Bloggers Push Story U.S. Media Has Been Ignoring

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“This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.”. So begins the “Downing Street Memo” and contained within is the revelation that “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” – way back in July of 2002!

A week or so ago I opined on how little attention this has garnered in the press.

Dan Gillmor has called the coverage a failure of U.S. media.

Now I’m not a blog triumphalist (err… maybe I am?) but PSoTD has been studiously tracking how bloggers have been keeping this story alive while organizations we trust to provide us with the news have passed on it.

At last count there were 2353 related blog postings (found via Technorati) vs. only 394 related news articles (found via Google News).

Why is that?

The Daily News Daily News: “Deep Throat is 91. He and the rigorous media that held a president accountable are footnotes in history. Their contemporary counterpart? Deep Indifference.”

Of note: Bolton is implicated in trying to keep weapons inspectors from Iraq: “John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat… A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani “had to go,” particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.”

Wow.

Today, if I have PSoTDs technique down, there were 616 mentions at Google News. A huge jump most likely due to yesterday’s Bush/Blair press conference where a brave reporter asked them directly about the memo.

Must Read Jay Rosen at PressThink

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Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion – PressThink:

…she “loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden.” That’s the lord’s prayer in the mainline church of journalism right there. And I think it’s dead on too when McGrath (now a happy freelancer) adds: “I’m still that idealistic.”

Deans of Journalism, scribble a note: Investigative reporting, exposing public corruption, and carrying the mantle of the downtrodden were taught to McGrath not as political acts in themselves–which they are–and not as a continuation of the progressive movement of the 1920s, in which the cleansing light of publicity was a weapon of reform–which they are–but just as a way of being idealistic, a non-political truthteller in the job of journalist. (Which is bunk.)

This kind of instruction is guaranteed to leave future journalists baffled by the culture wars, and in fact the press has been baffled to find that it has political opponents. Well, jeez louise, so did the progressives of the 1920s! As far as the religion knows, none of this is happening. And J-schools–by passing the faith along but making little room for non-believers–are part of the problem.

In the newsroom faith that I have been describing, Watergate is not just a big, big story with a knock-out ending. It is the great redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapon, journalists save the day. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers–and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism–is to my mind a big question. Whether it should continue is an even better question.

Income Mobility

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Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind – New York Times:

…Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes – a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data – now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.

Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.

The alternative minimum tax, created 36 years ago to make sure the very richest paid taxes, takes back a growing share of the tax cuts over time from the majority of families earning $75,000 to $1 million – thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars annually. Far fewer of the very wealthiest will be affected by this tax.

…One way to understand the growing gap is to compare earnings increases over time by the vast majority of taxpayers – say, everyone in the lower 90 percent – with those at the top, say, in the uppermost 0.01 percent (now about 14,000 households, each with $5.5 million or more in income last year).

From 1950 to 1970, for example, for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162, according to the Times analysis. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000.

…While most economists recognize that the richest are pulling away, they disagree on what this means. Those who contend that the extraordinary accumulation of wealth is a good thing say that while the rich are indeed getting richer, so are most people who work hard and save. They say that the tax cuts encourage the investment and the innovation that will make everyone better off.

“In this income data I see a snapshot of a very innovative society,” said Tim Kane, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. “Lower taxes and lower marginal tax rates are leading to more growth. There’s an explosion of wealth. We are so wealthy in a world that is profoundly poor.”

But some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation’s capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators. Speaking of the increasing concentration of incomes, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, warned in Congressional testimony a year ago: “For the democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow it to happen.”

Others say most Americans have no problem with this trend. The central question is mobility, said Bruce R. Bartlett, an advocate of lower taxes who served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. “As long as people think they have a chance of getting to the top, they just don’t care how rich the rich are.”

But in fact, economic mobility – moving from one income group to another over a lifetime – has actually stopped rising in the United States, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest it has even declined over the last generation.

Related:

The Mobility Myth (NYTimes) via Suburban Guerrilla:

“Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes – a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data – now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.”

US Income Distribution, 1980-1999 (rebeccablood)

My links page is back

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Even with the terrific writing I’ve seen encouraging the deprecation of blogrolls, I don’t think I could go on without one (or two). I’ve brought it back, on its own page (I had it there long ago), and added the Philly Future list. The urge is to turn it into a personal public aggregator. I mean – why use Bloglines when there are tools like Planet that make it easy for me maintain one myself?

The New York Times on Craigslist

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What eBay Could Learn From Craigslist – New York Times:

…triple-digit annual growth rates are rare among major Web sites. Meet that rarity: Craigslist.

Exceptional, too, is the ability to draw 10 million unique visitors each month without ever relying on venture capital and equity markets. Or the ability to attain fourth place among general-interest portals without ever spending a penny on marketing.

Signal accomplishments, to be sure, fit for boasting in an annual report. But Craigslist is a privately held company that has no such reports, and no burning interest in the competitive fray. It does far more shrugging than boasting. Its management regards profits, which it has earned consistently since 1999, as merely the means to remain in control of its own destiny. Free of debt, it can do as it wishes to maximize what it calls its service mission without having to maximize profits. This is good news for its customers – that is, community members – and bad news for competitors whose shareholders are unlikely to regard community service as their own companies’ raison d’être.

…Craigslist initially provided online listings of local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, the kind that could be found in an alternative newspaper. Visitors were encouraged to contribute, and they added the online equivalent of the mainstream newspaper’s classified section. Software handled e-mail forwarding.

Unlike eBay, which is dedicated to removing geographic obstacles to trading and defines “community” along national boundaries, Craigslist thinks and acts locally, organizing listings city by city for merchandise, jobs, real estate, personals, events, volunteer opportunities and discussion forums.

..Late last month, Knight Ridder Digital announced its plan to finesse the challenge of free classifieds: it dropped fees for ads for merchandise posted on the Web sites of 22 of its newspapers.

..Data collected by Nielsen/NetRatings show that eBay’s page views in April 2005 grew by less than half a percentage point, compared with the previous April. At Craigslist, page views grew 130 percent in the same period. According to the company’s data, its traffic is now about a fifth of eBay’s. And the operational efficiencies are astounding: Craigslist has 18 employees; eBay has 8,800.

…EBay uses an elaborate feedback apparatus to allow strangers who will never meet in person to feel safe doing business with one another. Craigslist does not need that apparatus. It is for locals only, and it is the one place that can fix you up with an entire life – job, shelter, furnishings, lover – at one stop, with minimal intermediation.

Macromedia aligns with Eclipse

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Macromedia aligns with Eclipse | CNET News.com:

Macromedia said it will join the Eclipse Foundation and create a “next-generation rich Internet application development tool,” code-named Zorn, based on Eclipse.

“This is a big move for us because we’ve always used our own tools,” said Kevin Lynch, Macromedia’s chief software architect. “Now we’re adopting an open-source approach to build a new tool. It’s important for the Flash platform because there’s a growing community of developers adopting Eclipse and we would like to enable developers for the Flash platform to take advantage of it.”

For the past few years, Macromedia has been trying to transform Flash from a Web design and animation tool into a technology for creating Internet-based applications. Against heated competition by everything from existing Web technologies to Microsoft’s long-delayed new operating system, code-named Longhorn, Macromedia has claimed some success with the adoption by more than 300 enterprises of its Flex application server software, which is used to create Flash applications.

Now Macromedia, which Adobe Systems in April announced its intention to acquire, is taking the Web application fight to developers, many of whom have long regarded Flash as a design language.

“Historically, one of the challenges Macromedia has faced is that the Flash development metaphor has been foreign to people familiar with (Microsoft’s) Visual Basic and Visual Studio,” said Burton Group analyst Peter O’Kelly. “These people think in terms of projects and forms and code modules, as opposed to timelines, movies and scripts that Flash’s creative designers know.”

Influences – Wanamaker’s, the Mac and Me

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I was playing hooky from school, which I was apt to do from time to time. I was consistently on the honor roll in class – yet never did homework and only haphazardly showed up. A combination of boredom, social awkwardness, and lack of supervision drove me to cut class and do a rather odd thing with my time – explore the city. The year was 1985 and I was 13.

Getting around Philly was an amazingly cheap thing to do for someone so young and so small. Timing your run under the turnstiles for the leaving of an El, just before its doors were to close, or blending into the flow of passengers crossing between shuttle busses and trains, or entering thru the back exit door on certain busy bus routes – it was easy. No one stops a 13 year old kid in a crowd who looks like he knows what he’s doing and casts an innocent glance when looked at. They think your parent must be somewhere.

I loved people watching and one of my haunts was Wanamaker’s on Market Street. Wanamaker’s was a very upscale department store, still is in its current incarnation as Lord & Taylor’s (the renaming is a crime I tell ya). Folks who shopped here were of a different world then mine – the pace was slower and the faces brighter – yet they did not notice me as I passed thru, while I munched on a soft pretzel with mustard.

They had opened a display on one of the upper floors for the Apple Macintosh. Ten of them arrayed in a semi circle, in a darkened atmospheric alcove. A chair invitingly in front of each. The upper floors of Wanamaker’s by day were pretty empty. Quiet. And seeing that display – well it was like I was suddenly presented with the entire Star Wars action figure collection… well close. That might be going too far.

I remember the walk to a chair and sitting down. The effort it took to be nonchalant – important if I wasn’t to raise a stir with staff and get thrown out – was very hard. It had to be only around five paces for me yet it felt like forever. I remember sitting down. I remember taking the mouse and opening up MacPaint – and I remember drawing! A couple of store hands came over to watch – one clearly said – “he seems to know what he’s doing – I think it’s OK” – and let me go. I felt empowered. I knew nothing of computers yet here I was manipulating one and folks observing asking “hey, how did you do that?”. I think I sat there for a couple hours. I recall a tutorial to familiarize yourself with the Mac that I took. I headed out when the major shopping crowd started to shuffle in.

I wouldn’t own a computer for a couple of years later – it was a Commodore 64C since the Mac was way out of reach. But it’s impact on me was undeniable.

Rafe, I hope you don’t mind me riffing off of one of another of your posts again, but I found myself in the same situation as you over the book post – there were no books that got me inspired about computers – it was the computers themselves that got me hooked.

Some thoughts

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I sit here at my keyboard tonight, after cleaning out my closet, cleaning out items I have held onto for reasons I can’t recall: old magazines, pins, ticket stubs, pamphlets, phone numbers from I forget who, and even to manuals to programs long ago deleted.

It’s hard not to reflect at times like these. Holding something as simple as an old newspaper, memories can come back, some of which you don’t want to face.

It wasn’t so long ago I couldn’t have collected such minutia. I had to travel light. A trash bag filled with around two week’s worth of clothes was all I could really handle. How I got from there to here still seems unreal to me – even with all the hard work and struggle.

I’ve never shared publicly how I came to such a state. Shoot – I’ve never fully shared my struggles getting from there to here. I guess I don’t out of fear.

Which is sad really.

Here I am – someone who encourages communication – who is compelled to encourage it and build tools to enable it – and I don’t allow myself the same freedom.