Media Nation

Last week I took New York Times columnist Joseph Nocera to task for falsely claiming that (1) you can’t move your music from your iPod to another portable music player and (2) you’ll lose all the music from your iPod if you send it to Apple for a battery replacement.

Today Nocera comes half-clean, writing (sub. req.):

Many readers chided me for writing last week that if you send an iPod to Apple to have the battery replaced you lose all your data. They noted, correctly, that so long as your music is stored in iTunes, you can easily download it onto the new iPod Apple sends you. When I wrote that line I was thinking of situations — which happen more often than you’d imagine — where your computer has crashed, and the iPod is the only place your music is stored. But when I pointed this out to a few of my correspondents, their rejoinder was swift: you should always back up the data on your computer. In the modern age, a computer crash is as inevitable as death and taxes.

Better than nothing. Although I’m scratching my head over his alibi.

I have an article (free reg. req.) in the new issue of CommonWealth Magazine on the citizen-journalism movement as exemplified by H2otown, a weblog covering Watertown. The piece focuses on Lisa Williams, who started the site about a year ago, and who covers town-council meetings by TiVoing them on the local-access channel and then taking notes after her kids have gone to bed.

Among other things, Williams tells me:

I don’t see H2otown as a newspaper, but it’s important to me that it add up to something. I’m not a professionally trained journalist. My coverage is limited by my babysitting coverage. I’m perfectly willing to be humble about that. But volunteer media is a heck of a lot better than no media. I’m angry at the economic realities of media consolidation. This is an extremely widespread problem.

Other folks I interviewed include Christopher Lydon, host of the blogified radio program “Open Source”; citizen-journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor; Universal Hub impresario Adam Gaffin; the Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain; the Poynter Institute’s Steve Outing; Baristanet founder Debbie Galant; and Greg Reibman and Dan Atkinson of Community Newspaper Co., which publishes the Watertown Tab & Press.

From today’s Boston Globe:

A campaign to build a wireless data network in Boston picked up momentum yesterday as Mayor Thomas M. Menino said he would mount an effort to spread wireless Internet access across the city.

From today’s Boston Herald:

Hub grudge politics may be delaying free Internet access in Boston as critics charge a power grab by Mayor Thomas M. Menino is stalling the spread of coveted free Wi-Fi.

*With apologies to Boston Magazine, which posted an update yesterday for the first time in months.

Give Media Nation credit. I believe I’ve come up with the least interesting sidebar to the violent international dispute over those cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Simply put: Why does the Boston Globe spell it “Mohammed”? I remember that spelling from childhood. But, at some point, “Mohammed” became “Muhammad” and “Moslem” became “Muslim,” apparently out of some language expert’s desire to make the English versions of those words conform more closely to the Arabic.

The Associated Press Stylebook specifies “Muhammad.” The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.), and the Los Angeles Times have all been going with “Muhammad.” Yet the Globe steadfastly renders the name as “Mohammed,” as it did in this Colin Nickerson piece today.

Of course, the Globe is free to develop its own house style and to go with spellings that other publications spurn. But the paper hasn’t been especially consistent. I did a LexisNexis search that showed the Globe has referred to “the prophet Muhammad” on at least a half-dozen occasions since November 2004. Granted, it has gone with “Mohammed” far more often. But the whole point of having a stylebook is to eliminate such disparities, which can be confusing to readers.

I realize that, while I’m obsessing over trivia, people are dying. Thus I offer you Mark Jurkowitz’s thoughtful commentary on the larger issues surrounding this.

The 24-year-old Bush campaign operative who tried to silence one of the world’s leading climate scientists has resigned after it was learned he’d lied about having received a journalism degree from Texas A&M University. The New York Times has the story (picking up on a blogger), which, as of this writing, is the lead item on Romenesko.

Never mind the specific details of the case about George Deutsch, which are bad enough. Think about what it means that Karl Rove and company would send an arrogant twit like Deutsch — even if he wasn’t a liar — to NASA in order to make sure that publicly paid-for science conformed to the White House’s political needs. I’m afraid that we’ve almost become accustomed to such things, but we shouldn’t.

James Hansen, the scientist whom Deutsch had targeted for telling inconvenient truths, finally popped up for his long-delayed interview on WBUR’s “On Point” last week. You can listen to it here.

Richard Sloan is a doctor and I’m not. No doubt his medical credentials are what led the folks at NPR’s “On the Media” to correct one of their guests from the previous week, Northeastern University professor Robert Gilbert. But his medical degree aside, Sloan’s e-mail turns out to be yet another example of something I’ve complained about before: a letter to the editor that should have been fact-checked but wasn’t, and was — as best as I can tell — just plain wrong.

Gilbert, the author of “The Mortal Presidency: Illness and Anguish in the White House,” appeared on “OTM” on Jan. 27 to discuss speculation that Vice President Dick Cheney’s changing shoe size is evidence of congestive heart failure, and that the bulge on President Bush’s back — briefly a cause célèbre during the 2004 presidential campaign — was related to a cardiac problem. Here’s what Gilbert told cohost Bob Garfield:

Well, I don’t think the modern press is particularly vigilant when it comes to the President’s health. For example, when President Bush supposedly fainted a few years ago after eating a pretzel and choking on a pretzel, the press basically accepted that explanation. But there certainly had been intimations by some doctors that the President might, in point of fact, have certain health problems. One problem that I’ve heard is that he might have the same condition that his father had, atrial fibrillation, and might actually be wearing an electrical device to monitor his heart and shock his heart back into normal rhythm if it goes out of rhythm.

This past Friday, the following letter from Professor Richard Sloan of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York, was read on the air (there is no transcript available yet):

Your speculation, endorsed by your guest, was that George Bush’s losing battle with a pretzel was evidence of an undisclosed heart condition, possibly explaining that squarish bulge on his back during the first debate with John Kerry. That is, the bulge might be an electrical device designed to control atrial fibrillation, the same condition that his father had. Pacemakers, the devices that perform this function, are implanted in the chest and not visible in outline on a person’s back. Whatever that bulge was it was not a pacemaker.

Gotcha, Professor Gilbert! But wait. A year ago I wrote a column on this very subject. And the speculation was that Bush was wearing something called a LifeVest. Please understand — I’m not claiming to be any type of medical expert. But the LifeVest is a real device, and it is a portable defibrillator worn outside the body designed, as Gilbert said, to “shock [the] heart back into a normal rhythm if it goes out of rhythm.”

Here is a description of the LifeVest by its manufacturer, LifeCor:

The LifeVest is the first wearable defibrillator. Unlike an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), the LifeVest is worn outside the body rather than implanted in the chest. This device continuously monitors the patient’s heart with dry, non-adhesive sensing electrodes to detect life-threatening abnormal heart rhythms. If a life-threatening rhythm is detected, the device alerts the patient prior to delivering a shock, and thus allows a conscious patient to disarm the shock. If the patient is unconscious, the device releases a gel over the therapy electrodes and delivers an electrical shock to restore normal rhythm.

I’m sure that Dr. Sloan knows his stuff inside and out. Maybe I’m missing something. But it certainly looks like he misunderstood Gilbert and fired off an e-mail without giving it much thought. And “OTM,” by reading Sloan’s letter on the air, allowed Gilbert to look like someone engaged in irresponsible speculation.

“OTM” needs to correct the correction — and apologize to Gilbert.

You can’t read Joseph Nocera’s column online unless you’re a TimesSelect subscriber. Today, at least, that’s just as well — wider distribution would only spread his misinformation.

The topic of Nocera’s column is a valid one. Apple, like most technology companies, sells many of its products for such a low profit margin that customer support isn’t worth the bother. Nocera’s complaint is that Apple treats iPods like disposable devices ($300 disposable devices), and expects its customers to do so as well. This results in anger and frustration when, say, your two-year-old iPod breaks and Apple evinces no willingness to repair it.

But Nocera soon gets himself in trouble, making two mistakes — one small (and perhaps more pernicious, since readers might actually believe it) and one whopping.

First the small one. Nocera writes:

You’re furious. But what choice do you have? You can’t turn to a competitor’s product, not if you want to keep using Apple’s proprietary iTunes software, where you’ve stored all the music you love, including songs purchased directly from the iTunes Music Store, which you’ll lose if you leave the iTunes environment. So you grit your teeth and buy a new iPod.

This is flat-out wrong, but I’ll call it a small mistake because the solution is — to use some fancy techno-jargon — a pain in the ass. There are two issues here, one concerning unprotected music, the other concerning copy protection.

First, unprotected files, which you generally obtain by copying your CDs into the iTunes software on your computer.

When you rip your CDs to iTunes, you have two main format choices: MP3 or AAC. MP3 is the lingua franca of music compression, and if you chose MP3, then you’re golden. You can move your music to any number of other players. But you probably chose AAC — which is unique to Apple — because it supposedly sounds better. So, yes, you’ll have to convert your AACs to MP3s. You can do it within iTunes, or you can simply burn your music to CDs, which will now hold your music as AIFF files, as the CD format is known; those files can be converted to anything you like. Of course, if you still have your CD collection, you can simply rip it all over again to whatever new system you decide to buy.

It’s trickier with music you buy from the iTunes Music Store, because copy protection has been added to the AAC files. However, it’s incredibly weak copy protection, and there are a number of ways around it. Perhaps the simplest, though the most time-consuming depending on the size of your collection, is to burn your music to CDs — which, again, will give you gloriously unprotected AIFF files. There are also programs available to remove copy protection from AAC files so that you can then covert them to MP3s. These programs are of dubious legality, but surely using them so that you can move your legally paid-for music to a different player is perfectly legitimate.

This is all simpler than it sounds, though I’ll concede that it’s not nearly as simple as buying a new iPod. Still, it can be done, even though Nocera has just told you that it can’t be.

Now for the whopper. Nocera also weighs in on Apple’s notorious battery problems and its even more notorious refusal early on to do anything about it. He writes:

Steven Williams, a lawyer who brought a class-action suit against Apple a few years ago over the failed battery problem, told me that he was amazed to discover, as the litigation began, that Apple seemed to feel, as he put it, “that everyone knew iPods were only good for a year or two.” Thanks in part to the lawsuit, the battery issue is one of the few Apple will now deal with: if your iPod dies because of the battery you can send it back and get a new one for a mere $65.95, plus tax. Of course, you then lose all your music.

Of course, you then lose all your music. What is Nocera babbling about? Nocera claims that his family owns six iPods and five Macs. If he only owned one of each, he would know — from the first day that he put them to use — that the contents of his iPod are nothing more than a mirror of what his iTunes software has stored on his computer’s hard drive. To say that his iPod would come back from the factory devoid of music is accurate, I suppose, but not even remotely true. Once he plugged it into his Mac, iTunes would quickly restore his music collection just the way it was before being sent to the factory. Nocera has to know this. Why did he write such a deceptive sentence?

I am no technical expert. Someone who writes about tech has to come very, very close to one of the two or three areas about which I know something before I can knowledgeably critique it. So this makes me wonder about the veracity of other things I read. What troubles me is that Nocera’s column seems to fit a pattern of breezy, “close enough” commentary that is typical when it comes to tech subjects in general-interest newspapers and magazines.

At a minimum, the Times should publish a correction. At a maximum, Times public editor Byron Calame might consider a column on the paper’s standards when it comes to covering consumer technology. It’s not about war and peace, but I suspect such articles are among the paper’s most well-read. There ought to be a commitment to get it right.

Everyone on my mother’s side of the family eventually loses some of his or her hearing. I’m not quite 50, but it’s already happening to me. Add to that the fact that I played bass guitar in a band when I was a teenager, and have listened to a lot of loud music over the years (still do), and there you have it: partial hearing loss caused by genes and knowingly questionable behavior on my part. (I say “questionable” rather than “stupid” because I’d probably make the same trade again.)

Enter one John Kiel Patterson of Louisiana, who is suing Apple because he can turn his iPod up wicked loud. Reports the Associated Press:

Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve W. Berman, of Seattle. But that’s beside the point of the lawsuit, which takes issue with the potential the iPod has to cause irreparable hearing loss, Berman said.

“He’s bought a product which is not safe to use as currently sold on the market,” Berman said. “He’s paying for a product that’s defective, and the law is pretty clear that if someone sold you a defective product they have a duty to repair it.”

Normally I think of the phrase “tort reform” as nothing more than a cynical slogan wielded by lawyer-bashing politicians. But this is ludicrous. Didn’t Patterson ever listen to what his mother told him?

Nothing to add to today’s Boston Globe story about John Kerry’s blog at the Daily Kos. Except this: The Kos has a reputation for being fairly hard left. That’s fine for a Massachusetts senator. But is this where a man who still wants to be president ought to be hanging out?

… but not for thee. (With apologies to Nat Hentoff.)

I’m probably late to the party, but if you haven’t heard about this, you’ve got to check out the unblinking, unapologetic double-standard voiced by U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla.

Young’s wife, Beverly Young, as you may have heard, was removed from the Capitol press gallery the night of President Bush’s State of the Union speech because she was wearing a political T-shirt that read, “Support the Troops.” That same evening, antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan was also removed — and arrested — for wearing a T-shirt that said, “2,245 Dead. How Many More?” Capitol police have apologized, the charge against Sheehan has been dropped, and there are red faces and indignation all around.

Anyway, here are the immortal words of Congressman Young, as reported in today’s Washington Post:

“When your wife is insulted and embarrassed, you do tend to get a little offended,” Young said yesterday, explaining his upbraiding of Gainer that night and his fervent speech on the House floor yesterday morning, when he waved the shirt and bellowed about his wife’s ejection: “Shame! Shame!”

Young said he wouldn’t be so mad if it were just Sheehan. “I totally disagree with everything she stands for,” he said. But by removing his wife, Gainer’s officers clearly “acted precipitously,” Young said.

You can’t even call him a hypocrite — he’s too up-front for that. (Thanks to Media Nation reader Michael Goldman.)