Category Archives: Politics

The Evening Pravda

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Aw, isn’t this nice.

The billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev is to buy London’s Evening Standard tomorrow, in a dramatic move that would see him become the first Russian oligarch to own a major British newspaper, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

Lebedev is poised to buy a controlling stake in the ailing title, following a year of secret negotiations with Lord Rothermere, its owner and the chairman of the Daily Mail General Trust.

Under the terms of the deal Lebedev will purchase 76% of the newspaper, with the Associated Newspapers group retaining 24%. His son Evgeny, who lives in London, is due to sign the deal with Daily Mail General Trust tomorrow. The agreement will make Lebedev the paper's controversial new proprietor.

It’s a logical move, really. After all, the KGB already controls all Russia’s media outlets. It needed to diversify overseas.

So will Mr Lebedev be interfering in British politics? Perish the thought. “My influence would be next to zero,” he declared. He promised an “absolutely” hands-off approach, and said it would be up to the Standard’s editor-in-chief and journalists to agree the paper’s editorial line. Absolutely. But now at least his friend Vlad will get a fair deal from the Russophobic British press.

Wonder how long it will be until he has a peeerage.

So what is ‘appropriate’?

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Thoughtful post by David Robinson on Freedom to Tinker.

A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration's Change.gov website: polite but pointed user-submitted questions about the Blagojevich scandal and other potentially uncomfortable topics were being flagged as "inappropriate" by other visitors to the site.

In less than a week, more than a million votes-for-particular-questions were cast. The transition team closed submissions and posted answers to the five most popular questions. The usefulness and interest of these answers was sharply limited: They reiterated some of the key talking points and platform language of Obama's campaign without providing any new information. The transition site is now hosting a second round of this process.

It shouldn't surprise us that there are, among the Presdient-elect's many supporters, some who would rather protect their man from inconvenient questions. And for all the enthusiastic talk about wide-open debate, a crowdsourced system that lets anyone flag an item as inappropriate can give these few a perverse kind of veto over the discussion.

If the site's operators recognize this kind of deliberative narrowing as a problem, there are ways to deal with it…

There’s an interesting parallel here between the mindset of Obama supporters and that of ANC supporters when Mandela came to power in South Africa. I knew several South African journalists who had been passionate opponents of apartheid and who found it very difficult to report frankly on the deficiencies of the new black government run by people who they had hither admired and supported.

The sting in the long tail

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This morning’s Observer column.

'Scorpions', says Wikipedia, 'are eight-legged venomous arachnids. They have a long body with an extended tail with a sting.' Staff of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the self-appointed monitor of 'child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide' and of 'criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK', may well find themselves in rueful agreement about the sting. Except that what they've discovered is that Wikipedia also has one.

Pause for a review of recent events…

McCain-Palin: everything must go — including all those private cellphone numbers

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A Fox reporter went to the everything-must-go sale at McCain-Palin campaign HQ. And, guess what?

We saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.” We couldn’t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.

The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.

But most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.

We called some of the numbers.

“Somebody made a mistake,” one owner told us. “People’s numbers and addresses were supposed to be erased.”

“They should have wiped that stuff out,” another said. But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

We called the McCain-Palin campaign, who says, “it was an unfortunate staff error and procedures are being put in place to ensure all information is secure.”

Source: McCain Campaign Sells Info-Loaded Blackberry to FOX 5 Reporter.