Archive for 2004

UKRAINE UPDATE:

KIEV (Reuters) – Viktor Yanukovich said on Friday he was resigning as Ukraine’s prime minister, but refused to concede defeat in a presidential poll as a vast New Year crowd feted liberal Viktor Yushchenko’s victory in Kiev’s main square.

Yanukovich has denounced his rival’s victory in the re-run of last month’s rigged election and is pursuing legal challenges to overturn the outcome.

But in a New Year’s address, he admitted the appeals to election authorities and the Supreme Court stood little chance.

New Year’s photoblogging from Kiev here. Let’s hope 2005 lives up to this promise.

UPDATE: 2005-blogger Tim Blair reports from next year: “Welcome to 2005. From my futuristic Australian vantage point, I can exclusively reveal that 2005 is very similar to 2004; except, of course, for all the hover bikes.”

LOOKS LIKE A BLOGGING SUCCESS for Stefan Sharkansky, whose work on the Washington recount is credited in the Seattle Times.

IF YOU’RE IN SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS and looking for something to do tonight, go down to The Warehouse and see my brother’s band play!

WHEN REASON DIED AS A LIBERTARIAN MAGAZINE: It was at 1:17 p.m. Pacific Time today, with this post by Tim Cavanaugh, savaging a man who patronized the tourist industry in Thailand instead of donating money.

There’s still a bit of life in the comments, but that’s just the corpse twitching.

UPDATE: Kevin O’Meara emails:

My family had a tourist store in San Francisco that folded after the quake of ’89. It wasn’t the quake that did it – it was the fact that tourists avoided San Francisco for months after the quake, despite pleas from the city that things were basically fixed.

So, the argument is that the way you “help” Thailand after the tsunami is to boycott Thailand’s largest industry by refusing to visit there?

It’s not a boycott, exactly. Just a sort of sympathetic shunning, I guess.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Blair notes that the Thais are desperate for tourist dollars right now to finance rebuilding, and are asking tourists to come.

In fact, here’s what the Thais are saying: “If you want to help Phuket and people living here, come back for holidays!”

But what do they know? Greedy capitalists!

MORE: Rajan Rishyakaran: “You don’t help a people by boycotting their main industry . . . . Now is a really good time to vacation in other parts of Thailand – far less tourists! Bali’s open too – it’s far from Aceh. And trust me, most resorts in Penang are okay.”

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION: My earlier music post generated a lot of email, most of which I haven’t had time to digest. But I do like Chimera by Delerium, which was originally recommended to me by Steve Jurvetson, I think. Like Thievery Corporation, it’s especially good music for driving or blogging. Or, as in the case of this week’s trip, driving and blogging.

LA SHAWN BARBER says she’s made it big.

PATTERICO HAS POSTED PART II of his 2004 Year-in-Review for the Los Angeles Times.

THANKS TO ALL THE PEOPLE who sent good wishes regarding my father and grandmother. My dad’s at home now, says he feels great and hasn’t needed even a single pain pill.

My grandmother’s doing well, too. She was in the Lakeshore Rehabilitation Hospital in Birmingham. It was a terrific place, really. The rehab was excellent, and the people were extraordinarily nice. However, Lakeshore was originally a sanatorium for TB patients, and in fact it’s the very place where my grandmother’s mother died in 1928, when my grandmother was 14. She remembers going there with her brothers and sisters and seeing her mother wave from a window, since they weren’t allowed to meet in person for fear of infection. (Once her mother went off to the sanatorium, she took charge of raising her four younger siblings). That, plus the absence of any close family nearby, made staying there a bit difficult for her, and I think she’s better off here. The place she’s staying now even has cats, which she likes very much.

And thanks to the people who sent donations, but don’t send them on my account. I don’t need them to pay medical bills and I’d rather you sent any donations to a tsunami-relief charity or something, not to me.

UKRAINE UPDATE: “Viktor Yanukovych announced Friday that he will resign as Ukraine’s prime minister after losing to opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko in the rerun of the presidential election.”

TSUNAMI UPDATE: Amit Varma is travelling around Tamil Nadu and posting reports on his blog. It’s sobering reading.

Meanwhile, Craig Winneker reports from Koh Mook Island in Thailand.

STINGINESS UPDATE: Over $7.5 million raised by Amazon.com so far.

UPDATE: It’s over $8.5 million now.

MORE: U.S. government aid is now up to $350 million.

ABC NEWS MAKES BLOGGERS people of the year. But there’s something missing from the story . . . .

MY EARLIER MENTION OF MICHAEL WILSON’S NEW DOCUMENTARY ON MICHAEL MOORE expressed a hope that it would be shown on college campuses. Some people doubt that, based on allegations of leftist bias.

Leftist bias on campus is real, of course. But several things suggest that this film might find an audience on college campuses. The first is that people have noticed the heavy leftist tilt of things like speaker series and film committees, and there’s pressure for balance. The second is that Michael Moore — having quite possibly cost the Democrats the election — is in somwhat bad odor even on the left these days.

But the most important is that Wilson’s film is really about the ethics of documentary filmmaking, and the ease, and danger, of going over to the Dark Side by manipulating subjects and engaging in deceit; Wilson is quite forthright about his own struggles with temptation in that regard. That would seem to me to make Wilson’s film an excellent teaching tool, and highly suited for a college audience, both within Film Studies programs and beyond them.

MICHAEL POLLARD WRITES:

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber writes that “bloggers like Glenn Reynolds …. think that blogs should replace the mainstream media.” I don’t think you’ve written anything that can be fairly interpreted this way, but perhaps I’ve misread you?

I note that in this post you write that “the political blogosphere is to a large degree about media criticism,” and you approvingly quote a reader’s comment that “Blogs are the letter to the editor that the editor does not want to print.” (Here’s another post where you cast bloggers largely as media critics.) Doesn’t sound like you regard bloggers as a replacement (or even potential replacement) for the MSM. On the other hand, you’ve also “pushed the concept of bloggers as news collectors”. I don’t get the impression that you think news collecting blogs will someday replace the Washington Post and New York Times, but like I said, maybe I’ve misunderstood you.

Care to address Farrell’s post directly?

Well, okay. First, Farrell says that I “seem” to believe that blogs will replace big media, and maybe to him I do seem that way, at least to him, though I can’t think of what I might have written to that effect, and apparently neither can he as he provides no link or quote. So maybe he’s just characterizing my views that way so as to create an apparent contradiction that he can exploit. . . .

But I don’t think I’ve ever said that that blogs will replace Big Media. (As I have said, it’s possible to imagine some sort of distributed news-collective that would do the same kind of work that newspapers or TV networks do, but there’s nothing like that in existence, and if there were it wouldn’t be a blog). I’ve generally characterized the relationship between the blogosphere and the legacysphere as symbiotic, with the prediction that blogging would remain an amateur activity by and large. And it is, at least overall. Jay Rosen is right when he says the shift is as much tonal as structural, with blogs forcing a conversation. And as I’ve said repeatedly, the real threat to Big Media is not so much to their pocketbooks as to their self-importance.

My hope (not borne out as much as I’d have liked) has been that blogs would pressure Big Media to do a better job, both by criticism and by force of example. I also think that blogs do a lot to produce reporting of things that Big Media can’t or won’t report — with the tsunami reportage and the AP bogus-boos story being examples from each category. I do think that blogs (and the Internet in general, via things like CraigsList) are pulling eyeballs from Big Media, for which there is considerable evidence. But that hardly boils down to a claim that blogs will replace Big Media, and I don’t know where Farrell gets that idea. Neither, apparently, does he, as he provides no sourcing.

Farrell also conflates InstaPundit with the blogosphere as a whole, by suggesting that my statement that InstaPundit is not a news service somehow means that the blogosphere isn’t up to news-gathering. InstaPundit is mostly about punditry (hence the name) but many other blogs are otherwise. Via this conflation, though, we get a claim of hypocrisy on my part: The argument is: Reynolds thinks blogs should replace Big Media; Reynolds admits he can’t cover everything; Therefore Reynolds is a hypocrite.

So we have an unsupported mischaracterization of my opinion, followed by a duck-and-switch in which InstaPundit is equated with the blogosphere, leading to a charge of hypocrisy. Farrell’s treatment of this issue — in which he accuses me of engaging in a dodge when I say I’m not a news service — is rather dodgy itself, and does him no credit.

What’s more — and Farrell really knows too much to make this sort of mistake, I would think — individual blogs aren’t the unit of analysis, the blogosphere is. Unlike Big Media, who until recently could black out a story with the agreement of a very small number of players, bloggers can’t do that. If I had ignored the tsunami, or RatherGate, other people would have covered them, and my omissions would have made little difference. That’s a fundamental difference in media, and hence in responsibilities in terms of inclusiveness. (And it cuts both ways, as I suggest in a response to Chuck Divine in the comments to this post by Rand Simberg.)

Farrell wants to carve out a niche as a scholar of the blogosphere, and he’s done some interesting work together with Daniel Drezner. Posts like this one, however, make me wonder how reliable his insights are likely to be.

UPDATE: Reader Randy Beck points out this from last summer, which I had forgotten. Fortunately, not everyone had. That’s another thing about Big Media and the blogosphere. In both cases, our readers are smarter than we are. But bloggers both know it and, more importantly, admit it!

Admit it? Heck, I rely on it. Meanwhile, Power Line notes Farrell’s use of the term “slavering right-wing hacks,” but also observes:

I think Farrell is missing the distinction between particular blogs and the blogsphere as a whole. No one blog can cover everything and many blogs, such as ours, deal primarily in opinion. But one can envisage a blogosphere that readers rely on to obtain essentially everything they now get from a newspaper or a newscast. The basic facts of a story would come from links to news services. The analysis would come from specialized blogs or non-specialized blogs that happen to have expertise in the subject area. The op-ed type opinions would come from the opinion blogs. I actually think we’re pretty close to having such a blogosphere, although that’s clearly a matter for debate.

I still think, as I indicated here, Big Media organizations have an enormous advantage in gathering hard news. But that advantage obtains, of course, only to the extent that they choose to employ it, and are trusted when they do.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In an update to his post, Farrell accuses me of being “characteristically evasive.” This assumes that he has a point worth evading, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Farrell says that it is hypocritical of bloggers, like me, to criticize Big media for failing at comprehensiveness and objectivity when we bloggers are neither comprehensive nor objective.

If I were running a newspaper, he might have a point. But for a blogger to criticize a newspaper surely doesn’t require that the blogger run his or her blog as if it were a newspaper. InstaPundit’s tagline is “Making even the dumbest sh*t interesting,” not “All the news that’s fit to print.” Farrell seems to be straining awfully hard to find a basis for criticism here.

However, treating Farrell’s point as worthy of engagement — it is the holiday season after all — I’d say that it fails on its own terms. We’ve seen how little the Big Media standards that Farrell invokes amount to — just look at the response of the Star Tribune’s ombudsman in the Nick Coleman affair, for the most recent example in a long and sad series. Newspapers, etc., claim to be comprehensive and objective, and are not. Bloggers do not claim to be comprehensive or objective, and are not. Who’s being hypocritical here, again?

MORE: Hugh Hewitt suggests, correctly, that Farrell is being rather ungracious. (“Rather than graciously admit how perhaps he might have ‘overwritten’ a bit (‘slavering right wing hacks’), Henry has doubled down, and it isn’t pretty.”) No, it’s not — and it really is going to make it hard for me to take Henry seriously as a scholar of the blogosphere, now that he’s written off half of it so unpleasantly.

But it’s not just Henry. I’ve noticed that others among the lefty bloggers have been rather down on the blogosphere lately, uttering complaints about partisanship and the like, and I strongly suspect that it has a lot to do with the election results.

What’s funny is that the reason why they hate us — Kerry’s defeat in spite of overwhelming and underhanded support from Big Media — is misplaced. The power of the non-lefty blogosphere is, as I’ve written before, largely an artifact of Big Media’s bias in favor of the left.

Meanwhile, King Banaian thinks I’m wrong:

I disagree with Reynolds that “Big Media organizations have an enormous advantage in gathering hard news” unless he means the first AP reports from places like Aceh about tsunamis. On that he’d be right. But blogs get a huge payoff for gathering a piece of information that helps shape stories other bloggers and the MSM are gathering. It does so in an efficient fashion: Spontaneous order occurs because those blogs able to gather good information draw eyes, Technorati rankings and NZ Bear love. In contrast, the marginal value to an MSM organization of getting a particular piece of data is small; ad rates and subscriptions will not be affected by coverage of one particular story nearly as much. As the mainstream media comes to understand that order in the blogosphere, it will rely on blogs more and more to help with the information gathering — rather than compete, there will be some desire for cooperation between the blogosphere and the MSM. See, for a current example, the reliance on Sharkblog’s coverage of the Washington governor’s race by the Seattle Times. I think this absorption will only grow.

Hmm. I think that’s more like the symbiosis I was describing.

Eric S. Raymond has a somewhat different take.

LAST UPDATE TO THIS POST: Jay Rosen weighs in with much more in an update to this post — you’ll have to scroll to the bottom: “Farrell did something I have seen many journalists (Nick Coleman is one) do: refute an argument that isn’t out there about blogging and Big Media. I’m sure someone somewhere has said something like it, but it is extremely rare to encounter any regular observer of the scene, blogger or not, right or left, who thinks the major news media’s army of reporters is about to be “replaced” by bloggers. I just don’t find anyone claiming that, probably because it’s an absurd and overblown idea that falls apart after about a minute of thought.”

TSUNAMI UPDATE: Is Burma hiding something? It’s likely that casualties there are much higher than reported, alas.

Meanwhile, here’s a report that some expect the death toll in Aceh province of Indonesia alone to reach 400,000, which is absolutely mind-boggling.

DNS PROBLEMS AT BELLSOUTH.NET: Rand Simberg notes a problem that BellSouth hasn’t noticed yet.

Actually, I just started experiencing this during the worm outbreak last week; before that everything was fine and pages loaded quickly. But since then (and, perhaps not coincidentally as I supposed, since Bellsouth rolled out some new web features around the same time) I’ve had the problem of transient DNS failures, intermittent slow page loads, etc. just as he describes.

ANOTHER REMINDER not to take tsunami charitable appeals at face value when you don’t know the background. On the other hand, don’t be too suspicious: I came back to a mailbox stuffed with emails from people worried that Amazon is taking a cut off tsunami donations. Er, but the front page says that 100% of the money will go the the Red Cross, so I believe the answer to that is “no.”

POOR MICHAEL MOORE: First, he loses the election for the Democrats, and now Michael Wilson’s documentary on Michael Moore is out. (Yeah, it says it was out Nov. 1, but I pre-ordered it, and I just got my copy this week.)

The Insta-Wife and I have seen it, and it’s very good. I hope it’ll be showing on HBO, and on college campuses around America, soon.

MADE IT HOME, with my grandmother dropped off at the new rehab center. Adding to the complications, my dad had a pacemaker installed today on short notice (I found out about it when he called my cellphone last night in the car) but he’s doing fine now and says he feels well enough to drive himself home. Back later, but I’m not sure when.

In the meantime, read this story on podcasting by Dan Kennedy, and this piece on exporting the Ukraine miracle by Max Boot: “The triumph of the Orange Revolution should dispel the quaint notion still prevalent in many Western universities and foreign ministries that democracy is a luxury good suitable only for rich countries with a tradition of liberalism stretching back centuries.”

Kaus has a lot, too.

HERE ARE SOME LINKS to people blogging from Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

RADLEY BALKO writes that there was actually a lot of good news in 2004. There’s a lot of it, and the column is a must-read.

BILL WHITTLE’S NEW BOOK, Silent America: Essays from an America at War, is now available on Amazon. It’s doing quite well in the rankings already. If you haven’t bought it yet, well, why not?