Month: July 2000

In Order to Write About Journalist Integrity, You Have to Have It First

    ZDNet’s Marc Cooper thought he’d lambasted problems with journalistic integrity on the web, but ended up unintentionally providing a prime example of it himself in his recent story, Web news: the new frontier?.

    Cooper simply recycles the old tired complaints against web journalism, especially the amateur kind. “…let me suggest,” he writes, “that throwing a mass of unfiltered, unchecked data and opinion onto the Internet doesn’t make for the best “user experience.” As example #1 of that problem he talks about an unnamed story by an unnamed “self-described Web journalist” who wrote an account of Microsoft’s recent announcement of that company’s .NET Internet strategy. According to Cooper, the unnamed author gets it all wrong and engages in “flights of fancy, creative writing or plain sloppiness.”

    Cooper can’t bring himself to name the web journalist, but it is in fact Userland’s David Winer and the account of the .NET announcement appeared on Scripting.Com, which acts as sort of a sounding board for Winer’s opinions and ideas about the Internet. Cooper’s column and Winer’s web log offer interesting contrasts — namely Winer’s opinionated, occasionally annoying web log has far more integrity than Cooper’s biting comments. Why?

    I find I rarely agree with Winer and both his presentation and style evokes very negative reactions from some people (I’ve offhandedly mentioned his name or his company in e-mails only to have my correspondent savage him — Winer definitely provokes strong feelings either way). But Winer doesn’t bill Scripting.Com as the last word on the Internet. In fact while he’s disparaging something or someone he doesn’t like, he always includes references and links to what he was talking about. You won’t see Winer post, “ZDNet posted a lousy article about .NET” and leave it at that. He’ll post links to the articles he disagrees with and usually to a lot of other background information on the topic. This is how the web is supposed to work — instant peer review. If I read something Winer writes I can visit the article or press release or product announcement he’s point to, and if I think he’s crazy I can mention that on the discussion area of Scripting.Com.

    Not so with Cooper. If Winer hadn’t posted a message about the ZDNet article on Scripting.Com I never would have known who Cooper was referring, much less be able to examine the article that upset Cooper to see if it was indeed as factualy incorrect as Cooper claimed. This is the worst sort of traditional media paradigm; the journalist as high priest and gate keeper always abstracting and hiding all of the messy primary materials from readers and instead only feeding them stories that have already been appropriately processed and massaged. News as Cheeze Whiz.

    It would come as a complete shock to someone like Cooper, for example, that some of us actually glean a lot more information by comparing three or four rough first hand accounts of events by non-journalists than we do by reading the official journalistic version of an event. This is especially true in the computer industry where often times computer reporters seem to be absolutely clueless about end users. One of the reasons, for example, that Winer’s Scripting.Com is popular because whether or not you agree with him, Winer has a handle on what people want from the Internet as well as the Internet’s still unrealized potential for connecting people. Winer’s vision of the Internet is creating tools to enable and enhance conversations between people, whereas Cooper’s entire view of journalism is based on the view that such conversations are pretty much worthless tripe lacking integrity, and requiring journalistic gatekeepers at every corner (in fact, ZDNet’s discussion system seems engineered precisely to discourage significant user feedback and discussion).

    Different people will have different ideas about the value of these conflict visions, but for me I’d rather be creating content and reading content by other individuals flung throughout the world, rathe rather be simply a daily consumer of whatever ZDNet or CNet or the other big gatekeepers tell me is important.

Marriage Isn’t A Recent Invention

Laurie Essig is a lesbian with a message — marriage, whether
between gay or heterosexual couples, is wrong. And Essig isn’t about to let
tiny details like historical facts get in the way (Same-sex marriage).

Essig’s argument against marriage is the typical radical feminist
view that was borrowed from Marxism — marriage is an inherently
oppressive social institution. “Although we like to pretend that marriage is
natural and universal,” Essig writes, “it is an institution founded in
historical, material and cultural conditions that ensured women’s
oppression…”

The logical fallacy here is jumping to the conclusion that any
social institution created by an oppressive culture must itself, by
definition, be oppressive. Taking this argument at its face value is what
leads some radical feminists to condemn things like science as inherently
oppressive to women.

But Essig really drops the ball when she bizarrely claims that
“Monogamous, heterosexual marriages were an invention of the Industrial
Revolution’s emerging middle-class.” This claim is so absurdly wrong that
it’s unbelievable the Salon editor’s let it pass.

Monogamous, heterosexual marriage didn’t exist until the Industrial
Revolution? That assertion would have come as a shock to the Romans,
the Hebrews, the Greeks and a whole host of other societies that
practiced monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Has Essig really never noticed the
numerous proscriptions against adultery in the Old Testament? Or read
any of the tedious Church writings on marriage in medieval Europe?

Even in cultures where monogamous marriage was not the rule, some
form of marriage institution is pretty much universal (anyone who
disagree is more than welcome to name a single culture that had absolutely no
marriage-like institution).

In fact, although clearly most Westerners today might not want some
of the sexist excesses of medieval or even Victorian marriage, marriage
survives as an institution precisely because it appeals to something
very deep in the human psyche. Essig finds this impulse to marriage
appalling.

What annoys me is that no one, not even queers, can imagine anything
other than marriage as a model for organizing our desires.

Essig does have a point that the state shouldn’t favor (nor
penalize) marriage over other forms of personal relationships. Someone who
wants to remain single shouldn’t be penalized for that decision (although
today it is married couples, not single individuals, who are penalized
by the tax code).

Other than that, though, Essig’s attack on marriage as a social
institution is historically inaccurate and absurd.

Death Penalty Opponents Lose High Stakes Gamble

    It finally happened. Anti-capital punishment activists started to get on the bandwagon of Ricky McGinn, who is scheduled to be executed in Texas. In 1995, McGinn was convicted of raping and murdering his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Stephanie Flanary.

    DNA testing had been done previously on pubic hairs and semen found on the body of the victim, but the tests at that time were inconclusive. McGinn, who maintains he’s innocent, wanted to have the material re-tested using more accurate tests that are now available. The state of Texas denied such an avenue, but Gov. George W. Bush gave McGinn a 30 day reprieve to conduct the testing.

    And the results apparently show what prosecutors maintained all along — the pubic hair belongs to either McGinn or a very close maternal relative of his. This pretty much puts the nail in the coffin for McGinn, and in the long term for the anti-capital punishment movement.

    Capital punishment foes like to tout new polls showing that support for the death penalty has declined in recent years — today only two-thirds of Americans support capital punishment despite the well-publicized incidents of innocent people ending up on death row. That’s down from a high of 80 percent a few years ago. Most of that drop can probably be ascribed to the question over guilt and innocence, but DNA testing is going to take care of all their fears.

    Already smart death penalty supporters are taking the obvious step to secure the future of capital punishment — they are pushing for laws to grant those convicted of capital crimes additional appeals to resolve DNA-related evidence issues. Once that is in place and Americans are assure that, wherever possible, DNA testing is done to make sure that the odds of an innocent person are astronomically low, support for capital punishment will again reach into the 80 percent range. In fact, with the advent of widespread DNA testing I wouldn’t be surprised to see capital punishment instituted in many states that currently don’t execute criminals. (such as Michigan, where I live).

    Although the anti-capital punishment forces have done an excellent job of winning individual battles and freeing innocent people from death row, but they’ve lost the war for the hearts and minds of the American people on the morality of the issue. The coming use of DNA to reduce the risk of executing innocent people will only further cement the pro-execution stance of most Americans and put the anti-capital punishment movement back at square one.

OTC the Pill Already

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering reclassifying a number of prescription drugs and turning them into drugs that would be available over the counter. Among the drugs under consideration for OTC status is the birth control pill. Such a move is long over due.

There is already some precedent for making this move. In some states pills that induce abortion can already be dispensed by pharmacists which makes them effectively over the counter drugs. Why not make the Pill, which hundreds of millions of women have safely taken, available without a prescription as well? Why shouldn’t a woman be able to walk into a drug store and buy birth control pills without going to see a doctor first?

The main argument against making the Pill available over-the-counter are the tired old paternalist arguments about protecting patients from themselves. Although the Pill is a relatively safe drug, a small percentage of women will have side effects and need to consult a physician to find the best drug for them. But this problem is no more egregious than the side effects that other OTC drugs have — after all aspirin is a potential killer when taken by certain people, yet it’s been available over-the-counter literally since it was first widely available.

It’s very important to have the convenience of popping down to a drug store for an aspirin or ibuprofen pain killer, and the same sort of freedom and convenience should be extended to birth control drugs.

Ironically while only one major anti-abortion group, the American Life League, has weighed in decrying the move to make birth control easily available without a prescription, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights League and Planned Parenthood are both oddly ambivalent about the whole issue. Salon quotes NARAL attorney Elizabeth Arndorfer as saying, “Using emergency contraception is a one-time thing that many recent studies have shown to be effective. But there are contraindications for some women using the birth control pill longer term. It may be better for a doctor to keep an eye it.”

So women are intelligent and capable of making the choice for themselves whether or not to have an abortion, but they are too irresponsible to seek out information on the birth control pill and decide for themselves whether or not to take it.

Women are not simply moral patients, they are moral actors. Women are more than capable of deciding for themselves whether or not to take a drug such as the Pill. The FDA should approve the Pill for over the counter sales as soon as possible.

Sources:

The silence of the Pill. Leah Kohlenberg, Salon.Com, July 10, 2000.

No prescription for the pill?. CNN, June 29, 2000.

The FBI’s Carnivorous Appetite

    At the same time that politicians have been complaining that e-commerce companies aren’t doing enough to respect the privacy of Internet users, along comes the revelation that the FBI has developed an electronic surveillance system called Carnivore which lets it monitor millions of e-mails.

    The system is as simple as it is insidious. First, the FBI obtains a court order to monitor the email of a particular person. These have become trivially easy to get thanks to the Clinton administration. Second, the FBI goes to the Internet Service Provider that the person uses and attaches its Carnivore system. Basically the Carnivore system intercepts every single e-mail message that is coming in through that system and is supposed to then filter out and capture only the e-mail from the person covered under the court order.

    But as former federal computer-crimes prosecutor Mark Rasch told the Wall Street Journal, this is “the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody’s phone calls to see if it’s the phone call you should be monitoring. You develop a tremendous amount of information.”

    The real problem being, of course, that there is no check on the system once it’s in place and based on its history only a fool would trust the FBI as far as you can throw Louis Freeh. Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia), who has led the fight against other government monitoring systems such as Echelon, summed up the problem with Carnivore: “Once the software is applied to the ISP, there’s no check on the system. If there’s one word I would use to describe this, it would be ‘frightening.'”

    The Wall Street Journal tracked down an FBI flak, Marcus Thomas, to whine that “This is just a very specialized sniffer” and to point out that there are criminal and civil penalties that prohibit the FBI from conducting unauthorized wiretap and that evidence gleaned from such a wiretap would be inadmissible in court. Apparently Thomas thinks that Americans are stupid with a capital “S.”

    Sure the evidence is inadmissible in court, but that doesn’t prevent the FBI from developing criminal cases based on information they find in an unauthorized wiretap and simply forgetting to mention the origin of the original information. Besides, the FBI has in the past managed to put inadmissible evidence to very good use. Much of the information that the FBI collected on civil rights groups was clearly inadmissible in court, but agents still used it to try to destroy people’s reputations and lives.

    Fortunately, the FBI hasn’t yet succeeded in banning strong cryptography so anyone who wants to communicate securely over the Internet can still do so by using a program such as Pretty Good Privacy.

    Users concerned about eavesdropping by the Feds should treat the FBI as network damage and route around it.

Sources:

‘Carnivore’ Eats Your Privacy. Wired News, July 11, 2000.

FBI’s system to covertly search e-mail raises privacy, legal issues. The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2000.