Media Nation

I honestly don’t know what to think about this week’s revelation that the Bush administration has been tracking international financial transactions. My first thought was that it seems less abusive than the secret NSA no-warrant wiretapping program, but that there’s much we don’t know. A few observations:

• Surely the terrorists already knew they were being wiretapped. The Bush administration’s only wrinkle with the NSA program was in breaking U.S. law. The financial program, though, strikes me as potentially something that the terrorists didn’t know about. Consequently, I find myself wondering whether the New York Times and other news organizations exercised good judgment by revealing it.
• Financial privacy does not seem to be all that firmly established, and has apparently not been recognized by the Supreme Court — although Congress did pass a law protecting it. Thus it appears that, once again, the White House broke the law when it didn’t really have to.
• The financial program may have actually led to the capture of a significant Al Qaeda terrorist, which is more — a lot more — than can be said for the indiscriminate NSA program.

Given my handwringing, I was interested to see The Opinionator point (sub. req.) to this post at Homeland Security Watch. After making some of the same points I was thinking about, security analyst Christian Beckner writes:

Based on the content of the story, I’m glad that this program exists — and although I usually err on the side of openness and disclosure, this is one program that I would’ve been fine to see remained cloaked in secrecy. This story could cause would-be terror financiers to rethink their money movement activities; and if SWIFT [the international consortium supplying the data] were to pull back from cooperation with the US government because of any controversy generated by this story (it’s still too early to judge the political fallout from it, if any), then that would be a real shame.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has shown such contempt for civil liberties that it’s possible we can no longer recognize a proper exercise of government authority when we see it. And yes, it’s also possible that the newly revealed program is a lot more abusive of ordinary citizens than it appears at first glance. (Surely the foolishness in Miami can’t be overlooked when assessing the White House’s motives and competence.)

For the moment, we should all learn as much as we can and not get too far out in front of this.

Good grief.

There’s an upside and a downside to the fact that space on the Web is essentially limitless. It’s great that a news site like NYTimes.com can be used to upload supplemental material such as audio, video, extra photos and original documents. But it’s not so great when someone decides that a tightly edited story in the print edition can undergo gasification on the Web.

To wit: This morning I was reading the online edition of the Times — ostensibly the print analogue — when I came across a disclaimer that accompanied a story about a video made just before a deadly protest last May in Uzbekistan: “This is an expanded version of the article that appeared in the print edition.”

Sure enough. I copied and pasted the online version into Microsoft Word, and it clocked in at 3,750 words. According to LexisNexis, the print version is just 2,949 words.

Extra stuff for those with the time and interest to peruse it is great. But please, let me read the basic story without having to plow through an extra 800 words.

I just got off the phone with my friend and former Boston Phoenix colleague Seth Gitell, who wanted to let me know that he was back on Romenesko. Seth is resigning as Mayor Tom Menino’s press secretary in order to research a story about his father’s experiences in the Green Berets. He’s writing it for the Atlantic Monthly.

Seth and I had a great time together at the Phoenix. The highlight was probably our road trips to Philadelphia and Los Angeles for the 2000 national political conventions. We hit Geno’s during our week in Philly; English-language disputes aside, I thought the place was hugely overrated.

No doubt Menino will miss Seth, but I know that his father’s story is one he’s been wanting to tell. Jerry Gitell is a fascinating guy, and was an enormous help to me in writing this 2002 piece (ignore the date at the top of the page) on revelations that former senator Bob Kerrey may have committed war crimes in Vietnam.

Seth: Good luck.

Media Nation’s loving family got me the new Bruce Springsteen CD, “We Shall Overcome,” for Father’s Day — and delivered me into the not-so-loving arms of Sony.

My iBook refused to recognize the CD. I read the fine print on the jacket and saw this: “The audio side of this disc does not conform to CD specifications and therefore will not play on some CD and DVD players.” I flipped it over, and the video side loaded perfectly.

Hmmm. I tried a cheap old CD player in the kitchen — no problem. Next I loaded it, CD-side up, into Mrs. Media Nation’s PowerBook, and got it to play. I ripped it to iTunes, burned a new CD, and then stuck that into my iBook. Problem solved.

So what’s going on here? This Wikipedia post suggests that it’s simply a matter of DualDiscs (CD on one side, DVD on the other) being too thick for some CD players. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, though, because both my iBook and my wife’s PowerBook have the same slot-loading mechanism. Springsteen’s last album, “Devils & Dust,” is also a DualDisc, and it loads just fine; it’s the music that isn’t much good.

This and this, on the other hand, place the blame squarely on Sony, claiming that its notorious digital-rights-management (DRM) scheme has been installed on “We Shall Overcome.” It seems that on Windows machines, loading the CD might even damage your files.

Now, a question for Apple: The PowerBook that plays “We Shall Overcome” is running OS X 10.2.8, which is several years old. The iBook that won’t is running 10.4.6. Has Apple deliberately messed with its operating system in order to give Sony something to sink its fangs into?

And to think I bought a few shares of Apple this morning.

Update: It doesn’t seem to be a Mac OS issue. That’s good news. But I don’t think it’s just a simple matter of disc thickness, either.

This says it all:

Arroyo (9-3) gave up a run in the first and Carlos Beltran’s 19th homer leading off the ninth. He struck out five and walked one in his third career complete game, second this season.

“He’s a tremendous competitor. He is fearless, and one of the better pitchers in baseball — and I mean pitchers,” Cincinnati manager Jerry Narron said. “It’s a lot of fun to watch. You sometimes think it’s a lost art for guys that know how to pitch. He’s one of those guys.”

After David Wright’s one-out single, Arroyo retired Jose Valentin and Xavier Nady to end it on his 116th pitch.

“I didn’t take a pounding in any inning at all,” Arroyo said. “I had plenty left in the tank.”

But all hail Kyle Snyder.

Rick in Duxbury passes along this essay on the Karl Rove indictment that wasn’t. A pretty good read, though I’m not sure anyone took TruthOut.org seriously to begin with.

Meanwhile, Media Nation is on a secret mission this week. Blogging will be light at best.

Things are looking up at the New York Times Co., but not at its Boston outpost. The Associated Press reports that company-wide advertising was up 4.4 percent in May. The story continues:

In the news media group, advertising revenue rose 5.6 percent at its New York Times group and 7.1 percent at its regional segment, while ad sales slipped 6.9 percent at its New England media unit.

The New England unit comprises the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. (Via Romenesko.)

Because it’s easy to get bogged down in technical arcana when discussing a topic such as net neutrality, I’m particularly taken with an argument offered by Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University. Without net neutrality, Vaidhyanathan explains, Internet service providers — mainly the cable and phone companies — get paid twice. It’s an easy, consumer-friendly message, and more people need to hear it.

Let’s say you’ve got broadband now, and are paying $50 a month. In a few years, your ISP might roll out a new, ultrafast connection that will let you download a full-length movie in just a few minutes. It might even be fast enough that Web-based television becomes a realistic possibility. Do you think you’re going to pay the same $50? Of course not. You’ll pay $70, or $100, or whatever, and if it allows you to get rid of other expensive services, you’ll be glad to do it.

But the ISPs want to charge extra not just to you but also to content providers that wish to take advantage of the faster connection. Here’s how Vaidhyanathan explained it in a recent interview with NPR’s “On the Media”:

[W]hat they’re actually proposing doing is double billing. They want to charge me and you, consumers getting broadband service, a very high rate and extort money from the service providers, so that those willing to write the big check get their stuff delivered faster to you and me. That’s not a fair business practice, nor is it really healthy for the sort of information and cultural environment and economic playing field that we really want to see on the Internet.

Net neutrality simply means treating ISPs as common carriers, requiring them to treat all content providers equally while allowing them to charge customers different fees for different levels of service. This is exactly how the phone companies have always been regulated, and it is how the Internet has evolved — at least until now.

This is not the world’s sexiest issue, yet it’s crucial to our hopes of a democratic, diverse media. That’s why groups ranging from MoveOn.org to the Christian Coalition are fighting for net neutrality. The Internet is the only medium in which major media conglomerates have no delivery advantage over the scruffiest amateurs. The ISPs are trying to change that, and we’ll all be the losers if they win.

Visit Save the Internet today. And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out this Moby PSA.

It’s one of the great mysteries of our time: If the news media have a liberal bias, as is generally supposed, why is the press so much more deferential to Republicans than it is to Democrats?

You might disagree with that premise, but I don’t think it can be denied. Bill Clinton was ripped apart for a nonexistent scandal (Whitewater) and for his personal failings (the Lewinsky matter). Al Gore was battered for minor exaggerations and for things he didn’t even say (such as the false assertion that he’d claimed to have “invented” the Internet). John Kerry was deeply wounded by the obvious lies of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has never really been held to account for offenses both high (launching a disastrous war on the basis of hyped intelligence) and low (Dick Cheney’s shooting an elderly hunting partner in the face).

In recent years, media observers such as Eric Alterman (“What Liberal Media?”) and Joe Conason (“Big Lies”) have tried to explain this conundrum. Now comes former Salon media columnist Eric Boehlert, whose “Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush” (Free Press) documents in sometimes mind-numbing detail the ways in which the media routinely pick over every minor Democratic flaw while ignoring much more important instances of perfidy on the Republican side.

My own view — not entirely original — is that though much of our major media are imbued with a mild liberal cultural bias on issues such as gay rights, reproductive choice and the role of religion in society, that bias does not extend to the way they cover politics. Indeed, it often seems that the way liberal reporters make their bones is by tormenting liberal politicians. And with partisan Republican media such as the Fox News Channel, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and the Wall Street Journal editorial page constantly charging “liberal bias,” life is much easier for journalists if they tilt to the right.

Boehlert’s book would have benefited from a stronger analytical tone. His methodology is largely one of documenting media somnolence in the face of outrageous behavior by Bush, Cheney, et al. and then asking his readers how the media would have reacted if a Democrat had engaged in similar offenses. Most of the material Boehlert offers will be familiar to readers who follow this stuff. The principal strength of “Lapdogs” is that Boehlert shows the easy treatment of Bush has continued since the 2004 election, thus updating the earlier work done by Alterman and Conason.

Slate’s Jack Shafer recently criticized “Lapdogs” on the grounds that Boehlert largely confines his critique to television news and talking-heads shows, giving a pass to our two most important news organizations, the New York Times and the Washington Post. If the Times and the Post aren’t part of the problem, Shafer asks, how can Boehlert complain that the media lean Republican? But I don’t read “Lapdogs” the way Shafer does; in fact, Boehlert cites numerous examples from both papers. A very short list would include:

• The Times’ decision to hold its Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the secret, no-warrant NSA wiretapping program from before the 2004 election until December 2005.
• The Post’s repeated editorializing in favor of the war in Iraq.
• The Times’ indulgence of Judith Miller’s flawed reporting on Iraq’s supposed weapons capabilities.
• The Post’s role in concocting that fake Gore quote about “inventing” the Internet, endlessly repeated by the sneering Washington press corps.

Boehlert gives due credit to media watchdogs such as the Daily Howler and Media Matters for America. Ultimately, though, that’s the problem with “Lapdogs.” The distinctive voice and edge Boehlert usually brings to his work is frequently missing here, replaced by his voluminous but not fully digested research.

Still, there’s a lot of valuable information in “Lapdogs,” and it shows how the goal of the right, as Boehlert puts it, “is to create a news culture where there are few if any agreed upon facts, thereby making serious debate impossible.” That is by far the most disturbing aspect of the media wars taking place today, and Boehlert does a good job of shining a light on it.