All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Conservative blogs have been buzzing about a recently translated communication within the Iraqi intelligence service from 2000 that appears to suggest a source within the Associated Press. Did Saddam have a spy within the wire service? That's what some blogs are asking. The document begins:

We were informed from one of our sources (the degree of trust in him is good) who works in the American Associated Press Agency that the agency broadcasted to through computer to its branches worldwide the following: …

In response to some assertions that this implies someone within the AP was effectively spying on behalf of Saddam Hussein, the AP has issued a statement pointing out that the material included in the communication was simply material previously published by the wire service. Via Editor & Publisher:

All the information in a handwritten Arabic document from Iraq that some blogs claim to be evidence that an AP employee worked for Saddam Hussein was actually published and distributed worldwide as a wire story [in 2000] by Associated Press two weeks prior to the date on the document.

Since the information in this AP story was distributed worldwide, it would be absurd to consider its substance as espionage. Speculation by the blogs rests entirely on use of the term "one of our sources" in the Iraqi document. However, an AP employee who provides a government official in any nation with a copy of a published AP story is providing public information, not espionage services.

Not everyone is buying the explanation, you can decide for yourself. But it’s one more example of news organizations who are meeting blog criticisms head-on and that’s a good thing.

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Andrew Kantor’s “CyberSpeak” column in the USA Today has Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs fuming (hat tip: Romenesko). We’ll let you check out that back-and-forth for yourselves but did want to point out Kantor’s humorous and often accurate example of how bloggers can blow small things out of proportion:

Imagine you're at a party, and you see someone you've met briefly before.

"Hi, Sue," you say.

"Hi, Andrew," she replies. "But my name's Jane."

You're embarrassed, but you apologize and get on with the conversation – no harm, no foul.

Now imagine that some other people overheard your gaffe. Instead of being embarrassed for you, they start telling everyone "Andrew got Jane's name wrong."

Sheesh, you think, It was just a stupid mistake.

But instead of simply dying out, the conversation about your slip picks up, and enters the realm of speculation.

"Jane's so pretty," says one person, "that there's no way Andrew would just forget her name." (In fact, you did simply forget.)

"I heard him complain about work once," says someone else. "He's probably in the office working late."

"I saw him take a pill in the bathroom," chimes in another. "My sister's boyfriend is a pharmacist, and it looked like Prozac to me." (It was an aspirin.)

You try to protest, but it's too late. Within hours, they're certain you have drug problems, hate your job, are seeing a shrink, and/or are pining for someone named Sue.

Welcome to the blogosphere, where speculation becomes fact, and where self-proclaimed "experts" offer opinions about as worthwhile (but well spoken) as creation science. Where wild guesses are pitched as absolutes, and where small gaffes are blown into major affairs.

For all the good, in-depth material blogs can bring to the table, there is a tendency to take little molehills and turn them into huge mountains.

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Attention reporters, producers and other media-types: if you thought your in-boxes were already clogged up with mass e-mail campaigns from organizations representing one point of view or another, wait until The Spotlight is turned your way. The Spotlight Project is a left-wing tool designed to enable users to communicate with individual members of the media. It’s being rolled out as a feature on Firedoglake (of Ned Lamont fame) and promises to allow everyone to send a blog posting they like to any number of reporters, producers or shows, along with their own comments.

On the face of it, this sounds like a great way to communicate with individuals in the media. But in practice, it threatens to become something ineffective, if not counter-productive. Here’s how it works: On participating blogs, each entry includes a “spotlight” tag and clicking that brings you to a site displaying the names of a large number of print, TV and radio types. If you want to send that particular entry to someone on that list (say the reporter whose article is being discussed), you click that name, add any others you’d like to send it to, make any comments of your own and send.

A savvy operator might take an interesting idea, thought or angle and send it to one or two reporters who might then somehow incorporate into their work – or at least think about it. But one would need a pretty hefty amount of knowledge about the press and the people in it to use that approach to target effectively. But will it more likely be used to flood journalists with yet more spam e-mail that simply ends up victim to the "delete" button?

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The Wall Street Journal this morning profiles J.P. Borda, a National Guard reservist who spent time in Afghanistan and started up Milblogging.com when he returned home. As Borda tells it, he began blogging and collecting other milblogs because, “you hear so much about what's going wrong … It gets hard to hear after a while when there's so much good going on.” The site links to some 1,400 blogs written by soldiers and veterans, mostly to correct what they see as shallow or inaccurate reporting by the mainstream media. What’s most interesting or newsy is the extent of Borda’s plans for the milblogging set:

What's the future of military blogs? Mr. Borda would like to see milbloggers get their own TV shows or have their entries printed in major newspapers. The goal, he says, is to "continually be blurring that line between the media and blogging."

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A new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project defines the rough size of the blogosphere at about 12 million U.S. bloggers and 57 million blog readers. Those are pretty large numbers on the face of it, but not quite as impressive when broken down a little more in-depth. Here are some the findings, released yesterday:

54% of bloggers say that they have never published their writing or media creations anywhere else; 44% say they have published elsewhere.

54% of bloggers are under the age of 30.

Women and men have statistical parity in the blogosphere, with women representing 46% of bloggers and men 54%.

76% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others.

64% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to share practical knowledge or skills with others.

When asked to choose one main subject, 37% of bloggers say that the primary topic of their blog is "my life and experiences."

Other topics ran distantly behind: 11% of bloggers focus on politics and government; 7% focus on entertainment; 6% focus on sports; 5% focus on general news and current events; 5% focus on business; 4% on technology; 2% on religion, spirituality or faith; and additional smaller groups who focus on a specific hobby, a health problem or illness, or other topics.

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Online video has officially hit the big-time now that The New York Times is blogging about it. That’s right, television critic Virginia Heffernan is now covering this new world of media in a blog, Screens (hat tip to I Want Media). Here’s how the blog is explained:

With television and the Internet converging at last, who's going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Everything from political propaganda videos to nip slips (the popular video of, yup, celebrities revealing their breasts) seems to expect an audience. "Screens" will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more.

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We love a good look inside an editorial meeting here at Public Eye. And we’re not the only ones. The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash. has been blogging about its editorial meetings for some time now. NPR’s new blog, Mixed Signals, has been doing the same. Yesterday, The Spokesman Review took it one step further – they now offer a live Webcast of the day’s two editorial meetings. Staffer Ken Paulman’s comment on the inaugural broadcast gave us a chuckle:

Today was the first day that the public could access the web stream of our news meetings, and an earlier assessment by the Inlander turned out to be almost correct. The weekly identified "the eight people outside the Review's 'transparent newsroom' who actually care...," and lo and behold, we clocked exactly eight connections to our webcast this morning! Only problem is, seven of those connections were from inside the newsroom. The eighth connection was actually two people - one who watched the first half (and, evidently got bored and left), and another who watched the latter half.

Ah, well. We'll be tuning in to make it nine viewers.

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Now that we know White House Karl Rove won’t be indicted by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, we can move on with the case and start tying up some loose ends. One of those loose ends is pointed out by Washington Post media scribe Howard Kurtz this morning:

So after five grand jury appearances and many months of twisting in the wind, Karl Rove dodges an indictment bullet in the Valerie Plame leak case. I wonder if Truthout.org, which reported that Rove had already been charged, will be issuing a full retraction.

Truthout is the Web site which published a report a month ago claiming, as fact, that Rove had already been indicted. Despite direct denials from Rove’s lawyers, the Web site and the reporter, Jason Leopold, continued to stand by the story. Leopold went so far as to promise to name his sources if they were proven to have misled him.

Well, we’re waiting for that disclosure – and the retraction.

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And now for the topic that’s been keeping you awake at night: net neutrality. OK, maybe you’ve actually been sleeping fine. And you’ve never heard the term net neutrality. In that case, here’s a (very brief) recap of the Internet issue that has put Moveon.org, Gun Owners of America and the Indigo Girls on the same team. To sum it up, cable and phone companies – who control broadband, high-speed Internet lines – want to charge Web sites for delivering faster broadband service, something that’s particularly valuable to video-heavy sites like YouTube, for example. Those sites that don’t pay a premium would not receive faster service. The theory behind net neutrality is that all Web sites should be charged equally for use of high speed Internet lines from cable and phone companies.

Net neutrality took a hit yesterday, when the House didn’t include a provision that would have, as Forbes put it, “forced cable and telephone companies to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing on their networks.”

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In Egypt, blogging can land you in jail, apparently. That’s the case for at least six bloggers in that country, who have been jailed following a spate of arrests after political demonstrations in Cairo. The Washington Post today looks at the case of one such blogger, Alaa Seif al-Islam. His blog, Manalaa, which he writes with his wife, “began not only to describe the troubles of Egypt under its authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak, but also described acts of repression and became a vehicle for organizing public protests,” writes the Post. The blog has caught the attention of uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds, University of Tennessee law professor and author of Instapundit, who told the Associated Press of Seif Al-Islam: "He's certainly the most famous blogger in Egypt and arguably the best known reformer there now. When you suppress dissent, even minor voices become incredibly powerful."

According to the Post, Seif Al-Islam is still blogging from jail – on scraps of paper that his wife posts online. He's been in jail since May 7 and right now, it’s unclear when he might be getting out. Writes the Post: “Under Egypt's emergency laws, which have been in place for 25 years, the bloggers can be jailed indefinitely. A special court reviews such detentions only every 15 days. Some prisoners held under emergency laws have been jailed for more than a decade.”

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