The feebleness of mainstream American media

Paul Krugman is a terrific economist and a great newspaper columnist. His cool, sane perspective on the Bush regime is one of the few bright sparks in the prevailing darkness. Here’s a report on his gig at Harvard the other day:

“Krugman was a riot on Big Media’s docility.  “If Bush said the earth is flat, of course Fox News would say ‘yes, the earth is flat, and anyone who says different is unpatriotic.’  And mainstream media would have stories with the headline: ‘Shape of Earth: Views Differ.’…and would at most report that some Democrats say that it’s round.”  There’s “something deeply dysfunctional,” he observed, with established media facing “something we’ve not seen before, an epidemic of lying about policy.”  Three years of Times columnizing have been “a story of radicalization” for the liberal (but not too liberal) economist who was hired by Howell Raines in 1999 to explain trade policy, globalization and the Internet bubble.   He has become instead the irrepressible child watching the Bush parade, speaking truth to heedless power.”

Blue Screen of Death — the stats

It’s just two years since I stopped using Windows. What do I miss? Viruses, and worms, obviously. But most of all, I haven’t seen a Blue Screen of Death in two years. Instead I have Mac and Linux machines which run without rebooting for weeks, and which never seem to experience the total system failure which is a Windows speciality. In an interesting article, John Dvorak has been doing some calculations based on something Bill Gates said recently about crashes. Quote:

“Gates said that 5 percent of Windows machines crash, on average, twice daily. Put another way, this means that 10 percent of Windows machines crash every day, or any given machine will crash about three times a month. Since Bill is a math junkie, I have to assume this number is real and based on something other than a phone survey…

Now according to StatMarket.com, as of March 2003, Windows XP had 33.41 percent global market share among operating systems. Let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and make Windows XP’s share an even 35 percent at this point. How many computers are in use? According to the Computer Industry Almanac, there were 603 million worldwide in 2001, and the growth rate seems to be around 10 to 15 percent per year. Let’s be relatively conservative, and add just under 100 million to get a round number of 700 million PCs. With 10 percent of them crashing daily, we have 70 million crashes every 24 hours. “

Now just try this thought experiment: imagine if Ford released cars with this kind of failure rate. And imagine if we changed our consumer legislation to make Microsoft liable for the instability and insecurity of its software. Now that would have an interesting impact on its share price.

The gist of the problem with Blair and Bush

Terrific column by Hugo Young pointing out that Blair effectively surrendered sovereignty when he decided that the UK should throw in its lot with the US. Quote:

“Intelligence, in other words, has become a flexible friend, a political instrument. Its chief agent, John Scarlett, moreover, has become a crony of No 10 rather than a distant and detached truth-teller. Among the many corruptions this war has brought about, we can therefore say, is the degradation of what was once advertised, and globally agreed, to be a jewel in the Whitehall apparatus.

This happened for a prior reason, which is not new but deserves frequent repetition. The intelligence, culminating in the dossier, had to fit a prior decision. This has been the great over-arching fact about the war that Blair will never admit but cannot convincingly deny. He was committed to war months before he said he was. Of course, he wanted it buttered up. He wanted a UN sanction. He fought might and main to push Bush in that direction. But he was prepared to go to war without it.

He needed this skewed intelligence to make the case, and he didn’t really mind what he had to say to get it. He had made his commitment to Bush, stating among other extraordinary things that it was Britain’s national task to prevent the US being isolated. But he was also in thrall to the mystic chords of history. He could not contemplate breaking free of ties and rituals that began with Churchill, and that both Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence – the Foreign Office is somewhat wiser – have cultivated, out of fear and expectation, for decades.”

People in glasshouses…

… shouldn’t throw stones. (Also, they should undress in the dark.) One of the more nauseating aspects of British press coverage of the Hutton Inquiry is the vicious attacks on the BBC delivered daily by the right-wing print media. To describe this sermonising as sanctimonious cant would be to dignify it. But yesterday’s Guardian carried a terrific piece by its editor, Alan Rusbridger, which beautifully pricks the bubble. He’s particularly good on Murdoch’s Times and Conrad’s loony Telegraph.

I expect that nobody will come out of Hutton looking good. But the BBC (though it made some mistakes) looks better than most. The Corporation should, however, now revise its policy of allowing BBC journalists to convert the celebrity they acquire as a result of doing their BBC job into freelance celeb employment. Andrew Gilligan, for example, the BBC reporter at the heart of the inquiry, should not have been allowed to write columns in rabid right-wing newspapers like the Mail on Sunday. Ditto for John Simpson, the former Foreign Editor of the BBC who was forever writing books and columns in reactionary periodicals about his adventures at the licence-fee payer’s expense. Ditto for the sanctimonious Fergal Keane — the nearest thing the media world has to Wackford Squeers. Journalists should never be celebs because that makes them the story.

Googled!

I wrote once that Google was one of the wonders of the world, but even I am regularly amazed by it. Recently Quentin discovered that if you type arithmetic expressions into the search box, then Google provides the answer. It will, apparently, tell you everything from 5+5 to the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight. But now comes something even wackier. Someone’s written a hack which uses Google’s image search to ransack the web for random photographs. Think of the Web as a giant collection of shoeboxes and you’ve got it. Amazing what people take pictures of.

Mein Camp

Simon Waldman is Director of Digital Publishing at the Guardian. He also publishes a really nice Blog. Some time ago, someone gave him a 1938 copy of Homes and gardens magazine which had a gooey, gushing piece about Hitler’s country retreat in the Bavarian Alps. It was the usual tosh. The predominant color scheme of Hitler’s “bright, airy chalet” was “a light jade green.” Chairs and tables of braided cane graced the sun parlor, and the Führer, “a droll raconteur,” decorated his entrance hall with “cactus plants in majolica pots.” (Gosh — nothing changes.) Simon scanned the piece and put it on his site. Then he received a message from the current publishers of H&G demanding that he take it down. So he did, and wrote a nice reply to the Editor. But of course by then the thing was all over the Net. The case raises interesting issues about copyright and fair use, as the NYT pointed out this weekend.

It all depends what you mean by…

On this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was interviewed by presenter James Naughtie. Straw was being his usual evasive self. After one particularly slippery passage Naughtie burst out “Oh come on, that’s Jesuitical”. I fell to wondering how many listeners would know what that meant. Naughtie clearly thought of it as synonomous with ‘cleverly evasive’, but strictly speaking it simply means ‘of or pertaining to the jesuits’, the religious order founded by St Ignatius of Loyola in 1534. As someone who was educated by the Jesuits, I assumed for years that the term ‘Jesuitical’ was a compliment, but somewhere along the line the Order’s reputation for tortuous justification of indefensible propositions gained the upper hand, and the term acquired its modern connotation: ‘characteristic of their principles and methods. designing; cunning; deceitful; crafty’. In this case, therefore, I suppose Naughtie was correct.

Come to think of it, the severely bespectacled Straw would make a rather good Jesuit. I can see him in a soutane now.

Why micropayments won’t work

If you could sell a joke a day for a cent a day to enough people on the Internet then you’d be a billionaire. So ran the reasoning in the early days of the Net. The only problem was that there was no way of collecting the cent — the ‘micropayment’. But that would surely come, one day. I have to confess that I believed that too, in my time.

But now comes a terrific essay by Clay Shirky, one of the most thoughtful commentators on the Net, arguing that the cent-a-day scenario is untenable, and explaining why. He’s right and I was wrong.

At last! Clarification on Iraq from Dubya

Ah, so that’s it. The reason the US and the Brits invaded Iraq was to lure in all those crazy Islamic terrorists and have a turkey shoot. Only problem is that it’s not clear yet who are the turkeys.

The nub of the Kelly story

Politics, so the cliche goes, is a rough business, and so it is. But rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse of how political and ideological expediency rides roughshod over human beings as is emerging from the Hutton inquiry. Yesterday, Dr. David Kelly’s widow and daughter gave evidence on how he was left twisting in the wind by the Ministry of Defence and the Prime Minister’s office. Nobody comes out of this looking good — including the media, though some organs (especially Murdoch’s Sunday Times) behaved especially disgracefully. Here’s how the Guardian summed it up this morning in a Leader:

“Though Mrs Kelly’s evidence was at all times calm and restrained, there were here and there explosive words such as betrayal: his betrayal – his own word – at the hands of superiors who were ready to feed his name to the press, who failed to give him support when he so needed it, who were even content, as the media pack closed in, to leave him to find his own place to hide. If the MoD (and behind them, as we now know, 10 Downing Street) were cold and neglectful, the media, descending on the Kellys’ Oxfordshire village, were predatory. Here, too, there was a betrayal, as the Sunday Times, on the basis of a fraught and hurried conversation, printed what looked like a full-scale interview, inevitably suggesting, Dr Kelly believed, that he had broken his word not to talk to the press.

The big events, such as the call to appear before select committees, one of them televised, and the small, unremarked ones tightened the pressure. Jack Straw, or so someone told Dr Kelly, had been disappointed that no one more senior could be found to accompany him when the foreign secretary met the foreign affairs select committee. Yet again, this acknowledged expert, who lived for a job to which he subordinated everything else in his life, had been demeaned and slighted – treated, he said, like a fly. ”