Press Ethics Alert

"The latest episode raises a serious question of journalistic ethics," writes Howard Kurtz, press ethicist for The Washington Post. How so, Howie? The Harvard Business Review "lets its subjects read drafts of the interviews and suggest all kinds of changes and deletions until they are satisfied," Kurtz responds. You don't say.

Isn't that the whole point of the Harvard Business Review? To publish the words and thoughts of business leaders and strategists (and Harvard Business School professors) exactly as they would want them published? And which is better: a clear explication of Jack Welch's management practices or using press ethics as a platform to titter about his sex life?

Apple on the Comeback Trail

Stewart Alsop has a smart column on Apple's resurgence. He thinks the new iMacs will help the company recapture some of the 10% market share it used to have with business customers. And he points out that many of the "issues" that made Apple computers incompatible with Windows-based computing world are no longer "issues."

More important, he rightly points out that the new iMacs offer fantastic software applications for managing digital media. To the text we go:

Apple Computer appears to have actually developed a real, applications-based software strategy. In my 20-plus years of observing the computer industry, I've found that hardware companies don't do software well and that software companies don't do hardware well. There are a lot of conflicts between the two. The business models are antithetical, and the engineers don't understand or like each other. So it is all the more remarkable that the programs that Apple now ships with its computers are actually really good: iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and iTunes represent a coherent set of applications for managing digital media that doesn't exist anywhere else. The integration among the applications is at least as good as in Microsoft Office--a huge element in the success of Windows.

Exactly right.

Blogger Down

Evan Williams, the man who wrote the code that makes blogging and blogspots like this one possible, took the Blogger Pro application software down today for some re-tooling. This is why the blogs went dark for a time. We're back up now and perhaps a bit more appreciative of Mr. Williams's extraordinary gift to writers everywhere.

Granholm Surge in Michigan

The surge of Michigan Attorney General Jennifer Granholm (D) in the Democratic gubernatorial primary is noteworthy and spells trouble for the GOP in the future. Yes, the Detroit News poll numbers are based upon a relatively small subset of likely Democratic primary voters. But those numbers don't differ much, if at all, from what private polls are showing.

Assuming Ms. Granholm is able to hold her grip on female Democratic primary voters (who now support her by margins of better than 2-to-1), she'll probably win the early August primary. According to the News survey, Granholm enjoys a huge lead over the likely Republican gubernatorial nominee (and perhaps appropriately named) Lt. Governor Richard Posthumus.

One has the sense that the national Republican Party may cut its losses in Michigan and redirect resources to other key states (like Pennsylvania and Illinois). If that happens and Granholm wins both the primary and the general election by wide margins, then a new Democratic star will be born. More important, Democrats will control the governor's office in a key battleground state in 2004.

Now If They Could Just Get That Signal Thing Down

Good news for road warriors. Scientific American reports that scientists at Lawrence Livermore have come up with a "portable fuel cell energy source" that can power a mobile phone or laptop computer longer than the current batteries do. And it's cheaper. Straight to the text we go:

The days of fast-fading cellular phone batteries may soon be over. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) recently developed a working prototype for a portable fuel cell energy source that could power a cellular phone 300 percent longer than existing rechargeable batteries do. Indeed, the new technology would be less expensive, smaller and more powerful than any battery currently in use, according to Jeff Morse of LLNL's Center for Microtechnology Engineering. He predicts that it could replace standard lithium-ion and lithium-ion polymer batteries in a number of consumer electronics products, such as laptops and handheld computers.

God bless 'em.

A Really Bad Idea

Glenn Reynolds has a good column today on the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, which would mandate the inclusion of copy-protection in every digital device and every computer operating system. The Libertarian Samizdata blogspot recently published an equally persuasive letter by Paul Allen on this issue, which is worth quoting at some length. Mr. Allen writes:

As any programmer worth his/her salt will attest, given the resources, anything that can be programmed into a computer can be programmed out, or worked around. In the case of copy protection such as the SSSCA would require, the resources needed for circumventing it is simply the source code for the operating system of the computer, and/or other source code for applications used on the computer (such as one of the many free video/audio layers available). Now given the wording of the SSSCA, along with the DMCA and other supporting laws, it stands to reason that such Free Software would suddenly become a target for legislation. Such legislation logically may require such software to be judged illegal. Such a decision may have serious consequences to the IT industry as well as the entertainment industry and the consumer as well. Little may the consumer or entertainment industry know, but much of the technology they rely upon today is provided at low cost by Free Software. Take that software away, and suddenly doing business costs a lot more, and eventually the consumer just will not be willing to pay for it.

Now aside from the consequences to Free Software, what about the consequences to those who do not use such software. Imagine that home movie you shot last weekend on vacation. Now you wish to send that home movie to a relative, friend, whoever, over the Internet, or place it on your web site for all to download. Well, with many of the protection technologies suggested, this would not be possible, or would be extremely difficult. Some of these technologies require digital watermarks to be placed in the media, for one example. CD burners, digital cameras, etc. can not make these watermarks. The copy protection works by checking for such a watermark, and if it does not exist, the system either will not allow the media to be played, or will not allow it to be transmitted over the Internet as the case may be. So much for sending your cousin your latest home movie, or allowing your whole family to see it from your web site. An additional problem is all current media, including CDs and DVDs, you may currently legally own would not work on proposed new CD and DVD players with copy protection hardware. You would not be able to copy CDs, tapes, or anything else that you legally own in order to exercise your right to fair use, so as to listen to that CD on the cassette deck in your car.

I could go on, but I think this is long enough and has given some food for thought. Besides, I have work to do. Election time is near, so think about what that person you are voting for represents. Think about actually writing a letter to a congressman or other legislator, to a magazine (I actually had one published once, so its not beyond the realms of possibility), newpaper, etc. Many people have the attitude that they can do nothing and make no difference. Well, I say to them they are right, because there are so many people with that attitude, that none of them do anything and they make no difference in doing so. The ones that make the difference, are the ones taking a stance, and the ones taking the stance are the ones that are causing these ridiculous laws to be passed. Guess who those people are?...

Email is particularly effective.

The War and Its Critics

What do you think the chances are that New York City will be hit again before the year is out? Fifty-fifty? Two-to-one? If you asked the people who see and read all of the classified intelligence reports and have access to every last al-Qaeda file, what do you think they would say? I doubt they'd put the odds at anything less than 50-50.

Given this reality -- the near certainty that another truly heinous act against American citizens will be at least attempted in the next 9 months -- you would think that the Democratic Party and its like-minded allies in the press corps would grant the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt with regards to its management of the War on Terror. Especially so when one considers the manifest competence of its efforts to date. But you would be wrong.

The press carps and whines. The Democrats parry and thrust and play politics with national security fire. Michael Kelly has an excellent column on this subject today, which I urge you to read. He's a bit more forgiving than others have been with regards to Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-SD). Kelly dismisses Daschle as an unserious hack.

As for the press, I suppose the question is: what did you expect? And I suppose the answer is that I didn't expect that in such a short period of time the major newspapers and newsmagazines would approach the War on Terror as a "factor" in the mid-term elections, or as a platform from which to lecture us all about civil liberties or as a seminar within which we might discuss the root causes of Islamo-fascist anger or as an opportunity to debate "unliateralism" and the needs of the EU.

You don't have to go to far afield to find frivolous press commentary and reportage. Consider the following paragraph inside an otherwise straightforward news story in The Washington Post:

"Behind the business-as-usual appearance, White House aides know the truth about public opinion in wartime: The more images Americans see of body bags or bereft families, the more likely they are to question a mission. There has been no decline in public tolerance for losses so far, and Bush is eager to keep it that way."

Consider the various conceits. First is the conceit that the author has any idea what is going on behind the scenes at the national security command post that is the White House. I can say (as can you) with virtual certainty that he has no idea what's going on behind-the-scenes in Ms. Rice's office or Director Tenet's office of Paul Wolfowitz's office or anyone else's office where the most serious matters of national security are discussed.

As for White House aides knowing "the truth" about body bags on television, I have no doubt that there are some on the White House staff who worry about such things, but so what? Does anyone think that President Bush turns to Secretaries Rumsfeld and Powell and says, "we can't attack those A-Q forces in eastern Afghanistan because there might be body bags on television.."? Does anyone think that Mssrs. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Powell and Ms. Rice would work for a man who even thought that way? Does the press really think that these extraordinary public officials, who have now devoted their lives to this War, are so shallow that their real, "behind-the-scenes" concern is how it all looks on television?

And who says that the more body bags there are on television, the more queasy the public becomes? Was that true in World War II? No. It certainly wasn't true in Vietnam. The public's response to body bags on television during the Vietnam War was increased support for wider, more ferocious warfare against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Most Americans believe that if you are going to fight a war, then fight it with every weapon at your disposal. Richard Nixon and George Wallace received 57 percent of the total vote in 1968 and not because they were anti-war. Richard Nixon, running against the explicitly anti-war candidate George McGovern in 1972, was re-elected by the largest landslide in modern American history. Nearly one-third of all Americans today believe we should use nuclear weaponry in the War against terror.

What is this Washington Post correspondent talking about? America, once provoked, is a warrior nation. And once engaged, we are spectacularly good at it. We do not shirk the responsibility. We understand what it implies. The body bags on television are a given; the cost of freedom. The cost of no body bags on television -- inaction -- is incalculably higher. The country, especially WalMart America, solidly supports President Bush's War on Terror. The only thing that will crack that support is if the country concludes that he is not waging the War vigorously enough.

If I were in Tom Daschle's shoes, I would make it my business to add "software" to President Bush's "hardware," for the simple reason that it would be helpful to the War effort and would therefore be good politics as well. There are any number of "software" initiatives that are at least worthy of consideration, if not implementation. One is organizing the Iraqi opposition to Sadam. Another is organizing the Iranian opposition to the mullahs. Another is figuring out how to get the US fundamentalist community more active in certain African nations (on humanitarian missions of mercy). And the list goes on and on.

Instead, Daschle whines that he is somehow out of the loop. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) bloviates about the Defense Budget request being too high. Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) tries to position himself for left/liberal Democratic presidential primary voters by back-handedly sniping at the scope and strategic outline of the War on Terror. Meanwhile, the press sneers at Attorney General Ashcroft, moans that al-Qaeda prisoners in Cuba are being "mistreated," complains that Bush has no respect for the First Amendment and on (and on) it goes.

I suppose Michael Kelly's dismissive verdict -- that Daschle and company are simply unserious -- is right. But at some level it's worse than that; a kind of denial. It's as if they still believe that what's important is their spin for or on the next news cycle. Instead of the news itself and what it implies.

The Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic continues to improve under the Michael Kelly regime. This month's issue has a strong Christopher Hitchens piece on Churchill revisionism and a funny one-pager by Walter Mead about the opposing world views of Jacksonian Americans and European sophisticates. The James Fallows piece on the role of the US Air Force in the Afghan theater of the War on Terrorism is also well worth reading. You can link to the site by clicking here, but for some reason Kelly doesn't post the latest issue of the magazine on the Atlantic website until a while after the hard copies have been mailed to subscribers.

Carli's Going to Win

Institutional Shareholder Services yesterday recommended that Hewlett-Packard shareholders vote in favor of the company's proposed merger with Compaq. As has been widely reported, this is a big win for H-P's embattled chief executive officer, Carli Fiorina. It now appears likely that the proposed merger will win shareholder approval and that HPCompaq will be born.

Opposition to the deal from Hewlett family members strikes me as short-sighted. Yes, the PC, server and mainframe businesses are all low-growth, low-margin businesses. Yes, it is impossible to raise prices on these products. Yes, H-P "owns" the "printer" business and would be well-advised to continue to build upon that point of competitive advantage.

But the future of IBM and HP/Compaq is computer services and bioinformatics. By combining HP and Compaq, Fiorini is creating a company that can at least compete with IBM's computer services and, potentially, beat IBM's Life Sciences computing division. Compaq, after all, was the computing power behind Celera's decoding of the human genome. H-P offers its own first-rate bioinformatics computing capability. Combining the two creates a powerhouse, the leading bioinformatics computing company in the world.

The problem is that bioinformatics computing (as a business) is (a) short-term risky and (b) very expensive. It is unlikely that the genomics sector will deliver much return in the near future, but it seems to me inarguable that it will deliver huge returns in the future. Being one of the two or three bioinformatics computing companies capable of handling, sorting and making sense of vast amounts of genetic data is, medium and long term, strategically sound.

This is what Ms. Fiorini is proposing to do. By combining H-P and Compaq, she hopes to rationalize and maximize the strength of the existing businesses and capitalize on the capabilities of both companies in the medium-term future. It's a smart strategy and one worthy of a "yes" vote in favor of the proposed merger.

Dowd Dead On

Maureen Dowd's column today on Ad-land is excellent and exactly right. Advertisers and marketers are still wedded to an idea of branding that says get 'em early and they'll stay brand loyal for life. Thus they advertise what teen-agers call "brown soda" to teen-agers who don't like, don't drink and don't want "brown soda." And they never will.

The best line in the column is this: "Advertisers, as Fred Brock wrote in The Times, 'have become a bunch of anti-Willie Suttons, aiming where the money increasingly isn't.'" Bulls-eye.