Cit Media

The furor surrounding Joe Klein’s misguided column of a week ago continues, incredibly, given Klein’s bizarre insistence on digging the hole deeper instead of forthrightly acknowledging error(s) and moving on. But this is not just about a columnist’s mistakes and tone-deafness. This is a debacle for the publication and company that employs him, because Time itself has compounded the problem, demonstrating contempt for its audience.

The episode is also a testament to the power of the Net to surface traditional-media wrongdoing — and to hold to account the people who have (and, despite the rise of citizen media, still have) enormous influence over what people believe about key issues. It’s almost inconceivable that Klein and his employers would have even bothered to issue their half-baked corrections had this all occurred a decade ago or earlier.

To recap a bit:

Klein’s original column attacked congressional Democrats’ effort to pass electronic surveillance legislation that would restrain the Bush administration’s wish for essentially no restraints or oversight whatever. In his piece, Klein got some vital facts dead wrong, giving a totally misleading message to his readers.

The responses from the Web were swift and, for the most part, far better informed. In particular, Salon’s fierce blogger, Glenn Greenwald, and Wired News’ Ryan Singel in the site’s Threat Level blog — both of whom are employed by online journalism operations — thoroughly dissected Klein’s factual and logical mess. Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake was among many in the independent blogosphere to join the fray.

Klein dug a deeper hole with a series of follow-up and factually challenged Time blog postings, in one of which he admitted not having actually read the legislation in question. It took him days to admit actual error, but even then he — and Time, in a correction that was and remains half-hearted at best — never fully owned up to the serious failure in this case.

The Chicago Tribune, which published excerpts from Klein’s erroneous column, published a direct and honest correction. Time still refuses, which makes the magazine’s failures much worse than Klein’s.

Why? Because as Singel notes in “Time Edits Wiretapping Correction, Still Wrong,” as he explains why the “correction” is itself so misleading:

For Time to continue to allow people to believe that that’s possibly what this bill would do means after all the detailed criticism it has gotten is clear proof the original column is no longer a dangerous misunderstanding of a complex issue by a two-bit political columnist.

Instead, it’s now an institutional lie.

I don’t know if this story will have further legs. Given the utter unprofessionalism it betrays, it should. But even if it doesn’t, something important has occurred.

Not so many years ago, this institutional arrogance would have been the end of the story. Actually, it’s likely that there would have been no clarifications or corrections of any kind.

And, unhappily, when this is part of journalistic history millions of people will have read Klein’s original column in the magazine. A tiny proportion of that readership will ultimately have learned that a fundamental premise of his argument was based on falsehood.

But the fact that Time (and Klein) felt obliged to respond at all, however grudgingly and still incorrectly, is a direct result of the growing ability of new media to be heard. There’s little to celebrate in this debacle, but we can at least take some satisfaction from that.

Cory Doctorow has a very smart analysis in Information Week about why he doesn’t fear Facebook taking over the world. Quote:

Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

That’s why I don’t worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go — and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

The folks at the Tactical Technology Collective are planning to release soon a “Citizen Journalism Toolkit” that

will provide accessible and effective training materials on selected free software tools and web applications with a focus on giving people what they need to know in order to create and distribute content. The materials will cover print publishing, using images, online publishing and audio.

Looking forward to giving this a whirl.

But tools are less important, by far, than community building and commitment. However valuable this kit will be, the people who use it are the key to any success.

Several of you have asked, but I’m still digesting the news. More later…

NY Times: Not All Is Gloomy in Real Estate: A Blog Network Attracts Capital. In some respects, sites like Curbed are insulated from the woes of the real estate market in a way that traditional sites may not be. “We’re not just about real estate,” Mr. Steele said. “People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.” This wide focus has helped Curbed draw advertisers like American Express and Volkswagen, Mr. Steele said.

NY Times: Murdoch, a Folk Hero in Silicon Valley. But on the left coast, Mr. Murdoch is truly among friends. The attendees at the Web 2.0 conference know him as the ultimate market timer, the guy who swooped in out of nowhere and bought MySpace for $580 million two years ago, before its audience doubled and before social networks became the platform of the future. And this was before Facebook got a valuation of $15 billion via an investment from Microsoft on Wednesday.

He’s not my hero. And he’s no hero to anyone who gives even half a damn about the future of honorable journalism in this world — which I’m willing to bet includes plenty of folks in Silicon Valley.

Murdoch is brilliant. He’s a genuine risk-taker. He’s more visionary than almost anyone in traditional media. So far so good.

But his publications and broadcast outlets have done more to poison the public sphere than any other media empire, by far. This is not heroic, not as any dictionary I’m familiar with would describe the word.

NY Times: Fox Bars Candidates From Using Its Images. The Fox News Channel sent notices to the campaigns of the leading Republican presidential candidates ordering them to stop using images from their Fox appearances in their campaign ads. The notices were sent out after the network was criticized for singling out only Senator John McCain’s campaign in barring use of the images.

I’m baffled that Fox can get away with this. Doesn’t fair use cover the candidates’ use of images of this sort?

Beyond that, why is Fox shooting itself in the foot so stupidly? The network is dishonest — “fair and balanced,” uh huh — but no one has ever called its executives stupid.

Business Week” A Cautionary Tale for Old Media. The collapse of Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper is in many ways the story of American newspapers in the 21st century. The industry has reached a near-crisis point. Many dailies are losing circulation at an alarming rate, and local newspaper ad spending fell 3.1% last year, to $24.4 billion, while Internet advertising rose 17.3%, to $9.8 billion, according to Advertising Age.

But the shivers rippling through the Mercury News also serve as a dramatic example of what happens when industry leaders get complacent in the face of fundamental shifts. Andy Grove, who helped sow the Internet revolution when CEO of Intel (INTC ), says that cross-industry disruptions follow a predictable course: Executives ignore the challenges. Then they try to resist. Only when it’s too late do they make radical changes. Grove, who now teaches a strategy course at Stanford University’s School of Business, summarizes the newspaper industry’s prospects: “Your doctor says you’re going to die, but if you don’t smoke, you’ll live a little longer.”

I’m on the board of the California First Amendment Coalition, which is holding its annual “Free Speech and Open Government Assembly” this week in LA. This afternoon I”m moderating a panel with some prominent bloggers.

The Open Net Initiative, in “Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma,”

examines the role of information technology, citizen journalists, and bloggers in Burma and presents a technical analysis of the abrupt shutdown of Internet connectivity by the Burmese government on September 29, 2007, following its violent crackdown on protesters there. Completely cutting international Internet links is rare. Nepal, which severed all international Internet connections when the King declared martial law in February 2005, is the only other state to take such drastic action. Although extreme, the measures taken by the Burmese government to limit citizens’ use of the Internet during this crisis are consistent with previous OpenNet Initiative (ONI) findings in Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and Tajikistan, where authorities controlled access to communication technologies as a way to limit social mobilization around key political events. What makes the Burmese junta stand out, however, is its apparent goal of also preventing information from reaching a wider international audience.

This report, compiled in an impressively short period, is must reading to understand how governments are responding to the communications revolution.

As the authors note, the events in Burma provide a “chilling example of the limitations of the Internet.” But there’s also reason for hope:

However, even the vast majority of Burmese without access to or knowledge of the Internet may have benefited from the enduring achievement of a small band of citizen bloggers and journalists—the uploading of vital, relevant information to the Internet was broadcast back in via television and radio and spread through personal networks and communities throughout the country.