We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I am one of those sad and tragic people that only goes to the movies once in a blue moon, but I’ve already booked ahead to see the “Revenge of the Sith”, because I am a Star Wars tragic (mock in the comments all you like, I still get a kick out of these films.)
So I have been surfing round to all sorts of different sites having a look at what other people think of the film. I happened across this article in the Houston Chronicle. But my thoughts were dragged back towards this Galaxy by the final paragraph, about the reviewer:
Jake Hamilton, 17, has been reviewing films for the Chronicle’s Yo! section for three years.
I did a double take at that. This kid has been reviewing films for a newspaper since he was 14?
What I think is impressive is that the Houston Chronicle is willing to take a punt on young faces with fresh ideas. When you consider this compared to the very high barriers to entry that exist in Australian journalism, I have to say that I am amazed.
It is possible of course, that James Hamilton’s Dad owns the newspaper. However this sort of risk-taking and innovation is, as I say, a world away from the closed-shop of Australian journalism.
There can surely be no more conclusive evidence of market success than the trademark name of a particular company becoming the commonly used verb to describe the activity for which said company provides its products. Have you ‘googled’ anyone today? Have you ever been ‘googled’ yourself?
As someone who ‘googles’ on pretty much a daily basis, I can find no material fault with this richly-deserved and glowing tribute in the UK Times:
Google is the modern Oracle, the all-knowing mechanical sage we consult to find, if not the answers to life’s questions, then at least a comfortable, reasonably priced hotel in Torquay. But is Google God?
I cannot recall such a mystical (and, for some, blasphemous) suggestion ever crossing my mind but, like the author, I am only too ready to wax lyrical about the benefits of Google’s simple and effective information gathering machine.
Google may have all the answers but, unlike God, lots of Google’s answers tend to be wrong, loopy postings from lonely people typing late at night in their underwear. Google moves in mysterious ways all right, but some of those ways are downright weird.
To whom could he possibly be referring? → Continue reading: Stick to what you don’t know
At last, that bastion of idiotarianism the BBC is going to go off the air for a while, God willing! That these grasping tax funded parasites are going to strike during major televised sporting events is splendid news so maybe now more folks might be a bit less willing to shell out £125 (about $240) per year in order to support an institution filled with moral relativists, collectivists, reflexive anti-Americans and pro-Islamofascists.
The Economist (the link, alas, leads to their premium content) has an interesting little article about fake news – ‘news’ broadcasts put out by the government via local television networks. Bogus reporting (or, more kindly, a video equivalent of issuing a press release) they call it:
The televised interview with John Walters, the White House drug tsar, ran on hundreeds of local stations before the 2004 Super Bowl. “Many parents admit they’re still not taking the drug [marijuana] seriously,” explained the news anchor. “Mike Morris has more.” It ended with the usual sign-off: “This is Mke Morris reporting.” It looked like a new report, and quaked like a news report. but it was not one. The segment had been produced by Mr Walters’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. The apparently independent Mr Morris was on contract to the government.
As the Economist points out the government should not be in the business of advocacy, but it may use public money to provide information. The question is which is which? Regardless of the formality of the decision and which watchdog or arm of the administration has the final say about the legality of such “news management”, the issue here is transparency. Both the government agency and the news programmes should identify the originator of the material they are running.
The most interesting point of the article is not even that – it is highlighting that this administration does not think that the press has “a check-and-balance function” and that this is a fundamental change of attitude compared with previous administrations and makes this one’s use of fake news different.
If there is nothing special about the press, then there is nothing special about what it does. News can be anything – including dress-up government video footage. And anyone can provide it, including the White House, which through local networks, can become a news distributor in its own right. Given the proliferation of media outlets and the eroding of boundaries between news, comment and punditry, someone will use government provided information as news. In short, the traditional notion that the media play a special role in informing people is breaking down.
The conclusion is one that many bloggers have been trying to break to the traditional media and journalists.
Behind all this lies a shift in the balance of power in the new business. Power is moving away from old-fashioned networks and newspapers; it is swinging towards, on the one hand, smaller news providers (in the case of blogs, towards individuals) and, on the other, to the institutions of government, which have got into the business of providing news more or less directly. Eventually, perhaps, the new world of blogs will provide as much public scrutiny as newspapers and broadcasters once did.
For myself, I am not too worried about “covert propaganda” in government broadcasts provided there is an individual somewhere in the process who will simply blog about it on his blog…
A journalist never reveals his sources – that is the stern injunction issued to any reporters. Reporters have even gone to jail in the past than reveal a source. Journalists who reveal sources are unlikely to be trusted again, and without trust, it is very hard for an ambitious correspondent to grab a great scoop. The problem for me, though, is how can one protect a “source” for a story if there is an allegation that the source stole an item for the story? How does one deal, for example, with alleged theft of industrial secrets? In my view theft trumps the right to keep a source private.
A test case in the United States is pitting three bloggers against Apple computer concerning their release of details about Apple products yet to be put on the market. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is acting for the three bloggers in this case.
Apple’s lawsuit accused anonymous people of stealing trade secrets about the Asteroid music product and leaking them to the PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret websites.
All three are Apple fan sites that obsessively watch the iconic firm for information about future products.
Apple is notoriously secretive about upcoming products which gives any snippets of information about what it is working on all the more value.
The lawsuit to reveal the names of the leakers was filed against three individuals: Monish Bhatia, Jason O’Grady and someone else using the alias Kasper Jade – all of whom wrote for the Power Page and Apple Insider sites.
This case could remind us, rather sharply, that weblogs are as subject to the laws of libel and the rest as any part of MSM. Stay tuned.
I would like to start this posting with a long-windedness warning. Basically I have only recently thought of the notions that follow. The separate bits of these ideas have mostly been present in my mind for quite a while, but the bundling of them is, for me, new. And stuff you are still excited by on account of its extreme recentness is generally the stuff you write least well. Apologies, but there you go, that is blogging for you.
Anyway… here it is. Cough, all sitting comfortably, begin. (Or skip, of course.)
Much is made, and quite rightly, of the empowering effect of the Internet for the little guy. We can all have our blogs and our say.
Recently I have begun to wonder if a similar Internet impact might be about to become unmistakably clear at the very top end of society, the bit where Great Men (as opposed to us little guys) try to have their say.
Great Men trying to have their say?!? But do they not do this already, all the time? Well, yes they do, but they are often either misunderstood or just plain ignored, and often relentlessly so.
I have lost count of the number of times when a Great Man has given what he hoped would be a Big Speech, laying out a major strategy for the months and years to come, only for all the questions from the assembled mob of hacks to ask only about the latest scandal that they have either observed or invented, concerning the petty details of the life of the Great Man. So, what about your wife’s astrologer? What about those crazy daughters of yours? About this intern. About your mortgage. This dodgy land deal you and your wife did ten years ago. How about this National Guard skiving then?
In a kind of hybrid category are the scandals that are less personal but equally demeaning and diminishing, like the scandal of Blair and Bush invading Iraq in pursuit of weapons they knew were not there, or Reagan doing whatever wicked thing he did with the Nicaraguan Contras.
Now I certainly would not want the hacks to neglect such questions. The idea that they should be compelled to ask only about the high and mighty abstractions laid before them in the Big Speech, is repellent not to say totalitarian. But one of my many complaints about our mainstream media is that they have a tendency only to ask the embarrassing questions. The attitude of the mainstream media when reporting a speech given by a Great Man is to look only for clay at the bottom end of his body, rather than to pay any attention to the noises emerging from the top end. → Continue reading: The smartening up of the culture: thoughts on some recent speeches by President Bush
During the last fortnight or so I have watched with fascination as the Eason Jordan story has unfolded. Here is a recent Instapundit posting about it.
Briefly, at a meeting in Davos on January 27th. Eason Jordan accused the US army of deliberately killing journalists. When challenged he retreated, but what exactly did he say, and how far did he retreat? A video exists, apparently, but has not yet been unveiled. For about a week, the Mainstream Media, hereinafter termed (as my QC Dad liked to put it) the MSM, ignored the story, while bloggers went to town with it.
Last Friday, Eason Jordan resigned from his job, as executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN. He did not accept any blame for his remarks, but said that he wanted to protect CNN from being “unfairly tarnished”.
At first, Eason Jordan and his colleagues probably hoped that this would be the end of the matter. Now that the lynch-bloggers had got their scalp, maybe they would stop their baying and yelling and go back to writing about God, guns, kittens, and suchlike. But the bloggers are not satisfied.
Eason Jordan himself is only the label for this story, he himself being only a part of it. The matter is absolutely not now closed, as the increasingly horrified MSM (mainstream media) are learning, to their severe discomfort. They have much more to learn yet. → Continue reading: Eason Jordan etc.
This is an interesting titbit, in today’s Guardian:
Peter Mandelson has attacked the BBC’s coverage of Europe and accused Today presenter John Humphrys of “virulently anti-European views”.
In a letter to BBC chairman Michael Grade, Mr Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, says the corporation has a “specific problem with the anti-European bias of some presenters” and said it was failing in its charter obligation to promote understanding of European affairs.
I seldom listen to the Today show, but it is clear from further remarks of Mandelson’s that the Guardian goes on to quote that what Mandelson means by “anti-European views” is “anti-EU” views, which is a typically sneaky piece of EUrophilia. Has Humphrys been denouncing French cuisine, or Italian opera, or German engineering? Has he been saying that the French are all rude, the Italians rotten at driving, and the Germans all crypto-Nazis under a veneer of politeness. Has he been saying bad things about Estonians? No, of course not.
What Mandelson has accused Humphrys of is making EUroscepticism sound convincing, in the following rather interesting way:
The former trade secretary, who was appointed to the European commission last year, says the BBC gives too much coverage to moderate Eurosceptics and not enough airtime to extreme Eurosceptics such as UKIP.
So Mandelson has now become a UKIP supporter. How is that going to look? No doubt it is all part of some cunning plan designed to split the anti-EU camp and present it as all bonkers, xenophobic, etc., but it sounds to me like a somewhat high risk strategy. What if UKIP gets more airtime, in accordance with Mandelson’s demands, and uses it to be rather persuasive?
I wonder if Mandelson also thinks that this man should have more airtime?
An interesting email arrived in my inbox this morning. It was from Stephen Mayne, telling me, along with 5,300 other subscribers, that he and his wife had sold their e-magazine crikey.com.au for $A1 million.
The interesting thing about this is the business plan that Mayne established. Although the website holds plenty of interesting articles about Australian politics, news, sports, media and business, the main effort that Mayne and his team put their energies into is the daily news email. Subscribers pay a fee, and in return, the daily email with between 15 and 20 news and gossip items come into their inbox.
It is a gossipy sort of publication, but no more so then the mainstream Australian media, and it was at least a different point of view then the reliably statist points of view that are published in the mainstream Australian press. Although Mayne has given up control, he will still be contributing so I hope the ‘crikey.com.au’ spirit lives on, and I am pleased for Mayne personally. The man has worked incredibly hard over the last five years to build up his little niche in the Australian media.
And it also gives hope to others that there is a long term viability to ‘new media’. You do have to work incredibly hard, and take risks, and you need a bit of luck. The only equivilent online publication I can think of is the Indian website Tehelka.com, which, after many adventures, seems to have made the transition from online to print media. (Samizdata magazine, anyone?). So well done to Mayne, and I hope he enjoys his new fortune to go with his more established fame.
[T]here is not much future in being a gatekeeper when the walls are down.
– the final words of this article by Jack Kelly about the travails of old school journalism
From yesterday’s Telegraph comes this amazing story:
A 10-year-old girl saved her family and 100 other tourists from the Asian tsunami because she had learnt about the giant waves in a geography lesson, it has emerged.
Tilly Smith, from Oxshott, Surrey, was holidaying with her parents and seven-year-old sister on Maikhao beach in Phuket, Thailand, when the tide rushed out.
As the other tourists watched in amazement, the water began to bubble and the boats on the horizon started to violently bob up and down.
Tilly, who had studied tsunamis in a geography class two weeks earlier, quickly realised they were in danger.
She told her mother they had to get off the beach immediately and warned that it could be a tsunami.
She explained she had just completed a school project on the huge waves and said they were seeing the warning signs that a tsunami was minutes away.
Her parents alerted the other holidaymakers and staff at their hotel, which was quickly evacuated. The wave crashed a few minutes later, but no one on the beach was killed or seriously injured.
I missed this yesterday, but Norm Geras, linked to today by Instapundit because of another posting about Guardian foolishness, caught it, to whom thanks.
I am sure that some time during the last few months I have blogged things which have at least suggested that blogging etc. is capable of replacing the existing media. If so, apologies, and if not, lucky me. This tsunami disaster has made clear what has long been obvious, that the old media and the new media complement and feed into each other, or at any rate they ought to.
Bloggers in the right places at the right times can feed stories not just to other meta-bloggers, but to the mainstream media. A few of them were, after all, actually there. And then other bloggers, as I have just done, can point blog readers towards particularly choice mainstream media stories.
I particularly admire the way that the Guardian, for all that it is easy for the likes of us to criticise it for all kinds of other reasons, has at least learned how blogging can actually help in times like these, not just by telling the terrible story, but by helping to make it less terrible.
Polly Toynbee gets her priorities right:
Social democracy and global cooperation are struggling under the tsunami of US neoconservatism.
Few things in life are as reliable as the Guardian.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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