After discussion with some of my readers, I realized that I was off-base entirely on the Slim-Fast/Whoopi Goldberg issue. Just as much as Ms. Goldberg should be free to speak her mind at any time on any subject, so too should her employer be able to speak its mind by making the decision to fire her or maintain her contract.
I was wrong, but I’ve learned from this experience. Thanks to everyone who helped me see the light.
Recently, Slim-Fast terminated its contract with Whoopi Goldberg due to some remarks she made at a non-Slim-Fast-related event, a Kerry/Edwards fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall. This annoyed me enough that I went to the Slim-Fast website and submitted some feedback informing them that their response to her remaks bothered me. Much to my surprise, I actually got a personal response a couple days later. The relevant paragraph is as follows:
Ms. Goldberg’s remarks created a great deal of negative media and consumer attention and this affected Ms. Goldberg’s ability to positively communicate our message of weight loss. Because
of this, we decided to conclude the current advertising campaign. Slim Fast believes its decision in no way impacts Ms. Goldberg’s freedom of speech, now or in the future.
I completely disagree. A decision like the one Slim-Fast made in this situation implies that there is no separation between Ms. Goldberg’s work and personal life. It implies that for the duration of her contract with Slim-Fast, every second of every day of her life should be devoted to the company. It furthermore implies that Ms. Goldberg, or someone like her, cannot be free to speak as she chooses at a non-work-related event without fearing for the safety of her livelihood. If one has to be perpetually in fear that a random comment made at any time could ruin one’s life, how can our speech be truly free?
Shame on you, Slim-Fast, for this stupid and cowardly act. All that was needed was a simple public disclaimer. People are smart enough to know that when Ms. Goldberg isn’t standing behind a glaring Slim-Fast logo, she’s not speaking for Slim-Fast.
I’m reminded, by Jill/Txt, of a March 2004 report (360kb PDF), which concludes that filesharing does not have a statistically significant effect on music sales, and could possibly actually help increase sales of some albums. This Guardian article, however, mentions that CD sales in the United States have actually risen by 7%, while filesharing continues to grow in popularity. I’m curious how the RIAA will respond to that. “They may be rising, but they’re not rising enough!”
I’m a subscriber to MoveOn.org’s email list, so last night I got an email from them that completely stunned me. It began as follows:
Our Fox campaign is becoming a major fight. The attacks are now coming from Fox — in an attempt to intimidate other media outlets. We need your help. It’s time to take this to Congress. On Friday, we’ll deliver our Fox petition to members of Congress and we need to have at least 250,000 comments from across the nation. We’re pushing members of Congress to make Fox come clean about its rank partisanship.
It continued, presenting arguments that Fox News is heavily biased towards the right, and saying how MoveOn is pushing Congress and the FTC to question Fox News and Rupert Murdoch about the partisan bias in their news arm.
This is disgusting. MoveOn, an organization which normally puts its efforts towards fighting for causes I wholeheartedly agree with, appeared to be actively trying to deny Fox News’ right to free speech. Upon further investigation, it turns out MoveOn is attempting to convince the government that Fox News’ use of the trademarked phrase “fair and balanced” to describe themselves is false advertising. While this may be so, it’s not a case that needs to take up the time and effort of the United States Congress. It could easily be dealt with by the courts whose jurisdiction includes Fox News’ headquarters.
Now, while I dislike Fox News as much as any liberal, and consider them by far the most shamefully partisan so-called news network on television, I feel that MoveOn has gone much too far with this. And while I agree that “fair and balanced” is not a phrase that accurately describes Fox News, I also think it’s not what our senators and representatives need to be concerned with.
The votemaster over at the Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 provides a handy service: he tallies up all the current polls and uses their results to determine which candidate probably leads in electoral votes at the current time. All the data is available on his site as well as information on all his sources, so you can fact-check his conclusions if you’re skeptical.
To facilitate the dissemination of his tallied results, I’ve whipped up a quick-and-dirty Flash movie that can be displayed on one’s website. You can see it on the sidebar of this site, or right here:
[FLASH]http://ryan.freebern.org/wp-content/evp04.swf, 150, 100[/FLASH]
To place this on your own site, you can download a .zip file (2.5kb) of the movie here, unzip it, place the .swf file on your web host, then use the following code (with “MOVIE-URL” replaced with the actual URL of the .swf file on your server) to display it:
Many thanks to the votemaster at electoral-vote.com for the great job he’s doing and for his assistance in making this little app work.
Update (22 July 2004, 1:13 P.M.): Turns out this applet only works with Flash 7.0 or higher, so I’ve updated it to produce a helpful error message if your plug-in is an older version.
Romenesko links to a USA Today story in which Tom McPhail, a journalism professor, calls bloggers “pretend journalists” because “they thrive on rumor and innuendo.”
What does this mean? It’s not as if perfectly legitimate newspapers don’t run stories based on rumors. They will generally qualify these stories so that the reader knows where the information comes from, but that’s exactly what good blogs do as well: provide links to their sources. Linking is the whole idea behind blogs, in fact.
Is McPhail concerned that bloggers are biased? That can’t be the only sticking point. Every newspaper in the country publishes a number of opinion columnists in its pages without qualms. These people are paid to be biased. Many of the most popular opinion columnists in the world are tremendously slanted one way or another in their perceptions of the world. Surely McPhail doesn’t consider George Will or Andy Rooney a “pretend” journalist, and certainly there would be very few objections if they were given press credentials to the Democratic National Convention.
Furthermore, the bloggers given credentials were not selected randomly. There are, unquestionably, tens of thousands of bloggers out there who can’t write their way out of a paper bag and shouldn’t be chosen to cover an event like a political party’s national convention. The ones chosen are, by and large, writers for or authors of well-respected blogs (James Landrith has a list of the invitees he knows of) who can be trusted to give an, if not unbiased, at least thorough and well-written look at the events that take place during the convention.
McPhail strikes me as a stodgy proponent of old media, unwilling to admit that the way people communicate is changing at blinding speeds, and unable to keep up with that change. By ridiculing new media as “pretend,” McPhail hopes his academic and professional credentials will help tilt the public’s opinion towards his. In reality, he’s just an old man unwilling to leave his own Land of Make-Believe.
2Entwine, a little Providence, RI-based technology company, just made release candidate 1 of version 1.1 of their Gush software available on their website. This release, among other things, adds Linux support, so as soon as I get home this evening, I’ll be giving it a try for the first time.
Gush is a free, professional grade, cross-platform, instant messenger and newsreader contained in an aesthetically pleasing environment.
Gush interests me because it seems like the first step towards a fully integrated, self-contained, all-in-one Internet communication application. Something that takes care of weblogs, text chat, email, photo galleries, voice chat, message boards, etc. in one neat package. Instead of having six or eight programs open to take care of all these similar but distinct tasks, why not have one powerful package to handle everything, and allow seamless integration from one to another?
Gush is exciting, and I think it’s the direction we should be heading.
George W. Bush in a speech today once again attempted to convince people that his invasion of Iraq was justified.
“We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take,” Bush said.
So if any country is an “enemy of America” and merely has the ability to make WMDs, that’s enough justification to invade them? Even if we can’t prove they are actively being malicious? Seems like we should be really busy, then, invading places like Iran and North Korea. Why aren’t we? What makes Iraq so special that we’d decide to invade there instead of anywhere else?
Bush also claimed that Saddam refused to open his country to inspections, which was yet another reason to invade. However, in February of 2003, just a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hans Blix reported exactly the opposite. His statement to the U.N. clearly indicated that Iraq was very cooperative with the inspectors, and that with full cooperation, the period of disarmament through inspection could be short. I guess that was just too long for Bush.
Once again, Bush seems to think that if he repeats something enough, it’ll become true. Unfortunately, the facts aren’t on his side, and he can’t change history to make them so. This war was precipitated on faulty and dishonest reasoning. A recent Senate Intelligence Committee report states that the CIA vastly overstated the threat of WMDs in Iraq, and Bush swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
Bush once famously said, “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. It… fool me. We can’t get fooled again” in reference to the fact that Saddam has managed to remain in power for over a decade since the first Gulf War. Well, it sounds like you’ve been fooled again, Mr. Bush. This time, though, it was the CIA’s faulty intelligence that got you. Yet, somehow, I, and millions of others like me, weren’t fooled into believing war was justified. Why not? Maybe we just weren’t eager to all be “war presidents.”
Tom Ridge is looking into how to delay the November election in the case of a terrorist attack. Now, if the terrorists’ aim is to “disrupt the democratic process” (as Ridge has said in the recent past), and in response to their actions we, uh, disrupt our democratic process… aren’t they succeeding?
Recently, the Senate approved raising the maximum FCC fine for broadcast indecency to US$275,000, a significant jump from the current US$32,500 fine. The vote was almost unanimous: the only dissenter was Sen. John Breaux, D-LA, who’s retiring and doesn’t have to worry about reelection.
U.S. society has no interest in responsibility, largely. When something goes wrong, we love to try and point fingers. We’re loud and litigious. If we get hurt, it’s almost expected that we’ll sue someone over it. So when the government does something that helps us point fingers at someone else, we gladly endorse it. At least, those of us who don’t think too much about it.
The FCC is the government’s way of letting us not be responsible for what we, and our children, see and hear through the television and radio. Their rules governing “decency” attempt to punish broadcasters when they violate a high-minded moral code supposedly embraced by the majority of the people in the country.
What the FCC doesn’t realise, though, is that, as long as broadcasting is supported by advertiser revenue, decency in broadcasting is a self-regulating system. If a broadcaster airs too much that its audience considers indecent, the audience will stop tuning in, and the advertisers won’t pay as much. To maximise profits, the broadcaster has to find the right programming that is interesting enough to draw a large audience, but not indecent enough to turn them away. This works entirely on its own without the need for a third-party to regulate it. It will change itself over time as the audience’s opinion changes, and it will automatically compensate for different viewing habits of different groups.
It’s like the foxes and the rabbits. When the rabbit population is high, the foxes hunt and eat more of them, reducing the rabbit population, and allowing the foxes to breed. At some point, there aren’t enough rabbits to feed all the foxes, so the foxes die off. This allows the rabbit population to increase again, restarting the cycle. Introduce hunters looking for rabbit-meat into the equation, and everything falls apart. To beat the metaphor to death: the FCC is a hunter, and it’s using the AK-47 of decency regulations to shoot up the rabbits of boundary-pushing television willy-nilly, leaving us with a bunch of dead-fox shows.
People have been amazed lately by the pull of networks such as HBO and Showtime. These premium television channels have had a surge in viewership lately, and it’s not just because they’ve been putting together high-quality shows. It’s because the FCC-strangled broadcast and basic cable networks have been forced to tame their shows, making them less and less honest in the process. Not fettered by the same restraints, the premium channels have been able to air shows that people actually want to see, and have benefitted tremendously from it.
The FCC thinks it’s doing the American public a favour by saving them from having to make moral judgments for themselves. In reality, all they’ve done is managed to create a sterile, homogenised stream of entertainment that increasingly finds itself too stifled by inane decency guidelines to produce anything that regularly engages viewers.
Where has personal responsibility gone? The government is so keen on traditional family values, about being strong and smart and patriotic, but they don’t want parents to actually have to parent. They’re no longer trusted to be able to keep tabs on their kids’ television viewing, or make sure they’re not tuning into Howard Stern.
To top it off, the FCC urges people to issue complaints every time something in the media offends them. They offer many easy ways to file a complaint — an electronic form, an email address, a postal address, a telephone number, and a fax number. Anytime anyone is even mildly offended, they can file a complaint, with details about the occurrence and the perpetrators, and the FCC will take it into consideration and, if they feel it’s necessary, slap someone with a hefty fine. Where are the balances for this system? If the FCC receives a thousand complaints about an incident, who’s to say there aren’t a million other people who thought the incident was perfectly fine?
As it is, the broadcasters who violate these overly-conservative decency regulations are being punished twice over: once by the loss of viewers (leading to revenue loss), and once by the FCC. The FCC’s decency regulations should be eliminated, and government trust in people’s personal responsibility should be reiterated. Explicit show ratings should be instituted for every show (”The following show contains sexual situtations, explicit language, and drug use.”), and better viewership tracking methods should be employed to let broadcasters know what the people want. Only then will truly free speech be once again available on television and radio, and the public’s opinion be truly represented in these media.
In a Department of Defense press release issued this morning, Paul Wolfowitz announced that the “enemy combatant” status of all 594 detainees at Guantanamo Bay would be reviewed before a military tribunal, and if any of them were found to be incorrectly classified as such, they would be swiftly repatriated.
I bet that will go over well. “Oops, I guess we were mistaken. Sorry about stealing two years of your life and keeping you in uncomfortable captivity halfway around the world from your home for no reason. You can go now.”
Why on earth wasn’t this done immediately after their imprisonment? That sort of mistake is what drives a person, and often his or her family and friends, towards lifelong hatred of America. I just hope it wasn’t made.
I'm Ryan Freebern, an experienced LAMP web developer living in New England. My résumé and portfolio are available, but I'm not currently looking for employment. Feel free to email me about anything at all.
You are currently browsing the ryan.freebern.org weblog archives for July, 2004.
