Chris Patten gets a proper job at last

Chris Patten, former Cabinet Minister, former Governor of Hong Kong, and current EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, has been elected Chancellor of Oxford University. One of my colleagues was an undergraduate at Balliol with him and remembers sprawling on a lawn with the great man after Finals ended. The conversation turned to what they were going to do after university. “I’m going into politics”, Patten said. “Oh really”, said my colleague, “which party?”. “Don’t know yet”, replied Patten, “I’ve written to both”. I liked what Patten said recently when a journalist asked him whether the EU would contribute to the rebuilding of Iraq after the Anglo-American invasion. He replied that he thought the appropriate rule would be what china and porcelain shops all over the world say to browsing customers: “If you break it, you own it”.

The White House press corps quote game

From Scott Rosenberg of Salon: Readers of the letters page on Jim Romenesko’s media news blog were treated this week to a remarkable admission about how the White House news operation cooks quotes — and how the press plays along. Washington Post economics correspondent Jonathan Weisman told the sorry tale, in detail that makes any conscientious reporter cringe. Weisman wanted to interview a particular administration economist; the White House press office insisted not only that the interview be considered off the record, but also that all quotes from the interview be run by the press office before publication. (I’m finding this confusing already since I’ve always understood “off the record” to mean no quotes at all — “Not for attribution” is when you’re okay with being quoted but don’t want your names on the quote.)

Weisman’s source actually said, “This is probably the most academic proposal ever to come out of an administration,” but upon reviewing his quote, the press office said, the official wanted it to read, instead, “This is probably the purest, most far reaching economic proposal ever to come out of an administration.” Gee, I wonder why?

Weisman assented to this whole process but later had second thoughts: “The notion that reporters are routinely submitting quotations for approval, and allowing those quotes to be manipulated to get that approval, strikes me as a step beyond business as usual.”

Uh, yeah. It’s more than a step beyond business as usual. It’s insane, outrageous, unconscionable. This is Journalism 101; it’s basic. You don’t let people review their quotes after they talk to you because they always have second thoughts about the most revealing things that they say. In the situation Weisman describes, of course, we don’t even know whether it was the original speaker who had second thoughts, or whether the quote-doctoring was being stage-managed by a press office enforcing a party line.

I empathize with the reporter whose tough assignment is to write stories about any White House — particularly one, like Bush’s, that is determined to close ranks and let no truth trickle out to the press. If your job is to get quotes from the White House and the White House says you don’t get quotes unless you play by our rules, maybe you have no choice.

What you do have a choice about is what you reveal about the process by which you got your quotes. And so, while I’m grateful that Weisman chose to blow the whistle via his letter to Romenesko, the place he should have done this was in his story. Just as a good newspaper will alert its readers to the fact that a report from the front has been reviewed by military censors, a quote from the White House that the White House got to doctor should come with, in essence, a consumer warning.

What I’d really love to know, now that Weisman has opened the door on this abuse a crack, is just how widespread it is. Weisman says it’s “fairly standard.” If newspaper editors told their reporters to tell readers every time a quote had been pre-reviewed by the White House, how frequently would the columns of the Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the other pillars of our journalistic establishment have to stop to note such a betrayal of their own ethics? And how soon would the insidious practice end?

[Source: Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

George Soros on American over-confidence
He was writing in the Straits Times but its archives are for subscribers only, so I can’t point to the online source, but here’s an excerpt:

“I see parallels between the Bush administration’s pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not arise out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but misconception distorts reality. Here, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of American supremacy the misconception. For a while, reality reinforces the misconception, but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable.”

It’s not the war itself we should worry about, but the aftermath, Soros argues: “Rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. Oil prices could fall, stock markets could celebrate, consumers could resume spending, and business could step up capital expenditures. America would end its dependency on Saudi oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations could start with North Korea without loss of face. That is what Mr Bush counts on. But military victory in Iraq is the easy part. It is what comes after that gives pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception which gave rise to it. That is to be feared here.”

The Information Society Directive

Useful overview in GigaLaw. And Bernt Hugenholtz’s critique is here.

David Reed goes back to first principles

Our broadcasting systems are based on a fundamental assumption — that spectrum is a finite resource, rather like land, to be allocated by governments to selected beneficiaries, i.e. broadcasters, mobile phone companies, etc. But what if that assumption is wrong? In a fascinating Salon article, The myth of interference, David Weinberger outlines Internet architect David Reed’s argument that the idea of ‘finite’ spectrum is really a consequence of bad engineering, not physical principles. Since Reed is one of the great engineers of our time, this is something one has to take seriously. Doubt if the FCC or our national treasuries will though. As societies, we have too deep an investment in the original misconception.

End-to-end Arguments in System Design

The classic paper on the underlying architecture of the Net by Saltzer, Reed and Clark.

Press Freedom — what freedom?

From Karlin Lillington’s weblog…

Gavin’s link to Tom McGurk’s amazing conversation last Sunday with venerable BBC correspondent Katie Adie, on the US censorship of how journalists present the situation in Iraq, has been picked up by Megnut, so imagine this will get a good and needed airing in the US. Basically, the Pentagon has told journalists they may well be fired upon as they try to upload information back to networks (presumably because the signals may be confused — obviously not because the journalists are considered hostile to the US POV – but really, this is a shocking sort of threat even as it stands). There’s a link to the show transcript as well. Unfortunately, Megnut seems to doubt this could be true because the US media isn’t reporting on it [mirthless laughter]. As an American journalist living abroad, who’s been back several times to the US in recent weeks, I can tell ya, folks: the US MEDIA DOESN’T REPORT a whole heck of a lot of perspectives/stories/breaking news/background that would conflict with the Bush admin position and what it does report is done so as if reporting on the home team at a football match. I noted Dan Gillmor’s wholly correct take on this recently; Gavin also links to it here. The worst perpetrators are Fox and CNN — CNN of course also being the main source of many American’s news on the pending war. What has become of this once-pioneering network? It is just a yapping lapdog these days.

Small worlds and networks

I’ve been reading Barabasi’s book Linked: the New Science of Networks, which is not the world’s greatest read but very interesting nonetheless. It’s clear that there’s a lot of intriguing mileage in the notion that the principles underpinning networks span both technical and social systems. Then I came across Steven Johnson’s article about social network mapping software, which in turn reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Cat’s Cradle and Howard Rheingold’s new book, Smart Mobs, which I’ve ordered and Amazon have just told me in an email is being delivered tomorrow. I’ve also had a look at the MIT work in this area. And all without leaving my study. No wonder people love the Web.

Paranoia and chips

According to Today’s Specials: Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast, Congressman Bob Ney (R-Ohio) ordered the cafeterias in the House of Representatives to remove the word “French” from all menus. Now being served: Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast. Wonder if this is true. [Thanks to: Boing Boing Blog]

Why are the US media so supine?

Scarifying analysis of Dubya’s press conference and of the way the White House Press Corps has lost whatever bottle it once had. It’s pathetic. Where is the Fourth Estate when the country really needs it?