Thursday, May 13, 2004

What's news (2) Our preferred local news show -- amazing that such a thing still exists -- comes on at 10 p.m. But lately, it's had competition: From "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central. I'm sorry -- this might be the only way I can make it through our "Giant Mess O' Potamia". 11:31:22 PM    comment []

What's news (1) A double bankshot from the world of Journalism Navel Gazing: The Online Journalism Review brief on an item on the Poynter Institute site: "A new Intelliseek service could be a godsend for Web-savvy editors, Poynter Online reports. The "automated trend discovery system" Blogpulse.com compiles the most popular names, phrases and links in more than 1 million blogs to find out what issues and personalities might be tomorrow's front-page news. Steve Outing, a senior editor at Poynter, was surprised to see that the top news stories -- prisoner abuse and beheadings in Iraq -- did not top Blogpulse's "key phrase" list. Rather, according to Blogpulse, many Weblogs are more concerned with the Mexican air force's UFO sighting, Ralph Nader's Reform Party endorsement and Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader who allegedly beheaded American Nicholas Berg." Wow. Torturegate didn't make the list. And parenthetically, but without the parens, I absolutely love the use of "allegedly" in that description of the Berg murder. Yes, journalists must pantomime their belief in the presumption of innocence and objective distance in criminal matters (even though they generally report the cops' or government's word as gospel). But this is where that exercise turns fatuous. Someone proclaiming himself to be Zarqawi is carrying out the murder on camera; further the reported evidence points to Zarqawi's personal role; and finally, there's no legal allegation at issue -- there's a video, a claim, and a bounty on a wanted man's head. So if you want to be careful, you could say "the al-Qaeda leader suspected of beheading of Nick Berg" or, "Zarqawi, the apparent self-proclaimed killer of Nick Berg" or something like that. But please, don't use "allegedly." 11:24:32 PM    comment []

Lovely parting gift Well, this is a crummy picture of a lovely objet d'art -- the paperweight TechTV gave us last Friday at the end of the meeting in which our layoff was explained. It's a heavy sucker -- exactly what you're looking for if you've got a homemade trebouchet. It took a certain kind of courage, or something, to hand these things out (we actually had to sign for them) instead of just taking them out to the landfill. Our camerafolks took the one pictured and put it on a small turntable lighted from below. Totally prismatic. 4:45:16 PM    comment []

Constructive criticism One of the really disheartening things about Bush's Baghdad Blunder is the fact we'll be stuck with the consequences for decades beyond the point where Laura Bush holds a press conference at the spread in Crawford to announce W doesn't remember who he is anymore, much less why he wanted Iraq so bad. The challenge for the Bush opposition now is to offer some constructive ideas for how to do what the reigning boneheads seem incapable of -- actually improving the situation in Iraq, if only as a prelude to our saying, "It's been nice, but now we have to go home and have a nice cold one." An example of this sort of constructive approach comes from the liberal Center for American Progress, which just put out a list of suggestions for what the U.S. authorities ought to do to deal with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. 4:23:11 PM    comment []

Sick Well, I didn't write yesterday. Felt flu-ish, though I wasn't totally flattened. To break the monotony of aches. nausea and cold sweats, I spent part of the day reading "The Devil in the White City," the best-seller that weaves together the stories of 19th century America's most marvelous world's fair and its most methodical serial murders, which unfolded side by side in Chicago. The book's very good. I also pondered the cause of my brief illness -- purely physical, or a combination of a bug and overwhelming Iraq crap, between the Bush-Rumsfeld post-Abu Ghraib publicity offensive and the heart-sickening murder of that poor kid from Pennsylvania. 4:09:44 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.