The Handy-Dandy Blog 'Steal-O-Meter'

Mark Glaser of Mediashift has a blog that discusses the difference between stealing other people's internet material and promoting what they wrote. He offers seven scenarios from legitimate to outright stealing. I recommend taking a look. Although he says he's not covering all scenarios, one scenario he leaves out is one often used on this blog. I sometimes quote two, three, sometimes four sources to make at least one point none of the quoted pieces covered. Often the point I'm making is the real story.

Even Bush PR Machine Now Stumbling

You cannot repair a series of blunders by following them with more blunders but there are signs that's exactly what Bush plans to do in Iraq. 'Surge' is just the latest of Bush's jargon words that will not win the war. If we add another twenty to thirty thousand troops, that will still not reach the maximum number of troops we have had in Iraq earlier in the war, particularly if we include all the contractors and all the coalition forces. This is about public relations and a desperate president trying to save face. It is not about sound policy. The consequence is that our nation and our foreign policy will only be further damaged, and that does not include the loss of more lives and the growing cost of the war, a cost, by the way that the president refuses to acknowledge.

But this is not December of 2005; it's December of 2006 and there's been a change of late. The media isn't jumping every time Bush waves his arms or every time his handlers bark at the media these days. And that too is a sign of another problem that is further damaging our nation, a problem that Bush barely seems to acknowledge: the president has no credibililty.

Slowly coming to terms with the incompetence of the Bush Administration should not have taken the media four years. MissLaura of Daily Kos has some thoughts on the situation that now exists as Bush 'decides' on his next move:

It seems like there's always a three-step process to George W. Bush being seen as weak: After it's well-established on blogs and the like that he's screwing up on a particular topic and things are going to go badly, his poll numbers drop, showing unpopularity nationally. Then, at some later point, if we're lucky, the big media narrative catches up to the reality that he's screwing up and is unpopular. That particular narrative does appear to be emerging on the question of how Bush will interpret what Democratic victories in November mean about the voters' will for Iraq.

I would add one step before the blogs in the process mentioned above and that's the experts and rational career people who couldn't quite get their message across to the media, even if their stories sometimes appeared in the back pages of major newspapers; these are the people who know that what the president says doesn't always match the reality, and that the president's tough talk is too often not matched by the competence necessary to understand and implement various policies. Without the experts and career people, the blogs might not have gotten far (sometimes, in the past, the experts and career people have been wrong, but Bush and his neocon enablers didn't even come close to demonstrating that they themselves knew the answers).

After two presidential elections, Americans are learning the hard way that tough talk is worthless if the individual talking tough doesn't know what he's doing or what he's talking about. This doesn't just apply to President Bush; it applies to the Republican Party which has allowed itself to be overwhelmed by right wingers who understand a great deal less than their spokespersons and media coverage would lead us to believe.

Thoughtful conservatives still have a place in American politics but we are witnessing the end of right wing ideology as a political force in our nation; nevertheless, it's going to take a few years yet to play out. A lot will depend on how soon and how quickly a new Republican Party replaces the frauds and the incompetents who have dominated the GOP of late. When the Democrats take their seats in January, there is much they can do. However, at the end of the day the Democrats can only do so much because that is how our constitution is designed.

I expect nothing from hardcore right wing Republicans in Congress except obstruction. But there are enough Republicans in the House and Senate who know better, who know perfectly well that Bush doesn't know what he's doing and that there is a major need for repairs to our government and our foreign policy. The sooner a significant number of Republicans recognize that we have a problem and that they need to join with Democrats, even if just on selected issues, the sooner the crisis in Washington can begin to be resolved and the sooner, I might add, that the Republican can find themselves again.

Bush has the veto. It is very likely that he will use that veto when Democrats try to check his abuse of power. He may even try to use that veto to slowly drag us into a broader war. In critical situations, for the sake of the nation, Republicans are going to have to cross the aisle and vote for a return to sanity. Otherwise, Republican obstructionism may extend the crisis in Washington for another two to four to six years. Those are years as a nation that we cannot afford to waste.

Some Thoughts on a Free and Responsible Press

One of the first journalists to talk specifically about the Nixonian qualities of George W. Bush was Jules Witcover, formerly of The Baltimore Sun. I started reading Witcover because he had a knack for noticing things other journalists kept missing. So it was something of a shock one day when his column simply disappeared. I checked around on the internet and found out that he apparently had been 'fired,' 'let go' or was unable to 'get his contract renewed.' As far I can tell, and it's not always easy to tell in this odd era, Witcover was apparently the victim of a cost-saving move largely because, as a senior journalist, he was earning more than the other journalists on the paper.

I bring up the story of Witcover simply to point out that there are multiple reasons the media has not being doing a good job of covering and analyzing the news in recent years. Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory has a post on the need for journalists and newspapers to be more than stenographers for government officials:

The Iranian President convened a convention this week to "debate" whether the Holocaust occurred, whether it is exaggerated, etc. In reporting on this event, The New York Times did not simply convey the views of both sides, but instead, declares definitively that one side of the "debate" -- the side of the Holocaust deniers -- ignores evidence, uses discredited sources, and relies upon false claims...

(snip)

By pointing out the reality that the Holocaust denialists are making false and unsupportable claims, the Times is not reporting this incident in a "biased" or subjective way. It is not being unfair to the holocaust deniers by siding against them. To the contrary, even though it is clearly siding with one side over the other in terms of whose statements are truthful, the article is reporting on this issue objectively, because it reports the objectively verifiable fact that the arguments advanced by holocaust denialists are simply false.

That is what objective and meaningful reporting requires -- not merely uncritically conveying what statement a person makes, but scrutinizing that statement for accuracy and clearly reporting if it is false. That is what the Times did here by labelling the denialists' claims "fantasy" and pointing out the fact that their claims are contradicted by abundant documentation. ...

If anyone thinks this is an abstract or even obscure argument, I saw a cartoon this morning which reminds us of the problem with Holocaust deniers: if one ignores history and the obvious moral lessons one can learn from it, one is free to repeat the mistake. Nor, by the way, is the problem currently only restricted to Iran's leaders or a few Muslims. In his book, Ethics During and After the Holocaust, the philosopher John K. Roth criticizes Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, for ignoring the distorted history and conditions that led to the Holocaust in the first place: "The problem is that Gibson's film has much more in common with pre-Holocaust Christian animosity toward Jews than it does with post-Holocaust reconciliation between Christianity and Judaism. (p. 49)." Christianity did not cause the Holocaust (Nazism had little to do with Christianity), but the point is that it was the distortion of facts and history through the centuries that clearly led to an environment that facilitated the Holocaust.

Journalism can never be simply a recording of what other people say, even if those people represent our government. Even a president can be wrong (yes, we need to say that). Without a press that challenges his assumptions and challenges his facts, a president can make major blunders.

Among others, we have seen two kinds of errors in journalism in the last six years. One type of error is to record the predictions of government officials or 'experts' who support them without noticing how often they get it wrong. If a government offical says a missile will intercept another missile and destroy it in a test, he can be forgiven if he is wrong the first time; it's a no-brainer that a journalist needs to inform the reader that the official has been wrong three times when three tests fail and the official is now making a prediction of a successful fourth test. In the last five years, the neoconservatives have frequently been wrong about terrorism, Iraq and a number of other issues and journalists have frequently failed to point it out; the same neoconservatives continue to be appear on TV as if their advice should still be taken seriously.

The second error has to do with accepting the word of government officials when it comes to the accuracy of information that is given to reporters; during the Bush years, the failure to test the accuracy of information, to investigate reports that contradict the government, and, in some cases, simply recording major, outright lies of the government went on until well after the 2004 election and continues in some quarters.

Recent history should have put more journalists on guard during the last six years. Some of the players in the Bush Administration were players in the Reagan Administration during the 1980s when isolated reports of death squads in El Salvador were reaching The New York Times; some of those tips were from doctors who worked for Doctors without Borders and ought to have been considered reliable (certainly worth more than a phone call or two). The story I hear is that one or two reporters from The New York Times decided to check out the stories by calling... our State Department. It took another year or two before the story of the death squads was confirmed.

When a president and his advisers lie to the American people and it takes years for mainstream journalists to 'uncover' the story despite abundant evidence early on, we need to think long and hard about where journalism stands these days and exactly what kind of creature American journalism has become. I strongly suspect that without the blogs and the internet message boards, a great deal might have fallen through the cracks that appeared in obscure places like the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau or the British paper, The Guardian— or even the back pages of The Washington Post or The New York Times, particularly on Saturday mornings, the black hole of mainstream journalism.

Political Blog Survey

Note: Myspace users see update at the end.

One of the largest listings of political blogs (if not the largest) is found at Technorati. In late December, the number of political blogs listed at Technorati was over 6,800; most blogs I regularly read usually list ten to fifty blogs in their links section.

I was curious to know who all these other bloggers were (and I felt the need to publicize my own site as well) so I took a deep breath and started surveying all the political blogs listed on Technorati. I used the alphabetical listing category under politics and sometimes it took several evenings to do a single letter (the letter 't' took the longest since Technorati doesn't drop 'the' from the title).

This was by no means a formal survey. For one thing, blogs were being deleted and added during the period I was doing the survey. Also, my main purpose was to locate active, frequently updated political blogs that would interest me enough to bookmark. Now I was very generous in what I bookmarked and yet I was pleasantly surprised at the number of quality blogs I found that are not listed in the links sections of the many blogs I already read.

I didn't click on every one of the more than 6,800 blogs listed. First, it became obvious that the number 6,800 is somewhat misleading. Many blogs are listed more than once and many blogs have been dormant for more than a 120 days; it became apparent that roughly 2,000 blogs fall in this category. It also became obvious that Technorati doesn't do much in the way of screening blogs that list themselves under politics. I surveyed many blogs that were really about other things and only occassionally was there a post about politics. I arbitrarily decided many of these did not qualify as political blogs. I really don't mind a variety of subjects on a political blog and in cases like Kevin Drum's blog on The Washington Monthly, I actually look forward to good non-political posts. But on many of the blogs I surveyed, there were far too many weddding pictures, baby pictures, music reviews, bad days at school or the office, technical discussions of electronics, travelogues, etc. and far too little to qualify them as political blogs. Roughly 3,100 so-called political blogs fell into the category of not-much-politics. Another 400 blogs or so fell into the category of too specialized because they were about a narrowly defined topic or they were an English-language blog about places like Malaysia; and I had to eliminate the 20 or 30 blogs in a foreign language. Some blogs were Canadian, Australian or British and I bookmarked some of the better ones (particularly if they wrote about international issues) but I considered most of them too specialized for my needs though a number of them are the equal of any American blog.

That left over 1,300 blogs that are actively about politics. I had no stomach to read every right wing screed after the first dozen or so but as far as I can guess, the blogs were reasonably divided between conservatives on one side, and moderates and liberals on the other. I should add that there were one or two dozen blogs on the left that were so over the top with conspiracy theories or so full of vitriol that I considered bookmarking them a waste of time (I can handle vigorous debate, and some good honest sarcasm and cynicism but when credibility falls completely by the wayside, there isn't much point in staying around). By the time I was done, I had bookmarked 624 political blogs that I didn't know about before. I would say that about 585 of these blogs are moderate to liberal (and a handful clearly way over to the left). The remaining 40 or so were a variety of conservative blogs that I bookmarked for reference. Some 'conservative' sites I bookmarked were the type difficult to read because of their hate-mongering, general dishonesty or outright silliness when defending Bush, but a number of conservative sites were reasonably straight forward in their posts and were readable. Some fell in the category of the thoughtful and rational conservative; whether I agree with them or not, I wish there were more in the category (see RealCurrents as an example).

So Technorati led me to 585 new moderate to liberal blogs (I'll call them progressive blogs). But I already had about 70 progressive blogs that I had bookmarked for a total of around 655 blogs listed on Technorati. I should add that I have about 35 progressive blogs bookmarked that don't appear on Technorati (or didn't appear at the time I did the survey). So let me summarize my survey of Technorati political blogs (all numbers are approximate):

Claimed Political Blogs on Technorati as of Dec, 2005: over 6,800
Duplicates or dormant blogs: 2,000
Blogs that aren't much about politics: 3,100
Political Blogs that are too specialized: 400
Active Political Blogs (my definition): 1,300
Political Blogs I bookmarked during survey: 624
Progressive Blogs I bookmarked: 585
Conservative blogs I bookmarked: 39
Technorati Blogs I had previously bookmarked: 70
Total Technorati progressive blogs bookmarked: 655
Non-Technorati progressive blogs bookmarked: 35

In the last year, I heard from different people that there are thousands of progressive blogs on the Internet. One person suggested tens of thousands of progressive blogs. Neither appear to be the case. Before I started the survey, one-third of the progressive blogs I had bookmarked were not listed on Technorati. So we have to ask how many people don't have their progressive blog listed on Technorati. If my arbitrary list of blogs just happened to be about the right ratio, the total list of progressive blogs that are active and of interest to American readers would be under a thousand. As far as I can tell, Technorati does a good job of representing most of the top 100 political blogs as measured by different surveys. So even if Technorati happens to miss many of the smaller progressive blogs that are active, it's not likely that there are more than let's say about 2,000 progressive blogs.

But I think it's safe to say there are thousands of people who comment on blogs and thousands more who leave comments on message boards. But I'll leave that survey to someone else.

One final word. The number of political blogs listed under Technorati has now climbed to over 7,800 blogs. That's an increase of 1,000 blogs in two months but I'm fairly certain that only about a hundred of those blogs would qualify for my aribitrary definition of an active progressive blog. Still, I wonder what's leading to the increased numbers?

Update: Myspace users interested in political blogs on Myspace should try IceRocket myspace search which hosts a search engine for Myspace. If you find something better, I hope you come back and let me know.