Category Archives: News Media

AP v. Bloggers

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Here’s the latest on the Associated Press v. Bloggers smackdown you may have read about elsewhere. The AP has announced an “Excerpt for Web Use” policy that requires payment of fees based on the number of words used. For example, one would owe the AP $12.50 for excerpting as few as five words. Yes, m’loves, that’s 5, as in the number of fingers most people have on one hand. See this article in BetaNews for more details.

Cernig at Newshoggers reports that the AP used 154 words from the rightie blog Patterico’s Pontifications and did not offer to pay Patterico. Per the AP’s scale, it owes Patterico $50.

Kos says he’s going to excerpt wantonly from the Associated Press all he pleases, nyah nyah nyah.

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP — an organization famous for taking its members work without credit — will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

The AP doesn’t get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they’ll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.

Having worked in print media for years, I can tell you that “fair use” often is one big gray area. I have encountered publishers who wanted a permissions fee for use of one sentence from a magazine or newspaper article to be republished in print. But on the web, if the brief excerpt is fully attributed and linked back to the original article, this is both driving traffic directly to the original article and also making the article more visible to search engines, which is a benefit to the publisher if its ad revenues depend on traffic.

I sometimes find entire blog posts of mine pasted on other blogs, and this annoys the hell out of me even if it’s linked. If the entire article is there, why would anyone feel a need to click on the link back to me? But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about brief excerpts. The AP is nuts.

Update: Scholars & Rogues is taking the side of the AP. I just left the following comment there:

Having worked in print media for years, I can tell you that “fair use” often is one big gray area. I have encountered publishers who wanted a permissions fee for use of one sentence from a magazine or newspaper article to be republished in print.

But on the web, if the brief excerpt is fully attributed and linked back to the original article, this is both driving traffic directly to the original article and also making the article more visible to search engines, which is a benefit to the publisher if its ad revenues depend on traffic.

I sometimes find entire blog posts of mine pasted on other blogs, and this annoys the hell out of me even if it’s linked. If the entire article is there, why would anyone feel a need to click on the link back to me? But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about brief excerpts. Now the AP wants to charge bloggers for use of as few as five words. That’s insane.

I write for the New York Times Company’s About.com site, which is a big commercial site, and I can tell you we live and die by traffic. Search engine optimization and traffic driving is the be-all and end-all of that business. If someone excerpts some of my writing with a link, this drives traffic back to my work on About.com and also helps move my writing up to the top of google searches, driving more traffic. Ultimately this makes About.com more money and it makes me more money, which makes me happy.

The New York Times encourages us to sniff out people re-publishing entire articles, and the NYT lawyers will issue takedown orders if such an article is found. But excerpts with links? We like people to publish excerpts with links.

There is indeed a crisis in news reporting now, because newspapers are losing revenue and cutting back on reporters and news bureaus. News gathering costs money, and bloggers do make free use of the work done by news-gatherers.

However, the issue ultimately is one of business models. The old print media business models don’t apply to the Web. How will news gatherers and media make profits in the future? The way things are falling out now suggests traffic and SEO are huge assets that web sites must cultivate to survive.

Update: See also Techdirt and Knoxnews.

The Replacement

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There’s a good discussion at Jack and Jill about who might replace Tim Russert on Meet the Press. I endorse the Christian Progressive Liberal’s opinions on this matter.

I predict NBC will have rotating hosts until they settle on someone. The other most likely possibility, IMO, is that Tom Brokaw would take the MtP hosting job.

As much as I love Keith Olbermann, and as much as I would so start watching MtP again if he were hosting, I just can’t see NBC going with him as MtP host.

Tim Russert

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I’ve just learned Tim Russert is dead of a heart attack.

Update: I’m watching the MSNBC retrospective, and I’m struck by the absence of Chris Matthews, even during his regular program time. Keith Olbermann is playing chief moderator. I don’t know if this means anything.

Who Needs Satire When You’ve Got Wingnuts?

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You may have seen this elsewhere, but it’s too rich — I want to pile on, too. Yes, below is the famous Faux Nooz clip in which Little Lulu discusses “substantive” charges against Michelle Obama while the scroll calls her “Obama’s Baby Mama.”

Of course, today Malkin defends the use of the phrase “Obama’s Baby Mama,” showing us once again she’s got all the integrity of the post-iceberg Titanic.

See also Oliver Willis and Kyle Moore.

Update: Be sure to read Liza.

Update 2: See also The Poor Man.

Distractions

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Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe:

THE REAL NEWS of April played second fiddle to the presidential campaign, the pope’s visit to America, and the Texas polygamy case.

The death toll for the US military in Iraq hit 49 in April, making it the deadliest month since September, according to the Associated Press. Around Iraq, at least 1,080 Iraqi civilians and security personnel were killed last month, an average of 36 a day, according to the AP tally. While that’s down from March’s total of 1,269, or an average of 41 per day, those casualties certainly don’t add up to a stable Iraq.

It’s not as if there is no news from Iraq, you know. Bradley Brooks reports for the Associated Press:

The US military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum yesterday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.

Separately, the military said late yesterday that four Marines were killed on Thursday by a roadside bomb in Anbar Province. No other details were released, and the names of the Marines were withheld pending notification of their families.

The strike in Sadr City, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant command-control center, the US military said. The center was in the heart of the 8-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, none of them patients in the hospital.

See Juan Cole for more details.

Similarly, awhle back John McCain came out with a health care “plan” that was such a bad joke it ought to have got him laughed out of the presidential race. It might have, had the American people heard anything resembling substantive discussion of it from news media. (See also Steve Benen.)

Instead, we get 24/7 coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. As Eugene Robinson said,

There’s something maddening about this presidential campaign. It has become irrelevant whether anything the candidates say actually makes sense. All that matters is how their words will “play” with voters who are presumed to be too stupid to realize that they’re the ones being played.

Bob Herbert, yesterday:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no doubt (and regrettably) a big issue in the presidential campaign. But what we’ve seen over the past week is major media overkill — Jeremiah Wright all day and all night. It’s like watching the clips of a car wreck again and again.

We’ve plotted the trend lines of his relationship with Barack Obama over the past two decades. What did Obama know and when did he know it? We’ve forced Barack and Michelle Obama, two decent, hard-working, law-abiding, family-oriented Americans, to sit for humiliating television interviews, reminiscent of Bill and Hillary Clinton on “60 Minutes” at the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

There’s something wrong with us.

Frank Rich points out in his column today that the alleged craziness of anything the Rev. Wright said pales in comparison to the utterances of one Rev. John Hagee, whose affiliations with John McCain seem to be an issue only among us leftie bloggers.

Here Rich gets to the heart of the matter:

Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell can blame America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right blinks and yawns. Some obscure who-is-this-guy-again? college professor named Ward Chamberlain blames America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right goes ballistic. Likewise, some redneck yahoos in Alabama get caught with an arsenal of explosives and weapons that included 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition, and it’s no big deal. But an exploding backpack in Las Vegas or, worse, the threat of homemade cherry bombs in Michigan causes Righties to beocme unglued if they suspect the perpetrator might be Muslim.

It’s all about fear. Righties base their political choices on what they fear. At the same time, they are drawn to what they fear; they obsess over what they fear. Because they are afraid of angry black men, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a big deal to them. He excites them because he vindicates them.

On the whole, the Left doesn’t react the same way to right-wing craziness. That’s partly because there’s so much of it, of course. We hear about a Republican politician associating with an extremist religious whackjob, and we think, What else is new? And news media, which has bought into the narrative that “religion” is something the Right holds a patent on, doesn’t ask questions about the religiosity of the Right. It’s only a “story” when it’s about the Left.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign continues to degrade everything liberalism stands for by sucking up to the Right. But I’ll have to save that for another post.

Identity Crises

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That Bill Kristol is as hilarious as ever today. He is comparing Barack Obama to Karl Marx:

But it’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of economic frustration.

Note the “we.” Another member of the elite who doesn’t get it.

Obama in San Francisco does no courtesy to his fellow Americans. Look at the other claims he makes about those small-town voters.

Obama ascribes their anti-trade sentiment to economic frustration — as if there are no respectable arguments against more free-trade agreements. This is particularly cynical, since he himself has been making those arguments, exploiting and fanning this sentiment that he decries. Aren’t we then entitled to assume Obama’s opposition to Nafta and the Colombian trade pact is merely cynical pandering to frustrated Americans?

In Kristol’s world, the unwashed masses who live in those anonymous small towns are too dim to notice where their jobs went (which, if true, would make them almost as dim as Kristol) and wouldn’t be against “free trade” if demagogues would just leave the subject alone.

IMO Kristol shows us how really out of touch he is here:

He’s [Obama] disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America.

Either Kristol has no clue whatsoever about the real working-class folks of small town America, or he doesn’t know what bourgeois means. Or both. Either way, there is a huge class of Americans who are utterly invisible to Kristol.

This goes beyond just looking down on the simple peasants. Kristol doesn’t even know they exist. (See also fubar at Needlenose.)

Meanwhile, Obama is fighting back. ABC News reports:

“Shame on her,” Obama said, echoing one of Clinton’s own atacks on him. “Shame on her, she knows better.”

Obama said he was disappointed with her for her response and then launched into a new criticism of Clinton over her recent admission of being a hunter, and compared her sarcastically to Annie Oakley.

“She’s running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment, she’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley! Hillary Clinton’s out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday, she’s packin’ a six shooter! C’mon! She knows better. That’s some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blinds.”

Obama said he is amazed and surprised by this “dust-up” but admitted that his words were chosen badly. He said he deeply regretted … that his words were misinterpreted.

This is exactly the right response. He shouldn’t back down. I think it’s possible that, when the dust settles, this episode will have resolved in his favor. Senator Clinton is already having to answer questions about the last time she went to church or fired a gun.

Here’s what’s sad: If I had read this column by Carl Bernstein six months ago I would have said Carl had fallen victim to Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Now, I suspect it’s close to the truth.

Here are some really good “see alsos”: Kevin Hayden at American Street; Ron Beasley at Middle Earth Journal; RJ Eskow at Huffington Post; Oliver Willis.

Here’s a particularly excellent commentary by Gary Younge. And David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers writes “A surge of new voters in Pennsylvania is likely to help Obama.”

Update: Robert Reich:

Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment — all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.

Read the whole thing.

Update 2: Quote du Jour from John Cole:

So, in case you are keeping score, yes, American voters are dumb enough to vote for Bush twice (and I include myself in that number, sadly). They are not, however, dumb enough to sit around and listen to an Ivy League educated lawyer who has spent all but two of the last 40 years living in a Governor’s mansion, the White House, and a NY mansion and who made 110 million over the past six years call someone else elitist.

Go figure.

A (Cracked) Pot Gazes Into the Kettle’s Shining Surface

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Every now and then one comes across a bit of punditry that is so colossally pathological it defies commentary. I want to just link to it and say, Read this. It’s better than a freak show.

Today Bill “the Everwrong” Kristol gives us such a specimen. When I read it, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or call the guys with the butterfly nets.

You have to read the whole thing to glimpse the bottomless pit that is Kristol’s brain. In a nutshell, he’s saying that Democrats don’t know how to govern because they can’t weigh actions and consequences. No, really. And all the more surreal that it’s Kristol saying this.

Echidne:

Get it? The ruling power is the Republican party, and they are really good at running the government because they have spent so much time asking themselves: “If such and such were to happen then what?” For instance, lots of this self-examination took place right before the Iraq invasion, I’m sure, and also when deciding on how the government should respond to the disasters caused by hurricane Katrina, and also when the Republicans decided to make the Food and Drug Administration go on a starvation diet, just in time for all the dangerous foods and medications entering this country. All that careful thinking, all that responsibility! Though the responsibility tends to come with retroactive immunity these days.

Connecting the Dots responds to Kristol’s suggestion that Dems should read Kipling:

… the New York Times’ newest sage adapts the wisdom of the author of “White Man’s Burden” to belabor opposition to the war in Iraq and illegal eavesdropping as the acts of decadent Democrats who have forgotten how to take responsibility for the use of power.

Cheerfully ignoring the fate of the British Empire that Kipling celebrated, Kristol advises Bush detractors to step up and emulate those men of action who muddled up the Middle East a century ago.

James Fallows:

We all delude ourselves about ourselves. But I wonder if Bill Kristol can imagine how this line — criticizing scholars for a descent into hackdom, and for being comfortably ensconced in sinecures — will strike many of his readers.

No, he can’t imagine. I do believe nobody on the planet is more oblivious than Kristol. He’s even more oblivious than David Brooks.

Update: Kristol speaks.

Billo Out of Control

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Faux News’s Bill O’Reilly had to be subdued by Secret Service agents. Lynn Sweet reports:

NASHUA, N.H.– Fox News host Bill O’Reilly got into a confrontation with an Obama aide after O’Reilly started screaming at him as he tried to get Barack Obama’s attention following a rally here. O’Reilly eventually did chat briefly with Obama and asked him to be a guest on his show.

The incident was triggered when O’Reilly–with a Fox News crew shooting–was screaming at Obama National Trip Director Marvin Nicholson “Move” so he could get Obama’s attention, according to several eyewitnesses. “O’Reilly was yelling at him, yelling at his face,” a photographer shooting the scene said.

O’Reilly grabbed Nicholson’s arm and shoved him, another eyewitness said. Nicholson, who is 6’8, said O’Reilly called him “low class.”

“He grabbed me with both his hands here,” Nicholson said, gesturing to his left arm and O’Reilly “started shoving me.” Nicholson said, ” He was pretty upset. He was yelling at me.”

Secret Service agents who were nearby flanked O ‘Reilly after he pushed Nicholson. They told O’Reilly he needed to calm down and get behind the fence-like barricade that contained the press.

Obama had his back turned at this point and did not see any of this.

Huffington Post is promising a video later today.

Update: John Dickerson’s account of the same incident.