Category: Fourth Estate

Qwest announced plans a few weeks back to share all sorts of its customers information (including frequently called phone numbers) between its many far-flung divisions, unless explicitly asked not to by each customer (known in the biz as an “opt out”).

Six hundred thousand angry calls later, Qwest has decided that might just be a bad idea, and is dropping the concept. That was about 5% of Qwest’s total customers, which is an incredibly high complaint rate.

“We have customers upset right now. It’s not worth having them upset,” Nacchio said. He said Qwest, which has 12 million local phone customers in its 14-state region, received calls from about 5 percent of its customers.
Qwest’s decision means that it won’t share private account information — such as the phone numbers a customer frequently calls — to divisions such as Qwest Wireless or Qwest long distance.
Nacchio also reiterated that Qwest doesn’t and won’t share private customer account information with third parties. Nacchio acknowledged that Qwest’s initial notice was confusing on the issue.
“We did not do a good job of communicating,” Nacchio said.

Ya think?

At an elementary school science fair last year, the Boulder Valley School District decided that one third grade girl’s project might be interesting, might actually teach some important lessons, might demonstrate a knowledge of scientific technique on the part of the girl … but it was Not Allowed under the school district’s non-discrimination policy, because it might be “hurtful”.

See, the girl set up Barbie dolls, one white and one black, and asked both students and adults to answer which was “prettiest.” She found that adults chose based on the clothing on the Barbie, but that the children tended to choose the white Barbie most often.

Bzzzzzzz! The BVSD certainly couldn’t allow other little kids to hear about that.

Well, after months of discussions, including with the local ACLU, the district has revised its policies — well, at least the guidelines regarding those policies — to recognize that there is some value in free speech, in science, and in having discussions that maybe are hard but which might give insight.

Imagine that.

Some perspective on the Enron debacle from Alistair Cooke:

The American public is as stunned as the British people would have been in 1912 to learn that the captain of the Titanic, having been told by the ship’s architect – as he was – that the ship would go down in two hours, summoned his exec officer, told him to round up the officers and prepare to abandon ship as silently as possible, ordering two or three lifeboats to be slipped down on the starboard side. Meanwhile the purser was instructed to open the ship’s strong box, take all the currency and the jewels of the passengers and join the fleeing officers.
The chief steward was told to have his men patrol the ship and assure the passengers that everything was fine, no danger and go back to sleep. The stewards might then join the rest of the crew in the departing lifeboats and pull away.

I have to confess that I didn’t realize Mr. Cooke was still with us, but I think his observation here is spot on. What is really driving this whole public outrage is not so much the worried amazement that a company seemingly that big could tank so quickly, but that all the top execs seem to have gleefully walked away with boatloads of money, relying on their inside information that things were going south, while the average Enron worker, lied to by their own management and locked into pension plans that didn’t let them act even at the last extremity, ended up taking it in the shorts.

(Via Trance Gemini)

An interesting article challenging the conservative canard that the media is wildly biased toward the Left. It contends that the media tends to be a bit liberal on social issues, a bit conservative on economic issues, but that what’s really going on is that American opinion on a lot of issues is slowly evolving — away from the social conservative agenda — leading to the ongoing outcry from that quarter.

(Via Cursor.org)

At least according to The New Republic. And, to their credit, there are voices here from both the Left and (in a few cases) the Right (but, I must say, solely from the Idiotic).

I’m not sure I agree with the order, but I can’t contest the categorization.

(Via InstaPundit)

Michael Kelly in the Washington Post hits much of the media chorus dead-on in this parody, “All-Negative, All the Time.”

“Good evening, and welcome to ‘All Is Lost,’ the nightly public affairs program produced by National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corp. Tonight we discuss what has been called America’s war against terror. I am your host, Perfectly Modulated Voice of Reason.

“With me, in our Washington studio, are: Fabled Newsman Who Was There When Saigon Fell . . . Scientifically Trained Impartial Scholar . . . and Bureau Chief of Second-Rate Regional Monopoly Newspaper Who Is Desperate to Be Hired by the New York Times. From London, we are joined by our European affairs analyst, Loathes America and Prays for Its Swift Destruction.”

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

(Via InstaPundit, who thinks this sounds more like NPR than I do)

Okay, which story on the cover of this week’s Weekly World News is the most amusing?

• HITLER’S NOSE CLONED — & It’s Growing a Moustache!
• TOILET OF TERROR Flushes People Into … (See P. 22)

In case you can’t see the image clearly, the first story is accompanied by a scientific-looking guy (you can tell because of the glasses, conservative haircut, and lab coat) holding a petri dish with what looks like a funny-nose-and-glasses-without-the-glasses.

The second story has a photo of a toilet wrapped in police tape.

Margie voted for the Hitler’s Nose story. I, on the other hand, think the alliteration of “Toilet of Terror” (enhanced by the synomym “Potty of Peril” on page 22) lends that story a poetic frisson which wins the coveted first slot. (The answer, by the way, is that it flushes people into the Bermuda Triangle, which also adds some more of that frissony stuff.)

I was amused to discover that there is actually a WWN web page. It makes for great reading. Heck, maybe that’s where Bill Gates got that open source idea ….

Harvard’s president on public service and the rebirth of patriotism, in the Wall Street Journal.

There was a time in our country when if you turned on the news and American troops were engaged in battle, Walter Cronkite said, “Our soldiers prevailed today.” Or, “Our soldiers struggled today.” It was a very significant thing for our country, I believe, when that pronoun “our” ceased to be part of the description of what the American military did. It was a very significant thing for our country when the tragic events of the Vietnam War period led to disaffection, which in many ways lives with us today, toward people who wear uniforms.

An interesting piece (from a speech at the John F. Kennedy School of Government).

(Via InstaPundit)

Now that’s a press release

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on the press constantly asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

In the end, war is not about statistics, deadlines, short attention spans, or 24-hour news cycles. It is about will — the projection of will, the clear, unambiguous determination of the President and the American people to see this through to certain victory.

Worth reading.

(Via InstaPundit)

Victory Blog is gone, but Spy Hamlet, its replacement, is a worthy successor. The lead story today is the government announcing new measures against the “global anxietyist networks” that are “worrying innocent Americans.”

Experts also point to such fear-producing CNN tactics as frightening photographs of anthrax germs and ominous theme music as further evidence of anxietyist groups’ involvement in the national epidemic of concern.

“It’s not just CNN,” Kerr said, “but groups like Fox News, CNBC, and even CSPAN that are behind the anxietyist attacks. These are large, well-funded, well-organized groups dedicated to scaring the shit out of innocent men, women, and children.”

A palpable hit on the Amusementmeter.

Are journalists themselves responsible for the “doubts” and “haunting spectre of quagmire” that they report on as lurking about the war? William Saletan at Slate thinks so.

The reason such questions “bubble around” is that reporters raise and repeat them in a self-escalating cycle. Here’s how it works. On Friday, a reporter tells an admiral at a Pentagon briefing, “There is a growing chorus now—it’s still a small chorus, but it’s getting louder—of critics who are saying that the United States appears to be bogged down.” On Saturday, under the headline “New Sense of Impatience Is Emerging,” the Los Angeles Times cites the “bogged down” question as evidence that doubts have “crystallized” as “the military faces increasingly skeptical questions.” On Sunday, ABC’s Cokie Roberts opens her interview with Rumsfeld by noting, “There’ve been stories over the weekend that give the perception that this war after three weeks is not going very well.”

Saletan suggests that lack of news of tremendous success can only be hyped by the media as failure — a self-fulfilling prophecy when it then turns into stories about American citizenry doubting whether the war can be won after all the “setbacks” endured.

(Also via InstaPundit)

Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic writes a good article about the risks of terrorism — and how they are overestimated by an anxious public (and a story-seeking media).

As new cases of anthrax infection continue to emerge, the World Health Organization is begging people not to panic. But tabloid headlines like this one from The Mirror in London send a different message: “PANIC.”

[…] Will sensationalistic reports of worst-case terrorist scenarios exaggerate people’s fear of being caught in an attack? There’s every reason to believe that they will because of the media’s tendency to exaggerate the scope and probability of remote risks. In a book called Random Violence, Joel Best, then of Southern Illinois University, examined the “moral panics” about a series of new crimes that seized public attention in the 1980s and ’90s: freeway violence in 1987, wilding in 1989, stalking around 1990, kids and guns in 1991, and so forth. In each case, Best writes, television seized on two or three incidents of a dramatic crime, such as freeway shooting, and then claimed it was part of a broader trend. By taking the worst and most infrequent examples of criminal violence and melodramatically claiming they were typical, television created the false impression that everyone was equally at risk, thereby increasing its audience.

Rosen disagrees with the Administration issuing non-specific “warning,” like the one this week. I disagree with him, but I also see his point. Certainly to the degree that it’s then amplified by the media, and lacks specificity as to the level of risk, it may just be uselessly churning matters even further.

(Via InstaPundit)

Actual promo for local news on KCNC Denver:

“Is Denver due for a …
TERRORIST ATTACK?
Or are we just …
SCARING OURSELVES?”

Ayup.

(Via Blather)