H5N1

A couple of years ago I pushed the line of insubordination with my daily complaints about our off-the-charts fearmongering on West Nile Virus. I also talked a former boss out of assigning a blowout package on the threat of weaponized smallpox, writing a lengthy memo that detailed the problems with her "we're all gonna die" thesis.

I tell these stories to prove a point to people who don't know me: Over the years, I've established a track record of reacting cautiously to the plague du jour school of scary journalism.

Having said that, you owe it to yourselves and your readers to get current on influenza Type A H5N1 as quickly as possible.

I put a "bird flu" story on my to-do list back on June 13, the day I left for two weeks vacation, on the advice of a local public health official I'd met through an unrelated story. I've been catching up on my reading since Tuesday, and I'm beginning to think that the H5N1 piece I've scheduled for July 25 may be overtaken by this rapidly developing story long before that orderly run date.

This is not to say that H5N1 is going to mutate into a pandemic form in the next three weeks. It may never do so. The point is not to scare ourselves, or our readers.

It's this: The issues related to a pandemic extend beyond mere health issues, and you don't have to be a public health official to be important. Every aspect of our society should be involved in planning for a pandemic, so this is not some "passive fear" story. There are things that can be done locally, in your home, county council or business, that will contribute to everyone's well-being should the infectuous mutation occur.

As usual, the annoyingly ahead-of-her-time Anna from NCFocus is way out in front on this one. Her site has good links. The infectious disease blog Effect Measure is an excellent starting point, and serves as a gateway to the flu wiki, which I printed out and read Thursday. For you blogosphere trackers, Canadian journalist Hellen Branswell's piece this morning was the first piece on "flu bloggers," and it's worth a read.

But the best background I've found so far was what my local epidemiologist told me to watch for more than two weeks ago: the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, featuring pieces by Laurie Garrett and Michael T. Osterholm. I didn't get my copy until this morning. Don't you make the same mistake.

The information is out there, and those of us in the business have a responsibility to make sure it reaches people in ways they can understand and use. We must calmly and clearly explain why H5N1 is worthy of the nation's attention, but before we do that, we should pause just long enough to make sure we understand the basics ourselves.

Into the Great Wide Open

Howdy, everybody. I’m back off of vacation, rested and tan and fired up … to put this little foray into blogging into RSS mothballs. That is to say: Your aggregator may occasionally find a new post here, but I expect they'll be rare.

The simple truth is, this six-month experiment has been so informative that I’ve now graduated to something new. That’s not to say that media is no longer a worthwhile topic, only that I have learned what I need to know from the current conversation.

Here’s how I described my thoughts on Sunday, writing to another media blogger (edited with my better judgment in mind):

*In the media blogging community, the emphasis is stuck on real-time critique rather than advancing new ideas. My experience: Write a snarky, off-the-hip slam, get lots of conversation; propose a novel solution to a problem, listen to crickets (ed note: in the original e-mail, I wrote ‘critics,’ proving once again that editors can be good to have around).

*Most media discussion threads eventually devolve into political arguments. My experience: There are right-wingers who camp out on these threads and make sure that all discussion is framed in terms of their grievances.

*Politics in the traditional sense is far too limiting a lens for viewing human interaction. It is quite literally a polarizing filter, creating opposition in all situations. Politics says "DECIDE!" and "PICK A SIDE!" and you don't have to observe people for too long to notice that such commands make most of us uncomfortable. My experience: Those who view the world from a political perspective see everything as conflict. They aren't WRONG, just hopelessly limited. (The Dude: "You're not WRONG, Walter, you're just an ASSHOLE").

*I started on this path about 18 months ago when I wrote the words "media bias" on a manilla folder and started printing out and collecting examples of media bias, writing on media bias, etc. I read books on the subject, started looking for blogs on the subject. I knew instinctively that the charge of "liberal media bias" was a distortion, but it wasn't a notion that I had really investigated. While examples of liberal bias aren’t difficult to find, the case for systemic “LBM” doesn’t bear up to critical scrutiny. My experience: I’ve wasted far too much of my time and energy arguing this subject, and to no effect. The people with whom I've argued reject my logic and evidence without seriously considering it, and their repetitive arguments have neither expanded nor illuminated my mind. So what's the point? I can either keep punching this tar baby, or I can walk on.

*'A-List Bloggers' are the popular kids in high school, the beautiful people on the beach, the rich people at the symphony gala. They are attractive to the hoi polloi bloggers because their approval represents an easy path to things that most of us want -- money, power, acceptance, status, etc. But the emphasis here is on "easy": One can acquire all those things without the “in” group’s approval, but going it alone means you have to work harder. My experience: I enjoy being linked by big-shot bloggers far more than I should, and if I'm not careful, I fall into their orbit. I start measuring my own value on their little subjective scales, and pretty soon other people are framing the context of my thoughts. Better to step out and make something new, something that isn't as easily turned into an intellectual commodity.

*Journalists v. bloggers is over (but the world doesn't know it). The same is true of the debates over the current administration's actions and motivations (guilty on all counts, but still in power). We can continue to debate these subjects with the intransigent and the late arrivals, or we can move on.

On the other hand, what will become of the media is NOT yet determined, and it bears watching and participation. Get the right media, create the right connective tissue between groups and individuals, and someday you won't even NEED government in the way we think of it today. Hand this amazing technology over to the corporate entities that run things now, and the future is fascist. No exaggeration on my part. Times are dark -- just as they usually are. My experience: When I can't see my way through the thicket to the place I have to go, it usually means it’s time to do a little recon.

Which is what I intend to do: Get out of the role that is expected of me, drop all the self-imposed limitations that come with the identity of "journalist," and try to find a way to use this medium to do something more constructive.

Psst... we don't get it, either
When I started this blog, I thought I could make a contribution by adding a voice from the working press to these discussions. But here’s the skinny: Working journalists are not talking about these subjects in my newsroom, not in any truly informed or inquisitive way, and based on conversations and correspondence with other journalists in other cities, their newsrooms aren’t talking, either.

So I figure, if the members of the “working press” don’t have anything more intelligent to add to the discussion of their future than the decade-old focus-group mantra “MORE LOCAL NEWS!” then we really don’t deserve saving. Screw us.

Because it boils down to this: I’m no longer interested in talking about the media as a subject unto itself. I’m interested in the media as it relates to a culture I live in, to a republic I love, to a city where I’m raising children. I want a media that is worthy of all three, and I want it not only as a journalist, but as a participant in that culture, a citizen of that republic and a resident of that city. I’d love to participate in reforming the practice of journalism, but to imagine that one could do such a thing in a vacuum is not only silly, but pointless. To what end do we improve journalism? To more efficiently and profitably deliver the same old intellectual pollution, regardless of its affect? Are we just designing a better cigarette here?

Many of us came to journalism from the idea that reporting was a way for Misfit Toys (like me) to give something of value back to the community. But at some point, reporters must start acknowledging that what we do – the act of journalism -- cannot heal a culture. Reporting is an essential function, yes, but the best it can do is to chronicle political and cultural pathology. Healing requires something else, something non-materialistic. And journalism, being fundamentally materialistic, is ill-suited to the job.

Politics isn't the answer, either. Politics isn't about ideas, and never has been: Politics is where you go to ratify the temporary power of one idea over another, but as a field it has never created a new idea or facilitated a meaningful discussion. Politics is great at killing things, terrible at nuturing them, which is one reason why conservatives like politics more than the rest of us. Conservatives, by their very definition, favor protecting the old over allowing the new, so they take to politics like pigs to slop.

No, if we want to resolve our political problems, rather than profiting short-term by preserving them, we have to do it through the culture, and that's the province of art. Art is to culture as journalism is to politics: Each creates and sustains the other. Journalism doesn't produce the ideas that drive culture -- journalism merely tells people about those ideas.

Now, it is a peculiar trait of journos that we act as if none of this is true. We treat artists as flakey, scientists and scholars as eggheads. Holy men weird us out, but we'll kiss some serious church ass if it will keep some nun from calling us up and rapping our knuckles.

Our only true affinity is for the politician, whom we treat with a glib mixture of condesension, admiration and distrust, as if the issues of democracy are just this private game that they play, with us tagging along as the refs. We act as if we're so far above this game that its outcomes are unimportant, and it really pisses us off if anyone questions one of our calls.

We do this as a profession because, deep down, we're shallow.

Politics as I see it
Americans hate politics, and that's OK by me. It says that we have better things to do with our time.

Our social contract works like this: So long as things are going well and most people are pretty happy, we'll give the government the keys to the barn. Congressmen, lobbyists, defense contractors, trial lawyers, asbestos manufacturers and all manner of creepy crawlies can slurp at the public trough so long as they don't screw things up so badly that we get pissed and start paying attention again.

In theory, the corrective anger of the American people comes along and puts the ship of state back on course after episodes of excess arrogance, but this is not generally what occurs. Two classes of people -- journos and politicos -- work together to make participation in public life so absurdly and unnecessarily unpleasant that nobody with their priorities in order would rationally choose to get involved. Excluding people from participation is an essential function of both groups.

I mean, have you ever dealt with a persnickety editorial page editor? Ten minutes around the average know-it-all-defender-of-community-propriety and a regular guy would be chewing his leg off. Same with the kind of deeply conflicted control freaks who tend to run county-level political parties. Neither is interested in new ideas, new voices, fresh perspectives or -- heaven forbid -- blunt truth. They hate surprises and generally despise smart-ass punks like me... and, most likely, you.

When real people are disconnected from real democracy, bad things happen. They are happening right now. As a journalist, it's my job to view these bad things with as much dispassion and cold-eyed logic as I can muster. As a citizen, I'm furious, and more than a little frightened. I'm also tired of pretending otherwise during my off-time.

I can't engage in a serious discussion about the sins of Dan Rather at a time when a cabal of bald-faced liars is throwing billions of dollars of "defense" money into a "War on Terror" in a country that wasn't involved in terrorism before we invaded it. I can't talk about the relative patriotism of Eason Jordan while the White House "disassembles" on its own torture memos and blames enlisted soldiers for Abu Ghraib. I can't seriously engage in a discussion of Newsweek's screw up while the neoconservatives thugs in Washington pursue illegal policies that are destroying my country's standing in the world, not to mention spitting on the grave of every American who ever gave his life for the idea of a country based on something more noble than the will to power.

The other side calls this "Bush-bashing." But we're not talking about one man here. We're talking about a confluence of interests and ambitions who have joined together in their common greed to manipulate both our fears and our higher aspirations. The most onerous result so far: Thousands of people have died in a fake war designed to keep the American electorate in line while funnelling money borrowed against our children's tax returns directly to the Halliburton Corp.

And we're not supposed to get notice. Or get mad. That's "extreme." So when some moron who thinks that it's "just a matter of time" before we find Saddam's buried WMDs writes some flame post blaming "liberal media elites who hate America," for the disaster in Iraq, we're supposed to engage him with respect, rather than instructing the hateful bastard to tell his story walking. How messed up is that?

But the tide has now turned, and it is only a matter of time now before a majority of Americans agrees with the following unpleasant truths: George W. Bush is an unprincipled, pathetic, lying sock puppet; the Religious Right is wrong; the "War on Terror" is a sham; the neo-cons are attempting to turn their temporary political gains into a permanent political dominion. The current ruling class treats Americans with contempt and serves only the interests of wealthy elites: Dubya's "Have Mores."

Now, did that little rant improve anything? Not a damned thing. But it did answer one question that Fox News loves to ask of any reporter who isn't in lock step with The Party: Are you a journalist first, or an American? And the answer for me is, I'm an American first, and I want my country back, dammit.

Taking back the culture first
The most ironic thing George W. Bush ever said was "I'm a uniter, not a divider." Or maybe it was just the most laughable. We can decide later. There's no rush.

But despite all his efforts to the contrary, Americans still have more in common than the current level of discourse would indicate. Plus, our post-9/11 experience taught us something that we need to point out every now and again: We LIKED feeling united and communal. Give us a chance to work together for the common good instead of pitting us against each other and we'll be happy.

So where I'm going now, I'm going to try to find ways to relate those experiences across the Red/Blue border. I ought to be pretty good at it: Those lines crisscross my personality.

Rather than trying to convert my opponents, rather than trying to repackage obvious truths that people simply don't want to accept, I'm going to bypass those oxbows and move ahead to ideas that haven't been chewed over yet. I'm going to tell the morons to get off my property, and I'm going to look for people with similar notions about things and I'm going to see what we can build together.

Will I still talk about politics and media? Sure. But I'll also be talking about art and movies and novels, about sex and religion and technology, about quantum physics and archaeology, the poetry of Hafiz and the future of human evolution. I'm not going to worry about the predictably offended, because I'm no longer interested in the predictably offended. Hell, they already have every newspaper in the country sucking up to them, why do they need to put their thumb on my little website, too? So if they try to crash my party, I'm not going to appease them with bland words: I'm going to kick them out the door.

The answer to what ails us cannot be found by sitting around negotiating over trivia with the bitter people who hate change. We have to go out and create, and we have to trust that the ideas we produce will come around, eventually, indirectly, and help everyone we left behind see things differently. I hope they make it out, but they're not my responsibility.

Will I be doing this under my own name? Not exactly, but I'm not going to be hiding my identity on my new site, either. And I'll still post here as myself, when I post here. For anyone who cares, I don't plan on commenting anonymously on other people's sites.

Anyway, that's it. Thanks for the feedback and education that you, my readers, have given me here over the past six months. Life's an adventure, and I hope we find each other down the road again.

Simply appalling

Money talks. It always has.

Here's a story demonstrates the way government works: It does what lobbyists, contributors and powerful men tell it to do. I'm not saying this is a new development. I'm saying it's happening right now, and the story below makes that apparent.

The question is, where's the outrage? Where's the accountability? How is it that the White House doesn't even make a sincere effort to conceal the fact that it is lying?

But the White House will win on this, because this story is too complex for people to follow. It's too detailed for TV soundbites. It can be rendered irrelevant by FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

All I ask is, read these excerpts, particularly McClellan's sorry excuse for an evasion, and ask yourself: Is this what I signed on for? Is this the America I want? Do I want this kind of behavior in my name?

From Jefferey Smith's June 7 story in The Washington Post:

For the past three years, the Air Force has described its $30 billion proposal to convert passenger planes into military refueling tankers and lease them from Boeing Co. as an efficient way to obtain aircraft the military urgently needs.

But a very different account of the deal is shown in an August 2002 internal e-mail exchange among four senior Pentagon officials.

"We all know that this is a bailout for Boeing," Ronald G. Garant, an official of the Pentagon comptroller's office, said in a message to two others in his office and then-Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Wayne A. Schroeder. "Why don't we just bite the bullet," he asked, and handle the acquisition like the procurement of a 1970s-era aircraft -- by squeezing the manufacturer to provide a better tanker at a decent cost?

"We didn't need those aircraft either, but we didn't screw the taxpayer in the process," Garant added, referring to widespread sentiment at the Pentagon that the proposed lease of Boeing 767s would cost too much for a plane with serious shortcomings.

Garant's candid advice, which top Air Force officials did not follow, is disclosed for the first time in a new 256-page report by the Pentagon's inspector general. It provides an extraordinary glimpse of how the Air Force worked hand-in-glove with one of its chief contractors -- the financially ailing Boeing -- to help it try to obtain the most costly government lease ever.

And then, later on, this paragraph:

In the copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post, 45 sections were deleted by the White House counsel's office to obscure what several sources described as references to White House involvement in the lease negotiations and its interaction with Boeing. The Pentagon separately blacked out 64 names and many e-mails. It also omitted the names of members of Congress, including some who pressured the Pentagon to back the deal.

You don't have to be a J-school grad to know what that means. The administration made sure that Boeing got a good deal, and it did so at our expense.

So let's go to today's White House press conference, shall we?

Q Scott, a question about this Inspector General's report, involving the lease deal between the Air Force and Boeing. In that report, there are 45 references to White House officials that have been deleted in the Inspector General's report. And that has to do with White House officials' involvement in this particular deal as it was being negotiated and then became more controversial. The question is, would the White House object to these names -- the names of the White House officials in this report being unredacted, being made public? And, if not, would it, in fact, invoke executive privilege to keep those names -- the names of those officials secret?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think it was understood going in that this is a jurisdictional matter. The Inspector General for any department only has jurisdiction over that particular department.

Q So what?

Q I'm sorry, I guess I don't understand -- what does that have to do with --

MR. McCLELLAN: It's the Inspector General for the Department of Defense, in this instance. They only have jurisdiction over their particular agency. We worked to help facilitate the investigation by the Inspector General, but this is a jurisdictional matter.

Q Is that to say that the White House will not allow those names to be made public?

MR. McCLELLAN: It's a jurisdictional matter, and like I said, it was understood. I mean, I think it --

Q Is that a "yes" or a "no," Scott?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think it was understood --

Q How is it a jurisdictional matter, for god's sake?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that that information would not be part of the report. But the Inspector General had access to the information he needed to complete his report.

Q So who in the White House was involved in putting pressure to make sure this deal went through? The Washington Post reports and names Andy Card as having some conversations about it, perhaps pushing for the deal. Is that accurate? Were other officials within the White House involved in pushing the deal forward?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I wouldn't describe your characterization as accurate. In terms of Andy Card's involvement, I've talked to that previously. He served, as he does on a host of issues, simply as an honest broker to make sure that all views were represented and to make sure that it was completed in a timely matter, because it was relating to a national security need that was pressing. And that was the extent of his role.

Q Would the White House invoke executive privilege to keep these names, the names of White House officials -- and I don't know how many we're talking about, you could tell us -- to keep those names from becoming public?

MR. McCLELLAN: Look, a couple of points. I think, as I said, it was understood the jurisdictional matter that is involved here, that that information would not be part of the report. The Inspector General had access to the information. Now, in terms of this issue, there was wrongdoing, and the people who were involved in that wrongdoing are being held to account; people are serving jail time because of what they did and others are being held to account for what they did in other ways. The Pentagon canceled the project, they canceled the contract. There are oversight measures that are in place when it comes to issues like this, and in this instance, those oversight measures worked to catch this and it enabled the Pentagon to cancel the contract.

Q So you deny any -- any -- improper interference in this negotiation on the part of any White House official?

MR. McCLELLAN: There has not been any suggestion of that whatsoever.

Q Then in the interest of transparency, why not make all those names public?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, we have worked to provide Congress with information. We worked to facilitate the DOD investigation and congressional leaders have been looking at this, as well. As I said, those who were involved in wrongdoing are being held accountable.

Q But if White House officials were also involved in the conversation, by making the names public you could then assure everyone that no White House officials were involved in trying to persuade people to push this deal through.

MR. McCLELLAN: That's what oversight measures are for. There are oversight protections in place to look at all these issues, both from Congress, as well as internally, with the Department of Defense. And in terms of this issue, it's not related to anything that you're bringing up, it's related simply to a jurisdictional matter.

Q No, but if you fall back on the excuse that jurisdictional concerns prevent those names from being made public, you let us wonder whether there was any connection between any of the White House names in that report and any of the wrongdoing.

MR. McCLELLAN: Actually, that's all been looked into and continues to be looked into by members of Congress. It was looked into by the Inspector General. The Inspector General, as I pointed out, had access to this information so that he could look at it, and look at it in the overall context, as well.

Q You're suggesting that jurisdictional matters would have prevented him from doing any of that.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, maybe if you have something to bring to my attention, you ought to bring it to my attention, but --

Q I'm asking you why you don't want to be more transparent.

MR. McCLELLAN: The people who were involved in wrongdoing are being held to account.

And then he moves on. He's counting on the rest of us moving on, too.

What we're seeing is a government that is run on the -- so far successful -- assumption that the American people suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. And those of us in the media just keep dishing out the sugar.

Spoletoblog: Howzitdoing?

Editor's note: I've been on something of a hiatus from this blog since the start of the Spoleto festival on May 27. Also, I'm in the middle of an e-mail blackout: I haven't received an e-mail at my home account since May 23, so if you're wondering why I haven't written back, that's why. Here's a field report from "our little experiment," working towards the memo I will eventually write on what I've learned ...

I'm dragging some serious ass this morning (hint: it's now noon), a natural side-effect of a weird daily schedule that's based around the demands of running a blog for a newspaper.

First thing each morning, I check the blog to make sure that nobody has posted a comment with, say, the word "shit" in it... then check to see if the newspaper website has posted the electronic copies of our reviews and stories... then read those reviews, looking for a passage of critical thought or flourish to paste into the daily Spoletoblog coverage summary... then check every link to make sure none of them take you to a porn site... then check the stats... study the referers and pings .... then run a couple of Technorati watchlists in Sage to check for diffusion... then read the competition's Spoleto blog... then edit the other posts and make my morning posts.

And then I usually go to work.

I try to keep up with the stats during the day, because I want to develop as good a mental picture as I can of our audience. And this week, since I've finished all the assigned stories I wrote for the paper, I've had nothing to do but blog stuff. That's a good thing, because some days the only original material that goes up comes from me and one other writer on the staff.

I write longer posts in the afternoon/evening, typically after attending some events or riding around town on my bike, checking things out from street level, taking pictures with my digital. Yesterday I wrote a 1,500-word post on criticism (typepad makes it easy to do extended comments without junking up your blog) before a 5 p.m. event, then came back and wrote a 900-word report on the event, which wound up being about criticism.

Before I leave for the day (or, while working from home) I put together an 8 to 10 inch (375-word) "Buzz From the Blog" column for the paper, just excerpting comments and posts. Last night, I didn't get home until almost 9.

Back home, I check the stats and comments around midnight, then pull the plug on the day.

Weekends are more hectic: I try to get scene and color, and I attend multiple performances. In most cases, I'll post several times a day, including photos.

So here's one thing I'm learning: Blogging doesn't HAVE to be a full-time job, but it sure can be.

Other lessons are more ambiguous. For starters, the typepad stats are less than reliable. The "hits today" is a gauge, not an actual count since midnight, and it's not always a stat based on the previous 24 hours. The typepad people won't really come out and say what it counts, saying instead that it's something they're working to improve.

The way I figure it (and I'm being conservative here), an average of about 500 to 600 people a day have been coming to our blog. Our peak day was last Wednesday (more than 1,700), but since Saturday we've been recording between 1,000 and 1,100 on the daily count. I don't trust those figures, and base my averages on the total hits count, subtracting the hits we had before we started promoting it and the festival began.

Now, is a readership of 500 worth the effort and expense? My answer is yes. This is no ordinary readership -- this is a wealthy, educated, arts-saavy readership that particular businesses and interests would find quite valuable. The overhead is negligible ($150 for an entire year of blog hosting), and so your only expense is my time for 17 days (and, in fairness, I was working on other stories for the paper throughout the first week of the festival), and a little bit of writing time for people who are already working on newspaper coverage.

The concept for Spoletoblog, by the way, was that we'd invite ALL our arts writers and editors to participate, and we did. Few of them have, with the majority pointedly shunning Spoletoblog. Of the more than 40 people who were invited to participate, only 16 have actually activated their author profiles. Of those 16, only six have actually contributed posts (plus one additional reviewer who simply could not get himself logged in, and so he sent me a post by e-mail).

Now, imagine if you had a team blog in which everyone who covered the festival for the paper also blogged on it. With that kind of coverage, nobody would have to do much, but the result would be tremendous. Imagine if you had 10 people blogging from different perspectives on the same festival. It wouldn't be hard to do, and the extra expense would be trivial.

Perhaps what news organizations should be thinking about is how to reward blogging. If a critic writes a review for the paper and then turns around and provides additional insight to the blog, what's that worth? Without that incentive, I don't know that you'll ever get people who are willing to participate.

Now, for me, the incentive is clear: It's my laboratory. The paper gets a blog, but it also gets the benefit of whatever I learn. What it does with that knowledge is up to managers (because i have no interest in becoming a "web editor," having just gotten free of editing for print), but thanks to this experiment we now have some institutional experience on which to draw for future web projects. That's a good thing.

But for other writers? I think some of the writers and critics just resent the blog. Some may resent me personally. I think some are just intimidated by the technology, and I think some simply don't want to do anything they aren't paid to do, and who can blame them?

But I was wrong at the beginning: I believed that no writer could stay away from an opportunity to write for an interested audience in a new medium. I believed that once the buzz got going, they would come over. There's plenty of buzz, but that hasn't happened, and I don't think it will. Some people just love a blank canvas. Others don't.

I said early on that the success of this blog would in capturing the audience that already exists for hard-core, inside-the-festival coverage. But what's the metric for that?

I don't know yet, but I'm starting to really look for it. The festival's largest venue seats just 2,734. Another seats about 750, a couple seat around 500. Sold-out shows are a rarity.

If I had to guess (and I've not been able to get any marketing figures from the festival yet to confirm this), I'd say that the core audience for Spoleto and Spoletoblog, including the artists themselves, is probably less than 2,000 people. To that I would add a small number of arts enthusiasts and arts management professionals who do not attend the festival, but might want to monitor it.

But how many of those 2,000 people are computer users? One of the striking lessons for me has been the difficulty people have had navigating the Typepad interface, even with my instructions. Not only that, but even people my own age have reported confusion when it comes to leaving comments. If you're used to blogging, these things are childish, but wake up: This is the experience of the people we're trying to reach and involve. And I don't know how you can make things easier without making them stupid.

Another good indicator of my audience's difficulty with the medium: It's not uncommon for me to have a "thousand-hit day" and collect only one or two outside comments... often left on the "wrong" post. It seems like they'll read one thing, want to comment on it, and then leave it on another post as if one is as good as another.

I attribute this to the average age of my audience, which is, basically, just about the average age of the newspaper reader... maybe a little bit older. My average readers are going to be retired, wealthier than average, educated and generally tentative when it comes to technology. Blogs and websites are not second-nature to this generation.

But that doesn't mean they aren't a great audience. This is an audience you want to find, attract, encourage and nourish. I don't give up on this generation as blog readers because I think they're interested in topics that work well on blogs. The trick will be in helping them negotiate the move to a new medium. And maybe that's a change that newspaper publishers aren't interested in encouraging.

Janet also pointed out that many of the people who are the audience for Spoleto are out-of-towners, people staying in hotels. How many of them brought laptops? How many will pay of highspeed access? How many have built-in wifi and know where the hotspots are?

In the future, I think the way we deal with the out-of-town audience is to market the blog as essential reading before they come to Charleston. For instance, if you live in Greenville and don't read the Charleston paper, you don't know to check Spoletoblog for coverage before you drive down, and while you're here, you don't have a computer.

Once I've factored all of this in, our traffic starts to look pretty healthy.

Spoletoblog does something cool...

Spoletoblog has been building a nice little audience over the past five days (more than 1,000 hits a day since Saturday). But what makes me happy about it is that we're already demonstrating the medium's natural ability to tackle the kinds of issues that tend to choke traditional newspapers.

For instance: Our print edition has chosen not to address the controversy over a risque scene in Mabou Mines "DollHouse," director Lee Breuer's avant-garde adaptation of Ibsen's "A Doll's House." Breuer cast "little people" in the domineering male roles and 6-footers for the female parts, an obvious political pun which drew all sorts of interest.when the play premiered in New York.

What drew not a mention from the New York press was that Breuer also included a simulated fellatio scene that, though short, was also funny and appropriate in the context of the absurdist staging and adult themes.

When word got out about the scene down here, editors assigned one of our reporters to investigate it. The reporter filed a story, but editors chose not to run it. I invited two separate editors to blog on the topic or the decision; they didn't.

After an unsuccessful preview performance of the play on Thursday, the Spoleto festival's director (Nigel Redden) received critical phone calls about the fellatio scene. He related this to Breuer, his good friend, but made it clear he was not asking for the scene to be removed. Breuer, however, removed the scene on his own, out of respect for Redden.

This caused quite a bit of buzz around town... which showed up not only in our blog, but also in our competitor's blog. One of our contributors wrote an impassioned post about it. None of this appeared in newsprint. (June 1, 15:55 Editor's note: This is incorrect. The print edition publishes a daily "Buzz from the Blog" column, which I compile every evening. I'd run short excerpts from posts and comments about the controversy on the 30th and 31st, so while the print edition had not assigned or published any stories on the issue, it had been mentioned in print via a summary of blog coverage. dc)

This morning, one of our blog authors (Mindy Spar) told me that she had run into Breuer at the theater before last night's performance and asked him "Why?" He laid it out for her (as explained above). Then, the news: "Lee next told me that he had heard that there was a blog saying to put the scene back in and that people had been commenting here and other places that the play should not be tampered with so in last night's performance it was back in."

And voila.

It didn't require the involvement of the print edition, which is -- to be absolutely blunt about it -- hamstrung by the sensibilities and expectations of its readers. It didn't require the mobilization of a huge online audience. It didn't require meetings and phone calls to lawyers, and nobody had to set any profound policies.

As Mindy and I discussed, you unlock the power of this medium by breaking down the traditional walls dividing subject, observer and audience. It wasn't necessary that the audience be a mass audience -- the mass audience isn't interested in Spoleto in the first place and wouldn't care about "DollHouse" EXCEPT for the fact that it would want to argue over the appropriateness of simulated fellatio on stage. The two local festival blogs opened this up to the people who actually cared, and let them have their say. In the end, this word reached the artists, and a mistake was corrected.

Because Spoletoblog is linked to the paper's website and its print edition, it must be respectful of the print edition's limitations and standards. We reflect them in everything we do. But we would be missing the boat if we applied the same policies and approaches to our blog content that editors apply to the print edition. Different mediums require different ways of thinking, as broadcast learned when television emerged out of radio in the 1940s and 1950s.

This will be a tricky road to walk, and each outfit will have to walk it to learn it. But I think that success begins in the same place that it began for our print edition forebears: Understand your audience, and serve it.

New (?) review

From the Speculative Literature Foundation...

Rich Horton's Market Summaries:

Anthologies: Miscellaneous, 2004

...From Absolutely Brilliant in Chrome, Daniel Conover's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (another near novelette) was pretty fun satirical stuff about aliens kept under wraps by the White House for the technological knowledge they promise....

Mine was the only short to get mentioned from Chrome, though Carl Frederick's "Deep Flows the River of Time" was noted (not particularly strongly) among the novelettes.

Spoletoblog update

At the moment, Spoletoblog is close to notching its first 1,000-hit day (975 at 4:35 p.m.), although I've figured out that that's 975 since this time yesterday, which is not quite the same thing. Anyway, a thousand hits is good for a blog like this, no matter how you count them.

The comments, however, are lagging. Obviously it's time for me to insult somebody's mom (although, on the bright side, we got our first really good comment just after midnight:

What a contrast between the Opening Ceremonies and the opening night opera! At noon, in front of the oldest public building in America, the wife of the Govenor of South Carolina told us that Spoleto attracts "the right kind of tourists." Tonight, in a building that was formerly a popular movie theatre, Spoleto Festival USA gave us the US premiere of a work that was banned by the Nazis who wanted to eliminate those who were not the right kind of people. Robin Zemp

I'm loving it as a multimedia medium right now: in the past 24 hours I've done traditional posting, posted my own original photos, put up a 45-second audio clip of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra's brass ensemble, and added four quick, loose sketches from this afternoon's trip to the Piccolo Festival's Ground Zero: Marion Square. While I sketched it, Janet photographed it. So we're a family blog.

Somewhere in all of this there has got to be a first. My guess would be that I'm the first newspaper guy to cover an event by drawing it and posting the results to a newspaper blog. OK? Got it? I'm staking a claim.

Let the rest of history pass me by, but let it be recorded for arcane posterity that I, Daniel Arnell Conover, was the first newspaper arts festival sketch coverage blog correspondent. So maybe that's not the most major development in New Media, but by gawd, it's my contribution.

Yes, I'm aware that this makes me pathetic. What's your point?

Abusing the Koran, and our trust

Joe Conason has a new piece up at Salon advancing the Koran desecration story. If you're not a subscriber at Salon, be prepared to watch a little ad to get your free site pass (clever, que no?). It's relatively painless.

Anyway, to summarize briefly: A Defense Department civilian employee assigned to military intelligence units gave Pentagon investigators a sworn statement last summer in which he described what happened when an interrogator in Afghanistan "took a Koran, threw it on the floor and stepped on it." Result: The detainees rioted.

The civilian employee goes on to describe the policy of "Pride and Ego Down," a means of breaking down the resistance of hard-case detainees.

Let's pause here, take a deep breath, and review the situation.

Newsweek was wrong. Even if someone someday somewhere finds proof that a Koran was flushed down a toilet (can you say "call a plumber?"), Newsweek will still be wrong. Journalism is materialistic. Truth isn't. Hence, Newsweek's standard is provable truth, and it fell down on that job. Nothing changes that.

The United States government has changed the rules for intelligence gathering and interrogation. The White House says that those rules don't condone torture. The rest of the world, including me, is not convinced. Just look at what Amnesty International has to say. (Scott McClellan, by the way, responded to the AI report by saying "The United States is leading the way on human rights.")

Instead, evidence suggests that the United States government has engaged in systematic torture and abuse ever since we were attacked in 2001. When this evidence is presented, the White House blames the problem on non-commissioned officers and enlisted soldiers. Bad apples.

Now comes a sworn statement about Koran abuse. It could be right, it could be wrong, but it is sworn and it is a document. It exists. It must be dealt with. I find it initially credible, in large part, because it fits so clearly with the pattern that Sy Hersh has been uncovering for the past year or so.

Some will argue that such things shouldn't be reported. Some will argue that it's bias to point out only the bad things. There's a whole litany of diversionary complaints that surround such unhappy facts: un-American, troop-hating, liberal, elitist. None of them address what I consider to be the central issue: Does such behavior represent the America we want to be?

The issue should not be "Can we excuse our behavior?" but rather "Are we proud of what we do?" When the answer is no, then we must reconsider our actions, make sincere corrections and do what is possible to repair the damage. If that's good advice for Newsweek, shouldn't it be good advice for the White House?

For those of us in the news business, at whatever level, these are all important questions. The media has been blamed for practically every problem in the country, and if we look at things honestly, there are lots of things we do poorly. We are not blameless -- far from it. We simply have to change.

But what lesson should we learn? Is the conservative critique the one we should pay the most heed?

If the White House critique is the conservative critique, then the answer is no. We are far from perfect, but journalists as a group are far more committed to truthfulness and integrity than is the White House Press Office.

Judge: Enough with the paganism

How pathetic is this? A judge in Indiana has prohibited the divorced parents of a 9-year-old boy from exposing him to their "non-mainstream" Wiccan religion.

You could almost see it if somebody was complaining, or if one parent was trying to limit the other parent's rights. But their religon is one of the things on which the divorcing parents agree. This was nothing more than a judge simply not getting it.

But no worries. This will work out over time. People think paganism is weird and creepy and that's going to change slowly. As much as you'd like to see discrimination reversed overnight, it just doesn't work that way.

Fortunately, Taoism has better PR...

Spoletoblog on the eve of the festival...

The 2005 Spoleto festival starts at noon, but as far as I'm concerned it began tonight with a preview performance of Mabou Mines DollHouse (one of the things I'd actually like to see this year, having interviewed director Lee Breuer and found him utterly fascinating). Since we're actually going to start promoting the blog tomorrow, I figured it would be cool to go out and catch just a bit of the scene before all hell broke loose tomorrow...

So I drove downtown, ran inside the ritzy Charleston Place hotel to check on "The New Mexico Amigos," a business group that an editor thought might be here for the festival. I don't think so, but whatever. I snapped digital photos of them and an industry group posing on the grand stairs, collected a few other images, then parked illegally and took some quickies of folks going into the Dock Street Theatre (one of the great things about Charleston: The Dock Street Theatre isn't on Dock Street).

Got home, downloaded my memory card and uploaded five photos into a new "Spoleto Scene" photo album. The editor called to ask about the amigos, but I told her to wait just a bit and she'd have the actual post. I got the whole thing up before 9, including a little bit of atmospheric prose arranged around two of my own photos, both of them less than 45 minutes old by the time I hit the "save" button.

That immediacy is a natural high for a journalist. But the depth of connection to the material is special, too. The control...

A lot of people don't know this about me, but long before I was a writer, I was a visual artist. My first newspaper job was cartoonist (at age 14; $10 a cartoon for the small paper in Madison-Mayodan, N.C.). I was a commercial artist in Charlotte in 1983 (designed the packaging for an ill-fated food brand called "El Mexican Fiesta"). In 1990, while working as a pasteup clerk at The Chapel Hill Newspaper, I complained so much about a crappy illustration by the staff artist that the city editor said "draw something better!" I jammed out a reply with a Sharpie on a piece of scrap paper in about a minute. He took one look, said "That is better," and ran it on the front page. In 1994, I took second place in an NC Press Association illustration contest at The ShelbyStar... where I was the city editor.

At The Mountaineer in Waynesville, I used to carry a complete photo kit and shoot assignments for other reporters' stories (we had exactly one full-time photographer). I shot high school footbal rivalry games, troops leaving for the first Gulf War, troops coming home. In fact, when we did a year-in-photos section, I got to lord it over the regular photographer that I'd gotten as many shots in it as he did (I still kid him about that... all these years later, we're still in the same fantasy football league).

I'd design pages (back in the days when you did this on paper), and, since I'd been a pasteup artist in college, I'd put them together, too. I was good with an Exacto, and my headlines always lined up plumb, straight and true.

For my 1991 package on trout fishing in the Smoky Mountains, I wrote the stories and the headlines, drew the lead illustration, shot the photos, designed the layout and pasted up the page. And if you've got the skills, that kind of control can be heaven.

Blogging feels a lot like that to me. It's like traveling back in time to a moment in my life when journalism -- that wonderful act of telling other people what's going on -- was actually fun.

Look, it's not that writing and reporting are a chore. I like it. it's a big part of who I am. But for some warped reason, I'm more proud of those cartoons, illustrations and photos than I am of my big pooh-bah news stories. I enjoy expressing myself in different ways. I like the sense of cohesion that you get when the writer is the photographer is the designer is the headline writer.

Community journalism isn't easy, and it isn't always fun. But it can be emotionally satisfying. Blogging is like that. It's hands-on and much more raw and real than the processed-cheese-food stuff that tends to come out of metro newsrooms.

Anyway, check out Spoletoblog, and point it out to your artistic friends...

Alternate realities

Here's E&P editor Greg Mitchell asking an extremely relevant question: In the week after (Newsweek's) retraction, where is the comparable outrage over the military's cover-up of the "friendly fire" death of Pat Tillman?

The answer is, sadly, that those of us on the right are so bitterly entrenched at this point that they simply cannot consider that question. They literally cannot see it.

Orson Scott Card's take on the Newsweek mistake is far from typical, but it demonstrates the absurd extremes of this "discussion."

Some of his stranger bits:

I’m talking about informal consequence, like Newsweek’s correspondents being frozen out of news stories. Being banned from the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department for at least a year. But if any administration did such a thing, all of the media would unite to crucify them.

Apparently Scott hasn't been keeping up with the decertification topic over at PressThink, or else he'd understand that pool reporters are already being frozen out for offending the White House. The media hasn't exactly been breaking out the nails and crosses over that offense, but such speculative "truths" are simply articles of faith on the far right.

But shunning isn't Scott's real goal. He wants to make the reporting of damaging truths during wartime an act of treason.

Our country is at war. And it’s a war in which victory absolutely depends on the Muslim world perceiving it as a war between the US and its allies on one side, and fanatical murderous terrorists on the other.

If it is ever perceived as a war against Islam, then we have lost. The world has lost.

So during such a difficult time, even people who think the Iraq war or even the whole war on terror is a horrible mistake still have an obligation of loyalty to the nation that offers them protection, prosperity and freedom.

I mean, what kind of idiot breaks a hole in the hull of his boat during a storm, just because he doesn’t like the guy at the tiller and thinks the storm could have been avoided?

Even if the allegations about Quran desecration were completely and absolutely verified, why in the world would you publish the information during wartime?

Perhaps because some of us believe that such actions are wrong, no matter who does them. Perhaps because some of us think that such actions will be damaging to our country if they are allowed to continue. Perhaps because some of us simply cannot endorse a rationale for war based on the notion that "In order to save our ideals it was necessary to destroy them."

I believe that condoning torture and abusive acts spits on the grave of every American who ever died for the idea of a country that was founded on better stuff.

Scott doesn't believe any of those explanations to be true. He concludes instead that only one group benefits from the reporting of such stories: "People who want to bring down or weaken President Bush and everything he stands for, no matter the cost."

And how does he justify this? By dehumanizing his enemy, the press.

To say that the media culture is unpatriotic isn’t a political ploy, it’s an obvious observation. Oh, if my words actually mattered to them, they’d howl and scream about my illegitimate attack. But in private, they are perfectly happy to mock patriotism in all its forms. They’re only patriotic when somebody says they aren’t.

They are loyal to a community – but it’s not America.

It’s Smartland. The nation of the newsmedia people. That’s where they live. Not in America. These newspeople generally don’t even know anybody, apart from “sources,” who serves America in the military. Smartland consists of a very different crowd.

I know that crowd. I’ve heard them jeer at all the values that most Americans still care about, laughing at religious people, at the middle class, at suburbanites, at the poor ignorant saps who don’t think correct thoughts all the time. You know – the citizens of Heartland.

Once upon a time I considered Scott Card a friend and mentor. He is a tremendously talented and thoughtful human being, a man with an enormous personal generosity. Not only is he an excellent fiction writer, he's also a challenging and charismatic teacher. He wrote the introduction to my first published science fiction short story, and I will always hold those words with great fondness. I know that he is a man who has endured loss, pain and discrimination, and that he has borne up bravely despite it.

But Scott's most recent column is sad evidence of the dangers of the extreme. His rage is palpable. He has been seduced, not by the dark side -- as if right or left had some monopoly on light and dark -- but by the evils of abstraction. His message: You're either for us or you're against us. And this is a dead end on every level I can imagine.

Take a digital photograph and crank up the contrast as far as it will go. Black and white, with no midtones. And the first thing you notice is, it doesn't look anything like reality. It's hard to recognize what you're looking ar.

Scott Card has become like Walter Sobchak from "The Big Lebowski" repeatedly demanding to know "Am I Wrong? Am I Wrong?" Walter's problem is that he's lost all sense of proportion. He pulls a gun on a guy for being "OVER THE LINE!" in a league bowling match, then screams "Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one here who gives a shit about the rules?"

Abstraction to extremism is both seductive and addictive, because human beings hate to be wrong. Pretty soon it is easier to demonize those who disagree as terrorists or elitists or traitors than it is to actually hear what's being said. After a while one is reduced to condoning all sorts of dishonesty from one's own "side," if only because the people you've demonized are pointing out that dishonesty..

I believe a day will come when Scott will look back at words like those above and feel great remorse for them. In his defense of America, he has lost the thread of what America is all about.

Jerry Falwell on evolution

Jerry Falwell is a creationist. Stop the presses.

But I point out this piece by Falwell not for its arguments in favor of creationism (he doesn't make any), but instead for what it reveals about the passion surrounding the issue.

In a challenge directed at Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens, Falwell equates the assault on evolution in the public schools to "the efforts of religious conservatives who want to preserve their rapidly disappearing rights in this great land."

He then goes on to promote a conference on creationism at his Liberty University, and writes the following passage in reference to one of the conference scholars:

Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham, who will be the moderator of our Creation Mega Conference, often states, “If you can’t trust the Bible’s history, how can you trust its morality?” Christians must be equipped to defend their faith and be prepared to give an answer to everyone who challenges them on their views.

Which is, of course, the entire issue in a nutshell. Falwell and his fellow creationists aren't really concerned with science. Rather, they are concerned with literalism and authority. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't think most Christians feel this way, but those who are in a "go along to get along" mood on intelligent design might want to consider the priorities of the people pushing this agenda.

A new kind of journalist

Jeff Jarvis promotes a link to a post in BusinessWeek's Blogspotting blog. I'm not familiar with the source, but the topic is interesting and pretty much in line with the conversation many of us have been having.

What will journalists be? The description of the city editor of the future sounds an awful lot like Superman.

Spoletoblog.typepad.com

In the morning, our paper will publish its 2005 Spoleto special section and, with it, the URL for our first blog, the cleverly named Spoletoblog.

(For those of you who are "From Off," Spoleto is a three-week arts festival in Charleston, S.C. Each May, it brings world-class music and theater to our small, historic city. Piccolo Spoleto, a companion festival, offers a wider array of arts at more affordable prices. Together, the two festivals transform Charleston each spring. It's a big deal for the newspaper and the community ... even though, in all fairness, most of our citizens have little connection to the festival. More on that in another post...)

Hence, this is an interesting moment for us. Some people are excited about the experiment. The new boss, who truly impresses me, understood the importance of blogging from the moment I suggested we try this. He required zero pitching and made things happen immediately: no committees, no studies, no ego-soothing. On the other hand, some of my coworkers don't yet know what to make of all this. They're waiting to find out if this is safe before they touch it.

On Friday, I made this comment in an administrative post (now removed in preparation for the public go-live) on the subject of blogging and its audience. It's something bloggers tend to understand instinctively, but for people who come to the medium from the newspaper world, where publications are products to be marketed and maximized, it's a subtle concept:

The blog will be promoted off the Spoleto page, but I'm downplaying the idea of heavy-duty promotion. Why? Because it's generally a good thing for a blog to grow with its audience, and vice versa.

The success of Spoletoblog won't be measured by the size of its audience, but by its quality. Do we reach the people who are interested in the subject? Can we become the first stop for anyone who are passionately about Spoleto?

That's success for a blog, and it depands far more on good content than it does on promotion.***

For those of us in the online "New Media" conversation, Spoletoblog represents a moderately interesting experiment. I've invited more than 30 reporters, editors and critics to participate as authors; we've avoided all the typical newspaper control-freak tendencies on free expression; and we're doing this completely outside our in-house web operation.

In fact, I'm the one running it: A features writer, not a web guy.

For us, it's a good experimental subject. If it works, we'll take the lessons and apply them to other projects. If it flops, well ... Spoleto will be over in a month, and we won't look foolish if the blog just fades away. Come to think of it, should this thing fail, the only person with anything on the line is ... me.

Please feel free to drop me a line, pass me feedback or suggest improvements.

*** The blog "quantity v. quality" subject came up in an interview I did in March with Dave Slusher of The Evil Genius Chronicles fame. It occurred to me that perhaps the goal of podcasting wasn't mass audience success and that building a relationship with the right audience was more important. I asked Dave about it, and he launched into a brilliant examination of the idea. Clearly, Dave had been giving it some serious thought. He went on to do a Clambake riff on the topic, and it remains one of my favorite podcasts. It also stands out as one of my favorite interview moments of 2005, one of those rare events when you ask the question that someone has been dying to answer. Those of you who do interviews for a living understand the sheer joy of such an experience. dc

I become a whiner

Rather predictably, the fallout over the Newsweek/Isikoff blunder drove me right into the ditch. I was so foul-tempered and snippy that I left a comment at PressThink that is so whiney and unintentionally ironic that it actually made me laugh at myself.

My grousing complaint: People who complain about the press being ignoble, inaccurate, blah blah blah focus on the blunders, when of course the reality is that the true blunders are rare. When they occur, we're all called to account for them. Result: Everyone learned what they already believed before the Newsweek story.

But of course, what I said was, substantially, the same thing that the Bush Administration and Fox News have been saying about the War: "Oh, the liberal media, they focus on the bad stuff because they hate America and freedom. Nobody wants to talk about the schools and the wells and the smiling children, all the great stuff we're doing every day."

Which, by the way, is a critique that I've always thought we'd be wise to consider in any story. Note that I said consider, not follow by rote.

Anyway, I have now officially become what I hate: an angry, whiney apologist.

First the WSJ, now the NYT...

The New York Times launches itself as a premium content site with TimesSelect, but what I like about this one is that you get it as part of your subscription to the print edition.

Critics will say "but the spirit of the medium is a la carte... why bundle?" I say that establishing yourself as a multi-dimensional information source is a good thing. You subscribe, you get all the web stuff free. You don't subscribe... well, stuff is gonna cost you.

In essence, this says that you subscribe to the New York Times experience. This is a good deal, too, because the NYT has positioned itself as a national paper. This is a big incentive to drop your local paper and pick up the Times as your daily.

As I've said before, the WSJ works pay-to-read online because it's a niche pub. The NYT might work online behind a limited pay wall because it's a national media brand.

But would anyone care if the Chicago Tribune offered the same deal? How about USA Today? The Charlotte Observer?

I don't think so.

Dang. Monday.

Had to bury another cat this morning, so that now I've got a matched set of little rescue kitties sleeping in the dirt next to the too-small stray I took in while Janet was out of town last August. The great irony: Janet went out and got the two littermates to "cheer me up" after the little one gave up and died.

Both have now been hit by cars. Pixie survived long enough to reach the emergency vet, who told us she was paralyzed with no meaningful hope of recovery. The good news is she got pain medication and we were able to comfort her during the euthanasia.

We have a fourth cat: Janet went and got him from the shelter about a month ago because Pixie was acting so depressed after Prez was killed.

*Here's a survey that will start your week off right, he said sarcastically: (E&P) "New Survey Finds Huge Gap Between Press and Public on Many Issues"

*From the NYT's review of the final Star Wars episode:

"This is how liberty dies - to thunderous applause," Padmé observes as senators, their fears and dreams of glory deftly manipulated by Palpatine, vote to give him sweeping new powers. "Revenge of the Sith" is about how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy." Obi-Wan's response is likely to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign: "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes."

*Newsweek backtracks on its Koran desecration story... because the Pentagon denies it? This is just so ... wrong...

Running out of patience...

Whatever you do, make sure you check out this link from E&P: It's a transcript of Scott McClellan blowing smoke up the White House press corps' collective ass on May 12, the day after the Cessna incident.

Several things jump out at you:

1. McClellan's talking-points act is wearing thin (can you imagine having to deal with such an insufferable jerk day in, day out?); 2. The WH press corps, which has rolled over repeatedly for this administration, reacted with some gumption when the story involved a threat that frightened and inconvenienced them.

The elephant in this room isn't difficult to spot, but it's the simple truth that no one dares speak: Bush isn't in charge. He never was. He wasn't in charge on Sept. 11 and he wasn't in charge on this day, either.

Had Bush been in the White House instead of riding his bike, then McClellan would have said that the president was notified and directed the response ... it might not have been true, but more significantly, it wouldn't have looked so patently, bluntly, obviously, undeniably false.

Instead, Bush was safely out of town, and his Secret Service detail let him continue his bike ride because... well, clearly, the thought of telling the President about a possible attack on Washington and the subsequent evacuation of more than 30,000 people never occurred to anybody.

As McClellan keeps saying, protocols were activated. Procedures were followed. All is well and everything went as planned. Oh really? Then clearly, Scott, those protocols don't include notifying the president. Remember Sept. 11? Cheney ran the show. Bush was told it wasn't safe for him to return to Washington and assume command, and so the commander-in-chief went for little airplane ride.

So what does it say if the President of the United States can't be trusted to lead the response when the nation is under threat of attack?

In February of 2001 I had a good-natured argument about Bush with novelist (now turned conservative online columnist) Orson Scott Card. Card said Bush was a good man. I said that this might well be true, but that to me the bigger issue was who had put him in office. Card thought that was typical liberal media bias.

My case: The lesson the GOP learned from its 1996 Dole debacle was that it should no longer leave its future vulnerable to extraneous, random indignities such as candidates and voters. Dole got the '96 nomination because people felt he had earned it, that it was his turn. In 1997, such notions were determined to be distinctly Old School.

Afterward, key leaders in the GOP decided that for the 2000 election, their elite was going to select one candidate, get everyone on board long before the primaries, and then fend off all challengers. This alliance, while not illegal, sought to soak up not only the available money, but also the majority of the party's political talent. This is why the McCain candidacy was typically described as an "insurgency."

Of course, when a few wealthy donors, insiders and operatives decide to short-circuit the democratic system, they don't so with the gee-whiz notion of selecting a president who is going to take office and then tell them what to do. When these people interview you as the possible receipient of their support, they're not checking to see if you've got good ideas. They could give a damn. All they want to know is whether you're going to stay on the plantation once you get elected.

My argument to Card was that one would be naive to look at Bush as an independent leader considering 1. His lack of independent achievements and qualifications; and 2. the weight and power of the group that selected him as its candidate.

Critiquing my own theory today, I would say that Bush has set the tone for much of US policy in the post-Sept. 11 world, and that he has been a stronger leader (though, I think, in a negative way) than what I considered possible in early 2001.

But I also contend that, for all his bluster, Bush has never left the plantation. Compassionate conservative? Maybe he was in Texas, but he hasn't been in Washington. Bush is a company man, and the company in this case is called the Project for the New American Century.

Besides, whatever Bush's role as a "big-picture man," the reality of character and power is always revealled in crisis. On May 11, 2005, as on Sept. 11, 2001, Bush was a bystander. Actually, he wasn't even that. A bystander is at least observing.

I think the press is finally losing its last scraps of patience with the President and his supporters. One can only be patronized, placated, manipulated, teased and insulted for so long before the consequences of stepping out of line are no longer worse than continuing to accept the status quo. Things will really get interesting once we stop focusing on Dubya's affable Everyman personna and start taking a closer look at the people around him (Bolton... Hager... Horsley... DeLay... Gannon (and by the way, check out the Talon News site these days)... Eberle... Rumsfeld... Sciafe... Robertson... Cheney... oh, and ExxonMobil...

Liberal media bias? Yeah, whatever, Mr. McClellan. That's like complaining about a leaky faucet when the house is burning down.

Letters to the editor

Two back-to-back letters on the pagan package, the only ones that have appeared so far.

Appalled at section
I was appalled at this past Sunday's section of Faith & Values. The editor(s) missed a great opportunity with this section and showed a great lack of judgment, publishing a section almost exclusively on paganism, witchcraft and Wicca.

One would think you could have come up with a better edition of this section for Mother's Day.

I would never have thought that such a section of a newspaper in Charleston would ever be dominated by articles on paganism and witchcraft, let alone on Mother's Day. There was only one article on mothers, and none on the place of motherhood in religious faiths and teaching. Even the apostle Paul, when writing to his colleague Timothy, indicated the important place of mothers in our faith walk: "I am reminded of the sincerity of your faith [he writes to Timothy], a faith which was alive in Lois your grandmother and Eunice your mother before you, and which, I am confident, now lives in you" (2 Timothy 1:5).

On Mother's Day, my church was filled with mothers who brought their children, young and old, with them on this special day. Where is the honoring of our mothers and their sacrifice? You missed the boat on this one and infuriated multitudes of your readers (in my congregation alone). I hope to never see such a display in this section of the paper again.

THE REV. GREG SNYDER
St. John's Episcopal Parish
3673 Maybank Highway
Johns Island


Positive religion
Accept my thanks for running such a wonderful story on Pagans and Wiccans in the Lowcountry. I have spent much of this past decade speaking with people of all faiths to explain to them that this is a positive, faith-based religion. Your reporter, Dan Conover, has written a wonderful, well-researched and positive piece. I can only hope that this article will help others understand that we all live in the light of the divine.

As I have come to accept and cherish those who follow other faiths, I hope that this piece will assist others in better understanding mine. Where there is light there can be no darkness. Where there is love there can be no hate. Where we find acceptance, we find peace.

MARY DELLUCCI
Priestess
The Foundry and the Spring
1125 North Blvd.
North Charleston

The pagan story: What we learned...

On Sunday, my story on neo-pagans in the Lowcountry appeared on the cover of our Faith and Values section. The mainbar ran about 95 inches and told a story of the last 14 months in the local pagan community, beginning with the suicide of that community's most visible and controversial figure.

The sidebars, just counting the text, ran another 80 inches. You can find my links to all the elements of the package here, on the special blog I created just to keep the subjects of the story connected to the final assembly of the package.

Janet, who in addition to being my wife is also the paper's chief designer, put the whole thing together, giving good play to photos by staff photographer Mic Smith. It sprawled across four pages of broadsheet newsprint.

Writing about neo-paganism was one of my first goals when I returned to reporting. As an editor, I had dealt with so many people -- including cops and a police chaplain -- who assumed that Wiccans were devil worshippers. They simply didn't know better -- and if you've been told that someone worships the devil, why would you go out of your way to hear their side of the story? Pagans have a story to tell, but their well has been poisoned by centuries of Western civilization.

We didn't have a Faith and Values section when I started reporting the story, but once it was created I figured that was the appropriate place for the package. The big question was, would the paper's editors be comfortable running such a story in a section that many of our readers still call "the church section"?

Answer: Despite some nerves and obvious discomfort around the newsroom, the paper's leadership never flinched from this story. That in itself is a minor miracle. I can say with no fear of inaccuracy that such a thing would never have been allowed six years ago.

With that resolved, I began thinking about the readers. What kind of reaction were we likely to get? My feeling was that the package would likely be panned by a few, but that most people in Charleston are mature enough to see that explaining another religion is not the same thing as an attack on their own religion. However, I did expect a bit of a "normative" reaction, people upset that we were giving legitimacy to a group they wanted to view as "weird."

On Friday, as the piece went to press (with extremely minimal edits), everybody I spoke to said the same thing: "I hope you're ready for the phone calls." I attached my phone number and e-mail address to the story.

So, here's phone/e-mail/misc. comment tally, as of Tuesday afternoon:

Phone calls: Two. One was a guy asking me to put him in touch with one of the witches because he had a suspicion that somebody had hexed him, the other just a "normal" guy calling to say how much he liked the story and that he "had been reading this rag for 22 years and I can't believe (you guys) could pull this off." This doesn't include phone calls from people who were in the story, who called up to say they were happy with it and hearing nothing but good things.

E-mails: I stopped counting the good ones. I'm still waiting for the first critical e-mail.

Misc.: The editorial page received this e-mail on Monday as a Letter to the Editor. However, it cannot run as such because the writer did not want her name to be used and didn't give her contact information.

I was appalled at the article on the front page of Faith and Values. I do not think that suicide is a value we should uphold! And to give place to Wicca on the front page is not appropriate on Sunday when our country is founded on Christian beliefs. The bible says that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and I don't think that should be promoted on the front page!! I was deeply distressed to see more than 3 pages on paganism worship in this newspaper!
I know I am not alone in this and hope that from now on, we can count on Faith and Values--Values of Life! Sincerely, (Please withhold my name)

Also, this morning our ombudsman ran this comment and response in her column (emphasis added by me):

Q: I am thoroughly disappointed that on Mother's Day, The Post and Courier did not feature the strong belief of the mothers of those boys who were lost at sea. Instead you feature pagans and witches on your Faith and Values section. I understand the need to report on a point of view different from mainstream religions. But why on a day when you had this option? Mary Rhett, peninsula.
A: I think you'll agree that (the paper) has not shied away from addressing the spiritual side of the rescue story. Reporters have interviewed the boys and their family members about how their faith sustained them. Front-page headlines said "It's a miracle!" and "It was just me, Troy and God." It is tempting to revist that story because it feels so good. Inded, on Sunday there was a front-page story chronicling the seven-day ordeal. Interviewing the mothers again would seem to me to be overkill.

Do I think we've heard all the response we're going to get? No. The story came out on a Sunday, so all the sermons were already written. It ran inside the paper on Mother's Day and was barely promoted off the front. Sometimes stories like this need a little time to perculate through the community before they find the people who are going to be angry about them.

But I think this lack of a violent reaction also says something about Charleston. We are stereotyped as backward. We aren't. And even though this is, without a doubt, a conservative community, it is not generally an ignorant one. Charleston is far more cosmopolitan than the general image people have of the South.

Everyone who writes for the public must work with an abstract image of their audience. Every now and then, reporters and editors do well to update that image. This might be one of those times.

After notes (5/11/05):

Here's a different perspective -- a pagan who disliked the article:

Dear Mr. Conover,
Being one of the people you first contacted through Witchvox when you decided to do
this article (although I chose not to be involved publicly, due to my husband not
wanting our name known and having to deal with backlash in his frail health), I
followed the path you were taking in your investigation and research, in the emails
you sent all of us and the blog you kept. I was excited when I learned the article
was to be published this past Sunday, and eagerly ripped open the paper that morning
to read it. My excitement died and saddened dismay and disbelief replaced it as I
reached the end of it. Instead of a straight forward, no-facts-witheld article on
paganism and WIcca that I was expecting, we got a highly sensationlized piece that
focused on the suicide of one local pagan group's leader, due to accusations of
improper conduct with a minor and its resulting loss of his business/depression, and
his covens reaction. And then to include the hint of possible resentment and
dissension between local groups? You dropped the ball, Mr. Conover. All the
disjointed little side pieces you included along with the article should have been
what your article was really about. You have done low country pagan's and Wiccan's
no favor in the publication of this piece. If anything, you have hurt how the
public views those who follow these alternate paths even further. I am proud of my
religious choices, and will vehemently defend them. But it saddens me that those
who don't know the truth about my path, and the path chosen by thousands of others,
still do not know the truth despite your disjointed efforts to enlighten them.

Blessed Be,

(initials)