Author: Dan Kennedy

There are reasons that the Encyclopedia Britannica has been around for 237 years. One of them, obviously, is that its editors do not allow anyone to post anything and claim it’s authoritative. An example of that would be the Wikipedia.

It’s easy to see why the Wikipedia had become a darling among Internet users. It’s well-designed, free and comprehensive. It also taps into the notion — a dubious one, in my estimation — that the “wisdom of the crowd” is superior to that of professional editors. (When did the “madness of the mob” become the “wisdom of the crowd,” anyway? When they got computers?)

Right now the Wikipedia is under siege as the result of two scandals. The better-known involves former Robert Kennedy aide John Siegenthaler, who wrote an op-ed piece for USA Today last week about how he’d been falsely cast as a conspirator in both Kennedy assassinations — and that this horrifying error was not removed for months.

But there’s more. It seems that Adam Curry, the former MTV veejay who helped launch podcasting, has been caught messing around with the Wikipedia entry on that subject, possibly to aggrandize his own role. Curry tells CNET’s News.com that his motives were pure, and whines that he’s now been cast as “the asshole of the week.”

Back to Siegenthaler. According to this News.com piece, the Wikipedia may have some responsibility for the slime job, but it’s probably not liable. The reason is that a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 exempts Internet service providers from legal liability for anything posted on their sites.

As News.com notes, publishers — even exclusively online publishers such as Salon — may be successfully sued for libel by those who are able to demonstrate that they were defamed with false information, and that the publisher acted with some degree of fault. But ISPs were given a get-out-of-court card in the 1996 law on the theory that it would be impossible to monitor the thousands, even millions, of posts from their users.

News.com quotes Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying that the guiding case in this area is Zeran v. America Online, 1997 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (not the Third Circuit, as News.com claims). Kenneth Zeran was the victim of a malicious AOL subscriber who posted messages in which, claiming to be Zeran, he offered T-shirts for sale that mocked victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. The court ruled that the 1996 law clearly exempted AOL from any liability.

Now, I don’t want to go toe to toe with a lawyer. Logically, though, the Wikipedia strikes me as being more of a publishing venture like Salon than an ISP like America Online or EarthLink. The Wikipedia’s model of allowing anyone to contribute content doesn’t strike me as somehow magically transforming it into an ISP.

But those are questions for lawyers and judges to decide. Either way, the Wikipedia’s honeymoon is over.

My Northeastern colleague Bill Kirtz attended the Nieman Narrative Journalism conference this past weekend. Among the speakers: new-journalism giant Tom Wolfe and former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll.

The predominant theme was that old-fashioned story-telling may be an effective way to keep readers — yet the resources it takes may be more than today’s corporate owners are willing to spend.

Here is Kirtz’s report.

Adam Gaffin checks out Boston Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón’s new blog and finds evidence in this post (about why he’s not allowing real-time comments) that Chacón’s technical knowledge is wanting.

Still, I’m not sure I want Chacón to turn his blog into an open forum. Steve wrote the other day that Chacón would be likely to receive 10 times as many comments as Media Nation. Try 100 times. I want someone to wade through the comments Chacón receives and post only those that are the most on-point.

Michael Jonas’ column in the current Boston Globe City Weekly is on state Sen. Steve Tolman, D-Watertown, who was the co-author of the 1998 law that requires Massachusetts schoolchildren to be taught about fate of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Jonas writes:

Tolman, who urged the state to remove from the curriculum guide any references to Turkish websites that contest the genocide label, says he’s all for freewheeling debate about matters on which reasonable people may disagree. He says this simply is not such a case.

“You cannot change historical fact by saying it did not happen,” he says. “They tried to wipe out everything to make it look like Armenians never existed,” he says of the Turkish rampage. Tolman points to a well-known 1915 telegram to the US secretary of state from the American envoy to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, in which he warns of a “campaign of race extermination” underway against the Armenians.

Because the question of whether or not the deaths of up to one million Armenians was genocide has become controversial, I thought I’d check and see what the Turkish government has to say about the matter. I found an essay titled “Armenian Allegations of Genocide: The Issue and the Facts.” Here is a sample:

A century of ever-increasing conflict, beginning roughly in 1820 and culminating with the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, characterized the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire participated in no fewer than a dozen named wars, nearly all to the detriment of the empire and its citizens. The empire contracted against an onslaught of external invaders and internal nationalist independence movements. In this context — an imperiled empire waging and losing battles on remote and disparate fronts, grasping to continue a reign of over 700 years — must the tragic experience of the Ottoman Armenians of Eastern Anatolia be understood. For during these waning days of the Ottoman Empire did millions die, Muslim, Jew, and Christian alike.

Yet Armenian Americans have attempted to extricate and isolate their history from the complex circumstances in which their ancestors were embroiled. In so doing, they describe a world populated only by white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains. The heroes are always Christian and the villains are always Muslim. Infusing history with myth, Armenian Americans vilify the Republic of Turkey, Turkish Americans, and ethnic Turks worldwide. Armenian Americans bent on this prosecution choose their evidence carefully, omitting all evidence that tends to exonerate those whom they presume guilty, ignoring important events and verifiable accounts, and sometimes relying on dubious or prejudiced sources and even falsified documents. Though this portrayal is necessarily one-sided and steeped in bias, the Armenian American community presents it as a complete history and unassailable fact.

A lot of observers, including Michael Jonas and Media Nation, have tried to draw an analogy between the Armenian catastrophe and the Holocaust — that is, we have asked, without knowing the answer, whether this is a story with two legitimate sides, or whether the no-it-wasn’t-genocide faction is no more credible than those who deny that the Holocaust took place.

In that light, I think the Turkish statement is important, not because I accept it at face value (I don’t), but because of what it represents. There is no credible person, government or organization that denies the reality of what happened to the Jews during World War II. But the Turkish government — a semi-democratic, friendly, pro-Western regime — does deny that what happened to the Armenians during World War I was genocide.

Regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong, I think Turkey’s position needs to be taken into account.

A few quick observations:

1. Boston Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón writes today that he’s started a blog. You can find it here. Cruise on over, and you’ll run into his assertion that “this particular blog does not yet have the technical capability to allow people to post their comments directly.” Really? Blogger.com does, and it’s free. Then again, as much as I’m for transparency, if Chacón opens things up to all comers, there will be so many idiotic comments to wade through that it will be nearly impossible to find the worthwhile stuff. A dilemma.

2. Genocide historians Peter Balakian and George H. Stanton follow up in a Globe op-ed piece on the dispute over the Armenian catastrophe of World War I. Massachusetts education officials have eliminated materials that suggest the deaths of one million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire may not have constituted genocide. The question: Did those Massachusetts officials somehow abridge the First Amendment, as my friend Harvey Silverglate, the noted civil-liberties lawyer, contends? The answer, according to Balakian and Stanton: No. They write:

The Turkish government and its supporters are free to express their thoughts, but it does not follow that their genocide denial websites are entitled to endorsement in Massachusetts classrooms.

The First Amendment permits us to express anything, but is does not enable a foreign government’s falsification of history to be taught in our public schools.

To which I add: They’re right if they’re right. That is, if there is absolutely no legitimate scholarship showing that what happened may not have been genocide, then I agree with Balakian and Stanton. But I don’t know the answer to that contentious question.

3. Katharine Seelye has more in today’s New York Times on what’s good — and bad — about the Wikipedia, adding some details to John Siegenthaler’s harrowing tale of anonymous libel. I’m not going to give up linking to Wikipedia entries, but I’m going to look at them more closely than ever.

4. Finally, a production note: Yesterday I made the switch to Ecto (or, as the programmer would have it, ecto), a sort-of word-processing program that makes it easy to write and post blog entries without having to go to the Blogger.com Web site.

Among other things, Ecto makes it simple to have links open in windows of their own. Now, if you click on a link, Media Nation will remain open rather than disappearing into the ether.

Media Nation reader Harvey Silverglate points out that I was too quick to endorse Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole’s approach in urging merchants to stop selling T-shirts that say “Stop Snitchin.”

In fact, in a letter (PDF file) to O’Toole and Mayor Tom Menino, ACLU officials Carol Rose and John Reinstein note that the not-so-gentle art of police persuasion can be considered just as much an abridgment of the First Amendment as yanking the shirts off the store shelf and slapping handcuffs on the proprietor. Rose and Reinstein write:

Over forty years ago, in Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963), the United States Supreme Court held that this type of official pressure to eliminate objectionable material violates the First Amendment. In that case, a state created commission had circulated to bookstores a list of publications which it considered objectionable. The notice sent by the commission solicited or thanked the booksellers in advance for their “cooperation” and reminded them that obscenity could be prosecuted. The result was that the objectionable books were no longer offered for sale. In the Supreme Court, the commission argued that it did not regulate or suppress the books, but simply exhorted booksellers not to offer them for sale. The Court disagreed. Although the commission had no formal power, it “deliberately set out to achieve the suppression of publications deemed ‘objectionable’ and succeeded in its aim.”

The T-shirts’ message, needless to say, is completely irresponsible, and could help contribute to an atmosphere of intimidation that makes it harder to solve murders and other violent crimes. No store owner should carry them. But that’s a different issue.

There’s no question that Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s threat to confiscate “Stop Snitchin” T-shirts from stores that sell them would be a violation of the First Amendment’s freedom-of-speech guarantee (Globe coverage here; Herald coverage here).

But everyone ought to chill out — it’s not going to happen.

Menino’s no fool, and a little bit of over-the-top anti-crime rhetoric is hardly surprising given the rise in the city’s murder rate. This morning, though, Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole told WBZ Radio (AM 1030) that city officials would restrict themselves to asking merchants to do the right thing by getting rid of the shirts. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Here (PDF file) is the ACLU of Massachusetts press release on the subject. Perhaps its quick response was the reason for O’Toole’s measured reaction.

And by the way, can’t our two dailies at least get it right in reporting on the T-shirt’s message? The Globe has it as “Stop Snitching.” The Herald says it’s “Stop Snitchin’.” But the Herald also runs a photo of one of the shirts, and it clearly says, “Stop Snitchin” — no “g,” no grammatically correct apostrophe.

Like many bloggers, Media Nation is fond of linking to the Wikipedia, the free, user-created and -maintained online encyclopedia. But I do wonder where some of this stuff comes from, and I try to give the items to which I link a critical scan to make sure they’re rooted in reality.

I’ve noticed that, increasingly, students are citing it the way those of an earlier generation would have cited the Encyclopedia Britannica. Generally, the information seems reasonable. But you never know.

So here is a cautionary tale: a column in USA Today by former Robert Kennedy aide John Siegenthaler, who says that, for 132 days, the Wikipedia’s entry on him included false information that he had once been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. Siegenthaler, understandably, calls the Wikipedia “a flawed and irresponsible research tool.”

Last July, NPR’s “On the Media” took a look at the Wikipedia. When co-host Bob Garfield asked New York University professor and wiki fan Clay Shirky about what happens to bogus material uploaded to the Wikipedia, Shirky responded with this:

There was actually a very interesting study done up at IBM in Cambridge around a project called History Flow that looked at the history of vandalism for highly contentious subjects on the Wikipedia, whether it was abortion or Islam or Microsoft, or any topic that got some group exercised. And what they found was that vandalism tended to last less than two minutes. People get e-mailed when a page is changed, so it’s not passive monitoring. There’s highly active monitoring around page changes, particularly for contentious pages, so that the vandalism is found and undone very quickly.

To which it now seems reasonable to add: Not always.

Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey today confirms that the owners of Quincy’s Patriot Ledger and Brockton’s Enterprise are interested in buying the Boston Herald and its suburban affiliate, Community Newspaper Co. Bailey writes:

[A] private equity firm, keen on synergy and cost savings, could merge many of the operations while preserving the papers’ identities. Could there, for instance, be a single headquarters, and printing plant, for all the papers? And it need not be in Boston. The Boston Herald property, owned separately by the Purcell family, could be a valuable development site.

Bailey couldn’t reach Herald/CNC principal owner Pat Purcell. But Purcell tells his own paper: “We’re very encouraged by the level of interest in investing with us. We would hope it could be concluded in the next several weeks.”

Still unknown is the meaning of “it.” A sale of the entire operation? New investors, with Purcell remaining as the chief executive? Stay tuned.

I’m perplexed by Sydney Schanberg’s latest in the Village Voice, lamenting a future in which the Internet has supplanted newspapers. “[T]he puzzlement,” he asks, “is where will the new digital providers of information get their fresh news?” And though Schanberg swears his intent is not to slam the bloggers, be aware that you will find the obligatory reference to pajamas.

I assume — I hope — that the “new digital providers of information” will be newspapers, transformed and perhaps revitalized by their move to an all-digital or almost-all-digital incarnation. Of course, the biggest ongoing story in journalism right now is who’s going to pay the bills. But that’s what we’re all trying to figure out.

Schanberg concludes with a laundry list of important stories broken in recent weeks by the Old Media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, National Journal, the Washington Post, The Nation and Rolling Stone.

Uh, Mr. Schanberg — did you have the print versions of every one of those publications? Or did you read some of them on, you know, the Internet?