BuzzMachine

Nein
: Poland asks Germany to participate in managing its zone in Iraq. Germany says no.

I hope we don’t hear any Germans complain about a lack of order in Iraq.

If you’re not part of the solution, mein Freund…

The Baghdad report
: Salam Pax is back again today with another good report.

He also says that browsing is awfully expensive.

We have to get this guy a tip jar!

SARSies
: From BWG — a great Hong Kong blog — come these SARS-inspired masked smilies.

Sina Motallebi update
: The case of arrested Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi gets stranger and more frightening. Thanks to Pedram Moallemian, here is the latest:

Iran based Noghteh.net (the point) quoted an unnamed judiciary source about the case against Sina Motallebi, Iranian journalist jailed for the content of his weblog. According to him, Sina is one of 5 members of a group involved in production and distribution of “depraved” videos (!).

They include videos of birthday parties, wedding receptions as well as womens swimming pools (!!). He is also charged with making videos of street prostitutes in Tehran, by order of a broadcaster abroad. Furthermore, this “source” has claimed that since some of the prostitutes were shamed by the videos into committing suicide, Sina could face manslaughter charges (!!!).

In what Hoder has labeled “Random Confession Generator”, Sina has already confessed to some of his “crimes” but claimes he wasn’t involved with the video about the street workers.

This is absured, bogus and degenerated enough to have only come out of a judiciary system known for immense corruption and biased resolutions.

Sina is a prisoner of conscience and no amount of rubbish charges, made up confessions or planted

Useless v. useful journalism
: William Powers is half right.

In the National Journal, he argues that it is time for journalists to make trouble again:

The best journalists are troublemakers, pot-stirrers, naysayers, dirt-eaters. When the whole culture is saying “Yes, yes, yes” to some sparkly idea or popular leader, we love nothing better than to be the ones who rush in screaming “No, no, no,” brandishing the ugly evidence. To the noble hack, there is no smell sweeter than the skunk spray of a major political scandal.

Which is exactly what nobody wants right now. The perfume of patriotism is wafting from every direction, including the media itself, and the whole culture is high on it and weirdly checked out. After all those long months of anxiety and worry, it’s clear that the public wants a break from all things troubling and downbeat. Iraq is liberated, and the president is a flying ace. Let’s forget our worries and have a nice long party. Maybe the economy will even come back and foot the bill.

It’s high time for journalists to start making trouble again…

Well, yes, but not trouble for trouble’s sake: pot-stirring as a sport and an end in itself.

Powers gives as an example of such good troublemaking the tempest in a thimble this week over the cost of Bush’s landing on the Abraham Lincoln.

That’s not good reporting. That’s just partisan pissing and network time-wasting that tires and disengages and pisses off the voters. IT HAS NO IMPACT ON OUR LIVES.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the essential test of news: It has to have an impact on our lives. It has to matter. Or it’s not news.

NEWS SHOULD BE USEFUL.

Sorry, I’ll stop shouting now.

But I’m tired of partisan pissing — whether the urinal is George Bush’s flight or Bill Clinton’s sex life; both are fun for a gossipy giggle but neither matters about our lives; neither is the result of real reporting.

I’m tired of the morning shows turning into a showcase for emotional voyeurism. Every time a child disappears or a soldier dies, we get Couric or, God help us, Curry asking, pianissimo, how the survivors feel.

I’m tired of overlong, underedited thumbsucking stories in the big national papers (damnit, I’m busy: find the nearest period!).

I’m tired of quoting stars as if we should listen to anything they have to say that isn’t out of a script.

I tired of seeing politicians uselessly pissing at each other, egged on my media.

I want to see media demanding constructive work from leaders; I want to see them exposing issues involving not private parts but the public good. I want to see them do it with brevity, impact, and force.

Attack our desperate need for health insurance and the shameful cost of health care…. our continuing vulnerability in homeland security…. the ongoing accounting scandal not only in private industry but also in government (for example, New York authorities hiding revenue so they can get a fare increase)… the failures of education we can witness at any Burger King… the unspun need to get a grip on firearms and crime… the threats we face abroad even from some of our allies…

The list goes on and on.

That’s the kind of troublemaking Powers should be yearning.

Everything else is just gossip.

If this is a monopoly, when do I pass ‘go’?
: Unlike many others here in the Blogopolis — take, for example, Prof. Lawrence Lessig — I am not all hopped up and full of fret over media concentration.

I wonder whether Larry and his confederates had a problem with media because their parents thwopped them about the nose with a rolled-up newspaper when they were young. Whatever the cause, Lessig, for one, does have a thing for media. He wants copyrights to be limited. And he wants media companies’ rights to own media properties to be limited by government regulation.

Now when discussion turns to media deregulation and concentration, I have a clear conflict of interest: I work in media; I’ve worked for some of the biggest.

But I also have been a victim of media concentration. When I started Entertainment Weekly, various Time Warner editors and executives (all long since gone) tried to lighten up my coverage of entertainment in an entertainment company (and I stood firm against them, as any self-respecting journalist would).

Having delivered all those caveats, I have to say that I do not fear media concentration.

Thanks to digital delivery of content and greater bandwidth on which to deliver it and thanks to new easy and inexpensive tools for making it, there are far more media choices today than there were 10 or 20 years ago; there is much more competition and more coming; and the barrier to entry into media is lowered to ground level, which will bring in an endless variety of new voices.

Yes, there are fewer newspapers (because of competition from new media). Sure, it’s still hard to get a movie made. But there are many times more TV stations. There are many more opportunities to consume media that used to disappear (that is, you can watch the DVD).

And there is the Internet. It not only provides new ways to produce media and reach audience the world around. It is also disrupting existing media businesses. There’s plenty of competition, plenty of choice, plenty of change.

Considering my conflict, I won’t engage in a lengthy argument on the issue. I just want to make one point:

The opponents of deregulation, those paranoid about media ownership, are missing the big change in the media business that’s right under their noses, right in front of their faces, right here where they argue it over: The Internet.

The courage of an engineer
: Just watched the press conference from the hiker who had to cut off his own arm to escape a bolder, Aron Ralston.

This guy is unbelievable.

He’s an engineer, he explained, and so he reduces things to problems to solve — even living, even dying.

He tried all kinds of engineering tricks to try to get the boulder off his arm (I never did do well with pulleys on those damned Iowa standardized tests).

He carefully got ready for cutting off his arm, putting everything out: “I got my surgical table ready.”

His knife was so dull he couldn’t even get through the skin at first. So he had to regroup and figure out how to get through the bone. He used strenth, torque, angles, and broke his own bones.

And he did it with the cold calculation of an engineer.

The first good reason I’ve seen to consider forgiving France
: Wi-Fi across all of Paris. [via Hammersley]