Sandhill Trek

Updates...

I have updated two posts below.  Yesterday I was working on an elaborate post called "Shadows are falling."  While I was bouncing around in my Firefox tabs, finding new links and inserting them in the post, I ran into a problem that closed my browser for me and erased everything in the browser based TypePad "Compose a new post" form.  My fault really... the proper way to compose a post is offline and then cut and paste into the blog-tool form.  My excuse was that I had no idea it would be such a lengthy post.  It was quite impressive really.  Sad that it evaporated.  Anyway, I created a new post with that title and it took me an entirely different direction out of the starting blocks.  The common point of departure for these posts was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution as the official beginning of the American war in Viet Nam.

I've updated last night's post to include a link that was in the earlier post, a link to a 1994 column by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon that describes the climate of journalistic credulity that helped us slide into that war.  They end their column with a quote from Sydney Schanberg:  "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

My second update is to the post relating to the deserved come-uppance of that scabrous barnacle on the vessel of American journalism, Ben Domenech.  This pissant's resignation from the Washington Post before the paper had to fire him because of his plagiarism was wonderfully reported by Tim Rutten in an online column for the LA Times.  Since Domenech is "a poster child" for the home school movement, and his ethics mirror those of the modern Republican party, I think it's important to spread the word of his rapid rise and fall.  An excellent blogger on home schooling, Daryl Cobranchi, criticized my post as an example of copyright infringement.  Since Sandhill Trek is not for profit and represents an effort to be transparent, and since I aim for proper attribution and "fair use," I would take issue with the accusation of infringement (especially since it comes from a third party).  Even so, my attribution was a little sloppy, and while I had linked to the source I hadn't included the author's name.  I've updated that post to credit Tim Rutten for his insightful work.

In general I think home schoolers and "libertarians" have abandoned their responsibilities to the community at large.  There may be a "selfish gene" (or "shellfish jeans" or whatever), but the "libertarian" meme certainly doesn't stand up to rigorous ethical scrutiny.  Creation of a safe and nurturing place for all of us and our children is certainly not possible if we withdraw from the community and isolate ourselves from community interests.  That said, I'm sure that public education, "the school system," has stagnated in many communities.  The challenge for those communities is for the citizens to find a way to address the issues rather than avoid them.

Suck-dog plagiarist resigns...

Tim Rutten, writing in his "Regarding Media" column online in the LA Times, says:

"Ben Domenech is a co-founder of RedState, the web's leading Republican community blog. He began his career as a political journalist covering Capitol Hill, writing for numerous publications and working as a contributing editor to National Review Online. After 9/11, he abandoned the journalism field for a taxpayer-funded life and was sworn in as the youngest political appointee of President George W. Bush. Following a year as a speechwriter for HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and two as the chief speechwriter for Texas Senator John Cornyn, Ben is now a book editor for Regnery Publishing, where he has edited multiple bestsellers and books by Michelle Malkin, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Hugh Hewitt."

In fact, Domenech is something of a poster child for contemporary social conservatism. He was home-schooled by his mother — that's the new right-wing school tie — in the impeccably red states of South Carolina and Virginia, and his father is the White House liaison to the Department of the Interior. The younger Domenech began writing for Human Events at 15. Under the pseudonym "Augustine" — no lack of chutzpah there — he contributes to a variety of rather nasty online discussions in the course of which he has compared the Supreme Court to the KKK because of its abortion rulings, called Coretta Scott King "a communist" and described Teresa Heinz Kerry as resembling an "oddly shaped egotistical ketchup-colored Muppet."

Definitely no manners class in that home school, and he must have had a cold the day mom touched on facts and logic.

By Thursday night, WashingtonPost.com had received more than 1,000 protests over the appointment. Brady told the Post's Howard Kurtz that "Domenech is 'controversial' and the fact that liberals object to his hiring 'shouldn't really be a shock to anybody.' "

What did turn out to be shocking is the fact that the conservative wunderkind is a serial plagiarist with a documented record — turned up by liberal bloggers — stretching back to his undergraduate days at the College of William & Mary. (One of the people he ripped off was P.J. O'Rourke and nobody at his school apparently noticed. Those kids should get out more.)

No ethics class at that home school, apparently.

In an announcement posted midday Friday, Brady said that Domenech had resigned after the Post had opened its own plagiarism inquiry.

Blog World Turns Corner

Winer is quitting to write fiction.  Look out Stephen King!  Allan Moult brought us Leatherwood Online a couple years ago.  Today, the head lemur, Alan Herrell points to another blog to webPub upgrade:  The Vision Thing closes down and Vision Monthly (now on issue number three) is declared its official successor.

Meanwhile, I've been invited to contribute to the Balanced News Blog.  (And for balance today I also opened a MySpace account.)

Knight-Ridder

craigslist ought to buy the 12 papers that McClatchy is letting go.   The synergy of dead trees and pixels would be mighty powerful ad revenue-wise. 

Ben Paynter

A Tale of Two Soldiers

Two Kansas City grunts who took bullets on the same day struggle with surviving the war.

By  Ben Paynter

Article Published Mar  2, 2006

US Propaganda Violations of the Smith-Mundt Act

The following extensive extract is from Timothy Karr's MediaCitizen blog...

Propaganda Track Record

The question now before Congress and the Department of Justice is whether this spending merits the enforcement of long standing prohibitions against "covert propaganda." The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 forbids the domestic dissemination of government-authored propaganda or "official news" deliberately designed to influence public opinion or policy. The law singles out materials that serve "a solely partisan purpose." The GAO has already found at least four separate occasions that Bush administration agencies violated this and other federal restrictions.

A recently inserted provision into an annual spending bill would require federal agencies to include a "clear notification" within any prepackaged news story that was paid for by the government. Though this new legislation still floats somewhere between a Senate committee and the floor.

Given its track record, it’s more than likely that the White House has set other illegal propaganda efforts loose in the media mainstream. We just don’t know about them yet.

The Public Eye and Prosecutor's Sword

While the compounding evidence is damning, the GAO lacks the teeth to enforce laws against the ongoing abuse. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has final say over executive branch legal matters. And GAO and Justice Still don’t see eye to eye on covert propaganda, specifically on the issue of unidentified video news releases.

Diane Farsetta on media ethics...

A year ago, Dan Gillmor appeared via phone on Madison's WORT community radio station talking about his book, "We the Media."  Diane Farsetta hosted the show, and she had me in the studio with her providing a little local blogger color.

Today on Alternet I noticed a reference to a recent Sandhill post.  That made me happy, but I was happier still at the company I kept there...  Diane Farsetta, was quoted extensively regarding media ethics.

I haven't seen Diane since October at the UN Day banquet here in Madison, but her picture in the Alternet posting reminded me of what a good and true person she is.  I am so proud to know her.

Euan Semple

Euan has left the BBC.  This news came in the same week that the Financial Times published a nice feature highlighting his good work there.  That article ends with the tag line,

“I’m solving problems most companies don’t even know they have.”

There's a story behind this separation and I hope Euan can bring himself to share the gory details.  What must it have been like to head up knowledge management for the Beeb, eschewing the seven figure solutions for low cost blog and wiki alternatives?  What must the big guns in IT have thought, the people who measure their success by how much their budget increases annually?  What will happen to the 3,500 or so people who are served by the KM solutions Euan has shepherded during his tenure?

Update:  Euan corrects the material I referenced from the Financial Times.  He says,

... ironically given it was the FT, the figures were incorrect! There are actually 13,000 staff using our forums, 1800 using our wikis and 200 or so blogging. The 3,500 refers to a mailing list and not to the Adobe interest group as the article suggests.

Here at Sandhill, a somewhat smaller operation than the Beeb, we were prepared to be wickedly impressed by a program with an impact on as many as three thousand users.  To draw over 13,000 people directly into internal corporate conversation is monumental.  Congratulations Euan!

Details

Proud dad brags about son's short freelance piece in Details magazine this month.  (Page 122.  Proud dads know that sort of thing).

Pole Dancing in St. Louis

Douglas McCollam suggests in the current CJR that "What newspapers really need above all else , is ownership that values journalism and understands that the work of gathering, writing, and publishing the news is an inherently inefficient business that is in a period of profound transition." 

I don't know if Craig's List, Google, and blogging will eat their lunch, but at least one privately held alternative weekly journalistic endeavor, the Village Voice/New Times Media Incorporated Global Worldwide Alternative Weekly McDonalds Press Syndicate and Would-You-Like-Fries-With-That Unlimited is thriving in this brave new world of corporate journalism mergers.   The combination that Gawker characterizes as "a 17-paper behemoth of back-page massage ads" is at its best this week in the St. Louis River Front Times article on a recent pole dancing contest at the Hustler Club.  The prize was $500 and a trip to Cincinnati to compete for the National Pole Princess title.

The RFT feature is about 4000 words on the art, the market, the personal trials of pole dancers.  It's best summed up, I think, in the last few paragraphs:

"We want to be featured in strip clubs all over the country, taking the place of porn stars," says Michelle. "Honestly, the porn stars, all they have is that they're porn stars. Most have been strippers at some time in their lives, so they dance like strippers. They usually don't have a performance — it's not artistic.

"A lot of feminists consider burlesque and striptease-dancing to be degrading to women because we're objectified, but I don't see it that way," she continues. "I love being a woman, and I feel I'm celebrating the beauty of women. I can't control how others see me, I can only control how I see myself, and I love celebrating my womanhood, my sexuality and my art."

Katrina sees herself as a role model.

"If you say you're a pole dancer, people think you're just some stripper who gets on her back and splays her legs," she declares. "They probably just expect two girls to hold onto a pole and make out. But when we get up there and don't do that — when we show that we really are using our bodies to do interesting things — it helps people break their stereotypes a little bit."

It's nice to know that alternative weekly journalism is in good hands.... thanks New Times!  Thanks Village Voice Media!