: annoy my readers, don't blog about Select stories and columns, or quote so much of the story that it defeated the purpose of the firewall (and left me open to charges of copyright violation). It was especially annoying when I would read something in the dead-tree version that I wanted to write about, only to discover that the online version was in SelectLand.

Because I had access, I referred to TimesSelect articles when necessary. But I'm sure many, many people simply learned to live without the content -- and their lives were not noticeably poorer because of it.

The Wall Street Journal has the same problem with its Online Journal service. It's good content, but not so good that I can't live without it. The result is that WSJ content gets a lot less consideration in my blogging than it would otherwise.

I fully sympathize with both the Times and the Journal and all online publications, who are still trying to find ways to get people to pay for high-quality content. As bloggers, we're in the same boat -- and the lack of paying customers is why most of us do this as a hobby rather than a profession. The $30 or so I've earned on this blog in the last year doesn't exactly pay the bills.

Of course, there are other considerations. For instance, I like writing, which is one reason I blog. But even with that excuse blogging is a poor investment. Last year I earned $474 from selling a short story. If I was making rational decisions about my writing time, I'd ditch blogging and spend those hours writing fiction instead. Even if I only sold one story every 10 years, I'd be ahead of the game.

In the end I blog because I enjoy it, it makes me feel engaged in the political process, and I'm full of ideas and opinions that I want to share. But it sure would be nice if the market rewarded those efforts, instead of reserving its love for the sites that can draw a gajillion hits -- enough to make decent money despite the paltry online ad rates.

That's a long-winded way of saying that I'm all for coming up with ways to make money on quality content. But requiring registration seems to be a losing proposition. A lot of people -- myself included -- hate having to register at sites in order to view content, even when doing so is free. If people are resistant to registering when it's free, they're even more resistant to registering when it costs money.

Requiring registration also hamstrings the great strength of the Web -- the ability to surf multiple sites, gathering information from disparate sources. Registration encourages people to concentrate into segregated communities, an overall ill in a diverse democracy.

Admittedly, the problem is more one of reader perception than an actual legitimate gripe. People have no problem paying to subscribe to the Times, but balk at registering to read it online; that makes no logical sense. Why are we willing to pay for information in one form, but not in another, more convenient form?

Nonetheless, it's the reality. And it may remain that way until content starts to disappear because there's not enough money to support it.

But I think companies will find a middle way -- indeed, they've already begun. Notice how the online ads are getting more and more annoying? I especially hate the ones that expand to cover the article you're trying to read until you click on it to make it go away.

But that's the point. If the ads are really annoying, you'd probably be more willing to register in order to make them go away. And if registering brought other perks as well -- expanded comment options, access to sortable databases instead of static articles, expanded photo galleries, discussion boards -- suddenly registering might start to have value. For the best sites, people might even be willing to pay a reasonable fee. And publications could charge a premium for those non-annoying ads that they show to subscribers.

The basic idea -- free-but-annoying content to nonsubscribers, a much more rewarding experience for subscribers -- would preserve the publicity (and public influence) value of free content while providing a way for the creators to make money.

Even better would be if sites banded together to form a registration cooperative. That way, instead of having to register at dozens of different sites, you could register once and gain access to them all. Most of my objection to registering at multiple sites is the hassle of keeping track of them all.

Establishing a system of micropayments would help, too. If we all had something like a Paypal account, and accessing an article cost a penny, and payment was automated, most people would gladly pay without thinking about it. Reading 30 articles a day would cost you less than $10 a month. But for a blogger like me who gets about 3,000 hits a month, that would translate into $30 a month -- not a lot, but an order of magnitude more than I get now.

A site that got 1,000 hits a day would earn $3,600 a year -- not enough to live on, but not total chump change, either.

A site that got 10,000 hits a day would earn enough ($36,000) for the blogger to live on.

A site like Captain's Quarters, which gets 30,000 hits a day, would earn enough ($110,000) to be quite comfortable.

Any such micropayment system would be a huge target for fraud, as it would be very tempting to steal a penny or two from millions of people and end up with some serious cash. The safeguards would have to be robust. But again the general principle applies: people will start paying for content when the price is right and the mechanism is extremely convenient.

Now that the Times has abandoned its initiative, maybe it will throw its weight behind a push for such developments -- developments that are needed if the Internet is to mature into a true communications node, where great content -- provided by fairly compensated producers -- is just a click away.

blogging, politics, midtopia

Bill O'Reilly is an idiot

You knew that, I know. But rarely are we treated to such a perfect example of it.

From Reason Magazine:

Apparently, America is under attack from roving bands of terroristic lesbian gangs. Broadly extrapolating from a few unrelated news stories, O'Reilly concluded that these butch brigades are scouring America's schools in search of young girls to rape, while launching brutal surprise attacks on unsuspecting heterosexual men. O'Reilly and Fox News "crime analyst" Rod Wheeler claimed these killer chicks pack pink pistols, and that there are over 150 lesbian gangs in the D.C. area alone!

Trouble is, none of it is true, as the Southern Poverty Law Center discovered. And Rod Wheeler, when challenged, provides no evidence to back up his claims and then essentially retracts the whole thing while pretending not to.

Even better: All the video shown on the segment, which is supposed to make you think you're watching lesbians beating down innocent bystanders? Just stock footage of girls fighting. One of the scenes, it turns out, is actually of girls fighting over a boy.

Morons. I don't usually waste blog space on drooling knuckledraggers like O'Reilly, but this one was too good to pass up.

To all O'Reilly fans out there: Please, please, please post comments defending the man.

O'Reilly, lesbians, politics, midtopia

Fun with interns

Today I got an e-mail from Kristen, an intern at MSNBC. Based solely on the fact that I have posted about Ann Coulter in the past, she wanted to alert me to upcoming appearances by the banshee on her network.

I realize that semi-personalized spam is what PR interns are for, so I do not blame Kristen for the failings of her employer. However, I felt I needed to respond rather than simply ignore the message. Perhaps a young mind could be reached while it was not yet too late.

Here's what I wrote.

Kristen,

Thanks for the note. Unfortunately, I consider Ann Coulter a vile slug of a human being, and I fail to understand why your network persists in giving national exposure to such a vituperative and shallow worm. So I won't be helping you publicize your latest bit of pandering.

If you were to announce that Coulter would no longer be appearing on your shows.... now *that* I would help publicize. Keep me in mind if your employer ever reaches that level of intellectual credibility.

Sean

I somehow doubt the message will find its way to her higher-ups.

media, Coulter, politics, midtopia

Objective? Maybe not

Hot Air has an interesting exchange on Fox News, in which reporter Adam Housley calls New York City Councilman Charles Barron a "son of a bitch" on air during a segment of Neil Cavuto's show.

Truth be told, Barron seems to be a full-blown Chavez apologist, at one point calling him a "hero for humanity." So on the merits I find myself on Cavuto's side. That said, Housley's unprofessional tirade is totally unjournalistic. I don't know if that's par for the course for Cavuto's show; if all the field reporters are transparently commentators, fine. But if Housley is presented as a "reporter", it's no wonder Fox has credibility problems.

Cavuto, Fox News, media, politics, midtopia

Assymetrical information warfare

I've been noticing signs of the approaching Apocalypse lately.

Yesterday, for instance, CNN devoted an hour of prime-time programming to.... Larry King and Dr. Phil dissecting the Alec Baldwin voicemail brouhaha.

Today, though, the earth really shifted. I find myself agreeing -- in substance, if not in tone -- with the conservative whackjobs Little Green Footballs.

They wrote about a Harvard study examining the media's coverage of last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah.

The upshot: Hezbollah tightly controlled media access to its side of the conflict, and thus controlled how it was portrayed. The Israelis, on the other hand, allowed far more unfettered access, and were victimized by it -- in part by the sheer number of images showing Israelis shooting at things, and the paucity of images showing Hezbollah doing the same thing. The result: Israel looked like the aggressor, even though Hezbollah started the fight by kidnapping two Israelis and killing eight others.

At this point LGF and I part company, because they see it as proof positive of willing media cooperation with terrorists, and also wax obsessive about the infamous doctored photos from a Reuters photographer in Beirut -- ignoring some facts in the process, such as 1) the doctoring was amateurishly obvious, 2) All it did was add more smoke (and buildings!!) to a scene that already had plenty and 3) the photographer was quickly fired and all of his photos re-examined.

In addition, while Hezbollah did indeed start things, Israel's (IMO, justified) response was also an attack: invading Lebanon. So it's hardly bias to depict Israeli troops relentlessly attacking Hezbollah when that, in fact, was what they were doing.

But the Harvard study does point up some serious problems, notably the failure of many media outlets to recognize and account for the effect of the Hezbollah restrictions. The blame can be assigned freely: The journalists on the ground were too willing to accept them, their editors didn't do enough to highlight those restrictions as they passed stories and photos up the chain, and wire editors at many news organizations here in the States didn't make a point of adjusting their coverage to correct for the imbalance in access.

Bias? Perhaps. I'm more willing to suspect bias among the reporters on the ground, many of whom were local stringers (with local biases) hired by news agencies. But bias doesn't really explain the failings higher up the food chain. Editors at all levels should have known better, because it's their job to know better.

So what caused it? I'm inclined to believe several things:

1. Laziness. Journalists, like everyone else, are more apt to cover things that are easy to cover. If Hezbollah is willing to drive you to the scene of a bombing, are you going to refuse? Nope. You should balance that out by noting the restrictions and limitations and trying to find other sources of information, but that's hard to do in normal times, much less during a war. At some point you shrug and accept that it's just another dog-and-pony show, like the briefings put on for journalists in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Further up, the stories and photos roll in as if by magic, each imbued with the authority of a wire service and a "just the facts" tone. Unless you have independent reason -- and the initiative -- to question whether what you're getting reflects the truth, you don't think much about it: you simply accept it and give your readers a representative sampling.

2. Excessive trust. As an editor, you're supposed to view things with a skeptical eye and ask a lot of questions. But you don't expect your reporters or photographers to keep important details from you. That trust may be misplaced when you're talking about local stringers (who can be expected to have their own political opinions) in the midst of a religious and ethnic war.

3. Lack of time. Employment in U.S. newsrooms has been steadily declining, as the Internet drains readership and an advertising slump cuts into traditionally fat profit margins. Newspapers are still cash cows, but they're not growing cash cows. Good journalism is expensive, and increasingly newspapers are unwilling to pay for it in any great numbers. So there's a lot less time for editors to look for not-so-obvious questions and angles, especially when it involves a story that is occurring overseas and they have no direct contact with.

Even on a good day, moreover, the fighting in Lebanon would have been just one of dozens of stories your typical wire editor handled on a given night. Most of those get no more than a few minutes' editorial attention: enough to get the gist of the story, assign a length and location and pick which wire piece to run. Then it's on to the next. Daily journalists work with the clock ticking remorselessly like a gun to their head: there would have to have been something about the Lebanon fighting that raised red flags in order for nonobvious problems to be noticed.

4. Lack of knowledge. A corollary to #3 is that knowledge and experience cost money, too. When newsrooms cut staff they often do it through buyouts, which disproportionately remove senior staff. This is great for the bottom line -- the most expensive warm bodies leave -- but it's not so good for journalism because you lose institutional memory, years of cultivated sources and life experience. It's intangibles such as those that often lead to the discovery of major mistakes because something just doesn't smell right, or the editor happened to visit the place in question 10 years ago.

If the above sound like excuses, they're not: they're laments. The media does not do the hard work often enough, or think about the big picture often enough, or communicate clearly to its readers the shortcomings in the data presented. And we all suffer for it, because democracy cannot survive without a free flow of quality information. So while I sympathize with the industry's troubles of late, there is no excuse for editorial timidity or laziness. The first question when covering something like the Lebanese war should be "how am I (and my organization) being manipulated by the various parties?" And then a plan developed for dealing with that -- even if the answer is simply to tell readers "here's how it is." Many outlets do that; too many do not.

It's a lesson the industry has learned before -- during Vietnam, and more recently with the often uncritical coverage of the Bush administration's WMD hype. Those lessons apparently didn't sink in in a lot of places, or else it's the kind of lesson that must be relearned by each individual reporter. But it's a lesson that will be even more important in the coming era of diminished resources. Perspective, hard work and a functioning BS meter can make up for a lot of missing dollars.

media, journalism, politics, midtopia

A peek behind the media curtain

.... and it isn't pretty.

Whoever Tim is, he's in big trouble.

Update: Here's what happened, as explained by a staffer at the paper in question.

media, humor, politics, midtopia

Coulter syndicate rejects plagiarism charges

Oh, fooey.

The syndicator of Ann Coulter's newspaper columns rejected allegations that she had lifted material from other sources, saying a review of the work in question turned up nothing that merited concern.

"There are only so many ways you can rewrite a fact and minimal matching text is not plagiarism," Lee Salem, editor and president of Universal Press Syndicate, said Monday in a statement.

This isn't all that surprising; the examples from her column were pretty weak. The examples from her book were more compelling, but her publisher there is a partisan publishing house, and they've already rejected the plagiarism accusations -- without serious investigation, IMO.

Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted. And we've still got the vote-fraud allegations to look forward to.

plagiarism, Coulter, politics, midtopia

Coulter plagiarism, continued

It's a bit of a slow news day, so we'll spend some time updating the Coulter case.

TPMmuckraker has gathered as many alleged plagiarism examples as they could find, so you can compare for yourself.

Some of the column examples are unconvincing, although overall they demonstrate that Coulter has a problem with attribution. The book examples are more damning.

Somewhat gleefully fanning the flames, Media Matters has asked Random House, Coulter's publisher, to investigate the book-related charges.

plagiarism, Coulter, politics, midtopia

Coulter caught plagiarizing?

The New York Post reports that the developer of a plagiarism-detection program has found multiple instances of copy-catting by Ann Coulter.

John Barrie, the creator of a leading plagiarism-recognition system, claimed he found at least three instances of what he calls "textbook plagiarism" in the leggy blond pundit's "Godless: the Church of Liberalism" after he ran the book's text through the company's digital iThenticate program.

He also says he discovered verbatim lifts in Coulter's weekly column....

Is this important? Not at all, unless you take Coulter seriously. And perhaps there's an innocent explanation. But as with her vote-fraud problem, it's good to see the karma system working properly.

Update: The company that syndicates Coulter's column has asked for details of the plagiarism accusations. This could either confirm or debunk the charges.

Update II: Here's a video of Barrie's appearance on MSNBC, which includes examples of the text he says was plagiarized.

plagiarism, Coulter, politics, midtopia

Bad omen?

I know news photographers have to work really hard to get new and interesting pictures of shuttle launches. But perhaps this guy worked a little too hard.

The caption:

A vulture sits on a pole near the space shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39-B Monday morning July 3, 2006 in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Workers inspecting the shuttle's external tank discovered a crack in the insulating foam. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

That's right. On a day when everyone is wondering if we can get the shuttle into orbit and back down to earth safely, we get a photo juxtaposing a vulture with the shuttle.

The launch was scrubbed twice this weekend, and now they've discovered a crack in the foam on the big external tank. They're still hoping to launch on July 4.

Which reminds me of the other crass shuttle-related imagery I've encountered. Way back in 1985, I spent a summer in Germany. One day some friends and I went shopping for fireworks. Among the items we purchased was a large bottle rocket with a little space shuttle on the top. Light it, step back, and watch it climb into the sky and explode.

I thought it was kind of funny at the time, a poorly thought-out tribute. Then two years later Challenger did it for real.

I still find this stuff morbidly funny. I've always had a weakness for gallows humor, which came in handy in the military. But I recognize poor taste when I see it.

Good luck to NASA and the astronauts.

Update: The shuttle launched safely, with no apparent damage from falling foam.

Challenger, astronauts, Discovery, shuttle, NASA, politics, midtopia

The media-military relationship

I came across this article in the Naval War College Review today. It's from 2002, but it's still a good exploration of why the media and the military so often find themselves at odds.

The author, Douglas Porch, is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School.

A choice and perhaps surprising quote:

the strained relationship between the media and the U.S. military has nothing to do with censorship—for the simple reason that media-military relations have always been rocky, never more than in World War II. The difference between World War II and Vietnam was not the presence of censorship but the absence of victory. In other conflicts, victory has erased memories of a troubled relationship; after Vietnam, the media was caught up in the quest for a scapegoat. Furthermore, the nebulous goals of the War on Terrorism, the fact that it is likely to be a prolonged operation, and the inherent difficulties from a media perspective of covering a war fought from the air and in the shadows virtually guarantee a degeneration of the relationship between two institutions with an inherent distrust of each other.

Indeed. Contrary to popular myth, the press during World War II was every bit as contentious as it is now.

And what about Vietnam? The canonical story is that it was the first "TV war", in which the press had nearly unrestricted and real-time access to soldiers, units and battlefields -- and then used that access to turn the public against the war. We didn't lose Vietnam on the battlefield, goes the mantra -- we lost it at home, our will to win sapped by defeatist media coverage.

This explanation, however, has been discredited by numerous studies. In fact, press coverage was generally favorable until the Tet offensive of 1968. As later became clear, that dramatic campaign was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong; nonetheless, it blasted the credibility of claims by the White House and Westmoreland that the United States and South Vietnam were on the threshold of victory. The critical tone adopted by the press thereafter “confirm[ed] the widespread public view held well before Tet, that the people had been victims of a massive deception” and that the prospects for success were in fact doubtful.

In fact, then, the press did not so much create public opposition as reflect it. And the government had no one to blame for that but itself. By routinely lying to the press (and thus the public) and painting a rosy picture of the war, their credibility vanished when Tet and subsequent actions exposed their deception.

And what about the media glamorizing war protesters? That's mostly myth, too. Press coverage of violent antiwar protests tended to increase support for the war by showing protesters in an unflattering light.

So what drives the poor relationship between the media and the military? Culture and mission, mostly. Setting aside hard-to-prove issues like "media bias", you just have two groups with different yet important goals.

Journalists want to shine light into dark places, to expose abuses of power, and to force public debate over issues that might otherwise never receive democratic scrutiny.

The military, like any bureaucracy, prefers to conduct it's business in private. Moreover, it's business is war -- the professional management and application of violence. This is inherently an awful thing that rarely looks good on camera. Moreover, the military necessarily breeds a culture of "team players" who adhere to strict discipline and often display a near-obsession with loyalty and security. Throw in operational security concerns, and one can understand why they're leery of, suspicious of or just plain disgusted by reporters.

So you end up with the classic standoff:

Military people typically believe that reporters, untutored in the fundamentals of the military profession, are psychologically unprepared to deal with the realities of combat. They fear that reporters, in quests for sensationalism rather than truth, may publish stories or images that breach security, cost lives, or undermine public support. For their part, reporters insist upon their professional obligation and constitutional duty to report the news. They consider the military’s culture closed, its insistence on operational secrecy exaggerated, and its “command climate” a barrier to outside scrutiny.

Both are right, to a degree; each reflect different facets of what it means to live in and defend a free society. Soldiers defend society from outside threats; journalists defend it from internal threats and the government itself. As with many such things, this comes down to an exercise in line-drawing; and the biggest problems arise when one side or the other tries to swing the pendulum too far in one direction.

But in the end, warfare in a democracy requires approval of the people. And that means the military needs the press.

Warfare is a political act. Political leaders, in democracies at least, must inform the public about foreign policy goals; the military must convince the public that it can achieve those goals at an acceptable cost; and both must do so largely through the press. Press reports of success and progress strengthen and extend public support. The media also familiarize the public with the military and with the complexity of its tasks. In short, the media offers the military a means to tell its story.

Familiarizing the public with the military is a crucial strategic need in this day of volunteer soldiers, when the share of the population that knows somebody in uniform has shrunk to tiny proportions.

The press needs the military, too: military connections are often the only way to gain access to the battlefield and to military deliberations -- the kind of access that lets a democracy know what is being done in its name. A press that cannot intelligently and fully cover the military in peacetime also cannot competently cover it in wartime -- and such a press is useless as a foundation of democracy.

The media-military relationship will always be a contentious one. But ultimately, that's a good thing. As long as a reasonable balance can be struck, their competing interests form a smaller version of the checks-and-balances that make our governmental structure so durable. The press provides public oversight -- and understanding -- of the military; the military uses the press to get its side of the story out. And that helps ensure that our military is used in support of democracy instead of to its detriment.

war reporting, media, military, politics, midtopia

Puppy killed; call Judge Judy!

At the risk of becoming the Ann Coulter of dead puppies, I had a couple of unorthodox reactions to this sad story.

A miniature pinscher puppy in North Branch, just a couple of months old, was beaten to death by three boys, ages 6 to 8, for no apparent reason -- not that there's ever a good reason for doing that.

This is terrible. I am saddened. It was a difficult moment in our house when my daughter accidentally killed a toad. And having recently lost our cat, I know how much the loss of a pet can hurt.

But I couldn't help noticing two things:

1. The family is named Darwin.

2. The family plans to take legal action. Maybe small claims court. Or maybe not:

They also plan to take legal action in small claims court or on the TV show "The People's Court." The Darwins contacted the show and have been told there is interest in their case. If nothing else, the boys should get community service, Darwin said.

You know, when my dog is killed, the first thought that goes through my head is not "hey, let's call People's Court!"

I'm going to hell, I know.

animal cruelty, Minnesota, Bella, politics, midtopia

Al Qaeda claims to have two missing soldiers

A group of Al-Qaeda affilated groups claim to be holding the two missing American soldiers.

The umbrella group, called the Mujahedeen Shura Council, said it was holding the two privates — one from Texas and the other from Oregon — as well as four Russian diplomats kidnapped June 3 in Baghdad. It also claimed to have killed a fifth Russian.

My stomach always clenches when I hear about U.S. troops getting captured, because the possibilities are so much messier than the relatively straightforward fates of being killed or wounded in combat.

I'm not hopeful about what will happen to these two. A lot depends upon which insurgent faction captured them; I would have been happier to see them fall into the hands of native Iraqis rather than groups linked to Al Qaeda.

A couple of thoughts and observations from the coverage:

1. Why do we "capture" insurgents, but insurgents "kidnap" U.S. soldiers? The answer is usually because we're uniformed combatants and they're not. But i don't recall us describing the Viet Cong as "kidnapping" soldiers during the Vietnam war. This isn't a criticism; it's just an observation on the role language plays in shaping perceptions of this fight.

2. The reason we should treat prisoners humanely is for precisely this situation: it gives us some hope that the enemy will treat our prisoners similarly. And if they don't, it gives us solid grounds for moral outrage.

But what can we say if they treat these two prisoners the way we treated the Abu Ghraib prisoners (some of whom died)?

What can we say if they simply decide to hold them indefinitely, like we do with the prisoners at Gitmo?

What can we do if they decide to waterboard them, or stick them in "stress positions", or freeze and bake them?

May we find them and rescue them so we don't have to answer any of the above questions. And if they are killed, may their deaths be quick and merciful.

torture, terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Quick response at Gitmo

In the aftermath of the deaths of three inmates at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, the Bush administration.... kicked reporters out.

Reporters with the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald were ordered by the office of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to leave the island today.

A third reporter and a photographer with the Charlotte Observer were given the option of staying until Saturday but, E&P has learned, were told that their access to the prison camp was now denied.

Despite the timing, the Pentagon said the expulsions were unrelated to the deaths.

A Pentagon spokesman, J.D. Gordon ... asserted that the move was related to other media outlets threatening to sue if they were not allowed in. He did not say why, instead of expelling the reporters already there, the Pentagon did not simply let the others in, beyond citing new security concerns.

Security concerns? I understand having to develop tighter controls over the detainees in the aftermath of the suicides. I don't see how that involves kicking out reporters. The pressure from other news organizations does create a dilemma -- how to decide who to let in? How to manage them once they arrive? -- but those are solvable.

Kicking out the reporters just makes it look like we're trying to hide something. That's just compounding the PR damage that began with the "PR stunt" explanation for the deaths.

Investigate the deaths. Report the findings. And let reporters cover the whole thing. Only with transparency can we dispel suspicions about what happened at Gitmo.

Oh, and shut the Gitmo facility down. Not because of the deaths; but because it's a legal, moral and PR disaster.

Update: David Ignatius says much the same thing.

suicide, terrorism, Guantanamo, Gitmo, politics, midtopia

Rove won't be indicted

Looks like Truthout was just plain wrong:

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has told White House aide Karl Rove that he does not expect to seek charges against him in connection with the CIA leak case, Rove's lawyer said today.

In a statement this morning, Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, said that Fitzgerald "has formally advised us that he does not anticipate seeking charges" against Rove.

"In deference to the pending case, we will not make any further public statements about the subject matter of the investigation," Luskin said in the statement. "We believe that the Special Counsel's decision should put an end to the baseless speculation about Mr. Rove's conduct."

That leaves just Lewis Libby on the hotseat. The White House breathes a small sigh of relief, though it's a sign of the difficulties they're in that "relief" is defined as "only one White House insider charged."

Does that end the buzz? Hardly. There's plenty of room for speculation, because somebody outed Plame. As Fitzgerald has noted, Libby being charged with cover-up crimes -- and nothing else -- indicates the the coverup was successful.

So unless something explosive comes out of the Libby trial, this is probably the end of the legal side of the Plame case. But it does not exonerate the White House, or Rove, or Cheney -- it simply fails to convict them. The only other hope for clarity lies in Fitzgerald's final report. It will detail what he knows and what he doesn't know, and why he chose to charge Libby and no one else. At that point we'll be able to judge the clarity or murkiness of the accusations and the defenses.

Libby, Rove, Plame, politics, midtopia

"A reckless abuse of power"

This one was a bit surprising.

The Justice Department recently subpoenaed the notes of reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle, as it attempted to identify whoever leaked grand jury testimony to the paper.

I've discussed before why the government should be cautious when it comes to trampling on reporter-source confidentiality. But what's interesting about this case is the source of the criticism: the former chief spokesman for Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The former spokesman, Mark Corallo ... said Mr. Ashcroft's successor, Alberto R. Gonzales, had acted improperly in issuing the subpoenas.

"This is the most reckless abuse of power I have seen in years," Mr. Corallo said in an interview. "They really should be ashamed of themselves."

The subpoenas, part of an effort to identify The Chronicle's sources for its coverage of steroid use in baseball, would not have been authorized by Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Corallo said. "You just don't ride roughshod over the rights of reporters to gather information from confidential sources," he added.

I'm not the only person who was surprised by the source of the criticism, and observers were quick to note the significance:

Specialists in journalism and First Amendment law said that Mr. Corallo's statement was itself significant evidence of a shift.

"This illustrates in an unmistakable fashion," said Mark Feldstein, director of the journalism program at George Washington University, "that the Gonzales Justice Department has moved so far away from the mainstream of established legal opinion and case law when it comes to press freedom that even judicial conservatives are disturbed by it."

I would not have believed it possible, but in Alberto "torture memo" Gonzales, Bush managed to find someone even more hostile to civil liberties than Ashcroft. That's quite an achievement.

Corallo, civil liberties, Ashcroft, Gonzales, politics, midtopia

Time ordered to turn over Plame drafts

The judge in the Valerie Plame case has ordered Time magazine to turn over drafts of articles written by reporter Matthew Cooper.

The judge found "a slight alteration between the several drafts of the articles" Cooper wrote about his conversations with Libby and the reporter's first-person account of his testimony before a federal grand jury.

"This slight alteration between the drafts will permit the defendant to impeach Cooper, regardless of the substance of his trial testimony, because his trial testimony cannot be consistent with both versions," Walton wrote.

A person familiar with Cooper's drafts described the inconsistencies as "trivial." The person spoke on condition of anonymity because Walton has warned the case's participants against talking to reporters.

This seems like a minor development, but it's always tricky when newspapers are ordered to turn over unpublished material. Reporters are able to get stories because sources trust their discretion and judgement. Reporters often get information "on background", for instance -- meaning not for publication or attribution -- to help them make sense of the information they can publish. If such private information is too easily seizable by a court, it could cause sources to clam up, seriously hampering the work that reporters do.

If it comes down to it, a defendant's right to a fair trial outweighs a newspaper's right to keep its files confidential. But care should be taken that any demand for media files is narrow, and that the information sought is necessary, clearly relevant and unobtainable any other way.

The judge appears to have done that in this case -- unless the discrepancies truly are trivial. In that case the dubious benefit to Libby does not justify seizing the files.

media, Libby, Plame, politics, midtopia