Tuesday, September 28, 2004
A World Without Middlemen?
The Internet has transformed the economics of many once-secure professions. This election year is likely to be remembered as the year the Internet transformed the jobs of political reporters.
Subscription-only Salon takes up this issue today in "How the Internet turned everyone into James Carville." The key quote:
The answer is that the Internet has fundamentally changed politics as we know it. There is just so much out there that we didn't have access to four years ago: polling data, fundraising data, media-buy data; instant access to every TV ad and press release and unguarded gaffe and well-timed leak to jolt the campaign; insider dish on what the media's covering and what it's not covering and why; . . .
I might add to the list websites updated daily or even more often by respected political journals like National Review (whose "KerrySpot" figured out the source of Dan Rather's documents well before The New York Times), and web sites run by smart folks who disagree with me.
Political information that once cost thousands of dollars, if you could obtain it at all, is now available for a mouse click. The Salon article touches on this wider story as well:
In the grand scheme of technological progress, increased access by bloggers to political information isn't the most astounding development. Glenn Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law professor who runs the popular, right-ish blog Instapundit, notes that "if you look at a more general picture of the world recently, the difference between amateurs and professionals has vanished in a whole lot of ways. For instance, look at music -- it used to be you only knew about studio stuff if you were a serious musician; the amateur would never know about it. But now you can set these things up at home. The insider tricks aren't insider tricks anymore, now that outsiders have access to the knowledge." A similar thing has occurred in film and photography with the advent of digital imaging, or in journalism with the advent of the Web and of blogs themselves.
As the space between amateurs and professionals erodes, that space, once profitably occupied for generations by middlemen, continues to disappear.
Consider the likely death of the weekly pro football newspaper. Priot to the Internet era, followers of NFL team A who lived in an area devoted to news coverage of team B had but one option: pay for an expensive, often late-arriving weekly newspaper devoted to coverage of all NFL teams.
One of those newspapers nows think the solution to declining subscriptions is to charge the same high subscription prices but make the text available online only to subscribers. Their problem is not getting their text out sooner, but that their text is essentially out of date by the time they finish repackaging it.
Even casual fans can simply dial up their team's hometown newspaper the day after the game and learn more in twenty minutes than they could ever learn from the one short article alloted to their team each week.
Meanwhile some news sources are "getting" the Internet. After Hurricane Ivan passed through the Florida panhandle, the Pensacola News Journal set up what was effectively a "blog" by neighborhood. Out of towners with relatives in the area could review those blogs and post questions. Local people generously answered them, often within minutes, providing priceless information for evacuees and those who loved them.
The news posted wasn't always good, but confronting reality ASAP enabled some to plan immediate trips to aid relatives with major repairs, while others, assured that all was well with family or friends, could stay home and not make matters worse.
|posted by Jim on 1:51 AM|
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Thursday, September 23, 2004
Inventing Election Law in Ohio
Efforts to put official English on the 1986 Florida ballot were challenged because the petitions were not circulated in Spanish as well as English. Opponents knew they would lose if the voters were allowed to work their will so they decided to invent a new election law and pray a judge would help them out.
That same story is being rerun in Ohio on the subject of homosexual marriage:
A group favoring same-sex marriages is running out of time in its attempt to stop a Nov. 2 vote on a proposal to ban the unions in the Ohio Constitution.
If Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell does not invalidate 11,047 supplemental petitions by midnight, it appears that Ohioans to Protect Marriage will have enough signatures to place the issue on the statewide ballot.
Ohioans Protecting the Constitution, a gay alliance that opposes State Issue 1, asked the secretary of state yesterday to invalidate the 144,247 signatures on the petitions, saying the petitions lacked the required summary of the proposal, certified by the state attorney general.
Attorneys for Ohioans to Protect Marriage argued before a hearing officer that the state constitution requires no summary, and that for the secretary of state to rule otherwise would violate the right of initiative petition.
Jeffrey A. Shafer, representing the petitioners, said the state constitution requires only that the title and text of the proposed constitutional amendment appear on petitions. "It nowhere calls for a summary," he said.
|posted by Jim on 5:06 PM|
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Finally, Some Good Election News in Florida
Via the Tallahassee Democrat:
Despite a plea that hurricanes and the winds of political change will cause confusion at the polls Nov. 2, Leon County Circuit Judge Ralph Smith refused Wednesday to make counties count "provisional ballots" that get cast in the wrong precincts.
The special ballots were authorized after the 2000 election, when thousands of voters were wrongly turned away from the polls. If a voter insists he's properly registered but poll workers can't find him on precinct lists, he can still vote. If the mistake is corrected at the county courthouse, the vote is tallied - but only if the ballot was cast in the right place.
A coalition of labor groups supporting Sen. John Kerry for president said they will appeal to the Florida Supreme Court. They argue that if a voter goes to the wrong precinct and gets the wrong provisional ballot for a few local races, his or her votes for president, Congress, the state Legislature, countywide offices and constitutional amendments should still count.
Of course, the Florida Supreme Court hasn't been heard from. One hopes the glaring possibility of organized vote fraud using provisional ballots would discourage even the highly partisan Democrats on that court from overturning this wise ruling.
|posted by Jim on 4:50 PM|
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Tuesday, September 21, 2004
New Column on E.O. 13166
by M. David Stirling of the Pacific Legal Foundation is well worth reading.
|posted by Jim on 2:50 PM|
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Thursday, September 16, 2004
Wise Words
"It's precisely the story that you want to be true that you have to be the most careful about," warns former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, a Bush opponent.
There are going to be a lot of accusations made during the remainder of this election campaign. Republicans, Democrats and Independents all should insist on high standards of proof, especially for accusations against candidates we already oppose.
I suspect Andrew is right about the roots of "Rathergate." Some folks "so desperately wanted the [forged Bush national guard] documents to be legit that they rushed this story onto the air without taking the proper precautions."
As proprietor of this blog, I insist on accuracy, but I do not claim perfection. If I make a mistake, let me know and a correction will be issued. That is how it is done by reputable newspapers, news organizations and most of the blogosphere. When mistakes happen, and they will, issue a correction and move on.
Had CBS simply said, "our mistake," that would have been it after a day or so. The coverup keeps the story alive. Story's like tonight's "the documents are fake but the charges are true" don't help matters.
I am reminded of the "West Wing" episode where C.J. reminds Josh after a presidential coverup is revealed, that the coverup was the real problem, not what might come afterward, just as your inability to swim should not be your first concern when jumping off a high cliff because "its the fall that's gonna kill you."
|posted by Jim on 1:40 AM|
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"Pajamahadeen"
is a word coined by National Review's own Jim Geraghty, to describe the many Internet bloggers gratuitously insulted by a former CBS News executive.
The full story, thanks to the Wall Street Journal's John Fund:
A watershed media moment occurred Friday on Fox News Channel, when Jonathan Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News who oversaw "60 Minutes," debated Stephen Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, on the documents CBS used to raise questions about George W. Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service.
Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the authenticity of the memos: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."
Let the record also show that many of us bloggers write in our spare bedrooms.
|posted by Jim on 1:04 AM|
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Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Will the 2004 Election Be Decided on Election Day?
Read John Fund's warning:
Indeed, we may be on the way to turning Election Day into Election Month through a new legal quagmire: election by litigation. Every close race now carries with it the prospect of demands for recounts, lawsuits and seating challenges in Congress. "We're waiting for the day that pols can just cut out the middleman and settle all elections in court," jokes Chuck Todd, editor of the political tip sheet Hotline. Such gallows humor may be entirely appropriate given the predicament we face. The 2000 election may have marked a permanent change in how elections can be decided, much as the battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork changed, apparently forever, the politics of judicial appointments. On April 19, 2004, John Kerry campaigned in Florida with Senator Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate, and vowed — six months before a single ballot was cast, counted or disputed — that he was ready to take the 2004 election to court.
Fund also asks if America has the will to deal with vote fraud:
CBS's 60 Minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names. By this means, for example, the illegal alien who assassinated the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, California — twice.
Fund's new book on this topic, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, looks like required reading in the days ahead.
|posted by Jim on 2:57 AM|
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