NY Times: On Web, Voters Question Clinton Directly. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton sat in a fake living-room set on Monday night and fielded questions on a live video Webcast.
Was this a joke? Clinton’s alleged conversations with America have been so entirely scripted as to be laughable.
If this is her idea of changing politics in a Webby way, we’re not making much progress.
A new site, Defend the Press, is taking up the case of Sarah Olson:
a journalist who published an exclusive interview with Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, the highest-ranking member of the military to refuse to deploy to Iraq. Now, the Army wants Olson to be their witness in the lieutenant’s upcoming court martial. The Army is trying to turn speaking to the press into a crime — and wants to have a reporter participate in the prosecution of political speech.
Government actions to limit press freedom — this encroachment is only one of many — are actions to limit free speech and public knowledge.
Time Magazine has launched a Washington political blog, where at least one of the staffers posting to the site shows how he doesn’t get the medium at all — and perhaps needs remedial work in basic journalism, too.
In this posting, entitled “The Clinton Playbook,” Jay Carney wrote, among other things:
In late 1994 and early 1995, President Clinton was in free fall. His aides despaired. They worried he might never recover from the shellacking the Democrats took in the 1994 mid-term elections. His approval ratings were mired in the 30’s, and seemed unlikely to rise. When Clinton delivered his State of the Union address in January 1995, his first with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole seated behind him as Speaker and Senate Majority Leader, he looked out at an audience of Democrats who blamed him for losing their majorities and of Republicans who were already convinced he would be a one-term president…
There are two glaring errors in that paragraph, which commenters pointed out almost immediately. First, Clinton’s approval ratings were considerably higher than that at the time. Second, the vice president and House speaker sit behind the president at the State of the Union speech. The Senate Majority Leader (Dole in those days) does not.
The comments were often unfriendly, to be sure, and sometimes downright stupid in their hostility. But Carney’s response made things worse.
He didn’t correct his errors in the original piece — a no-no in any journalistic book. And then, in this posting, where he grudgingly admitted his mistake (and tried to salvage credibility by noting the Clinton’s approval ratings had gone below 40 percent briefly in 1993, more than a year before the time he’d asserted in the other posting, he compounded his problems by writing:
Amazingly, some Swampland readers seem to think my earlier post about President Bush’s State of the Union address was too sympathetic to Bush, which proves nothing but that the left is as full of unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land.
As one commenter then wrote, accurately: “Journalism is supposed to be about accuracy. The proper response to someone who points out an error is to say ‘Thank you’ and then correct the error.”
The original posting remains uncorrected, incidentally.
Sanjana Hattotuwa: The promise of citizen journalism. Often, this new age of citizen journalism lacks the grammar of age-old diplomacy and socio-political norms – the conversation is raw, visceral, impatient, irreverent, pithy, provocative. In Sri Lanka, it is a conversation that’s largely still in English, and also limited to urban centres.
The potential of citizen journalism, however, is its ability to provide a forum for all citizens – male and female, of all ethnicities, castes, classes and religions – to express themselves freely, society will better accommodate ideas and measures that engender peace.
OUT-LAW.com: Texas court bans deep linking. A court in Dallas, Texas has found a website operator liable for copyright infringement because his site linked to an ‘audio webcast’ without permission. Observers have criticised the judge for failing to understand the internet.
The defendant represented himself, and as often happens in such cases he lost. But the ruling, unless overturned on appeal, stands.
Someone needs to hold a training session for judges, to help them understand even a small part of the tech world. This judge clearly didn’t get it at all.
(I originally wrote this for PR Week magazine.)
An honorable tradition among lawyers is representing defendants whom they strongly suspect to be guilty, especially people with little or no ability to pay for their defense.
When the overwhelming power of the state is brought to bear against an individual whose freedom or even life may be at stake, we need an adversarial system – however flawed it often can be – to help protect the innocent.
The PR profession has its own justification for representing parties whose behavior, by almost any definition, warrants widespread contempt. Everyone has a right to push his or her own story, the logic goes, and expert help is a necessary part of the system.
Is this really true anymore, assuming it ever was? Not in the Digital Age.
I’m not talking here about the closer calls, where a client’s positive characteristics and deeds are many and transgressions are the smallest exceptions, or where the facts invite a serious debate over a nuanced public issue. Nor am I talking about the cases where a relatively small minority of opinion is on one side, but you can still make an honest case. No, this is about the truly bad clients whose records deserve deep contempt or who peddle hoaxes – the kind of clients that opinion-making organizations take on for purely mercenary reasons.
For them, it’s open season on truth. So we have pros who promote the virtues of a fear-ridden, impoverished nation run by a murderous kleptocrat. They concoct a fantasyland campaign for a company that mistreats workers, the environment, and shareholders while a compliant board of directors tosses loot to executives in amounts that would make Marie Antoinette blush. They torture language, obfuscating reality or denying it outright, deliberately trying to con the press and public.
Defending the indefensible, they generate fat fees. And they tell themselves and peers that they’re helping create a robust public debate, or just doing their jobs.
In the age of ever-more-giant mass media, images were made and unmade mostly via the press and advertising. Such justifications for doing the bad guys’ bidding, while still arguable, weren’t entirely ridiculous.
Today and especially tomorrow, anyone can tell a story, unmediated. In that media-sphere, the old rationalizations hold a lot less water.
So what am I arguing for? Naively, no doubt, I’m suggesting that PR folks decline some business.
Say no to the dictators and their apologists. Say no to the sleaziest CEOs and their minions. Say no to the piracy of candid discourse. Say no to the actors – corporate, political, whatever – who behave as though honor is a tactic, not a principle.
Tell them all that they can do their own imagery. They can use the Internet, buy advertising, and try to fool people without your help. Now they have access to global media in their own right. Let them use it.
I don’t know of any PR code of ethics that obliges disrespect for truth. Say yes to the value of liking the person you see in the mirror.
At the generally fantastic DLD Conference in Munich, where the future of media and communications are the major subjects, the first speaker of the morning gave a demonstration on how not to make a good impression.
Andy Wood, CEO of a company called Image Metrics, gave what can only be called a sales pitch for his company. Image Metrics has some extremely cool technology, no doubt about it — especially the real-time facial animation that is scarily accurate and opens many possibilities for creative folks.
Had Wood shown the technology and then discussed its implications, he’d have had this high-brainpower audience listening and learning. Instead, he relentlessly threw commercial and branding messages at the crowd.
I did hear several people talking in the hallway about the interesting technology he showed. I also heard wisecracks about his misguided pitch. Whoops…
Hilary Clinton is — gasp with surprise — running for president, and made it official on her HillaryClinton.com website. Not in a crowded hall, packed with supporters and TV cameras, but on the website.
Of course, it was not exactly news. She’s been making public and semi-public moves in this direction for a long time now. But the way she, and John Edwards a couple of weeks ago, used the Web as the official announcement space is telling. (I don’t believe Edwards scooped himself on the website, as the Washington Post alleged; this had the ring of pre-planning.)
Now, back to your regularly scheduled political wrangling…
Tim Berners-Lee (who basically invented the Web): Neutrality of the Net. To actually design legislation which allows creative interconnections between different service providers, but ensures neutrality of the Net as a whole may be a difficult task. It is a very important one. The US should do it now, and, if it turns out to be the only way, be as draconian as to require financial isolation between IP providers and businesses in other layers.
The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true.
We cannot afford to allow the new robber barons — the cable and phone giants that are bidding to own the broadband marketplace and decide which bits flow in what order and at what speed — to capture that kind of control.
Read Berners-Lee’s posting, and then read the comments. Lots of great discussion.
Consumer Reports has withdrawn a report on infant car seats that incorrectly called many of them unsafe. The mea culpa doesn’t suffice, as it lacks all detail. The magazine needs to come totally clean about this — or risk a major whack to its reputation.