When the snark runs uphill. Funny ... Looks like a little anti-Bush snark got past the editor of the business section today. In "A Heretical View of File Sharing" John Schwartz reports on "the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying," a study whose conclusion is that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." Unwelcome news for the RIAA and industry file-sharing hatas, of whom the article is sharply critical. Here's the graf:

The industry has reacted with the kind of flustered consternation that the White House might display if Richard A. Clarke showed up at a Rose Garden tea party. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America sent out three versions of a six-page response to the study.

posted by michael  4:16:23 PM  
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A fairly significant event. John Burns, who last week was rude to our military propagandists in Iraq, is seriously not bringing the happy after yesterday's al-Mahdi uprising, which leads A1 today:

The insurrection, which spread across the Shiite heartland in a matter of hours, came five days after the ambush in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Falluja, outside Baghdad, in which a mob mutilated the bodies of four American security guards and hanged two of them from a bridge. Together, the events in Falluja and the other cities on Sunday appeared likely to shake the American hold on Iraq more than anything since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's government last April 9.

In effect, the militia attacks confronted the American military command with what has been its worst nightmare as it has struggled to pacify Iraq: the spread of an insurgency that has stretched a force of 130,000 American troops from the minority Sunni population to the majority Shiites, who are believed to account for about 60 percent of Iraq's population of 25 million.

Privately, senior American officers have said for months that American prospects here would plummet if the insurgency spread into the Shiite population, leaving American and allied troops with no safe havens anywhere except possibly in the Kurdish areas of the north.

"7 U.S. Soldiers Die in Iraq as a Shiite Militia Rises Up"

Burns is still in a state of high scorn at the information policy of the American military, and ready to show it; he describes "a senior American officer rush[ing] into a news briefing inside the American headquarters compound in central Baghdad wearing a helmet" on his return from a helicopter tour of the Kufa/Najaf fighting, to contrast the officer's bland use of "the insistently understated language that the American command has used at every juncture of the war" to wish away the violence as a "fairly significant event" now "pretty settled down." And note that Burns's lead insists on the fighting as "a coordinated Shiite militia uprising," a description echoed in the caption to the accompanying front-page photos. Add Jeffrey Gettleman's (somewhat scattered) color commentary, off-lead, and it seems the Times may be in full "Fool me once ... shame on ... fool me ... can't get fooled again" mode on this one—now if only they could get there wrt Condi Rice and the gang.

[Juan Cole, whose middle name is apparently "the always indispensible," has been on fire when it comes to this story. Check out this Sunday post, then the one immediately above it, for the crucial stuff.]

posted by michael  1:11:11 PM  
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Fear of a blog planet. If you're unaware of the recent flap surrounding Daily Kos—well, good for you. Though actually it's hard, given the way this has been flying around the left-wing blogosphere in the last several days, to imagine anybody coming to this blog who doesn't already know. Nutshell: Kos, himself a veteran, made an intemperate remark about the dead American mercenaries in Fallujah which he retracted when he had time to think better of it, the remark was picked up as a smear opportunity by a few wingnuts and amplified through the blogosphere by Professor InstaHypocrite (who, as a fellow-traveller of hatebloggers, if not arguably one himself, I refuse to link to), and as an upshot the Kerry campaign pulled ads and delisted Daily Kos from its own blogroll. (For a full account of the flap, and of the issues surrounding it, see Matt Stoller's long, thoughtful post from The Blogging of the President.)

In the wake of the flap, Atrios changed his ad and linking policy: he eliminated what he calls "special fundraising relationships" (dedicated donation pages, donation tracking links) from his blog, stopped accepting new ads from individual candidates, asked the Kerry campaign to de-list Eschaton from its blogroll. I think he was entirely correct to do it. Here's what he writes:

If we haven't grown up enough to realize that one stupid retracted comment posted by a blogger in the comments section of someone else's diary post on that blog deserves absolutely no official written response by a campaign - no matter how offensive it is - then I don't think we're grown up enough yet to have blog/campaign complementarity. The Kerry campaign is now operating on the standard that they are responsible for the comments made by any blogger they link to, and in fact will allow themselves to be forced into commenting on any transgressions. They're trying to get their guy elected, and they're going to do what they think is necessary (I'll let others judge the wisdom), but it shows they're not ready to really have a blog and interact with the rest of the blog world.

I'll go Atrios one further—and this is based off of various comments, in reaction to Billmon's post about the incident, expressing grave disappointment with the Kerry decision. What really bothers me here isn't anything that the decision reveals about the Kerry campaign, since I don't think it reveals a damn thing we didn't already know, and know we were going to have to live with. And it's not that the Kerry campaign isn't ready to live in the rough and tumble of the blogosphere, or fundamentally fails to understand what linking means. What's really distressing here, and unforgiveably short-sighted, is that the Kerry campaign has now created a de facto standard for political candidates in relation to blogs that will tell significantly against efforts to organize money (and manpower) in the blogspace for upcoming races—to do on a wider scale what we did for Ben Chandler in Kentucky. Atrios' response demonstrates what that standard is going to cost—what damage is going to be done, not to Kerry, but downstream, in the score of local races we need to win to begin taking back the Congress, where blog organization has looked like a powerful new mutation of the netroots story. And of course, the standard is entirely asymmetrical: the GOP doesn't need blogspace organization the way the Dems do, in addition to not being geared to produce it.

The Kerry camp has been thoughtlessly, unstrategically reactive in this matter: and even beyond the damage done, that makes me fear in a general way for their—our—electoral prospects.

posted by michael  11:07:23 AM  
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