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Saturday, April 24, 2004
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 Saturday, April 24, 2004
started 4/24/2004; 8:22:01 AM - last post 4/24/2004; 11:18:47 PM
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Doc Searls - Saturday, April 24, 2004 
4/24/2004; 12:22:01 PM (reads: 4718, responses: 1)
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Disclosures 
| | I just added a comment to a conversation over at Jeremy Zawodny's blog. The bottom line, it seemed to me, was about the ethics of disclosure. Whether bloggers are Official Journalists or not, it's good practice to disclose financial interests, when we have them, in the companies we cover. To make clearer the nature of my own financial interests, I just added some detail to my bio page (which needs lots of updating on other grounds... I guess I'll get to it eventually). |
| | I also believe we need some kind of convention around this... Notes in the bio page, a "see disclosures" link, or something that doesn't serve as a huge distraction in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph, yet also achieves the ethical purpose. |
Getting a thousanth of the picture
| | There's a reason we say "I see what you mean," rather than "I read what you mean." Seeing is understanding. Reading is comprehension. The difference may be a matter of degree, or of force multiplication. |
| | Check out Sheila's survey regarding the Bush administration policy banning media coverage of fallen soldiers' remains. |
| | I think the administration's concerns for the bereaved are heartfelt and legitimate. But it's also hard to deny the policy's political benefits. If pictures are worth 1000 words, what are words worth? If you had to ban just one of the two, which would you ban? (First Amendment excepted.) |
He said, as he gets excerpted by another blog
| | Micah Sifry: Bloggers are editors, not journalists. His point is about roles in the journosphere. While we're busy arguing about whether or not blogging is journalism (it doesn't matter), bloggers serve the growing need for editors (it does matter). Sez Micah: |
| | In a word, what editors bring to the table is their sensibility. Of course, not all of the articles or news stories they select for our attention are picked because they are trustworthy. Sometimes, quite the opposite. But a good editor then tells us why that's the case. |
| | Why isn't it enough to rely on old fashioned eidtors to keep doing this for us? Two things have changed in recent years that have created space for bloggers to fill this essential role. One is that we are glutted with information like never before, and at a pace that we can't keep up with alone. It's not enough to pick up a weekly newsmagazine or journal of opinion to be guided by the editors' judgments on what the big stories are. By the time Time magazine or The Nation comes out in print, thanks to the requirements of printing schedules and the like, it's already partially out-of-date (unless the editors are really prescient in their selection of articles, which is often the case--hence the role of the journal of opinion as "thought-leader" or "agenda-setter.") |
| | But info-glut happens on a daily, even hourly, basis. Most individual bloggers don't have the time to sift every story or column either. But the alchemy of the blogosphere--where we each read or hear about a few things and blog them, and some of us read several other bloggers and reinforce their choices with our own echoes or dissents--produces a pretty good zeitgeist watch... |
| | The other space that bloggers are filling is in the department of truth-telling, or at least truth-claiming... |
Bonus kink
Probably more
AWL
| | I was absent yesterday while I drove, very slowly, from San Diego to Santa Barbara (not recommended on a Friday). Same will probably go for today and tomorrow while I get ready to go to Dublin on Monday (I'll be speaking here at the invitation of linux.ie), then London next Friday (hanging out with Euan and others). So: my blogging may vary. |
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Dean Landsman - Re: Saturday, April 24, 2004
4/25/2004; 3:18:47 AM (reads: 618, responses: 0)
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Doc, you write
>>I think the administration's concerns for the bereaved are heartfelt and legitimate. But it's also hard to deny the policy's political benefits.<<
Surely you jest. This administration has a heart for nothing but what fattens their wallets and their imperial resolve to "change the world" by foisting democracy (or what they consider "proper" democracy) on a traditionally theocratic people. "Peace through War" and "Democracy by Force" seem like the internal slogans of the Bush administration.
They want the oil revenues, and to create a paper tiger in Iraq as the US once had in the Shah's Iran.
It would be an entirely different discussion if we wanted to consider balance of power, a stronghold in an Arabic country in the region, and the ideal location for a bevy of American troops.
But that is not the discussion of the moment. The Administration is banning media coverage of the fallen soldiers' remains because this is an election year and that makes for bad press. Smells a little like Viet Nam, doesn't it? This administration wants to keep the bad news off of the living room TV screen.
This is an administration that holds and accuses both citizens of the US and foreign nationals without allowing them representation or communications. This is a regime that hides behind proclamations of "faith based" initiative while conducting unholy acts on those it chooses to hold at fault or as a threat to its imperial perpetuity.
We should not be in a position to make or even discuss a "pictures or notices" choice. American troops are dying by the day, and even greater numbers are wounded. Why is this information anything other than public? Are these the secret troops of a secret war? Is there some covert operation that none of us should know about, except for Condoleezza Rice, since she is the National Security Advisor?
An administration that prevents the public from knowing the truths and casualties of war is an administration that is not to be trusted.
The only choice we face is next November, when this administration should be shown the door.
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