DiA interviews Slate editor Jacob Weisberg:
Nico Pitney of The Huffington Post asks "Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working towards?"
Obama's response:
Well look, we didn't have international observers on the ground, we can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places throughout the country. What we know is that a sizeable percentage of the Iranian people themselves, spanning Iranian society, considered this election illegitimate. It's not an isolated instance, a little grumbling here or there. There [are] significant questions about the legitimacy of the election. And so ultimately, the most important thing for the Iranian government to consider is legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, not in the eyes of the United States. And that's why I've been very clear, ultimately this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government. What we can do is to say unequivocally that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence, about dealing with peaceful dissent, that spans cultures, spans borders, and what we've been seeing over the Internet and what we've been seeing in news reports, violates those norms and violates those principles. I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.
UPDATE: John Amato sez:
Awww, the Politico and the Villagers are upset at the White House because Nico was singled out and asked a question about a subject that they all missed: Iran. Not that they didn't know the story, but that they didn't know how to cover it, since Iran was blocking as much info as it could get away with. I think it's exciting that the Obama Administration knew what Nico was doing -- and by the way, major props go to Nico for doing an incredible job, because he knew what to do before the Villagers did.
Iran Updates (VIDEO): Live-Blogging The Uprising
The traditional media never wants to recognize excellent work except when it comes from their own. How many times have we heard Chris Matthews call Chuck Todd a genius? Why is Chuck Todd a miracle worker? Before he was the anointed one, he was crunching election numbers for the presidential primary. Anyway, Michael Calderone wasn't too happy that Nico got called on by the White House. And by the way, Nicco's question was one of the toughest to answer, but the substance of what happened didn't matter to them. To Villagers everywhere, Nico cut in line.
Here's what Greg Sargent wrote:
Some reporters and right wing bloggers are accusing the White House of “coordinating” a question with The Huffington Post at today’s press conference, suggesting this shows the White House cozying up to a lefty news outlet.
Actually, the White House didn’t have to coordinate with HuffPo to know what Nico Pitney was going to ask, since he wrote this the day before the presser:
Tomorrow, President Obama is holding a news conference at the White House and I’ll be attending. If I get called, I want to ask a question that comes directly from an Iranian.
Emptywheel writes: Politico: “Oh Noes! The Best Reporter on a Subject Got Called on!!!”
When I heard, before the presser, that Nico was hoping to pose a question from an Iranian, I knew some beltway idiot would bitch if the HuffPo got a question. I just thought the bitching would come from someone with a more consistent record of being a complete idiot than Calderone...read on.
NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable.
What do you make of what's going on in Iran right now.
I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that ... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.
Which services have caused the greatest impact? Blogs? Facebook? Twitter?
It's Twitter. One thing that Evan [Williams] and Biz [Stone] did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it's easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I'm sure it wasn't conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it's had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook's model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people aorund the world who've made it their business to help keep it open.
Do you get a sense that it's almost as if the world is figuring out live how to use Twitter in these circumstances? Some dissidents were using named accounts for a while, and there's been a raging debate in the community about how best to help them.
Yes, there's an enormous reckoning to be had about what works and what doesn't. There have been disagreements over whether it was dangerous to use hashtags like #Iranelection, and there was a period in which people were openly tweeting the IP addresses of web proxies for people to switch to, not realizing that the authorities would soon shut these down. It's incredibly messy, and the definitive rules of the game have yet to be written. So yes, we're seeing the medium invent itself in real time.
Talk some more about the sense of participation on Twitter. It seems to me that that has spurred an entirely deeper level of emotional connection with these events.
Absolutely. I've been saying this for a while -- as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think. But Twitter is also just a much more personal medium. Reading personal messages from individuals on the ground prompts a whole other sense of involvement. We're seeing everyone desperate to do something to show solidarity like wear green -- and suddenly the community figures out that it can actually offer secure web proxies, or persuade Twitter to delay an engineering upgrade -- we can help keep the medium open.
When I see John Perry Barlow setting himself up as a router, he's not performing these services as a journalist. He's engaged. Traditional media operates as source of inofrmation not as a means of coordination. It can't do more than make us sympathize. Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it's just retweeting, you're aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the ouside world is paying attention is really valuable.
Of course the downside of this emotional engagement is that while this is happening, I feel like I can't in good consicence tweet about anything else!
There was fury on Twitter against CNN for not adequately covering the situation. Was that justified?
In a way it wasn't. I'm sure that for the majority of the country, events in Iran are not of grave interest, even if those desperate for CNN's Iran info couldn't get access to it. That push model of one message for all is an incredibly crappy way of linking supply and demand.
CNN has the same problem this decade that Time magazine had last decade. They simultaneously want to appeal to middle America and leading influencers. Reaching multiple audiences is increasingly difficult. The people who are hungry for info on events of global significance are used to instinctively switching on CNN. But they are realizng that that reflex doesn't serve them very well anymore, and that can't be good for CNN.
Do you get the sense that these new media tools are helping build a global community, forged more by technology and a desire for connection, than by traditional political or religious divides?
You can see it clearly in what's happening right now. And it cuts both ways. The guy we're rallying around, Mousavi, is no liberal reformer. But the principle of freedom of speech and fair elections and the desire for reform trump that.
So how does this play out?
It's complex. The Ahmadinejad supporters are going to use the fact of English-speaking and American participation to try to damn the dissidents. But whatever happens from here, the dissidents have seen that large numbers of American people, supposedly part of "the great Satan," are actually supporters. Someone tweeted from Tehran today that "the American media may not care, but the American people do." That's a sea-change.
The [College Republican National Committee] is also working on its technological chops, which outgoing president Charlie Smith told me should be the CNRC's No.1 priority going forward. David All, of the eponymous conservative media consulting group, tried to persuade a less-than-capacity crowd that Twitter was the future. "That's the thing that we need to embrace and evangelize every single day," he said. "We have a massive opportunity to grow the pie of conservatism because of the quickness of Twitter and because everyone is jumping on board."
It's a brave new world. More than thirty-five years ago, Timothy Crouse wrote the seminal Boys On The Bus, detailing for the first time how the press--specifically types like Robert Novak and David Broder, among others--operated as a kind of hive mind, which Crouse coined as "pack journalism":
(R)ight at the outset Crouse identifies the "womblike conditions" of the bus and/or plane as giving rise to "the notorious phenomenon called 'pack journalism,' " and goes on: "They all fed off the same pool report, the same daily handout, the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same mobile village. After a while, they began to believe the same rumors, subscribe to the same theories, and write the same stories."
At a precociously early age, Crouse understood some essential but little-known truths about journalists and journalism: that journalists are deathly afraid of being "wrong" and thus tend to stay within parameters set by the pack; that journalists want "to be on the Winner's Bus" because "a campaign reporter's career is linked to the fortunes of his candidate" and they don't "like to dwell on signs that their Winner [is] losing, any more than a soup manufacturer likes to admit that there is botulism in the vichyssoise"; that "journalism is probably the slowest-moving, most tradition-bound profession in America," refusing "to budge until it is shoved into the future by some irresistible external force."
Well, look out, boys, because as Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert chronicles in his new book, Bloggers on the Bus, there is a whole new group of people on that bus, and they won't be swayed by the hive mind of the old media. In fact, they thrive on being the outsider. And to the horror and consternation of those boys so comfortably entrenched within the Beltway Bubble, these upstarts are actually grabbing their audiences....and doing their job better than the old guard.
The liberal blogosphere was birthed from the outrage of the offenses of the Bush administration and the search for sanity amid the crazy-making and incestuous relationship between the White House and the press corps. Vastly varied backgrounds and unlikely histories coalesced into a formidable force that not only cowered the administration and Congress at times, but helped carry our first African-American president into office. But not without some bumps along the way.
For every triumph like getting a clearly shaken Chris Matthews to apologize for his misogynistic statements about Hillary Clinton, or a nervous John McCain to refuse the endorsement of Rev. Hagee, or empowering Sen. Christopher Dodd to agree to filibuster retroactive immunity in the FISA bill, we've had lows like the intense bifurcation of the blogosphere over the Democratic Primary, and the disappointing arm's-length distance the Obama White House has kept his liberal supporters.
During this time, we've developed a brand new roster of go-to people for information: John Amato, Digby, Susie Madrak, Arianna Huffington, Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, Josh Marshall, Howie Klein, Marcy Wheeler, all of whom play prominent roles in Bloggers on the Bus (is it at this time that I mention the glaring omission of my work from Bloggers on the Bus? ;-P) We've adapted our approaches and focus, we've spent hours pouring over arcane and wonky reports, we've connected dots between different sources and we've uncovered a narrative that in drips and drops has been proven correct.
In Bloggers on the Bus, Eric Boehlert has talked to these new guards and chronicled the liberal blogosphere's growing pains and victories. As someone who was right in the middle of all this, blogging my little heart out, it's fascinating to read a bird's-eye view accounting of everything that was happening.
...The campaign to pass the Employee Free Choice Act has reached the Twittersphere, and, naturally, foes of organized labor, such as Newt Gingrich, are taking it all in stride.
"We are writing to demand that you immediately take down an illegal and fraudulent posting on Twitter...which falsely purports to be written by our clients and unlawfully uses the name of Messrs. [Newt] Gingrich and [Saul] Anuzis," reads a letter (PDF) from Stefan Passatino of the law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge.
The cease and desist notice comes in response to an online movement intended to convince Gingrich's Twitter followers (among others) to sign a petition in support of EFCA. Gingrich and his lawyer takes issue with the campaign, but that's possibly because the finer points of Twitter have eluded both of them.
We have recently learned that a pro-EFCA group calling itself "The Truth About EFCA.Org" and operating a website at that URL, has apparently publish the Posting on Twitter. The Posting falsely purports to have been written by Messrs. Gingrich and Anuzis and includes the Mark [ampersand] as well as the Twitter "handles" of the foregoing individuals.
By that, Gingrich's attorney means the group posted this.
Which could, I suppose, be interpreted both as a solicitation of Gingrich and Anuzis as well as a statement about them (though does anybody really think Gingrich would sign a pro-EFCA petition?) But anybody with even passing familiarity with Twitter knows that the message isn't purportedly written by the people named in it. It's directed at them. Hence the [at sign @].
The website for The Truth About EFCA can be seen here. And the Twitterer who's being threatened with the lawsuit has a blog of his own where he's written a post about this ordeal. We've contacted him (by direct Twitter message!) and we'll let you know what, if anything, he has to say about his sudden brush with Twitter scandal.
Drezner argues that the internet hasn't killed intellectuals:
...critics fail to recognize how the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing has partially reversed a trend that many cultural critics have decried — what Russell Jacoby called the "professionalization and academization" of public intellectuals. In fact, the growth of the blogosphere breaks down — or at least erodes — the barriers erected by a professionalized academy.
From later in the essay:
Perhaps the most-useful function of bloggers, however, is when they engage in the quality control of other public intellectuals. Posner believes that public intellectuals are in decline because there is no market discipline for poor quality. Even if public intellectuals royally screw up, he argues, the mass public is sufficiently uninterested and disengaged for it not to matter. Bloggers are changing that dynamic, however. If Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman, or William Kristol pen substandard essays, blogs have and will provide a wide spectrum of critical feedback.
Well, it's the last week of the campaign, and there have been some amazing amateur and not-so-amateur web contestants. A blue ribbon Daily Dish committee of experts, i.e. me and Patrick, selected the ten finalists. Pick your favorite and we can give it one last viral push before election day. Voting starts now and ends tomorrow at noon. I'll re-post it occasionally to keep it in front of readers' eyes. So have one last look back at some of the best expressions of YouTube democracy - and vote:
Explaining how TPM works can be daunting, especially if you're describing it to someone from a traditional journalism background or, say, older relatives for whom something as simple as email is still intimidating.
As most of you know, we have a bricks-and-mortar office in Manhattan. But that's just the anchor for our operation. We have a reporter in DC, another reporter who works most of the week from Connecticut, and I'm in Missouri. So a third of our staff of nine is not based in the NYC office.
For that model to work, we rely some on phones, a lot on email, but primarily on Skype. That means a whole series of Skype chats going on at any one time between and among editors, reporters, and interns. Even most of the internal office interactions are via Skype, so that those of us not in the office proper can be kept in the loop. Picture a staff of mostly 20-somethings squeezed into a 700-some-odd-square-foot newsroom, hunched over their computers, fingers flying across their keyboards as they IM with colleagues who may be sitting right next to them.
As I say, it's a hard arrangement to explain to the uninitiated. Spencer Ackerman, who used to work for us at TPMmuckraker, captured it pretty well in this blog post:
If you want to understand what it's like to work at TPM, spend a couple days with your ten smartest friends and constantly IM with them. Set up IM windows for multi-person conversation, and break out those discussions with individual participants. And make the substance of those conversations deep-in-the-weeds investigative journalism. Make sure you don't often go more than, say, two minutes without contributing to the discussion. And see if you can avoid being overwhelmed.
As odd as all that may sound, one of the most out-of-the-box things about TPM was that until Wednesday, I had never met any of our staff in person, including Josh, even though I've worked at TPM in one capacity or another for approaching two years now, the last 10 months as managing editor.
It had just worked out that way. Josh and I both have young kids. Travel is expensive. Whatever. A hundred reasons why it hadn't happened yet. But since I was flying from St. Louis to Serbia this week, it made perfect sense to stop off at the office for a couple of days on my way back through New York.
There were suspicions among staff that I might not really exist. Maybe I was just Josh's imaginary friend and that I would walk into the office, take off my sunglasses, and be revealed to be Josh himself. (When my kids were younger, their toddler-level understanding of my online work was that I had cleverly managed to squeeze the people I work with into my computer. It suggested that they thought I had superhero powers so I was content to let that misapprehension linger.)
By David KurtzFor an online generation, the Web offers what traditional counseling does not. It's a chance to communicate without having to face someone or fear their judgment. Some people are seeking legal advice and medical information, and many younger victims believe they can warn others about their accused attacker, counselors say.
Poblano, who has wowed Kossacks with his detailed election analyses and in-depth background Diaries like this one at Daily Kos and at his own FiveThirtyEight.com blog, got some well-deserved attention today from the National Journal.
As Mark Blumenthal writes:
Over the last week, an anonymous blogger who writes under the pseudonym Poblano did something bold on his blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. He posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data. His model predicted a 17-point victory for Barack Obama in North Carolina and a 2-point edge for Hillary Rodham Clinton in Indiana.
Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina. Looking back at Poblano's efforts in Pennsylvania, pollster Dick Bennett decried the models as "stepwise regression run amok." Slate's Mickey Kaus predicted failure for "a sophisticated model that ignores... what's been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright."
But a funny thing happened. The model got it right. ...
Moreover, the predictions were more accurate than any of the pollsters' results, as indicated by the graphic below (modified from a chart created by Brian Schaffner of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies).
Poblano is just another example - albeit an exemplary one - of how a blogger with a brain and an obsession benefits us all. We don't know if he does this from a basement in his pajamas, but who cares? Kudos to you, sir.
... a guy named Mike carrying a video camera came walking by and began peppering [Derrick] Ashong with a series of skeptical and very pointed questions.
“So why are you for Obama?” he asked. It was clear from his approach that he expected a dimwitted answer, an expectation that he was about to talk to another acolyte smitten by Senator Obama’s rock star persona.
But, as it turned out, Mr. Ashong, who was raised in Ghana and elsewhere, was glad to be asked. For almost six minutes — about a century in broadcast television years — Mr. Ashong, who has an immigrant’s love of democracy and the furrowed brow of a Brookings fellow, held forth on universal health care, single-payer approaches and public-private partnerships.
On Feb. 2, the interview of Mr. Ashong was posted on a YouTube channel called “The Latest Controversy,” where supporters of both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Obama are asked very aggressively to justify their choice of candidates. The video blew up, drawing more than 850,000 views. And after that huge response to his policy analysis, Mr. Ashong decided to double down and explain the emotional component of his support for Obama in a follow-up video that was posted Feb. 11 and received 300,000 views.Taken together, that means a guy who was looking to (anonymously) show a little love for a candidate was able to look into the camera for more than 13 minutes combined and draw in more than a million clicks with an impassioned but reasoned pitch.
At a time when politics and popular culture are still in an awkward mating ritual, Mr. Ashong inadvertently tapped into the youthquake that is shaking up the campaign. While the clip could have been lost among some of the popular rubble at YouTube (“Let me see, do I watch a tutorial on health care or Tori Spelling on ‘Jimmy Kimmel’?”), Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic blogged about it, as did Think on These Things, a political blog. Then The Economist chimed in, which led to an editor at The New York Times hearing about it and — well, you get the idea.
I believe in the democratizing power of the internet. Every week I bring to your attention various campaigns going on at the grassroots level and encourage involvement and activism. It may not always achieve the results we seek as quickly as we’d like, but here’s a story that John mentioned earlier that proves that your activism does get noticed and does make an impact.
Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher has launched an email campaign directed to local and national newspapers against the Associated Press’ Nedra Pickler, for her recent story documenting conservative attacks questioning Barack Obama’s patriotism. Ultimately, I think Pickler’s story was one worth reporting, but as TPM notes, the first source in her story is Roger Stone, a disgraced former GOP strategist who has been in the news lately for less-than-savory antics. It’s also not the first time liberal bloggers have turned their sights on Pickler.
It was pretty much world-record speed with which the smears against Barack Obama’s patriotism alley-ooped from the right wing attack machine into the pages of legitimate media, neatly laundered into the AP by Nedra Pickler.
Way to go, Jane! She told me that there was an astounding 12,000 letters sent to 620 newspapers in all 50 states. Amazing work. Think that doesn’t get noticed? Christy continues:
Successful pushback means we need to cover every base, not just the prominant ones, so we are asking you for a little more help today. If you haven’t yet written letters — especially if you live in OH, PA, FL, NM, CO…pretty much any swing state — please write one to your local newspapers today. It’s very easy to do using our handy contact tool.
And now, you can use this new link to send the letter tool to friends, family, neighbors — whomever you think might also be interested in sending a letter telling local newspapers that using AP feed to launder pre-fabricated GOP talking points is not acceptable and not news. And you are not willing to simply look the other way.
A number of our readers have already contacted us to say their Letters to the Editor are being published this week. Fantastic job! If you’ve already written letters, please check the contact tool to see if perhaps you missed a local paper or two. Every letter counts!
We’ve tried to come up with ways to make this as easy and user-friendly as possible for you to take action. All it requires of you is to act. The time to stand up for better reporting — and accountability when it is done badly — is now. Please write…today!
Make your voice heard. It matters.
Amid pressure from consumer, health and environmental groups, Target Corp. said it is reducing its use of the plastic polyvinyl chloride in packaging and children's products, such as lunch boxes and bibs.
![[TARGET]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/PJ-AL254_PVC_20071105182837.jpg) |
| Anti-PVC protesters in front of Target stores |
Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, is a cheap, durable form of plastic commonly used in building materials such as pipes, as well as consumer products such as toys, electronics and shower curtains. Packaging made of PVC includes the soft plastic zipper bags that hold sheets and the hard plastic containers for small electronics.
PVC is made with vinyl chloride, which the Environmental Protection Agency has classified as a human carcinogen. People can be exposed to the chemical through discharge of gases from factories, groundwater and occupational exposure, the agency said.
A concern with vinyl products is they may contain lead, which can pose a problem if the plastic deteriorates or children put the products in their mouths. Earlier this year, the Consumer Product Safety Commission warned consumers that old and peeling vinyl baby bibs could expose children to unsafe levels of lead. Phthalates, chemicals often added to PVC to increase flexibility, have been linked to reproductive development problems in males. The European Union and California have banned the sale of toys containing phthalates. The California ban will go into effect in 2009.
A spokeswoman for Target said efforts to reduce the use of PVC predated actions by health, consumer and environmental groups, which protested and handed out fliers in front of Target stores throughout the year. Last month, the company sent a response to the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, a nonprofit organization in Falls Church, Va., which led the anti-PVC campaign, detailing a number of recent anti-PVC initiatives. They include the development of an action plan to identify PVC alternatives, efforts to make the company's place mat and table linen categories nearly phthalate-free by spring, and efforts to find PVC alternatives in most toy categories for fall 2008. The company said all children's lunch boxes and utensils in Target's own brands are now PVC-free.
Target said it is using alternatives such as recycled paperboard or corrugated packaging, as well as ethylene vinyl acetate, another type of plastic, for products like shower curtains. In some products, the company said, it will use phthalate-free PVC.
Ethylene vinyl acetate is preferable for the environment because it doesn't create harmful dioxins when produced or destroyed, and doesn't contain lead or phthalates, said Michael Schade, PVC campaign coordinator with the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. However, he said his group advocates bio-based plastics, such as those made from corn. There are no human studies on the possible cancer-causing properties of vinyl acetate, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Target is among several large companies, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., that have agreed to reduce the use of PVC in packaging and products in recent years.
Write to Sara Schaefer Muñoz at sara.schaefer@wsj.com
