Politics, Viral Media and the Chilling Effect on Stupid

Does a politician on the campaign trail have any expectation of privacy? It's almost a silly question. But some pretty smart politicos have behaved as if there is more than one answer: Michael Steele is learning this, but unsuccessful Virginia Senatorial candidate George Allen and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown learned it the hard way.

Now California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown seems to be shocked shocked that there's video recording going on here.

Continue reading on wired.com's Epicenter blog

Facebook Privacy Week (Month, Year ...)

My very first appearance on Reuters television.

VICTORY IS MINE!!!

Lost in Translation: Rewrite the Last Page

Spoiler alert: This article assumes you’ve seen what passed for a final episode.

If you’re like me, Sunday night’s Lost series finale may not have exactly hit the spot. Sure, everyone’s dead — and some might say not a moment too soon. Well, nearly everyone: Inscrutable Ben Linus isn’t “ready” to “move on” and is left to his own devices right outside that multi-denominational church where the high school reunion from hell is going on. So, naturally, the dramatic plot device we are thinking of is: Blockbuster Feature Film.

I made my disappointment about the trajectory of final season clear in a post on my personal blog three weeks ago, so I won’t dwell on the ultimate dramatic sin of the series: Since anything is possible, nothing is impossible.

Continue reading on Wired.com's Underwire blog

The Unbearable Lightness of Lost

The first sign that I had lost my edge came without warning: I Tivo'd Lost on Tuesday, when I was unable to watch the show in real-time for the first time ever, and then was in no real hurry to see it. I'm now the weary gambler who won't fold because he secretly wants to lose, and betting on an indifferent hand hastens that perverted joy.

A lot of people died this week on Lost -- only white people survived, a friend observes, and the suicide bomber was an Arab, she also noted. Well, Sayid is Iranian and thus Persian, but at this point, on this show, which purports to be all about the details, this slight twist on an cheap cliché seems like an inconsequential inside joke.

Even death provides no finality in this bloated final season. Jacob says he can't bring people back to life and the seemingly untrustworthy Man in Black promises he can. But of course, nobody is ever really dead on Lost, because people can time travel and reunite in the past and also alter the future (with evidently imperfect effectiveness). And, anyway, Hurley can talk to dead people -- or pretend he has.

So what are we to say when Sayid and Jin selflessly make the supreme sacrifice, for love? Later, dude?

I think what really upsets me is that the creative forces behind Lost have miscalculated the value of "Anything is possible." It anything is possible, nothing is impossible. And when nothing is impossible, whatever happens has zero impact. Lost has created a huge appetite among a dwindling but committed fan base for answers, and at this point it no longer matters. That is the cost of having no canon; there is no need to hew to the nuance of a thousand delimiting historical "facts."

There is a strong religious theme playing out (or, sigh, so it would seem) but Lost has literally become the Bible: there are no fixed truths, lots of confused, needy, susceptible people living in caves and so many vague non sequiturs that it says exactly what you want it to.

And like the Bible, the only counter-argument is that Lost is not an the inspired word of God but the work of humans, which, of course, the Bible teaches us are flawed.

But SciFi needs rules, as well as faith. Certain things are impossible on Star Trek, for all of its imagination and invention. Lucasfilm employs a Star Wars continuity cop named Leeland Chee who keeps track of "thousands of years of story time, running through all the bits and pieces of merchandise" to protect the viability of that franchise. The boys on the Big Bang Theory can correct you in Klingon and argue about String Theory and make them seem equivalent.

Lost, meanwhile, has become a prime time soap with the worst daytime attribute: Nobody (Jack) ever asks the obvious question any intelligent person (neurosurgeon) would, settling something once and for all instead of staring as if lobotomized as we cut to commercial.

Lost is bound by nothing now, and that makes it uninteresting, by any definition.

Reuters Opinion 2.0

Reuters waded into the waters of opinion and analysis against a very strong tide: An iron-clad policy of doing nothing that could conceivably open the 150-year-old news agency to the charge it was not absolutely free from bias. In the not-yet three years since Reuters columnists began taking sides on stories Reuters reporters were covering, a breakthrough I called "Reuters Opinion 1.0," its global reporting power has only grown.

But Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer seemed to complicate the question of institutional ambivalence with a post on his personal blog in which he inveighed against a "rush to judgment" concerning financial giant Goldman Sachs and a civil complaint by the SEC which accuses the Wall Street behemoth of fraud.

Glocer states an obvious fact: Goldman is guilty of nothing until the company is found guilty of something, or agrees that it broke a rule or regulation.

But now comes an object lesson into why this may not have been the best idea: News that federal prosecutors are now investigating the company prompted a rush to judgment on Wall Street as investors shot Goldman shares down 10% to a nine-month low.

Of course, Glocer's message is still valid and correct and (irony noted) probably not directed at the markets, whose amorphous, amoral, extralegal and essentially unchallenged power to literally take sides at all times on anything is precisely what Reuters' business is based upon (to say nothing of the basis of the broad charge that Wall Street created or at least exacerbated the global financial meltdown.)

I've lauded Glocer for being among the few CEOs who actually does blog. It is genuinely bold and refreshing: He has an unusually high burden to bear since he is not only a material person who can't say certain things publicly but the head of a media company which takes extraordinary pride in its impartiality.

So the problem isn't really that he's taken the side of a concept enshrined in the U.S. Constitution but that he picked this fight to take that stand -- a fast-breaking story being covered aggressively by people who report up to him who already know that they aren't supposed to pre-judge anything. And it doesn't help that Goldman is a major client -- at the very least an inconvenient truth.

Criticism when the context was only the sleepyish SEC civil case came quickly, from expected and unexpected quarters. The union representing US reporters seized upon the incident to renew its call for an ombudsman to advocate for editorial. The New York Times stepped in to say that Glocer's post was "an unusual step for a media executive." Michael Reupke, a former Reuters editor in chief and general manager, had much stronger language: "outrageous and inadmissible."

"Are the Trustees too sleepy to think of stepping in here?" Reupke wrote in a letter to "The Baron," a social network for current and former Reuters employees. "If this had happened in my day I doubt whether he could have survived in his job."

I'm inclined to think that there is nothing sinister going on, even though the atmospherics are terrible: Defending Wall Street, which pays many Reuters bills, as it digs it way out of the worst PR challenge since tainted Tylenol. The first non-editorial person to run the company in modern times, he screws the pooch in a way no Reuters journalist without a death wish could even imagine.

The Goldman story will play out for some time and there will be lots of opinions expressed about the company's comportment from all sides. In fact, Glocer need look no further for judge-and-jury-like conclusions than "The Great Debate" blog on reuters.com. Like in this post, from veteran columnist James Saft:

"Regardless of whether the actions of Goldman meet a legal hurdle of fraud, they very easily clear a very low hurdle of immoral and unethical behavior. Seriously, would you let these guys repair your car or treat your house for termites?"

And that's the point. The hue and cry of the masses -- and even by British Prime Minister Gorden Brown, whom Glocer singles out for excess -- are not part of the process Glocer wants to protect, unless one is to believe that the SEC will be persuaded by the likes of Jon Stewart.

Goldman will get its day and its due and is still powerful enough to do as well as is humanly possible in their legal tussles no matter what the world thinks of them.

As Saft notes in that same column:

So remind me, why will clients continue to do business with Goldman Sachs?

I know, it is a stupid question; investors and corporations will continue to do business with Goldman even after the bank has been charged with an alleged fraud for the same reasons they always have: because they hope, like every gambler, to beat stacked odds and because they flatter themselves that they are not the sucker at the table.

Conan Says He Wouldn't Have Pulled a Leno

Conan O'Brien tells 60 Minutes that, had their rolls been reversed, he would not have returned to The Tonight Show if it meant pushing out Jay Leno.

I thought as much three months ago.

"He went and took that show back and I think in a similar situation, if roles had been reversed, I know -- I know me, I wouldn't have done that," O'Brien tells 60 Minutes interviewer Steve Kroft, as reported by TV Newser.

"If I had surrendered The Tonight Show and handed it over to somebody publicly and wished them well -- and then...six months later. But that's me. Everyone's got their own, you know, way of doing things."