Then she asked me if I liked skiing. I answered honestly. I love skiing, although I’m not great at it and I haven’t been on the hill since I annihilated my knees a few years back. I’d love to get back into it, though, but haven’t so far because I hate doing things alone.

I knew as I hit the send button that I’d never hear from her again.

I’ve been a Match member on and off for maybe a year and a half and have very little nothing to show for it. I tried to play it straight, using my profile to tell the wonderful women of the 5280 who I was as best I could – what I do for a living, what I do for fun, what my interests are, and so forth. But no results to speak of past a few coffee first dates. Whatever I served up, nobody was buying.

I don’t mind admitting that it’s been frustrating. And yes, it strikes at your self-esteem. I have historically hit periods when, as a result of where I lived or the structure of my daily life, I had a hard time meeting women, but I’ve never had trouble getting dates when I was actually around eligible women. My Match.com experience, though, has begun to make me feel like an untouchable.

I’ve had plenty of time to think about what the problem might be, and a good deal of that energy focused on the perfectly valid question of “what’s wrong with me?” Back when I was more successful on the relationship scene I was, after all, a bit younger, and I’ve had to entertain the uncomfortable possibility that 50 year-old Sam is simply less marketable than 30 year-old Sam.

I concluded that the problem is multi-faceted. For one thing, I’m just not Outdoorsy Guy, but I live in the middle of Outdoorsy Nation. Also, I’m picky as hell (when you’re educated to the doctoral level, for instance, you’re going to be looking for someone with significant intelligence). And there are plenty of things about me guaranteed to cause daily match surfers to lunge for the “next” button – as in, we know that a substantial percentage of American women don’t find bald guys attractive, period. I get it. Since there’s nothing I can do about some of these things (short of leaving Denver and joining Hair Club), I decided to go straight at the issue as best I could. So about three weeks ago I changed my profile. Here’s how I began:

The great thing about Match is the chance to meet women I might never encounter otherwise. The bad thing is that somehow the place encourages us to define ourselves as a checklist of things we like to do. Shared interests and compatibility are nice, but I’ve always felt like relationships thrive on a chemistry that has very little to do with activities.

The working theory for businesses like Match and eHarmony, I suppose, is that true love is best predicted by that checklist of activities. (eHarmony may not be as bad about this as Match – I have no experience with them past filling out the application form.) You like live music? You’re the oldest child, too? We’re soulmates!

Then, yesterday, I tripped across an interesting new study headed up by Dr. Eli Finkel, a Social Psych professor at Northwestern. Finkel’s team agrees that online dating is a great way to discover people you might not meet otherwise. However:

One of the weaknesses of online dating is an overreliance on “profiles,” the researchers say. Although most dating websites feature photos and detailed, searchable profiles covering everything from personality traits to likes and dislikes, this information isn’t necessarily useful in identifying a partner, Finkel and his coauthors write.

The study suggests something that I think most of us know, even if we’ve never stopped to think about it. To wit, love is often about serendipity.

…daters don’t always know what they want in a mate—even though they generally think they do. Studies suggest that people often lack insight into what attracts them to others (and why), and therefore the characteristics they seek out in an online profile may be very different from those that will create a connection in person, the review notes.

Fight it if you like, but Marshall McLuhan’s adage applies to online dating: the medium is the message. In a format that emphasizes “things I like to do” and sorts according to activities, your viability is going to hinge on how well you conform your life to those dictates. Is the “shared interests” assumption valid? Well, it’s obviously nice if the person you’re interested in likes some of the things you do. If you have nothing in common the relationship probably has a short shelf life. But let’s be honest. There are probably lots of people out there who share nearly all my interests that I’d think are barking assholes. Some of the most compelling women I have ever met, on the other hand, had very little in common with me….at first.

See, if the click is there, people find things to do. They grow together. They shape their world to fit the emotional, spiritual and physical connection instead of robotically sorting themselves according to somebody else’s preconceived generic categories. She grows to enjoy watching games with him. He realizes how much he likes watching movies with her, even movies he wouldn’t have been caught dead watching before. She’s never had any interest in going to New Mexico until she spends a weekend in Taos with him but now she can’t wait to go back. He always thought of sushi as bait until she took him to the Sushi Den and eased him into it with a California Roll. Now he’s badgering her to go check out this new place called “Sasa” he heard about up in LoHi.

When you interpret who you are and what you have to offer another human being according to a mass market dating corporation’s categorization schemes, you place significant limitations on what you can be and on who you can discover. Homogeneity is bound to be the result.

My friends have heard me complain about this templating tendency and about the seeming sameness of the single women in town. If you believe what you see on Match 99% of single females here fall into one of two or three categories (if that). I joke that between the time they spend camping, hiking, skiing, climbing 14ers, mountain biking, laying on the beach in Mexico and volunteering with poor children in either Africa or Chile there’s simply no time left for them to actually be in Denver. They’re all in love with their careers and have great friends. Family is incredibly important to them and if they don’t have children of their own they’re okay with it if you do because they love children. At least two pictures of their dog(s). And so on.

I was deep into this rant with my buddy Mike a few months back and he was laughing at me, so I logged in and called up my daily matches to prove it. The first profile was a little off. The second was word for word, picture for picture what I just described.

I noted above that I feel a lot of frustration with the process. I try to be honest about myself. I’m 51, which means that statistically speaking I’m playing the back nine of life. I’m not a runway model. I have no hair. Like just about everybody who has lived past the age of 12 I’m broken down in some ways, both physically and emotionally. Yes, I have baggage.

That said, talk to my female friends. I’m a pretty good guy. I’m not David Beckham, no, but I’m okay looking. If you saw pictures of all the beautiful women who have been a part of my life through the years you’d have to conclude that I must got something going on. I’m smart. I’m creative. Strong and sensitive in fairly equal measures. Funny, thoughtful. As for the baggage, most of it fits in the overhead bin.

In other words, I’m not a bad catch.

But: all those gorgeous women who loved me? Almost none of them loved me on sight. Some of them disliked me at first, in fact, and others didn’t warm up to me for quite some time. I understand all this. The things that are best about me simply aren’t evident at a glance. And there is no way to communicate this dynamic in a Match.com profile. (Or speed dating environments, either, for that matter.) In an online dating context you can’t make me look terribly desirable to the female window shopper without lying.

I have no doubt in my mind that dozens of women who might like me a great deal if they knew me have zipped past my profile without a second thought.

If I sound narcissistic or self-indulgent here, stick with me for a second, because this is a sword that cuts both ways. In short, I’m guilty, too. Here’s how the story on the Finkel study concludes:

The abundance of profiles online also may make daters too picky and judgmental, the authors say. The sheer number of options can be overwhelming, and the ease with which people can sift through profiles—and click on to the next one—may lead them to “objectify” potential partners and compare them like so many pairs of shoes.

“Online dating creates a shopping mentality, and that is probably not a particularly good way to go about choosing a mate,” says Harry Reis, Ph.D., one of the review’s authors and a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in Rochester, N.Y.

The shopping mindset may be efficient online, but when carried into face-to-face interactions it can make daters overly critical and discourage “fluid, spontaneous interaction” in what is already a charged and potentially awkward situation, Reis and his coauthors write.

How often do I find myself in that shopping mode? How often does it become about reflexively saying no instead finding a reason to say yes? I just took a quick break to review my daily matches, which refreshed as I was writing. Seven women, and I cleared the list in less than 30 seconds.

How many times in the past six months have I looked at a picture of a woman who would make me insanely happy for the rest of my life and clicked no? No telling. I do know, from personal experience, that there are women I don’t think are attractive or interesting when I first encounter them, only to later conclude that they’re stunningly compelling. (I have a friend like that in my life right now.) I’d be stupid to assume that doesn’t happen routinely on Match, wouldn’t I?

Thanks for the memories, online dating, but I’m signing off as soon as my current subscription expires. Your system may work great for some folks, but the more I think about it the more I realize how perfectly it’s engineered to fail for me. My perfect match and I are going to walk right past each other without even noticing 100 times out of 100.

And I just don’t want to be that guy. You know, the one who bitches because women don’t give him a chance while he’s not giving them a chance? You’re making me a worse person. Or rather, I’m using you to make myself a worse person, and it has to stop.

I may not find anyone at all. Who knows? But at least I can stop shelling out $30 a month for the privilege of deluding myself.

Contrary to what Komen’s highly-paid PR crisis hacks and gullible headline writers at newsdesks around the nation would ask you to believe, The Susan G. Komen Foundation does NOT promise to fund Planned Parenthood in the future. They promise to let PP APPLY for grants in the future. Applying and receiving are different things, as anyone who ever applied and got rejected for a job ought to know.

…

The announcement is timed beautifully – just before Super Bowl Weekend – and they’re hoping that the combination of the pretend apology and the big game will insure that, come Monday morning, nobody will remember what they did. They can then find a reason to deny those future Planned Parenthood grant apps when nobody is paying much attention.

The title of that post wonders if the American public will be stupid enough to fall for it. Perhaps the question I should have been asking was this: why are America’s copy editors stupid enough to fall for it? Witness the headlines from some of the nation’s more prominent purveyors of journalism:

• Komen Drops Plans to Cut Planned Parenthood Grants – ABC News
• Komen reverses Planned Parenthood move – angering antiabortion activists – Philadelphia Inquirer
• Komen reverses move to cut Planned Parenthood funding – Reuters
• Komen backs off decision on funding cuts – msnbc.com
• Komen Reverses Stance on Planned Parenthood – Bloomberg
• Web Fury Spurs Komen Reversal, $3 Million for Planned Parenthood – BusinessWeek
• Cancer Group Backs Down on Cutting Off Planned Parenthood – New York Times
• Komen does about-face on cuts to Planned Parenthood – The Seattle Times
• Komen changes course on Planned Parenthood funding – Atlanta Journal Constitution
• Charity Does an About-Face – Wall Street Journal
• Komen Caves Under Pressure, Reinstates PP Funding – Forbes
• Komen Charity Reverses Planned Parenthood Grant Cuts – PBS News Hour

It’s frightening how much journalism has changed in a generation. For instance, there used to be a subtle game of cat-and-mouse between the PR hacks who wanted their clients’ stories told a certain way and the journalists who wanted the story told the right way. The pros would tune up a pitch and present it to a reporter or editor so that it put the organization in the best light. There was something of a negotiational process. And the publisher went to press with a headline (written by the copy desk) that, in their view, best summarized the nuts and bolts of the story. The PR pro/journalist relationship was a professional one, with each side understanding the demands of the other’s job. A good PR exec would work to make the reporter’s job easier by making sure the pitch was tailored to the publication’s audience and the reporter understood that the PR industry could be a helpful source of information – after all, communities have a vested interest in the businesses and private organizations that serve them, right? Reporters often resented the high salaries that PR professionals earned (and any number of reporters eventually migrated over to “the dark side” for this very reason – in fact, most of the best PR people I have known in my career followed precisely that path), but there was a productive symbiosis that worked well so long as everyone did his or her job well.

I remember the frustration on the 50th floor at 1801 California in Denver back in the late ’90s when US West would go to the press with a story and they’d spin it differently than we wanted. This happened often enough, and especially with quarterly earnings reports. The Media Relations and Investor Relations teams would hone the story to a fine edge, release it to the world, and what appeared in the papers the next day often bore very little resemblance to what we had put out. Why? Well, the PR group’s job is like that of a lawyer – represent the client’s interest, period. The reporter, on the other hand, was more like the judge, making sure that due attention was paid to the facts themselves. The audience was the jury.

That was then, and this is now. While the nature of financial reporting is such that you still get some actual journalism when earnings are released (thanks to the laws and regulations around corporate finance), the rest of the newsroom might as well be on the payroll of the PR firm doing the pitching. My colleague, Dr. Denny, spent 20 years on the copy desk and has dedicated significant energy here at S&R to explaining why our papers are increasingly populated by unedited PR copy (and to the corrosive impact this exerts on our democracy). The next time you’re thinking of buying a book on why the republic has gone to hell, save your money. Just click that link above and spend a few hours reflecting on his analysis. It’s more illuminating than just about anything on the virtual shelves at Amazon. And it’s free.

I don’t want to put words in Denny’s mouth, but I suspect had yesterday’s “reversal” story broken on a day when Denny was running the copy desk he’d have taken the time to:

• actually read the release;
• consider the established context of the story and the motivations of the players involved (no, he wouldn’t project his politics into the story, but he would be aware of the politics of the organizations because that’s at the center of the controversy);
• take a moment to think about the importance of the story to the community he served – what was their interest?
• Oh, yeah – he’d consider how much space he had and whether there were other more pressing stories.

Then he’d have edited the story according to these factors and he’d have written a headline that summarized what Komen had actually done. If, in his professional judgment, Komen was legitimately reversing field, that’s what the headline would have said. If, on the other hand, he had read the facts of the case the way I do, he would have ignored the cleverly crafted 48-point bold headline that Komen’s PR folks had put at the top of the page.

But yesterday, all across America, copy editors who are in too many cases inexperienced, poorly trained and swamped with more responsibility than one person can reasonably manage, did what they usually do. They took the headline at face value and ran the press release pretty much as-is.

And what landed in front of the public, flying under the banner of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, and, the gods help us, the PBS News Hour, was unfiltered crisis PR put together by hacks paid not to think about the best interests of the public, but about the financial and political agendas of their client. Put in the terms of my courtroom analogy above, it’s like we’ve made the defense attorney the judge and jury, as well.

The lesson, sadly, is that with this story (and just about all other stories of importance to the citizens of the US), we cannot look to the press for help. They have become nothing more than the publication arm of the American public relations industry. Typists. Transcriptionists. Gofers. Foot soldiers.

So it’s up to us to read closely, to think critically, and to keep each other plugged in, using whatever tools are available, so that we can make informed decisions in the public interest. If we don’t, nobody will.

Or, Allegations of America’s dirty little backwoods secret and Google won’t let their ads be placed on the newsfic coverage…

Since I’ve only got a few articles under my belt thus far, I feel like I can still beat the “new blogger” drum, at least for a while. I’d best enjoy this while the romance is still all hot and sticky. My posts should still throb with their burgeoning tumescence. Why, I’m so hot, my prose is even turgid.

As a new blogger, I face many issues. Finding a name for a blog (and available domain) that pleases more than just me. Finding a host that will serve my needs without breaking the bank. Learning the ins and outs of social media and self-promotion. Maybe even generating a little (likely very little) revenue while I’m at it. That’s where this post comes in. Naturally, one of the first places I looked for those buckets of mythical blog money was in Google’s back pocket, the one with the AdSense logo stitched on it.

As a fairly astute observer of fine print everywhere that affects me (well, except for Facebook’s) I took a gander at some of Google’s fine print leaking out from an unseemly hole under the pocket. No, I’m pretty sure it was fine print, not santorum. Having read it, I had this to say on Facebook, where I may enjoy all of the privacy in the world.

Sites with Google ads may not include or link to:

• Pornography, adult or mature content

Erm, what is “mature content?” I advocate against rape here on FB, I’m sure I will there, too [my own blog], eventually. I link to anti-porn sites like gaildines.com. Surely those are “mature” subjects, if not of the xxx variety. What about some of the biblical stuff I might be prone to? Onan has a bit of a sloppy story, not that I think I’ll be using that one.

• Violent content

Ummmm, hello, I rail against war and would conceivably post articles including images of, oh, let’s say…Marines (who do not reflect on the entire military) urinating on Taliban corpses. That, and one Skinny Puppy vid could do me in.

• Content related to racial intolerance or advocacy against any individual, group or organisation

*blink* WTF?! Just about all I do is advocate for/against individuals, groups or organizations.

• Excessive profanity

Fucking fuck fuck!

• Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia content

How the hell would I advocate for decriminalization of marijuana unless it were first illicit?

They’re nuts. Or I am. Or both.

A friend, who should remain nameless (to protect the [circle one] guilty/innocent), replied by way of reassurance, “it’s not like you are posting interspecies snuff films that include a how to on cooking meth presented by a fucking skinhead.”

I’m not? I’m NOT?! Like !@*(&’in hell I’m not!

I don’t know if you’re aware of this latest trend in backwoods America, but every fucking second of every fucking day, there are fucking Neo-nazi skinheads stroking themselves to blisters in a xenophobic, crank-enhanced fucking rage while cooking meth that will be gobbled up like Pop Rocks by our nations children. Worse, they do this from the fucking safety of filthy little blood-smeared back rooms in the fucking slaughterhouses that pepper our great fucking nation like the giant, fucking festering open wounds seeping bovine pain and despair that they are.

In part, these locations are chosen because they’ll gladly fucking hire anyone with at least three fucking functioning fingers, as long as they’re on the same fucking hand that holds a faulty fucking captive bolt pistol. Primarily, these sites are chosen because there’s just about zero fucking probability of a fucking camera intruding on their illicit fucking industries. The fucking slaughterhouse managers certainly don’t want footage of what the fuck goes on behind the scenes hanging around. For that matter, thanks to recent big fucking government rollbacks of our fucking civil liberties, being caught with a fucking camera in a fucking slaughterhouse where all those fucking animals are brutally fucking slaughtered is enough to get one fucking charged with fucking terrorism!

The fucking irony here is that the absence of unwanted cameras shields these fucking raving, gibbering, tweaking racist fucking assholes from exposure while they fucking produce interspecies fucking porn and snuff films. Fuckin’ A right. It only takes a warped fucking imagination to fucking imagine the fucking horror of it all.

A fucking rusty steel door creaks open to reveal a fucking cinderblock room smeared in fucking offal lit only by one fucking flickering dim bulb swinging from frayed fucking wiring. One swastika-fucking-emblazoned skinhead mans a fucking video camera. Another one with his overalls dropped around his fucking ankles is [omitted for being too disgusting even for me] the business fucking end of a pig. Just as the sweating, squealing and the grunting become too fucking much for even fucking Newt Gingrich to bear, another fucking tweaker covered in fucking hate propaganda squeezes the trigger on a fucking stun gun aimed at the pigs fucking forehead, but the motherfucking gun doesn’t work. There’s a loud fucking pop as the air hose leading to the fucking thing blows out and the fucking pigs just falls over and fucking twitches while the fucking skinhead just keeps going.

This shit, if it’s actually fucking happening, really fucking has to stop. Like right fucking now.

That sound you might hear from all the way over there? That’s my fucking bank account sobbing at the loss of any possible fucking ad revenues from Google’s AdSense program of which I might have fucking dreamed.

Honestly, though, I think my friend is fucking right on another fucking point. Really, Google just won’t fucking care.

Photo credit: Elana Centor. Creative Commons. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The number of jobs eliminated in the newspaper industry rose by nearly 30% in 2011 from the prior year, according to the blog that has been tracking the human toll on the industry for the last five years.

Mutter, working with data from Erica Smith, author of the Paper Cuts blog, notes layoffs have been horrific over the past four years.

Since Smith began her running count of publishing layoffs in the middle of 2007, 39,806+ newspaper jobs have been eliminated. This represents 11% of the all the jobs in an industry that, according to the Census Bureau, employed 360,633 individuals in 2007.

Worse, Mutter points out, the number of journalists in America’s print newsroom is at an all-time low. The layoffs, over time, have taken a staggering toll on newsrooms.

Nowhere has the toll been higher than in newsrooms, where staffing has slipped each year since 2005 to successively new modern-day lows.

Nearly 1 in 3 newsroom jobs have been eliminated since the number of journalists peaked at 56,900 in 1989, according to an annual survey by the American Society of News Editors. At the end of 2010, only 41,600 scribes were left on the industry’s payrolls.

If only a fifth of the cuts identified by Smith in 2011 were in newsrooms, then barely 41,000 journalists will be left at America’s newspapers at year’s end.

I’ve written repeatedly about the increasing need for good — even great — journalism and the declining ability of the newspaper industry’s ability to provide it.

The reason’s no secret. A decimated business model that a decade ago arrogantly wrote off the Internet as a credible competitor and a tectonic shift in technology that turned Everyman into a supposed journalist killed the industry’s centuries-old reliance on ad revenues. According to Mutter, 2011 was

a year that many newspaper people had hoped would be a time of relative stability after five years of successive revenue declines. Instead of steadying, advertising sales slid throughout 2011 and likely will come in at less than half of the record $49.4 billion achieved as recently as 2005. [emphasis added]

With the number of journalists half that of the historical high, who will produce the local stories that matter those tens of thousands laid off no longer do? As one of my colleagues at S&R advises me, the citizen journalist and the neighborhood blogger are inadequate replacements to produce quality local news.

Citizen journalists … say they will do for free what journalists used to do for money, e.g., cover school board meetings. Whether they do or not is another matter, but as a general rule, in any industry where people are willing to work for free, you end up with a bimodal distribution of returns — a few who make it very rich, and the many who make almost nothing. Examples include writing, acting, music, fashion, etc. It appears that journalism, or at least column writing, has become one of those industries.

Plenty of opinions on how to fix the news biz exist (see here, here, here, here, and here). Recent attempts to revive industry revenues have met with uneven success — permeable and impermeable paywalls, dalliances with social media, and so on. Foundations and non-profit organizations have taken up the mantle of investigative reporting on regional and national levels. But good local news is a vanishing commodity.

I wish I had answers. I wish more than 41,000 journalists will be holding governments and corporations accountable — that’s the job that needs to be done — in 2012. But the trend suggests the next year will bring more dismal news for those remaining in newsrooms. If you value good local news, you’re likely to be increasingly disappointed.

Cases in point. As I’m scanning the headlines today looking for fodder, I find what appear to be three relevant articles. The first is a blog article by Robert J. Ambrogi, a media and technology lawyer in Rockport, MA, “1st Circuit Rules Public Has Right to Videotape Police,” August 28, 2011.  The second is an article by Richard Chirgwin published in The Register on December 6, 2011, “‘Blogger not a journalist’ says Oregon court: The $2.5 million defamation distinction.”  The third article, “Crystal Cox, Oregon Blogger, Isn’t a Journalist, Concludes U.S. Court–Imposes $2.5 Million Judgement on Her,” was posted by Curtis Cartier at SeattleWeekly Blogs on December 6, 2011.

On reading the Ambrogi article, I felt a certain exhilaration at discovering that no matter how the police may try to distort the law to shield themselves from accountability, the courts could and would come to the rescue of the common citizen, or, in this case, the “citizen journalist.” In Simon Glik’s words:

In 2007, while walking through Boston Commons, I saw a teenager being arrested by Boston police. After I took out his [sic] cell phone and recorded the arrest, I was myself arrested and charged with felony of “illegal wiretap”. This arrest was a vindictive attempt by some unscrupulous cops to suppress citizens’ right to record, observe and comment on police actions.

Ambrogi highlights the significant bits of the decision as they pertain to citizen journalism. For me, the joy-inducing line was, “The First Amendment right to gather news is, as the [Supreme] Court has often noted, not one that inures solely to the benefit of the news media; rather, the public’s right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press.” Now that is empowering.

As I was riding high on this new-found citizen power, the Internet quickly stuck pins in that bubble, the pins being the Chirgwin and Cartier articles. In the case reported by them, a “citizen journalist,” (at least as I thought I understood it from Ambrogi and the First Circuit) Crystal Cox, is sued by plaintiffs for defamation and the plaintiffs win. Cartier provides a bit more detail about the case than Chirgwin does, yet both home in on the same relevant aspect, that U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez decided that Cox does not enjoy protection under Oregon’s shield law because she is neither media nor a journalist.

Here’s the language as quoted by Chirgwin:

[A]lthough defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law”, wrote US District Judge Marco A Hernandez in his judgment.

Here it is as quoted by Cartier:

. . . although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law

On its surface, ignoring the punctuation for the moment, the quote pricked my bubble because it seems to fly directly in the face of what I thought I’d just learned from the Glik case. From Glik I understood that the First Amendment right to gather news does not inure solely to the benefit of the news media and that the public right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press. Yet here is a judge that seems to make the case that the right to gather the news does indeed inure solely to the news media and that the public right is not coextensive.

But am I just reading that all wrong? Maybe the right is to gather but not to report the news? Now wouldn’t that be odd? Journalists, by that measure, would only be protected in the role of researcher but not in the role of reporter.

It’s when I took the next apparently obvious step of reading Judge Hernandez’ judgment that I came to two conclusions. First, there’s occasionally something rather specious about Judge Hernandez’ reasoning and second, there’s something a bit peculiar in the reporting by Chirgwin and Cartier. The latter is where we go back for a moment and look at minor punctuation issues and their disproportionate effect on the sense of quotations.

Both Chirgwin and Cartier appear to be sounding an alarm (or maybe that’s just me seeing more RoadWidgets) by emphasizing Judge Hernandez’ distinction between Cox (bloggers) and journalists. There’s rather a bit more to it than that, however. Look at that variant punctuation again. “[A]lthough” and “…although” obviously imply something came before. Chirgwin’s comma at the end may not imply anything, but Cartier’s missing period certainly implies more follows. Here’s the actual quote from the judgment:

First, although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet,news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law in the first instance.

Ah-hah! Granted, I feel I should be bothered to read the judgment anyway, else I’d just be reporting and opining on the reporting, but even were I not inclined before, I’d be inclined now since the judge obviously has so much more to say.

This case appears to bear out the old adage that a lawyer who represents herself and her client are both fools. In her pro se representation, Cox makes several arguments to defend herself while missing a very simple and obvious piece of the law. Judge Hernandez does a meticulous job of shredding the majority of those arguments without any apparent controversy. It seems Cox would do well to either better educate herself on such matters as the definition of “public figure” and when to submit certain types of motion or to get herself some qualified legal representation. She may have spared herself some grief, or not.

She argued that the plaintiffs shouldn’t even be eligible for damages for defamation because they never demanded a retraction, so she never had the opportunity for the non-compliance that would have justified the damages. As fairly noted by Judge Hernandez in support of his first ruling, Oregon law hasn’t caught up to the Internet yet, so blogs aren’t protected by the retraction statute, see O.R.S. 31.205, and O.R.S. 31.210. Here I take umbrage at what appears to be a lack of journalistic integrity on her part. If her only reason for not issuing a retraction (were she to have a reason) was that they didn’t ask, well, shame on her. As I see it, if I write something and later discover it to merit retraction, it behooves me to do so without waiting for a demand. In any case, her argument makes it sound like it’s possible she would have caved to such a demand for fear of the financial consequences, even were she to hold to her alleged factual basis. Or maybe she would have just rolled over on her alleged source.

Cox argued that the claim against her must be dismissed under Oregon’s Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) statute.  In explanation of his third ruling, Judge Hernandez dismantles her argument on two fronts. First, she dropped the ball procedurally. Second, he’d already determined that plaintiffs are entitled to proceed on one of the offending blog posts, presumably because he sees a probability that the plaintiffs will prevail.

Cox then demonstrates a misunderstanding of “absolute privilege.” Perhaps an attorney would have made the difference for her on this point, but I doubt it given the case law cited by Judge Hernandez. He quite tidily points out that while statements made in a judicial proceeding enjoy absolute privilege, i.e., aren’t subject to defamation claims, at least in this context, republishing same may indeed expose the publisher to defamation claims. To top it off, he then points out that even were there some privilege afforded in that case, it wouldn’t apply because the defamatory statements in her blog post weren’t even such republications.

Implicating First Amendment rights, Cox tries to place the burden of proof on the plaintiffs as “public figures” when it comes to the  assertion that she published the allegedly defamatory statements with actual malice. In his fourth ruling, Judge Hernandez schools Cox for several pages as to the court’s role in determining public figure status and just how they do it. Adding insult to injury, he even goes so far to point out that it’s the defendant’s burden to prove that the plaintiffs are public figures, which she clearly failed to do.

Also implicating First Amendment rights, Cox tried to cover her bases on the public figure issue by further making the claim that, because she is “media,” even if the plaintiffs are not public figures they may not recover damages without first proving negligence on her part. In part B of his fourth ruling, Judge Hernandez does something I find rather peculiar. First, he states:

Defendant cites no cases indicating that a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” is considered “media” for the purposes of applying a negligence standard in a defamation claim.Without any controlling or persuasive authority on the issue, I decline to conclude that defendant in this case is ”media,” triggering the negligence standard.

Then, while so declining to conclude she is media, he proceeds to indicate just how she is NOT media:

Defendant fails to bring forth any evidence suggestive of her status as a journalist. For example, there is no evidence of (1) any education in journalism; (2) any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity; (3) proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest; (4) keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted; (5) mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources; (6) creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others; or (7) contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story. Without evidence of this nature, defendant is not “media.”

Here is the first (second chronologically) instance where I think both Chirgwin and Cartier dropped their own journalistic balls. If, as the First Circuit concludes (if I understand that correctly), the journalistic rights of individuals is coextensive with those of the press, then where, exactly, is the codification of these seemingly arbitrary distinctions of true journalism? Where Judge Hernandez does a great job citing case law after case law throughout his judgment, on this matter his citations are strikingly…missing. Now, I’m sure that bona fide journalists replete with degrees from duly accredited institutions, undisputed affiliations with legitimate media, and adherence to all manner of professional standards likely have some serious grounds for contending that bloggers are not true and genuine journalists. I’d also be willing to place a gentleman’s wager they would cite their sources.

When Judge Hernandez implicates education in journalism, does he only mean formal education under the auspices of an accredited program? He fails to say, but seems to imply such. Would he then discount the journalistic authenticity, if only on the grounds of education, of an editor of a small-town local rag who learned journalism the hard way, by practice?

When he questions her lack of credentials or proof of affiliation, does he mean to imply that such is sufficient to validate a journalist as a journalist? I submit for your consideration…Jason Blair. Excellent affiliation, to be sure, for someone now distinguished as a life coach.

When he challenges her adherence to standards, such as editing, fact-checking or disclosure of conflict of interest, does he bother to indicate her failings at a) editing with an example, b) fact-checking with an example, such as a reminder of her absolute privilege goof (even were she to have it, her defamatory statements were not republication), or c) conflict of interest disclosure with any indication of such a known conflict?

When he challenges her on the keeping of notes from conversations and interviews, did he bother to ascertain that she didn’t?

When he challenges her on the mutual understanding of confidentiality between defendant and source, does he conveniently forget her claim to protection under the shield laws for that very reason? If not, then why even suggest there was no mutual understanding of such, especially when she invokes that protection to her own detriment?

When he challenges her on the distinction between creation of an independent product and assemblage of writings of others, what exactly is he even saying about the nature of the created work? Should authentic journalists NOT assemble a collection of resources, connect the dots and make something of it? Or does he mean to find fault with intellectual property law that protects works like directories, which are solely such assemblages? Does he make a case that in her blog articles she only creates assemblages without contributing anything of her own? Does he consider that, were that the case, clearly the defamatory comments were necessarily extracted from others as sources?

When Judge Hernandez challenges her on whether or not she contacted both sides of the story, where is the assertion that she did not? For that matter, if this is such a critical issue, is he actually thus making the legal claim that Fox News is not media? If so, I would concur, but that’s beside the point.

Most especially, however, for a judge that makes a case again and again on whether there exists a burden of proof and, if so, where it falls, how does he magically determine that the burden of proof falls on her to meet his apparently arbitrary criteria?

As if to make up for these glaring oddities of jurisprudence, Judge Hernandez proceeds, in part C of his fourth ruling, to shoot down her contention that the offending blog post refers to matters of public concern and thus affords her First Amendment protections. He does so with more case law and more clear explanation. It’s rather as though part B of his fourth ruling is neatly bracketed with giant red neon letters stating “What lies between is different!”

The gentle reader may have noticed that I skipped blithely past his Honor’s second ruling. I like to think I saved the best for last.

Regarding the application of Oregon’s shield laws, Judge Hernandez goes so far as to open his comments with the citation to O.R.S. 44.520(1), which reads:

[n]o person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public shall be required by . . . a judicial officer . . . to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise . . . [t]he source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public[.]

He goes further and clarifies the essence of “medium of communication” by including the following definition from O.R.S. 44.520(2):

“Medium of communication” is broadly defined as including, but not limited to, “any newspaper, magazine or other periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”

There’s the hook. There’s the line. Now for the stinker, which just happens to be the source of almost all the substance to be found in Chirgwin and Cartier:

Defendant contends that she does not have to provide the “source” of her blog post because of the protections afforded to her by Oregon’s Shield Laws. I disagree. First, although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law in the first instance.

Were he to have omitted this one little paragraph, I think Chirgwin and Cartier would still be looking for an article to write. More’s the pity, because by including this little gem, Judge Hernandez opens up a line of inquiry which Chirgwin and Cartier left alone. Had Judge Hernandez just jumped to the next paragraph and stated his denial of the protections of the shield law in this case solely on the basis of O.R.S. 44.530(3) which rules out the shield law defense in civil cases for defamation, he could have dusted off his hands and moved merrily along.

No, he included this gold nugget so I’d have something to play with in these, my first faltering forays into the world of citizen journalism.

First, by including this bit of interpretive nuance, he fails to take into account what he only just included moments ago from O.R.S. 44.510(1): “[n]o person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public…” [emphasis mine]. Please correct me if I am mistaken, but isn’t the Internet a medium of communication to the public? Further, if one posts content to the Internet without password protection, presumably to limit access to said content to a nominally private or more selective audience, isn’t it safe to say, especially in the case of blogging, that the content is intended for public consumption? On it’s face, (1) here starts down the path to suggesting that bloggers do, indeed, enjoy the protections of Oregon’s shield laws.

Second, by including this paragraph, he fails to take into account what he only just included from O.R.S. 44.510(2): “‘Medium of communication’ is broadly defined as including, but not limited to [emphasis mine],…” If a subset of Communications Media is such that the subset includes the elements A, B, C and D, but the set is broadly defined as including the subset but not limited to the subset, why does Judge Hernandez imply that such a limitation exists when he states that she fails to show affiliation with “any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet,news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cabletelevision system.” This is the first of two occasions (the second previously examined above) where he places the burden of proof on the defendant to show that she is media by some arbitrary measure when there isn’t even a requirement to do so at all. Worse, it’s the more damaging of the two, insofar as he goes out of his way to suggest that bloggers, by no stretch of the imagination, are journalists, no matter the standard to which you hold them, and thus neither they nor their sources enjoy any shield law protections.

This, I would think, will have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights as they apply to the blogosphere. Unless, that is, we relegate ourselves to being mere unoriginal collators of others’ works. I don’t care. I’m keeping my Mitsuyota RoadWidget. It’s fun to drive. It’s empowering. And I hope to see someone drive one just like it right into the Supreme Court of the United States.

——————————————-

If I have committed errors or omissions typical of the rank amateur, I beg your indulgence and both encourage and welcome your esteemed corrections lest I become a blight on the face of the blogosphere. In keeping with the spirit of Judge Hernandez’ arbitrary section, “How Do You Tell a Witch Journalist?” I feel I should volunteer the following:

Education: I have read an article on a wiki. I’m not sure which one. I submit that this is hardly an accredited program. My only degree, advanced, at that, is from The School of Hard Knocks. This article is part of my post-doc work.

Credentials/Proof of Affiliation: For credentials, I submit that I possess an original long form birth certificate and a drivers’ license. No, you may not see them. As for affiliation, oh, hell, do I really need to implicate S&R so soon?

Proof of Adherence to “Some” Journalistic Standards: a) Editing – I have indeed strived to eliminate as many errors from this article as I am able. I cannot account for my stylistic excesses. b) Fact-checking – As evidence of some modicum of effort in that regard, I submit everything I have linked in this article. I admit that I have not bothered to look up Crystal Cox’s blog. If her pro se failings are indicative of other kindred failings in writing, life is too short. Besides, my issues, as presented, aren’t with whether or not she defamed or whether or not she writes well. c) Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest – I am a self-proclaimed blogger, investigative or not, and have written this piece in hope of publication at one blog of which I am not an editor and assurance of publication in my own. As far as I know, I will not receive any financial reward for this work.

Notes of Conversations/Interviews: While I did, indeed, talk to myself rather a lot during this effort, I made no recordings. I will, however, email the article itself to myself, if only because I am silly like that.

Mutual Understanding of Confidentiality Between Self and Sources: Nothing was related in confidence to me during the crafting of this article. I am sure, given the state of Internet privacy, or the lack thereof, that there is more information held on theInternet about me and my searches for information than I hold pertaining to my online sources. Further, I’m quite sure my information has been mined and will be sold in aggregate.

Creation of Independent Product: Views and opinions in this article that are not attributed to sources are my own independent product. If you did, somehow, manage to compel me to formulate these views and opinions, I really need to get my tinfoil hat adjusted.

Assemblage of Writings/Postings of Others: Well, yeah. Then I added a ton o’ stuff. Had I not, the article would be far less verbose.

Contact of the “Other Side”: No thank you. My Ouija board is packed up at the moment and quite far away. As for journalistic integrity, I meant to write a position piece in support of First Amendment protections and shield law protections for bloggers. I think at least one other side of the issue has been presented quite thoroughly, and in his own words, throughout, with reference to his full judgment.

Frank Balsinger is a rank beginner of a blogger and feels rather passionately about the last remaining shreds of his Constitutional rights.

Romenesko was publicly corrected by his Poynter editor for not using quotations, just links, in his aggregations, a practice he’d been following for the dozen years he’d written the blog for Poynter.

I used blog posts and stories from Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and others to launch a discussion on appropriate attribution for aggregators for students in my press law and ethics course at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism.

We had a good discussion with the majority of students insisting on quotation marks around sentences that had been taken from others and posted (always with a link to the original story). They felt Julie Moos, Poynter’s online  editor, was correct in her assessment but frankly ham-handed by posting about it on Poynter’s website. A small number of students felt that different rules should apply in this evolving form of journalism, especially since those whose content was excerpted and linked to all felt comfortable with the practice that had been used through his dozen years on Romenesko’s blog.

Poynter posted a collection of written responses from various staff on the saga in an effort to be transparent and to show that  there was disagreement within the ranks. That was a laudable and maybe an effort at damage control.

Romenesko resigned. His version of events and his recounting of the back story provide new context and some new information.

Among  the revelations, he received a call from Poynter’s attorney who told him: “Karen Dunlap wanted to show her appreciation for my work and pay my salary through the end of the year. I told the lawyer that the skeptical journalist in me wondered: What strings are attached? None, she said. I then accepted Karen’s gracious offer.” Karen Dunlap is a class act, and smart CEO. (In the interests of full disclosure, Karen is an MSU journalism alum. I know Karen and have a great deal of respect for her.)

Other insights included Poynter’s efforts at damage control and to keep Romenesko’s name on the blog through the end of the year.

I’ve read with interest many of the comments on the episode, but what struck me most was how this played out in tweets, blogs and online. I spend a lot of time warning students that employers check Facebook, Twitter and other sites before making hiring decisions and to be careful and circumspect about what they put online. And it occurred to me that just as so many put all of their thoughts, activities and some great and some unfortunate photos and videos right out there on social media sites with little, if any filtering, in the initial instance, Poynter did the same.

“He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24)

“Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” (Proverbs 23:13-14)

By now, you’ve probably heard about the video of Texas judge William Adams beating his disabled, then-16 year-old daughter, Hillary, with a belt. You may even have seen the video. If not, a caution: it’s every bit as disturbing as reports would lead you to believe. We’re not used to seeing this kind of domestic brutality on YouTube, especially when it’s punctuated by lines like ”lay down or I’ll spank you in your fucking face.”

I initially ignored this story. I heard the headlines, made the same assumptions as a lot of people probably did and moved along. But today the story hooked me back in when I saw that Adams, in the process of blaming the victim (she only released the tape because he was cutting her off and taking away her Mercedes, he says), suggesting that the footage looked “worse than it was.”

What we see on the tape is prima facie evidence of a crime. It’s either child abuse or assault, depending on the victim’s age, and it sounds like the facts in this case are that she was old enough to make it assault, but the statute of limitations has run out. I would say lucky him, but I suspect that the worst the law could possibly do to him pales to what YouTube has in store.

I don’t know Adams. I don’t his daughter. I have no first-hand evidence whatsoever of the internal dynamics of the family, of whether or not she’s acting out of concern or spite. There’s one thing I’m pretty sure I do know, however: no, Judge, it’s worse than it looked.

I have some experience with what Hillary suffered that night, because it’s similar to what I endured growing up. I was routinely subjected to whippings, either with a belt or a hickory switch, that if they happened to a child today would result in the child’s immediate removal from the home by protective services and the arrest of the offending parent. On multiple occasions I was beaten as badly, or worse than, Hillary Adams.

But – and here’s the sticky part – it wasn’t child abuse. Not by the standards of the day, and not by the standards of nearly all of human history. I was taken in by my paternal grandparents when I was three. My parents split and, well, I’ll spare you that part. It was deemed best for me if I went to live with them. In many respects this was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

My grandparents, though, were old school Southern working class Baptist, born and bred to the wisdom of the Old Testament. To the modern ear, the idea of beating a child because you love him sounds counter-intuitive, but to people of their generation (born in 1913 and 1914, respectively) you had to administer corporal punishment if you loved a child. Failing to do so was to fail as a parent and to literally risk the child’s eternal soul. The swats with their hands were no big deal. Call those attention-getters, if you like. But when I’d do something they deemed serious, the results could leave welts for days.

There is no question that they loved me. Totally and unconditionally. And I loved them just as completely. I have published poetry honoring my grandfather and in 1989 I took the step of changing my name to his legally (I was not born Samuel) because he was the only real father I had ever had. And just the other day, I described my grandmother as the single most important person in my entire life. I have said many times, and I mean it, that without them I have no idea where I’d be today, but it’s not likely I’d ever have amounted to much. A big part of me feels like I’m betraying their memories in writing this, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that if I can say something that helps, then it’s worth it. I also do not blame them. I’m 100% convinced that my grandparents were purely the products of their context, and that if they were young parents today they’d die before they’d hurt their children.

All that said, violent physical discipline leaves psychic and emotional scars that may never heal. For starters, one comes to accept that love and pain are inextricably connected. One also can’t help seeing violence as a logical and normal solution to problems. Rationally speaking, I know that violence is sometimes necessary and perhaps even appropriate, but if you grew up like I did there’s the uncomfortable tendency to see it as a first resort instead of the last resort.

Those who know me the best probably wonder where this streak of mine comes from. I’m not a violent man, but I suppose you might say there is a great deal of turbulence in my soul. To the consternation of many of my more enlightened friends (and in truth, most of my friends are more enlightened than I am) I have no issue with the death penalty in principle. I have been known to find satisfaction when brutal justice catches up to genuinely bad human beings. I’ve never said this before, but I’m disturbed when I reflect on the kinds of fate I wish for people like Michael Vick. There’s an irony in it, I suppose: in my mind, the worst criminals are those who abuse the helpless. The retribution: render them helpless and visit upon them the same abuse they inflicted.

I hate abusers and always will, but I cannot stand the feelings they arouse in me. Even in pondering justice, the abuse I suffered as a boy fosters an enduring rage that thrives at a deep, inescapable emotional level.

Of course, it isn’t just me. How many millions of people across this country and beyond would read this and understand exactly what I’m saying? How many people think, as did one friend of mine some years ago, that he owes who he is as a human being to the fact that his father beat the hell out of him? And what implications does this have for his children?

I don’t have anything to say here that a legion of child psychologists haven’t said more compellingly, I suppose, but I find myself wishing I could talk to Judge Adams. While those watching the video linked above are absolutely seeing what they’re seeing and I’m hardly absolving the man, I find it perfectly plausible that he loves his daughter and that he was genuinely, honestly doing what he thought was best for her. He doesn’t act like it’s hurting him more than it is her (that line may well have been my earliest education in the art of irony), but part of me suspects that you simply have to slam the door on the part of you that empathizes with your loved one in order to “do what’s best for them.”

It’s pathological in the extreme, but maybe his generation, and some of mine, and certainly every generation that came before suffers from a sort of collective post-traumatic stress disorder. To note that this particular beast is self-replicating seems almost too obvious to mention.

William Adams says his daughter released the video to get even with him. Hillary Adams says she did it so that he would get help. I don’t think the rest of us have any way of knowing who’s right. Regardless, my advice to Judge Adams is to get help. Also, I hope Hillary Adams gets help, because the beast is alive in her. Probably always will be.

This is an ugly case that nobody would ever have known about before the advent of social media. And as banal and pointless as channels like YouTube can be, today it presents millions of American families with an opportunity to learn and heal, and most importantly, to begin putting the wisdom of the Old Testament behind us for good.

In anticipation of getting a new iPad2 I migrated my MobileMe over to iCloud. It’s hard to have a definitive idea of what a new service is going to do until you get your hands on it in earnest, but I had read about iCloud, asked some Apple types who knew more than I did about it, and felt like I had a fair idea that it was going to help me solve some problems I’ve been dealing with in the course of managing the logistics of my business.

I was wrong. Mostly, anyway. I knew I was in trouble when the guy at the Apple Store told me do not migrate, sweet gods, for the sake of all that’s sacred do not migrate!! Okay, that’s not exactly how he put it, and I won’t repeat the words he actually did use (which weren’t much much better), but suffice it to say that staff was finding iCloud to be “suboptimal.” I explained that unfortunately I had already moved over. He sighed, then said he’d heard there might be a way of moving back but he wasn’t sure. After some Googling last night, I’m sad to report that if there is a reverse-migration path I can’t find it. But I’m still a relative Mac novice, so maybe I’m just missing something.

In any case, I’m not 100% in love with iCloud. A brief cruise through some Mac user forums last night suggests I’m not the only one, although: a) people do seem to be slowly getting the hang of it, b) I’m not seeing people with my exact complaint, and c) in fairness, I’m getting a better sense for how to use the new service as I wrestle with it more today.

Still, iCloud is a long way from what it could have and should have been. Here’s what I was hoping for:

• Full-spectrum automated online backup, a la a Mozy or Dropbox type service…
• …driven (logically) by Time Machine.
• Integration for all my devices so that I can reach into the cloud, grab what I need, whenever, wherever, then save it back, seamlessly, etc.

Honestly, this vision seems like it would be easy enough for Apple to produce, doesn’t it? All the pieces already exist, it’s just a question of putting them together. You could have tiered data levels (first 5G free, scaling up to 100G or more for $75-100 a year, which is more than Mozy, but a price I’d gleefully pay for that sort of integration). I’m not an engineer, but this doesn’t strike me as the sort of task that a company like Apple would have any trouble pulling off.

With luck, the folks in Cupertino are thinking along the same lines and the issue isn’t that they aren’t going to give me my dream cloud, just that they aren’t there yet.

Fingers crossed. In the meantime, I’m underwhelmed, which isn’t how I’m used to feeling regarding new Apple rollouts.

“Come in,” I say. You stride in and sit in the chair next to me. The phone in your hand chirps. You glance at it, then at me. I frown. You sigh and put your phone in your pack.

“What can I do for you?” I ask.

“I want to write well,” you say. “How do I do that?”

I nod. “How much do you read?” I ask.

“Not a lot,” you say.

“Why do you not read more?” I say.

“I do not like to read,” you say. “It takes too much time.”

“That is too bad,” I say.

“Why?” you ask.

“To write well,” I say, “you need more words to choose from. When you read, you find words you do not know but need to know.”

“Why do I need more words?” you ask.

“If you have more words in your mind,” I say, “then the voice in your head will be clear to those who read the words you choose to show your voice. That is a great boon to those who write and those who read.”

“So I should read more?” you ask.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. Learn a new word each day. Or each hour, if you can.”

“What should I read?” you ask.

“Find those who write well,” I say. “Then ask them what they read.”

“If I read more, will it be worth it?” you ask. “I like to write, not read.”

“No one who writes well likes to write,” I say. “It is a hard search for just the right word, then the search for the next right word. And the next. That is why you need more words to choose from. To write well is pain; it is blood sweat; it is to pluck just the right word from all the words in your mind, time after time after time.”

“But,” I say as I smile, “after you write — if well — it is joy with no end.”

You rise from the chair. As you do, you reach in your pack and grasp your phone.

“Thank you,” you say. I nod, but I sense you are not sure what I have said to you has worth.

As you leave, you punch at your phone with your thumbs.

I watch you text as you leave. I doubt you will read more.

I sigh, and turn back to my book.

h/t to Stephen King: “Read a lot. Write a lot.”

Well, first of all, the reporter sent to prison for phone hacking, Clive Goodman, received a payoff for keeping his mouth shut. Goodman also indicted that phone-hacking was regularly discussed at editorial meetings until reference to phone-hacking was banned by Andrew Coulson, who became David Cameron’s communications chief for a while, much of which is being made here by the British press, but is actually the least interesting aspect of the whole affair. Cameron, remember, took on Coulson only after receiving personal assurances from Rupert Murdoch that Coulson had no involvement in phone hacking, none. So now Cameron knows exactly what Murdoch’s personal assurances are worth. Moreover, News International executives were told four years ago that phone-hacking was rife. And just today, James admitted that News International did, indeed, pay hush money to another phone hacking victim, Gordon Taylor, in spite of previous testimony to Parliament to the contrary.

Then there are the lawyers. In the Murdochs’ testimony, they made much of the clean bill of health they had received from their lawyers, and then they said the lawyers had obviously screwed up. Well, the lawyers cited by both Rupert and James as having given the company a clean bill of health called time-out on that claim. Rather, they called the Murdochs’ testimony “inaccurate and misleading.” Lawyers are generally pretty precise in their wording of things, so one can assume that the lawyers here know exactly what they are saying. Both The Independent and The Guardian have extensive coverage of what was released, and its import, and The Guardian, to which we owe a debt of gratitude for following this when everyone else had dropped it, provides an elegant timeline of events. As Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism notes, there’s no reason to pay any attention whatsoever to the anemic US media coverage of this.

All of this leaves Labour salivating, although it shouldn’t, since it was under Labour that all these cozy relationships between News International and the Metropolitan Police were allowed to flourish. This is the other real scandal here–the compromising of the police, which News International appears only too happy to have pursued, and which some members of the Metropolitan Police appear only too happy to have gone along with. Which, of course, explains the complete fiasco of the earlier investigations into this by the police. It’s the age-old question—who will police the police? On the basis of their handling of this, it’s certainly unclear whether the police can police themselves. At some point, I suspect, there will be a massive housecleaning—there has to be. The recent riots have provided a welcome diversion, I imagine.

The more interesting question is how much trouble are the Murdochs in on the basis of this. Actually, quite a lot, I imagine. It now appears that, in spite of constant denials, News International has continued to withhold material information from those investigating the phone-hacking mess—at the very least, from Parliament, and has persistently provided misinformation. Consistently, it would appear. And, as we intimated in a previous post, all of this has implications for News Corporation’s US businesses, potentially quite negative ones. Those who thought Rupert did a good job in his testimony a couple of weeks ago might want to reconsider—it looks like both Murdochs have a bit more explaining to do. Frankly, it’s not clear to me how they can explain all this away. I would be very surprised if, in six months time, either one of them is still running anything.

Colorado’s Department of Public Safety is employing analysts at the Colorado Information Analysis Center to monitor sites like Twitter and Facebook with an eye to gleaning information about potentially disruptive events before they happen. By monitoring social media conversations in real time, the CDPS analysts hope to be able to identify emerging threats within minutes of the first discussion by online plotters — which should hopefully allow law enforcement to preempt, for example, apparently spontaneous outbursts of civil disorder.

Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety, told Colorado journalists: “Because we know people organize this way, we’re listening,” adding, “People will describe online, or in some of the chatter that they send back and forth, indicating what they will do.” The CDPS program actually dates back to 2008, with online monitoring in the lead-up to Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Hmmm. Well, is this the same thing as Cameron’s notion that shutting down the Facebooks and Twitters is a good idea in times of civil unrest?

I don’t think so. What the CDPS is essentially doing (assuming this is the whole story) is listening in on public (or semi-public) conversations. If you and I are sitting around in a mall food court plotting a looting spree, we have no expectation of privacy if the guy at the next table has good ears and happens to be, you know, a police officer. Facebook and Twitter are like that – users can control who has access to their streams. If you aren’t one of my friends you can’t read my Facebook posts, although I have the option of making that feed available to the public. My choice. Ditto Twitter. In real life, if I don’t want something out there for everybody, you and I can talk in my living room.

If police departments didn’t monitor public chatter they’d be remiss in their duties. And if they feel the need to access private conversations, well, we have established processes for asserting probably cause and obtaining warrants, right?

None of this excuses the state from its responsibilities to promote an atmosphere free of the kinds of dynamics that breed civil disorder, of course, and anybody who has lived here as long as I have can probably tell you a story or two about how they wouldn’t necessarily trust our law enforcement to anything much more serious than guard string. So this shouldn’t be taken as a stirring endorsement of the trustworthiness of the local gendarmerie by any stretch.

But, in principle, what the CDPS appears to be up strikes me as perfectly valid.

Analystas

One sobering development, though, should make British citizens sit up and take notice. For that matter, those of us in America and in every other democracy in the world (to the extent that the US can be called a democracy) need to be paying very close attention to the latest move by Brit Prime Minister David Cameron, who is calling on Parliament to consider enacting social media bans.

Amid continuing rioting in multiple cities across the U.K., British Prime Minister David Cameron said in Parliament that legislators should consider laws allowing officials to ban individuals from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, if there is a chance those individuals intend to use the sites to plot violence. Cameron’s proposal, coming as thousands of British police attempt to reestablish order in blighted inner cities, acknowledges the central role played by social media in initiating, organizing, and spreading civil disorder — but immediately drew criticism as a misguided over-reaction, which does nothing to address the real causes of the violence.

Cameron told lawmakers that home secretary Theresa May will meet with executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Research In Motion, which makes Blackberry devices, to determine the feasibility of a social media ban on miscreants. This could include banning individuals who have already used social media to plan violence, and constant monitoring of social media to spot (and preempt) new episodes of violence in the planning phases.

Cameron explained to Parliament: “Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

There’s more at The Guardian.

Now, at a glance, there’s not a lot here to scare a dedicated law-and-order type. We’re just talking about cutting off miscreants, right? And no, I don’t think thugs and looters have any particular right to advanced technology in the pursuit of criminal activity.

The problem is that this only works if you trust the government when it comes to defining the terms. I mean, instead of the UK and Cameron (whom we trust because they’re a lot like us) let’s imagine if this had come from former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as the Arab Spring was collapsing around his ears. Imagine if it were Moammar Gaddhafi or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (who’s currently in the process of stomping the shit out of his own protesters) insisting on a meeting with Facebook, Twitter and RIM. Imagine if there were enough North Koreans who haven’t been starved to death to work up a good riot – how would we feel if it were Kim Jong-Il instead of Cameron?

Most of us have a clear enough idea in our heads about the difference between a democratic protester and a criminal. Or, at least, we think we do. Usually, though, the difference can be quickly inferred from a basic look at who we support politically. History has taught us that the distinction between “freedom fighters” and “death squads” is often one of perspective.

So how, then, do we receive Cameron’s agitation for a social media smackdown? Is he an honest man looking to address the tools of common street crime? Or is he a hegemon looking for means of tamping down political protest that has boiled over in the wake of the failure of government policies?

Many Americans probably can’t fathom our leader, President Barack Obama, even contemplating such a move. Of course, once upon a time we wouldn’t have conceived of backscat security porn machines, granny shakedowns, diaper searches and gate-rape at our airports. Telecom carriers colluding with the NSA to spy on average citizens would have been unthinkable. The Patriot Act would have sparked a call to the barricades. Now we learn about the goddamned Super Patriot Act, which smells like a Soviet version of Dean Wormer’s double-secret probation activities against Delta House. And of course, we have to acknowledge that, pretty campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, Mr. Obama has expanded Bush-era affronts to our freedom, and we might also note that the roiling field of GOP probables looking to challenge a very vulnerable Obama in 2012 features precisely zero candidates known for their commitment to civil liberties.

At this point, perhaps the question isn’t whether the US government might contemplate shutting off social media in times of unrest. The better question might be whether they already have and this is where Cameron got the idea. Heck, is it possible that Cameron is, in part, floating a friendly trial balloon for his friends in DC? Maybe I’m being paranoid, but it’s been a long time since our government did anything on the civil liberties front to earn a presumption of innocence.

Given the direction our economy is heading and the zeal with which both parties are willing to collaborate against the middle and working classes in order to protect the financial interests of large corporations and our wealthiest citizens, it’s also not unreasonable to wonder whether the riots in the UK might be a foreshadowing of things to come over here. Which is to say, this is anything but idle navel-gazing.

And now, for the knee-buckling irony part of the discussion. What if we were to develop some street-level unrest in the US? And what if the government were to seek to shut down the social media channels being employed by organizers (or, for the sake of argument, let’s say they just moved to shut it down for everybody, you know, just until order was restored – and really, restoring order is all that Assad is looking to do, right)? Who would stand up for the cause of free speech?

Well, Google is a Fortune 100. Facebook is pretty big. RIM is smaller and dying, but still they have some heft. With a market valuation of $4 billion or better Twitter is nothing to sneeze at. And these companies represent a certain degree of influence where our political landscape is concerned. So they might be expected, in the name of shareholder value, to go to the mat in defense of their customers.

Or they might fold like a cheap lawn chair. Who knows. But they’d be the only potential dissenters whose voices had a hope of mattering.

Stay tuned. This one has the potential to get interesting. You know, interesting in the sense of “may you live in interesting times…”

A descriptivist views language as it is written, as it develops, without the harrumph, harrumph. She systematically studies linguistic change and records it without comment.

I raise the issue — to harrumph or not to harrumph — because I recently harrumphed … a lot. One of my graduates, who is distinguishing himself in his first newspaper job, is tweeting his stories at light speed to promote them.

As you know, tweets are capped at 140 characters. So Twitterati tend to use shorthand, abbreviations, and other things about which I have no clue to express a thought. Frankly, to me most tweets I see represent a lack of planning on what to say and how to say it. But I have to teach journalism students how to wisely use Twitter. So it’s my prescriptivism versus their linguistic inventions and generational conventions.

So my former student (let’s call him, oh, Charles) wrote this 137-character tweet:

John Gross, controversial Niagara Falls contractor, was back in federal court this morning on 2 fel. chgs. He faces up to 23 yrs in jail.

“2“? Instead of “two“? “fel. chgs.“? We’re now deleting vowels and consonants from words? Surely this did not have to be! Perhaps delete “controversial.” Or “Niagara” if “Falls” is a city’s nickname. “yrs“? Really? Oh, be still, my prescriptivist heart.

So I harrumphed as only a tenured professor can and called Charles to detail the errors of his ways. I’m sure he’s still smarting from the sting of my AP Stylebook whip.

But after reflection, I think I was wrong, and Charles was right.

Did I recognize “fel. chgs.” as “felony charges“? Yes. Did I recognize “yrs” as “years“? Yes. Did I have sufficient understanding of the context of the story to challenge his decision to use “controversial“? No. Did Charles’ tweet adequately communicate meaning? Yes.

Newsmen and women these days use Twitter as one more means to promote their work. Charles even tweets about his colleagues’ stories. Filing on Twitter is another piece added to the backbreaking workload in a newsroom diminishing in staff size. A tweet is necessarily an act of haste. But as Charles does more of it, he will become more efficient. Journalists these days must take on the added task of promoting their work and “establishing their brand” (a phrase that still makes me feel icky, even though I’ve been doing it for six years).

In the coming semesters, I’ll be requiring my students to post their work and promote it — using Twitter among other avenues. I’m going to have to walk a fine line between my inherent prescriptivism and their invention of a language designed to fit a small space.

But I’ll tell them this: Writing a tweet is nothing more than writing to fit, something journalists have done for generations. A tweet is about 22 to 25 words, less if a tiny URL is used. After all, I require them to write headlines of between six and nine words. That, too, is writing to fit. Both are condensed versions of stories that may be several hundred words in length.

So I will see, and perhaps grudgingly accept, what has been anathema to me for my entire professional career — breaking AP style, overlooking punctuation requirements for errant comma splices, and words missing letters. (Another former student, knowing how much I value “omit needless words,” sent me a mug with this legend: “Omt ndlss vwls.” Guess I’d better get used to it.)

But there’s one line they better not cross: I will not allow anyone to drive the last nail into the coffin for the apostrophe. I better not see “its” instead of “it’s.” And I don’t want to hear “my thumbs are too big” as an excuse.

I will probably harrumph less, but I will harrumph nonetheless when I see too many prescriptivist lines crossed.

Meaning matters. Clarity matters. They can tweet “fel. chgs.” if they wish, but it better be crystal clear in the context of the tweet. Too little regard for prescriptivism may leave their tweets less than credible, and their reputations as content creators less than competent.

In so doing he will save 10% of the world’s children whom the invaders, the 456, wish to use as living factories to produce recreational drugs.

At its best, science fiction confronts us with human choices against the stark contrast of an alien background.

Children of Earth asks us: would you sacrifice someone you treasure and love in order to save millions of others who you have no connection to and who may never know of your sacrifice?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The surprise success of the series led its creator, Russell T Davies, to take the franchise across the Atlantic to the US where Starz financed the new series, Miracle Day.

And then everything went to pieces.

Miracle Day has as simple and brilliant a plot device as does Children of Earth.  What would happen if, one day, all over the world and at exactly the same moment, people stopped dying?  There would still be terrible accidents, disasters and illnesses.  There would still be bodies maimed and brutalised.  They just wouldn’t die.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Davies uses the device to show a backdrop of political and legal systems grappling with the implications of criminals on life sentences, murder victims who don’t die, of hospitals struggling with trauma words that are full of casualties who won’t die but can’t be healed, of disease epidemics and chaos and social movements filling the streets with their fears and phobias.

It’s all good stuff and despite everything I’m about to say, an idea so compelling I’m willing to overcome everything else just to see how this ends.

For you see, the idea is let down by some rather obsolete story tropes.

Trope 1: The obvious villain

Stories have always needed obvious villains.  We like to believe that, if we just get that one person, everything will be better.

This simple-headedness led Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein was responsible for all of Iraq’s faults.  A more chastened America realises that removing Muammer Gadhaffi from Libya will not bring about democracy there.

Any system requires lots of people to accept it.  Not necessarily support it, but be sufficiently disinterested in alternatives as to tolerate the status quo.  When sufficient people change their minds then systems change rather rapidly no matter how entrenched they may appear, or how untouchable their leaders think they are.

Robert Mugabe didn’t single-handedly create the cluster-fuck that is Zimbabwe, although he has certainly profited from it.  Ditto for North Korea’s Kims, Iran’s ayatollahs, Russia’s oligarchs or even Fox News in the US.

Miracle Day persists in this trope.  The simple enemy is a single pharmaceutical company which has engineered the end of death in order to sell lots of painkillers and make a fortune.  The BBC has only shown three episodes at this stage, so I really hope this doesn’t turn out to be the whole story, but it’s a crummy beginning.

Pfizer is the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company by revenue.  GSK, Sanofi-Aventis and Novartis round off the top four.  They’re mind-bogglingly large with revenues of almost $200 billion a year.  They make up only 25% of the global market.  Pfizer only has an 8.7% share and this is falling.

There are over 200 global pharmaceutical companies and the greatest profits and growth are found in tiny companies in new industries (like biotech) or new markets (like India and China).  Competition between these companies is fierce and disclosure requirements are brutal.  You can pretty much track every drug everywhere in the world, including all new product pipelines.

The idea that a single company could somehow produce a new type of painkiller and corner the market without any company or country doing anything about it is just silly.

AIDS and anti-retroviral drugs provide a real simple illustration of the consequences of patent monopolies for what are perceived to be critical medication.  From Brazil to South Africa to India, governments passed legislation to compulsorily license these drugs and have them produced by local generic manufacturers.

The impact of such legislation, and the threat that drugs classed as “essential” could become worthless, has propelled Pfizer to produce treatments for illnesses that really only worry rich people.  Lipitor, for treating cholesterol and Viagra, for treating impotence.   Lipitor alone is worth about 25% of Pfizer’s revenue.

But there we go, the bad guy is a global pharmaceuticals company and this may suite the many who believe that such companies exist merely to exploit our sickness or to create illness so that they can sell us the cure.

Unfortunately, this view doesn’t happen only in stories.  Much of the AIDS in Africa disaster is caused by the view that it is an invention of Western pharma companies.  Ditto for the last holdouts of polio in parts of Northern Nigeria.

Tope 2: The obvious hero

Choosing an obvious villain is sometimes forgivable.  It can simplify a way of focusing attention on a particular problem.  Saying, “We will defeat the minority Islamic fundamentalism which has found a claw-hold in an otherwise peaceful and progressive religious movement,” is very different from saying, “We will kill Osama bin Laden.”

Unfortunately, what happens when bin Laden is dead and fundamentalist intolerance still exists?

This problem fades into insignificance next to the next plot trope.  The “all of our leadership has been corrupted and that leaves only us/me to take on the forces of evil” trope.

Space opera has often had a small band of heroes defeating mighty armies. Ditto Space Invaders or Doom, for that matter.  But it’s always been a bit silly.

The arrival of the Arab Spring has killed that trope for good.

Mubarak did not lose control of Egypt because a plucky band of can-do heroes took on the might of the state.  It is because millions of people decided that they would deny him his authority to rule.

These mass protests are not necessarily honest or honourable.  Mass revolutions in Russia led to the USSR, in Iran to the Ayatollahs, in the US to the Tea Party.  Neither do these revolutions necessarily have a clearly-defined agenda or recognisable leaders.

Spanish protestors in Madrid are simply united as The Indignants, outraged at the current political status quo.  They don’t have any solutions. They don’t even seem to have any real demands.  Politicians are scared of them.

As with all these movements, people turn up wanting to place themselves in front and take advantage of the vacant leadership spot.  Sarah Palin turned up for the Tea Party, Mussolini for the fascists, Castro for the Cuban Revolution.

Most movements are too messy and chaotic for there to be a driving and controlling leader.

But outrage can have triggers.

News International didn’t upset too many people when they hacked Prince Charles’ phone.  British newspaper readers don’t think much of celebrities.  However, when Milly Dowler – a teenage murder victim – had her phone hacked, the outrage was palpable.

When Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor, set himself on fire on December 2010 his frustration and despair finally resonated with Tunisians.  They turned out in their millions and only four weeks later President Ben Ali fled.

What that trigger will be, or how many times a trigger will be required before a social movement gets going is always a large unknown.  But they are essential.

So, when the Torchwood team realise that PhiCore may be at the centre of creating Miracle Day in order to profit, what happens?  First they call a senior US government representative.  Who sends in the troops to catch them.

Their response? It’s only us, we’ll have to save the world ourselves.

Children of Earth never flinched.  When Harkness went careening in like an all-conquering hero, the result was the death of his lover, instant alien revenge, and collapse of support for standing up to the villains. That’s what happens when you’re a single target standing before the tanks.

Miracle Day would have us believe that Harkness can be at once torn apart by his sacrifice of his lover and grandson due to his own choices, but still ignorant of the alternatives to going it alone.

The world has changed

Writers and story-tellers seem to know the world has changed.  Films are filled with people filming events on their phones, or watching clips on YouTube.  Almost as if the writers are mugging to the cameras about how “hip” they are with this new Intarwebs thang.

If they really are web-savvy writers, maybe they’ll go the other way, showing how everything will soon be free and we’ll live in a utopian world where humans are mere bacteria in a world governed by an all-knowing internet.

That’s just as silly.

What’s changed is not how the world works, but its speed. A single trigger event can rapidly spiral out and inspire millions.

The movement can die just as quickly.  Pyjama activists can soon switch websites if a cute kitty comes along.  But they can also be re-energised by a stream of information from the front.  And this is easy to arrange.

Joao Silva, New York Times war photographer recovering from the loss of his legs to a landmine in Afghanistan, spoke about the future of war footage.  “[A] lot of the fighters are getting cameras and videophones. They’re filming their own stuff and they’re getting a lot better footage than what [we’ll] ever get. It doesn’t pay, but [they’re] getting the message out. These guys don’t really care about payment. They care about getting their picture out there.”

The stream of news from activists is, individually, meaningless but it becomes a massive concert of action.

Miracle Day has cast the Earth’s citizens as background scenery for a handful of heroes to perform against.  In the real world, everyone has a role to play and no one person dominates.  We may idolise heroes but we don’t need them.

“Whether you shoot a thousand pictures or you shoot 10 to get a good one, who cares? The pictures get run all the time. You see it with the paparazzi and the celeb pictures. Nobody cares about the quality of the picture. Nobody cares about whether it was taken with good ethics. Nobody cares, they just want it,” says Greg Marinovich, in the same interview with Silva.

Miracle Day would have been better if it had not flinched from allowing the world’s people to tell the story of their response to the Miracle.

That wouldn’t leave the Torchwood team with nothing to do.  After all, someone needs to be the trigger.

In Captain Jack Harkness’ immortality we have the real consequence and tragedy of living forever; the torture of all the world’s trigger choices – for good or evil – mounting up without even the solace of death for escape.

The power of Children of Earth was of Harkness’ decision for his grandson to be that trigger. Would that Russell T Davies had found the strength to let something similar happen again.

Disclosure: There are still a lot of episodes to go and Davies’ capacity to surprise and entertain is beyond doubt; with more than half the series still to go, I really hope this happens and I get to write an apology.

I don’t know, and I don’t care, and I think the media pursuit and frenzy over this question is both bizarre and foolish. Her parents care, and that’s appropriate. Likely the plaintiffs in the various lawsuits care because they have to serve her under the court rules. But the media frenzy, with more than likely a number of blank checks ready to be written, hurts journalism as a profession.

In stark contrast to the Anthony is kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard. What an amazing woman, she’s a true profile in courage and grace. She went through 18 years of hell, captured by a pedophile and his sidekick–his equally sicko wife. Diane Sawyer’s ABC interview was probing and often disturbing as Jaycee calmly related the day to day horrors of her existence during her imprisonment. ABC paid for her story, and likely People did, too.

Though the predator fathered two daughter on her in the course of repeated rapes, she clearly loves her girls and managed to transform evil into good.

Elizabeth Smart has shown similar grace. Her ordeal, though equally horrid, was mercifully shorter.

Compare that with the sad and pathetic Casey Anthony. We may never learn the truth of what happened to her young daughter, Caylee. Any of the grandparents (paternal or maternal) could file a wrongful death civil suit on behalf of the little girl. As part of discovery, Casey could be questioned about what happened to her daughter. Assuming (and this a big assumption) she would not lie, she could be compelled to testify or face civil contempt where she would hold the keys to her jail cell–all she’d have to do to stay out of jail or get out of jail would be to truthfully answer the question about what happened to her daughter. But truth seems elusive for her.

But we should never forget that there are thousands of other Caylees out there–children missing and/or murdered. And as terrible as Jaycee and Elizabeth’s ordeal was, they are still alive. The National Center for Missing Children
estimates that about 2,000 children a day are reported missing in the U.S. That’s nearly 800,000 each year. Approximately 200,00 are abducted by family members and 58,000 by non-family members or strangers. The website reports that dozens are victims of “stereotypical kidnapping. These crimes involve someone the child does not know, or knows only slightly, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently.”

The media covered the kidnappings of Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard extensively, but many other children do not garner the same coverage. News media, at least at the local level, should focus on every child that goes missing, and devote no more time on tracking down Casey Anthony.

I disagree. If the public are good regulators then I assume you would accept that the public would have Casey Anthony found guilty even though a court of her peers found differently? The “court of public opinion” isn’t always wise or informed.

Making difficult and appropriate, but socially unpopular, decisions is part of the idea of justice.

This isn’t a call for the government to manage the media any more than it is a call for the government to manage legal interactions. However, the government does ensure that there are independent courts where parties to a conflict can get an independent hearing and finding. The government also acts on behalf of the public – who vote for it – to manage, create and implement legislation in the public’s interest.

The same should be true of media regulation. How does someone like Christopher Jefferies recover his reputation when media interest has prejudged him in an ongoing murder investigation? He was entirely exonerated and independent courts found the Mirror and the Sun guilty of contempt of court for their coverage. In the future would he have to take to social media to rehabilitate his reputation and seek redress?

Saying that “the public will regulate” isn’t good enough. How would that actually work? How would you prevent sock-puppets and distributed proxy voting? People’s lives are not X-Factor, something that Casey Anthony must deal with for the rest of her life.

An impartial regulator is paid to pay attention even when the public has lost interest. Many arguments are technical in nature and require specialist analysis. You really want courts to decide by popularity?

Who is the proper regulator? The law; duly enforced by its legally appointed and constituted representatives in a hearing that is transparent, open and consistent.

For a more nuanced take on regulating the media, read George Brock, head of journalism at City University London.

Because it’s one thing to hack the voicemail of movie stars and politicians—the public turns out to be supremely indifferent to that. It’s quite something else to hack into the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl and delete messages, leading her parents to think she was still alive. Or the families of other murdered schoolgirls. Or the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the victims of the July 7 bombings. Not only is this beyond the bounds of decency by several orders of magnitude, the public actually recognizes this. And they’re steamed. Oh, did I mention the admission that News of the World, which was probably responsible for all of the above (perhaps directly, perhaps only indirectly), also gave lots of cash to policemen? Which is against the law, by the way. After you’ve been denying that any of this stuff happened in the first place, and spent the past four years insisting that these problems were the work of one rogue employee.

Murdoch is not loved in the UK, even though he owns four of the largest newspapers, and controls the second largest broadcaster. But he is feared. He has made a number of enemies over the years, but seems to have build up a certain amount of political immunity over the years as well, since the endorsement of The Sun is still actively courted by leaders of the major political parties—including David Cameron, the current Prime Minister, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the two previous Labour Prime Ministers. Blair’s sucking up to Murdoch was legendary. Cameron, who unlike Blair appears capable of embarrassment, has at least had the decency to be less obnoxious about it, although he has also played the game with a vengeance. But it has paid off—whomever The Sun endorses, wins.

So now Murdoch has a real mess on his hands. He has steadfastly refused to abandon Rebekah Brooks, who edited the News Of the World for a time before she went on to edit The Sun, and before her current stint as head of News International here in the UK. Likewise Murdoch’s son, James, who this afternoon put out one of the most deliriously loopy letters of apology in living memory, which has managed to infuriate even more people, as if that were remotely possible. Meanwhile, advertisers were canceling right and left, and News Corporation shares have hit the skids. So what has News International done in response? Why, today they decided to shut down News of the World—this Sunday’s edition will allegedly be the last one. This stunning announcement—which will cause several hundred people to lose their jobs at the UK’s (heretofore) largest selling newspaper—is absolutely baffling, since it actually solves nothing. Labour MP Chris Bryant, who has emerged as one of the genuine good guys in this whole affair, argues that this is a cynical move designed solely to protect Brooks, and he’s probably right. Not for the first time one wonders what hold Brooks has over Murdoch.

It’s hard to know where this goes next. Allegedly Andy Coulson, another former News of the World editor who was, for a time, James Cameron’s media advisor before resigning this past spring as the phone hacking scandal was taking off for real, is allegedly about to be arrested. And more arrests are almost certain to follow. Then there’s the scandal at Scotland Yard, where it’s now clear there were perhaps quite a number of police on the News International payroll, so to speak. So not only is this a huge embarrassment for them, because they blew the first investigation of this so badly a couple of years ago. It also turns out that there were, and perhaps still are, obviously a bunch of cops who have been illegally taking money from a news organization.

Then there’s Cameron, who up to this past week has been able to float a bit above the fray—but no more. His hiring of Coulson as his media advisor was criticized at the time, and that criticism was ignored. But it now looks to have been prescient. Cameron is taking an increasing amount of heat here, not just for the Coulson decision, but also for his closeness to Brooks, whose family the Camerons had to Christmas dinner. Cameron is a smart guy, and generally has proven to be politically adept—but this will linger. In part because the government still has yet to approve the takeover of BSkyB, which Rupert Murdoch desperately wants to accomplish—and the longer this goes on, the more difficulty the government will have in approving this, given everything that has come out the past couple of weeks. Today Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary whose decision this will ultimately be, announced the decision was being put off until September, given the volume of mail and emails he was getting. And Parliament certainly looks set to step into the fray as well. The power Murdoch once had appears to be gone.

What does this tell us about Murdoch? I know people always say that it’s dangerous to underestimate him, and that may still be true. On the other hand, this has been festering for several years now, and has been outright problematic if not dangerous for months, and was still allowed to fester until it finally exploded. What were his people thinking? He was here in the Spring, remember, to straighten this all out. But, as I think about it, he actually didn’t have much to say then. And what he’s said recently has sounded suspiciously like what other News Corp and NI people have been saying. So is he just flailing around, or what? Well, I figure one of three things happened last spring. First, he may have learned then how bad this all was, and decided to wait it out, hoping that the BSkyB transaction would get through, and then deal with whatever the fallout was afterwards. It was a calculated business decision, and it didn’t work, but Murdoch is above all else a businessman, and he knows the potential payoffs and costs of calculated risks.

Second, he was outright lied to. But this means that not only Brooks lied to him, but probably his son as well. The first I would believe, the second seems less likely. But stranger things have happened. And it explains why Murdoch, who normally solves problems before they become crises, has been so casual about all this. Third, he’s just dottering around at this point, and didn’t really grasp the significance of all of this. Which would be one of the risks of letting an 80 year-old run a large corporation. But which would also explain quite a lot. This last possibility is one that will probably be concerning News Corporation shareholders the most. If the company founder and largest stockholder is losing it, what do you do? Not that I have a whole lot of sympathy for News Corp shareholders. They’re the ones who continue to allow Roger Ailes to foist Fox News on America.

I do have to say that as a committed news junkie, this is great stuff. And I’m not alone. This has become gripping, the way Watergate was, as Alexander Cockburn reminds us. So much so that it’s easy to forget the pain and suffering that News of the World practices have inflicted on people who already were dealing with a lot of pain and suffering to begin with. There’s a certain irony here that Murdoch would understand if he had any distance from this—he’s been pushing to get approval for the BSkyB takeover because he’s been concerned that its share price would keep rising to prohibitive levels, making any acquisition by News International more expensive. Too bad he didn’t consider what might happen to NI and News Corp share prices if he let this get out of hand.

Anyway, more details tomorrow, I’m sure. Oh, and by the way, remember when we wondered whether Murdoch had an Internet strategy? Apparently the answer is no.

Mobile phones have been such a transformative technology you would think there would be more stamps with mobile phones on them You would be wrong—this not very attractive stamp from Denmark seems to be it.