News-Record.com

So Saddam Hussein, in U.S. custody and facing all sorts of human-rights charges, nonetheless plans to run for Iraq's interim national assembly in January.

Forget that preparing his defense might interfere with his campaigning. Can you picture the campaign yard signs? My co-worker Mark Binker suggests a few:

When I read this morning that our minor-league baseball team, the Greensboro Bats, is changing its name to the Greensboro Grasshoppers (site not up yet), my first reaction was, "What were they thinking?"

But as I recall, I had the same reaction when the then-Hornets changed their name to the Bats a decade ago, and the name Bats grew on me. Maybe Grasshoppers will as well.

The N&R story indicates that marketing to kids was a significant consideration in the team's decision, so I checked with my kids. My son didn't really care. My daughter, a little older and ever tender-hearted, was much less concerned about what the team's mascot is than about whether the team would continue to employ the person who wore the Bats mascot costume last year.

The answer, it turns out, is no. Travis Trotter, who has portrayed Casey (as well as other teams' mascots), just told me he won't be working for the Grasshoppers next year. He called the decision primarily a personal one: The Bats/Grasshoppers play about 2 1/2 months' worth of home games each year, and "that's a lot of time away from my daughter," who is 2, he says. "I'm away too much as it is."

The deadline for registering to vote in the Nov. 2 election is 25 days before the election, which means this Friday, Oct. 8. The link also includes info on where you can register and where you can vote, so if you want to vote and haven't registered yet, now's the time.

TO: Google
FROM: Lex
DATE: 5 October 2004
RE: Yanking my chain

I know y'all are all head-in-the-clouds over the IPO and everything, but do me a favor, huh? When I'm searching for "xyz," don't ask me, "Did you mean to search for 'xyzA'?" unless searching for "xyzA" actually will return at least one entry.

Thank you.

This sounds like the beginning of a horror movie: Scientists resurrect killer genes from 1918 flu pandemic

On the other hand, about 36,000 Americans die of flu in a typical year. Which is why the research might well be worthwhile and the lack of vaccine this year is so troubling.

UPDATE: Bigwig over at Silflay Hraka wonders why we couldn't just place orders for flu vaccine in advance to help keep the supply more stable year-in and year-out. It's an excellent question.

In honor of tonight's presidential debate, local blogger Mr. Sun! presents:

Remember the guys at Jibjab who created the parody of "This Land Is Your Land" featuring Bush and Kerry?

They're back with a new bit of animation, "Good to Be in D.C." Enjoy.

Blogger Mathew Gross is soliciting predictions on the outcome of the presidential race: you pick the percentage of the popular vote down to .1% (e.g., 44.3%, to decrease chances of a tie between contestants) and the total number of electoral votes garnered by each candidate.

I don't do predictions, but if you're feeling lucky (or blessed with superior insight), Matt's waiting.

OK, maybe not to the death. And, well, maybe not a cage match, seeing as they don't make cages for abstract concepts.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Which is funny because, where blogging is concerned, I'm running behind.

The so-four-days-ago big news in the political blogosphere is the so-called "Halperin memo," written by ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin on Friday to his staff and later obtained by Drudge. Since I couldn't read the memo in the *.jpeg file that Drudge posted, I'm relying on Drudge himself to have transcribed it accurately -- dangerous, I know. But if he's correct, the memo, complete with typos, said:

It goes without saying that the stakes are getting very high for the country and the campaigns - and our responsibilities become quite grave

I do not want to set off (sp?) and endless colloquy that none of us have time for today - nor do I want to stifle one. Please respond if you feel you can advance the discussion.

The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.

Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that.

I'm sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.

It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.

This memo was seized upon by Drudge and other conservatives as "proof" of liberal bias at ABC. Whether you agree with that assessment likely depends upon whether you agree with Halperin's assertion that "the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done." But that's not the issue I'm highlighting here.

Halperin goes on to say: "We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides 'equally' accountable when the facts don't warrant that. ... It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right."

Sentence fragments and all, Halperin has hit on a crucial principle here: News organizations have a duty to provide a free people with the information they need to govern themselves. That goes beyond reporting what each candidate says to attempt to determine which of them is speaking the truth, or is closer to it.

Here's where journalism and postmodernism collide -- and where, in my personal and humble opinion, the national news media largely have failed the American people in recent political campaigns. You would think that journalism would be more attracted to objective, verifiable facts, but the national media in recent campaigns have taken an almost insanely postmodern approach to political claims. (Now, I might have gone to a nice liberal-arts college and majored in English, but I do not care for postmodernism -- not in life and certainly not in journalism -- and have said so on several occasions.) And as a result, a free nation is being denied critical information it needs to govern itself.

Because, postmodernism to the contrary, everything doesn't necessarily depend upon your point of view. Some candidates' factual claims are measurably, objectively true or false. And a news media worth a damn will assess those claims as carefully and thoroughly as possible and report which claims are accurate and which are not. Even if it takes people. Even if it takes time. Even if it takes money.

Moreover, it will not, out of some misguided sense of "fairness" or "balance," treat factually unequal claims equally, nor will it treat all candidates' offenses as equally bad when, in fact, some are much more serious and much more indicative of a candidate's suitability for office than others. That's the journalistic equivalent of claiming that 2+2=5. (That's also the significance of the bolded passage above, which I bolded because when Drudge posted his announcement about the memo, this is the part he did not include. Anyone just reading Drudge's page who had not waded through the *.jpeg or read Drudge's transcription would have missed an important qualifying phrase.)

Halperin's memo obviously was written in haste, but that is the larger point he is making, and he's absolutely, positively right.

As for his claim that "the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done," that's an objectively verifiable or disprovable statement. If that's what he thinks, and if that thinking is guiding ABC News' coverage of the presidential race, then ABC News needs to marshall its evidence and lay it out before the electorate. And anyone who disagrees, in the national media or in Blogworld, ought to do the same.

:: Lex enters, stage right, hanging his head. ::

Hi, everyone. I guess I need to apologize for the fact that we missed this story* right here in our front yard.

We're sorry. We'll try to do better next time.

---

*For those who aren't familiar with it -- and to judge from my e-mail, that's more than one of you -- The Onion is a satire site.

So last week, Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," appeared as a guest on CNN's political-argument show, "Crossfire." You really have to see the video to get the full gist; the transcript just doesn't convey things like the look on co-host Tucker Carlson's face as Stewart, in the wonderful words of blogger Nancy Nall, "cuts out Tucker Carlson's heart, shows it to him, then eats it slowly." (That's a metaphor, for the easily alarmed.)

Dave Winer, who has forgotten more about blogging than most people will ever know, sees Stewart's take as, at least in part, the complaint of a dissatisfied customer and asks:

Wasn't he a customer saying he wasn't satisfied with the service?

Should journalists listen to their customers? (I don't mean advertisers, I mean the people who read, listen to, or watch their reports.)

Should they try to give them what they want?

If not, why not?

Would journalism get better?

Some journalists say they give the customers what they want, but I wonder about that.

If they were, wouldn't they have to listen to customers?

I think Stewart was saying he was dissatisfied with the program hosts' product, but I also think he would argue that "customer" inappropriately casts the relationship between him and "Crossfire" in commercial terms. Rightly or wrongly, he believes "Crossfire" and its network ought to be doing more to provide the citizens of a free republic with the information they need to govern themselves and that it is instead engaging in political theater for purely entertainment purposes.

Nonetheless, the question is valid: Should journalists listen to their customers? And the answer is: of course. And the N&R often does that very well, I think. For example, a few years ago our delivery goal for weekday morning papers was 6 a.m. for the last paper. But reader research suggested that so many people are commuting such long distances or otherwise starting their days earlier that we needed to move that deadline up at least 30 minutes, to 5:30 a.m. And so we did.

But saying that we should listen to customers is not synonymous with giving customers everything they want.

For one thing, if we gave customers everything they wanted, we'd go broke. And having been in business for 114 years or so, we've gotten kind of accustomed to being in business and would like to remain so.

For another, because we can't give customers everything we want, we have to prioritize. And for a newspaper's news department, local news and public-service journalism need to be at the top of the priority list, in my humble opinion, for both practical and philosophical reasons.

The practical reason: We can do local news and public-service journalism better than any other mass medium. In classical economic terms, we have a competitive advantage in these areas.

The philosophical reason: We have a constitutional duty to provide that service, and providing it well and in quantity is the kharmic payback we owe for industrywide profit margins a couple of multiples of the national industrial average. (Again, this is me talking, not the N&R.)

Those two priorities must remain priorities, I think, even when customers tell us they want other things. That doesn't mean we won't run national or world stories on the front page from time to time, and it doesn't mean we're going to kill our sports and features sections to devote those resources to news. But it means that in a less-than-stellar economic climate in which hard decisions are forced upon us, that's where the bulk of our resources must continue to go.

Now, within that framework, there is wide latitude for a newspaper to take the wishes of its readers into account. And we use reader research and other tools to try to do that -- to focus on subjects readers say they want more coverage of. We also try to respond to tips we get. Historically, the N&R's ambitions always have exceeded its resources, and it gets a little frustrating some days when we have six great story ideas to pursue and only three available reporters, but we do the best we can with what we have. More importantly, we use that sense of frustration to help us keep from getting complacent.

Blogs, among other virtues, are one more way we can listen to customers -- to get story tips, feedback on stories, and information on what's going on in the community and what the community considers important.

And as leader of the paper's enterprise/investigative team, I'm always particularly interested in tips on good stories. We might or might not be able to pursue the story, but I'm definitely willing to listen.

UPDATE: Journalist-turned-rhetorician Andrew Cline thinks "The Daily Show" serves its customers well and that "Crossfire" does not. To put it mildly.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has grown into a major story not just among bloggers but in the mainstream media, darned fast. It's worth a review, not necessarily because of the partisan political implications for the 2004 presidential election but because of the implications for all of society.

More after the jump.

UPDATE, 10/21: Daily Kos has posted a transcript of "Stolen Honor." Also, Sinclair now says it will air only a portion of the video as part of a "special one-hour news program, entitled 'A POW Story:
Politics, Pressure and the Media." The statement also quotes company executive Joe DeFeo as saying, "As with
all news programming produced by Sinclair's News Central, "A POW Story" is being produced with the highest journalistic standards and integrity." I'll resist the urge to snark here, but I will point out that company president David Smith is falsely claiming that people are trying to prevent the show from being broadcast. In fact, they're seeking the legally required equal time for John Kerry and are seeking an injunction against broadcast as leverage toward that end, not as an end in itself.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jay Rosen, dean chairman of the New York University j-school journalism department and author of the PressThink blog, has been following this story closely, and today he brings the pain to Sinclair.

Actually, I can answer the first part: Thane Peterson is a contributing editor at Business Week Online, and he's concerned about civility:

We shouldn't confuse negativity, which is often justified and informative, with incivility, which isn't.

INSULT TV. A few weeks ago, Zell Miller, the 72-year-old Democratic senator from Georgia who is supporting President Bush, felt MSNBC-TV's Chris Matthews was peppering him with harsh questions and cutting short his answers. Miller become so frustrated he told Matthews he wished we lived in the day when he could challenge the hyperaggressive TV host to a duel. Shades of Alexander Hamilton. ...

While many heaped scorn on Miller for his quaint nod to politics past, I actually applaud him in this instance -- even though I don't support his politics and don't condone his vitriolic attacks on Kerry at the GOP convention. Miller is to be congratulated for not impugning Matthews' motives or calling him names, as many politicians would have done.

It's important to remind people -- strongly if necessary -- that their actions have crossed the line. I support [New York Times ombudsman Daniel] Okrent, who recently wrote a column naming -- and condemning as a "coward" -- a San Francisco blogger who ended a note to a New York Times reporter with these words: "I hope your kid gets his head blown off in a Republican war."

The guy in San Francisco sends a reporter an abusive but private e-mail, and Okrent holds him up to public ridicule in front of an audience of millions on the Web site of The New York Times, complete with the guy's e-mail address, as a way to "remind" him that his e-mail "has crossed the line"? I'm sure that felt quite cathartic. But it also was bullying, plain and simple, and unworthy of The New York Times. (Okrent's defense, as quoted by Peterson: "... I thought about it, and I decided that someone who goes out at night and paints a swastika on the door of a synagogue doesn't want it written about either." Ah, so a private communication expressing difference, however rudely, is equivalent to public desecration of property with an underlying message of religious bigotry. Ooooooh-kay.)

I don't condone uncivil discourse, the headline on this post to the contrary. But sometimes "uncivil" is in the eye of the beholder, and in any event, despite what Peterson thinks, even greater incivility, or worse, is not the solution.

The Wall Street Journal is all in favor of the power of the market -- except when it's used to enforce shareholders' rights.

Let's see: The SEC's enforcement arm has been inadequately funded for at least a decade. The current administration wants to make it harder for shareholders to sue management. And I'm supposed to take the Journal seriously when shareholders use the only other tool at their disposal to object to propaganda disguised as news -- not because of the content, but because of the damage it's doing to their investment?

That scritching sound the Wall Street Journal's editorial board is hearing is me playing "My Heart Bleeds For You" on the world's smallest violin.

Here's an interesting passage a relative sent me from a book called "The Logic of Failure: Why Things Go Wrong and What We Can Do to Make Them Right," by Dietrich Dorner:

Anyone who has a lot of information, thinks a lot, and by thinking increases his understanding of the situation, will have not less but more trouble coming to a decision. To the ignorant, the world looks simple. If we dispense with gathering information, it is easy for us to form a clear picture of reality and come to clear decisions based on that picture.

Sometimes there is probably even positive feedback between the amount of information we have and our uncertainty. If we know nothing at all about something, we can form a simple picture of it and function on that basis. Once we gather a little information, however, we run into trouble. We realize how much we still don’t know, and we feel a strong desire to learn more. The more we know, the more clearly we realize what we don't know. Anyone who is fully informed will see much more than the bare outlines and will therefore find it extremely difficult to reach a clear decision.

Positive feedback between uncertainty and information gathering may explain why people sometimes deliberately refuse to take in information. It is said that before the Seven Years' War Frederick the Great declined to hear about the modernization of Austrian and Russian artillery. And it is said that before his invasion of Poland Hitler deliberately ignored a report that England was serious about coming to the aid of its ally if Germany attacked Poland.

New Information muddies the picture. Once we finally reach a decision we are relieved to have the uncertainty of decision making behind us. And now somebody turns up and tells us things that call the wisdom of that decision into question again. So we prefer not to listen.

To deal with a system as if it were a bundle of unrelated individual systems is, on the one hand, the method that saves the most cognitive energy. On the other hand, it is the method that guarantees neglect of side effects and repercussions and therefore guarantees failure.

A reductive hypothesis tying everything to one of variable has, of course, the positive virtue of being a holistic hypothesis, which is desirable because it encompasses the entire system. But it does so in a certain way, namely, reducing the investment of cognitive energy. The fact that reductive hypotheses provide simplistic explanations for what goes on in the world accounts not only for their popularity but also for their persistence. Once we know what the glue is that really holds the world together, we are reluctant to abandon that knowledge and fall back on an unsurveyable system made up of interacting variables linked together in no immediately obvious hierarchy. Unsurveyability produces uncertainty; uncertainty produces a fear. People use many dodges to defend their pet hypotheses against logical argument or the evidence of experience. One excellent way to maintain a hypothesis indefinitely is to ignore information that does not conform to it.

We are infatuated with the hypotheses we propose because we assume they give us power over things. We therefore avoid exposing them to the harsh light of real experience, and we prefer to gather only information that supports our hypotheses. In extreme cases, we may devise elaborate and dogmatic defenses to protect hypotheses that in no way reflect reality.

The Denver Post has endorsed George W. Bush for president. This is not surprising. What is surprising is the language of the endorsement editorial:

Typically, in the case of an incumbent, our endorsement calculation would begin this way: Are we, as Coloradans, better off today than we were four years ago?

In a word, no. Since 2001, Colorado has lost more jobs than we've gained, and the ones we've gained pay less than the ones we've lost. We pay less in taxes, but our household and medical expenses have skyrocketed. Ninety thousand of us have lost our health coverage. Washington is ringing up record deficits and sticking the next generation with the bill. In Iraq, Colorado-based military units and reserves are deployed in a hostile environment for questionable purpose and uncertain result. ...

It's no secret that we part company with the president over many issues. Two glaring sore spots are his obsession to cut taxes even while piling up record deficits, and his mishandling of all things Iraq. He squandered global good will by taking a "my way or the highway" approach to matters of global warming, international law, Iraq weapons inspections and ultimately the Iraq invasion. He bows to corporate preference in matters of energy and environment, and his education funding levels leave far too many children behind.

Kerry has infused the 2004 campaign with energy and gumption, offering fresh ideas on health care and sensible plans for our tax structure. His are the superior proposals on environmental protection, on stem-cell research and judicial nominations. Sure, we've seen Kerry bend to the political winds over his long career, but we wouldn't mind one bit if more Washington politicians would reconsider their past judgments and ideological certainties. Kerry's growth on the campaign trail gives a glimpse of his potential. ...

The president sent U.S. forces into Iraq 18 months ago to oust Saddam Hussein, but with no plan to handle any subsequent resistance. Vice President Dick Cheney said Iraqis would greet the invasion force as liberators, quite a miscalculation, and there was no Plan B. Coalition forces have been unable to defend Iraqi oil assets from insurgent sabotage. It's hard to believe the United States could have done a worse job planning for a new Iraq. ...

I'm cherry-picking, of course. But even in context, this is not the kind of language one expects to see about Candidate X in an editorial endorsing Candidate X. I'm not saying an endorsement should omit all negative description of the endorsee (or any positive description of the opponent, for that matter), but this editorial seems especially conflicted when one considers that voters are being given the clearest distinction between the two major-party candidates since the Reagan-Mondale contest of 1984.

Guys, if you're going to endorse somebody, endorse him. Otherwise, you're wasting your readers' time.

UPDATE: Wow. Looks like Denver agrees with me. The Post reports that it received more than 700 responses to this editorial and adds, "Every letter we received was critical."

Doug McGill, former New York Times reporter and current blogger, takes on journalistic objectivity in this guest essay at Jay Rosen's PressThink blog.

For more than a century, objectivity has been the dominant professional norm of the news media. It has at its heart the noble aim of presenting indisputable facts upon which everyone in society can agree, and build upon towards the goal of a better society. Unfortunately, the ideal of objectivity has in practice in today’s newsrooms become a subtle but powerful means of self-censorship. It’s a conglomeration of contradictory practices that serve the purpose of rationalization as often as investigation. It has become a crutch for journalistic practices that work against civic aims.

It is not any disagreement with objectivity in its ideal sense that I am expressing; but rather that, when I compare the ideal of objectivity to the observed practice of it, I see a great gap. I also believe that journalism’s failure to serve the public interest, which has been so pronounced in recent years, is in large part traceable to the breakdown of the norm of objectivity as a practical and ethical guide.

It is natural that the breakdown has occurred. Think of all the contradictory goals that journalists today are asked to serve in the name of objectivity. They are supposed to be neutral, but still to grab attention in a crowded media marketplace. They are supposed to be impartial, yet also crusading. To be a clear and unbiased conduit for the facts, and yet also to “follow their nose”--a clear call to the use of individual moral conscience--to get the facts. My own personal experience as a reporter was that as time went on it became harder and harder for me to reconcile these contradictions.

The uncorrupted ideal of objectivity, in the sense of reporters driving to dig out verified facts and present them fully and fairly, is indispensable in journalism. Unmasking its nefarious twin -- an omnipresent and abused pseudo-objectivity – is what I would like to do.