I'm as surprised as you are that I've received a comment on my Judith Miller piece. I was serious when I said that you don't care. However, it seems I was wrong. Someone named "b", though initially only interested in U.N.K.L.E., found his way through the entire post. Using up his last bit of strength, after what I'm positive was an extremely dry and not entirely accurate read, "b" managed to let me know about his opinions. Normally I'd disregard him, but he seems to be more interested in explaining his position to me than asking me for U.N.K.L.E. albums or proclaiming that Judy Miller is a terrorist and so am I.
So, "b", you've made a good point that I failed to address. Wilson, or, in fact, anyone else mentioned in this last post, could be lying to you and I. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to say that everyone involved is looking out for their own best interests, first and foremost.
It's quite difficult to leave your own politics out of anything that you do, and I don't think I can expect it of anyone. Does that mean that I support it? No, not in the least. However, I am saying that when I get information from anyone, I anticipate the bias based on their particular lean. Wilson has political beliefs, so does Karl Rove, and I'm willing to bet that Judith Miller has her own as well.
I can't claim to know the truth, but I can claim the information that I've presented here has been given to me. If that seems like a weak hand for serious opinions, then ignore me; chalk me up to a rambling misinformed blogger, but know that all I have is the information I've gathered and my opinions on that information. The former I can not stand by any more than it is proven, and the latter is the firm ground I'll stand until I can trade it for firmer.
All of this is why I affirmed in the closing paragraph that I don't care what Judith Miller's reasons for refusing to name her source is. If her source hasn't released her from her promise of confidentiality, then I'm proud of her resolve to face her sentence for civil contempt, and she has taken responsiblity and faced it.
I know that what she is doing is illegal, I know that what Judge Hogan has prescribed for her sentence is fitting, but I also know that I think that this act of defiance should not be a crime. The orders to reveal her source should never have been issued, and therefore Miller would have had nothing to defy.
Alas, this is not the way our federal law works. Judith Miller does what she feels is best, and Judge Hogan does what he feels is best. I don't remember, however, Judith Miller protesting the court's ruling. There were legal appeals, and then there was a refusal to testify, but Judith Miller is serving her sentence, and paying her debt to society, as it were. I feel as though Judith Miller's sacrifice of four months of her life is paying for the way I think things should be.
Now, "b", this is where you and I disagree. I see your point, and you've made it well, however you seem to predicate your argument, that Miller deserves no support, on her concealing a criminal's identity. It doesn't seem to me that either of us are sure that Miller's source is a criminal. This is an important caveat, and has serious weight on my support of her actions. I, however, will point out the difference in my stance on Judith Miller's actions. I support the press' right to conceal a source, and I would advocate a national shield law. I do not support the protection of a criminal, and I can appreciate the seriousness of the IIP Act. If the source is in violation of this act, then I have an ethical problem with Miller or anyone else protecting the source. In contrast, if the source isn't violating national security, then an overzealous special prosecutor shouldn't be allowed to use incarceration to extract the information.
It is this ethical versus legal intersection that a reporter must attend to. With the rights afforded by the First Amendment, the press also has the responsibility to be mindful of the balance between what is within their rights and what is in the best interest of the general public. If journalists are to be trusted with a national shield law, then they need to find themselves responsible for using it. This means that there should be a voluntary reduction in the number of anonymous sources used. In addition, reporters need to check their ethics when using such a national shield law, as protecting a criminal could hardly be considered in the best interest of the general public.
Is this a great responsiblity? It sure is, but you should be able to shoulder it if you're going to put yourself in the business of journalism. So you get your rights and your responsibilities, and you go out there and bring me the news. If you do it well, and you do it right, there shouldn't be a damn thing anyone can do to stop you.
...or "All this talk of yellow cake is making me hungry."
I want to talk about Judith Miller of the New York Times, and why she's in jail right now. I know you don't care, but that's what makes the explosion in blogging so wonderful. You won't read this, and I won't care. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I'll have you know that I use First Amendment rights constantly, both directly and indirectly, and so I have a previously established interest in this case. Now I'll let you know why you have an interest, but may not know it.
I'm not so naive to reduce the situation surrounding the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the information that I've got on hand. I'm sure, as with all things political, that there are a number of factors on all sides of the event, the issue and the outcomes, that play a part in what has and will go on. These factors are both covert and overt. The one thing that I do know, despite the secrecy surrounding this case, is that I enjoy and appreciate the first amendment, as I may have explained already.
So allow me to go into a brief explanation of how I understand this ordeal to have taken place. Subsequent to that, I will briefly tell you why I care, so as to inspire you to care. That's right, all the reward you'll get for reading this is what I'll let pass as my opining condescension.
A long time ago, you may remember that our American president informed us that Saddam Hussein, infamous dictator of Iraq, was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. He cited documents, that detailed the transaction sought, as evidence of this. This was a primary crutch to a war to depose Hussein from power, and, as was the hope, neutralize this threat of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
As it so happens, these documents were questioned. It seemed the questions were intended to prevent us from invading a country on a preemptive strike carried on false claims of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein was certainly not a champion of human rights, but the question at hand was his intent to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger. Before Bush had used these documents to bolster his efforts to rally the American people behind him to go to war with Iraq, the CIA had sent Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson to Niger to verify the documents' claims.
Wilson determined the documents to be a forgery based on the Nigerien (Pronounced nee-ZHAIR-ee-an, and now you know the adjective form of Niger.) yellowcake mining operation's international management and the International Atomic Energy Agency oversight. Wilson, who verified his findings with the US ambassador to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, concluded that with the magnitude of international interests in the oversight of yellowcake mining, and other factors he'd reveal publicly later, that the covert sale of it to Iraq just wasn't possible. This ordeal came to be known as the Yellowcake Forgery and though the validity is disputed from both sides, the false intelligence is cited by detractors from the war in Iraq.
Though the CIA had sent him to Niger, Wilson's warnings that the intelligence was forged was not heeded by the administration. After the President, as mentioned earlier, cited the evidence in his 2003 State of the Union Address, Wilson and others were left to question the motives behind ignoring your own intelligence reports.
In response to this, Wilson wrote a piece for the New York Times entitled "What I Didn't Find In Africa", which reasserts his findings in Niger by giving some background on how he came to the conclusion that the documents were a forgery, which included the oversight structure of the mines, the Nigerien government's denial of the claims and reports that the documents themselves were signed by people who were no longer in the government.
This overt and brazen disagreement, between the President of the United States and Wilson, over intelligence that Wilson himself gathered, seemed not to jibe with the administration's decision to "fix facts" around their war plans. This outspoken article, condemning Bush's adherence to the false intelligence, spurred Robert Novak to write an article for his column in the Chicago Sun-Times, which he called "Mission To Niger". Within this article, he disclosed that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson (née Valerie Plame), worked for the CIA as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction". Novak attributed the information he'd gathered, including the contention that Wilson's wife was the one who authorized his trip to Niger, to "two senior administration officials".
Popular opinion seems to indicate that this act of divulging the nepotistic roots of Wilson's claims to discredit the President's run up to war on Iraq, is actually a White House attempt to discredit Wilson himself and the conclusions that he came to in this assignment. Surely this is not an assumption that is out of line, but should not be taken as truth yet.
Shortly after Novak's article, Matt Cooper, with Time Magazine, wrote an article on Plame, and it was at this time that the New York Times' Judith Miller was doing the research and background so that she could write a story on the same topic. This was a goal that Miller did not complete, however, in her preparation she had taken interviews on the subject.
Once Wilson found out about Novak's article outing his wife's role in the CIA, he began to complain loudly that this was an act of retribution for showing fault in an overzealous and aggressive administration. However, an investigation was called for by Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration, into whether there was, in fact, a crime committed in revealing his wife's identity, due to her role at the CIA. In order to prosecute this case, a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, operating outside of the US Department of Justice (this part is important), was given the case. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, revealing the identity of a covert agent is a crime and can hold a hefty fine and imprisonment up to 10 years. With this in mind, Plame's status at the CIA as it relates to the law should be taken under consideration. It seems that Plame was not a covert agent, and hadn't been one in at least 6 years, surpassing the 5 year statute of limitations offered by this IIP Act.
In this investigation and trial, Fitzgerald has subpoenaed administration officials all the way up to the President, and, in addition, all reporters that could have conducted any interviews on the leak. These reporters include Robert Novak, Matt Cooper and Judith Miller. Little is known about Robert Novak's role in the trial, but he is rumored to have given full cooperation to the special prosecutor.
When Fitzgerald called Matt Cooper and Judy Miller to testify as to their anonymous sources for Valerie Plame's identity, they both refused. I know you think that under the First Amendment freedom of the press is guaranteed universally, and that these two reporters should have no legal problem refusing to reveal their sources to the prosecutor, but you're, unfortunately, wrong. The freedom of the press, guaranteed nationally in this country doesn't cover protection of anonymous sources, as that right is left up to the individual states. Now the District of Columbia and all but one state (If you know which one, let me know.) has a "shield law" to protect reporters in this way, however there is no national shield law. Now, it has been a matter of policy for the US Department of Justice to consider a reporter's right to anonymous sources above the government's right to extract that information, however, as Fitzgerald is operating as a special prosecutor, the policies of the USDOJ are of no concern to him.
So Matt Cooper and Judy Miller go to jail for contempt, right? Not quite, as Judge Hogan (picture "Hulk" Hogan in a black robe with a gavel) charged not only Cooper and Miller with contempt, but also Time Magazine. As Time collapsed under the threat of a 1 million dollar fine, they turned in Cooper's notes and sold him out. This was not enough for Fitzgerald, and as Cooper still refused to testify, he was set to go to jail for the rest of the Grand Jury's term, about 4 months.
On the morning of his sentencing, before he left the house, Cooper received a personal release from his agreement to confidentiality with his source, who turned out to be Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy Chief of Staff. Rove, it seems, spoke to Cooper on double super secret background (No, his source is Rove, not Dean Wormer from Animal House. The term is "double super secret background" not "double secret probation".) This 11th hour personal release also turned out to be a long discussion between Rove's and Cooper's lawyers. With this out of the way, Cooper agreed to testify and was spared his jail sentence. Judy Miller, however, was not.
Judith Miller, a well-known and talented reporter for the New York Times went to jail for contempt for protecting a source on an article that she never wrote. There has been some support of her actions from other journalists, and also some who don't realize the reality of the situation (This is a pair of emails between Nick Goldberg, Op-Ed Editor for the Los Angeles Times, and Bill Keller, Executive Editor for the New York Times.). While there is some speculation that this is not as simple as it seems, it certainly feels like Ms. Miller is standing up for her promise to confidentiality. If the trust behind a confidentiality promise is lost to aggressive prosecution, then these sources, sometimes blowing the whistle on powerful government officials doing illegal things, will be more hesitant to come forward.
This sort of issue has the power to put a chill on the jobs of journalists all over the country, carrying important stories with anonymous sources revealing things that concern the safety and security of the country. Don't believe me? See for yourself, that the ramifications are already being felt.
I don't agree with excessive use of anonymity, and I feel that there is an journalistic ethics problem with protecting a source that was using the media as a puppet to discredit a voice of dissent, but I agree with what Judith Miller is doing, and I'm glad that the New York Times stands behind her, because I think she may be doing it for all of us who value the right to know what is really going on in the world, not just what the government approves for you to know.
I make no apologies for the length or serious tone of this article. Watch the video of "Black Bush" talking about aluminum tubes and yellow cake that's linked off of the article's header picture, or the Daily Show coverage of the incident, if you want funny... you know they made me laugh. If you've made it this far through the piece, you should know that you have started to be able to understand just how tired I am of writing about this. I started the research on this over a week ago, and was committed to finding out as much about this as I could before I declared that Judy Miller is doing a good thing for the First Amendment. Hours of research into it, I realized that I don't care if Ms. Miller is protecting a political douchebag attacking some diplomat's wife or Captain America revealing that you are all being lied to by your government. It doesn't make a difference to my support of what should be her right to protect her sources. I'm not sure if I agree ethically with her decision to protect her source from coming clean about his actions, as they may not have been in the general public's best interest. However, this is civil disobedience, and while it doesn't make her Ghandi or Rosa Parks, I feel like it's important to see someone stand against the erosion of civil rights. No one seems to do this anymore, and it is becoming easier to find someone as unAmerican just for wanting to be free. Vicious attacks, verbal or physical, require steadfastness to our principles. Though this situation isn't perfect for demonstrating the need for a national shield law, as Bill Keller, Executive Editor for the New York Times, said when his reporter was taken away to jail, "You go to court with the case you have, not the case you'd like to have."
“Your failing business model is not my fault or my problem.” I remember reading that somewhere and it couldn’t hold truer. In every other Pro-MPAA / Pro-RIAA argument I hear the point brought up that media sales are suffering due to widespread piracy and internet with such nasty technological advances as Napster and BitTorrent are stealing from the media industry. Welcome to Media Post-Industrialism.
There's a whole lot more... Read On.
How is it that DVD and CD sales are up, yet the Media Industry still cries bloddy murder at the speculated loss of it’s “possible earnings?” It’s Movie Math. Numbers and statistics lie, but apparently Media executives can lie that much better than your conventional used car salesman. Every positive is a negative and every negative has a positive outcome, the important thing when flipping around the truth to suit your stance on a topic, is to remember what your stance is.
I saw a van around my house pimping Verizon FiOS. It’s apparently a Fiber Optic line run directly to your apartment building for broadband service. Their promotional page makes a point of saying that you’ll be “downloading feature films in no time. Grabbing CD-quality audio in seconds.” I’d like to think that I can do this now but is this an actual endorsement for media piracy? BoingBoing made a point of mentioning the Post-Grokster ruling interpretations of this, but I like to think that Verizon means more positive media deliver such as the ITMS or MovieLink or Microsoft’s new mythical white horse Avalanche. Then again, fuck that shit… We still have BitTorrent & KaZaa right?
Every time a Torrent site dies, a Media Exec gets his wings. Hopefully the wings will help his decent out of the skyscraper window next time a 16 year old or 80 year old woman shatters his business model and dooms is Media Cartel to failure. To keep it on the legal, I understand the trading of music and movies is a no-no, but why go after the TV Torrent site? That just pisses me off. Just when I got my torrent aggregators working to my precise liking you go and take down BTEFNet. Fuck you, fuck you in your stupid asses. Chop off one snake’s head and two grow back in its place… but I mean the general annoyance of it all… thanks a lot. Is it because now someone at the top realized that the same content can be shoveled on to DVD and released at the end of the season keeping all rights reserved and all copyrights in check? Copy-Wrong… they were going to make money off it anyways, that or let it die is some vault somewhere. It’s all done in the name of preventing piracy.
Asia has had to deal with the scourge of media pirates for ages and their media industry has not collapsed upon itself as of yet. In fact through out China and Japan, to combat the pirates, media distributors offer enhanced value in the form of extra content, collectors boxes or some other type of gimmick to show that you have paid for and have earned that piece of media. Brandon, that’s why the Japanese have better CD packages than us, not because they are better but because they have better pirates.
I’m going to go down to Chinatown and see what’s on the tasting menu for tonight.
That’s right. I’ll buy the bootleg DVD and if the movie is worth it, I’ll still end up seeing it in the theater with friends. I have no problem paying for media that is worth it. I’ll download an MP3 to see if the CD is worth buying. That’s why I downloaded and bough The Postal Service’s “Give Up” and then downloaded and avoided Daft Punk’s “Human after all” or anything by Linkin Park. I have spent more on DVDs, CDs and LPs in the last 2 years than I ever have… ever. All because I was able to sample the media before buying it. I have hunted down obscure mixes only available on vinyl and waged bid wars on eBay over out of print CDs just because I appreciate the media. I think that’s why shitty artists oppose the ITMS, because people can grab the one to three tracks off of the new CD that arte worth it for $.99 and save themselves what they would have blown on the full $15-$20 CD. Use that money and go buy yourselves a soft pretzel kids at the mall or something. Better yet, Donate a dollar to BitTorrent. Cause business models die, but ideas cannot be killed.
So far as I'm concerned, rewriting comic dialogue doesn't get much funnier than this handful of Rejected "Love Is..." Comics. Here's two to get you started:
Fuck you, I like this stuff. Sensitive and modest? Maybe not, but it's damn funny.
Everyone should read about Mark. He's a bastard, but he makes a good point that I feel needs to be made. What a logical and forward-thinking post disguised under the blanket of him being a bastard. I think he shouldn't write off his opinions so quickly, as he almost always has merit. Though, despite his disgust with the newsmedia, I feel they're still an important source of real news, though they seem to be doing everything in their power to hide that... now I wonder why?
I'd think that because news is a commodity and not a service, the best way to turn a profit is to increase the entertainment value, thereby increasing the number of people who are willful news consumers. Just because a news item is entertaining doesn't mean that it is less meaningful or important than dry, vanilla news (see The Daily Show for an example), but quite often that disparity is the rule. Maybe, the major news outlets find a better profit by disseminating news that panders to low-intelligence, sensationalistic tastes.
I mean, everyone can decide their opinion on shark attacks very quickly. The common opinion may well be that very few people are in the market to be attacked by a shark. A piece on a shark attack also plays on our direct fear of falling victim to an angry or hungry shark. So to both protect and entertain yourself you learn about the shark attack in very short uninformative bursts from the reporter, and then satisfy your sick curiosity by listening to the family of the victim and perhaps the accounts of onlookers. It's drama and it's real, and you can enjoy that without anyone you know being consumed by an animal.
This formula becomes very different when someone is presented with a deeper or more intelligent topic, such as a case of eminent domain. (If you don't want to register for the Washington Post, just download BugMeNot for Firefox and it'll take care of registration sites for you.) This may be a difficult case to understand, though it has greater potential to affect every American than a shark attack, as I found out in a bit of brief superficial research that there were 10,000 American eminent domain cases between 1998 and 2002, however, there were only about 224 shark attacks in American waters in that same time period. This means that in America, you're about 4400% more likely to have your home seized by the government than you are to be attacked by a shark. If you don't believe that cities plan on taking advantage of this precedent setting decision, then understand that the mayor of Washington, D.C. is already planning to use this decision in two separate projects: to levy private property to build an upscale shopping mall and a baseball stadium for the district's new baseball team, the Nationals. (Take some pleasure that the justices of the Supreme Court are not uniquely protected from the effects of their decisions that all Americans have to live with. All it takes is an informed member of society who's willing to understand the ramifications of a Supreme Court decision and then use those ramifications in his best interest.)
In order to make an informed decision on this topic you must both know the law and be able to make a critical decision on the interpretation of the law. I seriously doubt that a majority of the population knows that the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution provides protection from government appropriation of private land unless the private owner is justly compensated and the property in question is to be put to public use. If you didn't understand that, then to take anything from a news piece on the recent Kelo V. New London Supreme Court case, you'd have to learn enough to understand the issue and then make a decision based on your newfound knowledge about how you feel about the decision and the events surrounding it. So, since you're much more likely to be affected by government property theives than aggressively hungry fish, why don't people learn the material and care about these topics?
I fear that this process is a bit too much for the average person, in that they cannot take the time to drive their car to work at a reasonable speed, but instead opt to exceed the speed limit, drink coffee, eat an Egg-A-Mooby Muffin and talk on their cell phone at the same time, all in the name of saving the very time that they never seem to have. Everyone is in such a hurry to do everything and no one has the time to read or watch the news, nevermind analyze it. In this situation the infrequent news consumption must be concise and dumb. It must tell you both minimal facts and a coherent attitude to take on those facts. If you're lucky, you get to gloss over your barrage of light news from a morning radio "shock jock" disc jockey or talk show host of your manufactured political leaning, so that the news fits your sensibilities and entertains you. This is probably so that you don't feel like you've wasted your time on something boring, like learning about something that affects your life, not the rare shark attacks or kidnappings in island paradises you'll never see.
So where does the "important source of real news" section come out? Well I know I've mentioned before the importance of getting your news from multiple sources to create more than a nebulous flat view of an event. But, when you take the time to do this, you're building not just your understanding of the merits and biases of the news outlets that you have on hand, you're also establishing a background or foundation from which you can relate news in the future back to. This will help in forming your own opinions and understanding the progression of events that are constantly happening just outside your door.
Sure it takes time to consult multiple sources, and then more time to understand the information you've been given, but I feel it's your duty as a citizen to be well enough informed so as not to vote on party lines, but to vote on issues. And where the news doesn't relate to politics, then you're better informed as a person, not just a voting citizen. It may make you feel better after you get over the sensation that nothing in the world seems to be working out how you want it to. I'm told that'll take some time, and when I get past it myself, I'll be sure to let you all know.
Put the puns on Cruise control, strap them to a Cruise missle, but don't send them on a Cruise to the Bahamas just yet, there's still more people willing to buy their way into to L. Ron Hubbard's sci-fi enlightenment.
I don't have anything against Scientology, and if you'd like to prove that you're level OT-VII insane on national television, then you'd just better be prepared to be laughed at, as your cult / Hubbard yacht financier has been, for as long as anyone can remember. It's not threatening to me that Tom Cruise hates Ritalin, Adderall, psychiatry, Matt Lauer and of course Oprah.
You'd think that as a godless heathen, I'd be enamored with a religion that's not pro-life or pro-choice, but instead takes a stand outside the left / right bickering, and goes with pro-abortion. After all, population control built into a religion is a big step against Catholicism's refusal of contraception. But, when one could prove your religion's theological insignificance with more science than your "facts" about "aliens", "psychiatry" and supposed "glibness", then I just can't get on board.
The uncomfortable feeling comes from the reports of suppressed homosexuality (If you don't come out of the closet Tom, we're sending Christopher Lowell in to get you.), PR love contracts (So, she's up Dawson's Creek wihout a paddle for 5 years for a measly 8 mil?), and, most importantly, because L. Ron Hubbard took Joel Goodsen/Maverick/Brian Flanagan/Charlie Babbitt from sane 80's movie loving America.
Whatever Tom Cruise decides to do about his apparrent growing lack of sanity, we'll all know that Dane Cook is crazier than Scientology could ever make anyone... ever.