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Showing posts from January, 2007

Same Time, Next Year

I always look forward to the State of the Union and shortly after it begins forget why. The speeches themselves are well below the average hot convention speech or presidential address to the nation prompted by tragedy or political necessity, although President Clinton, with visible glee, used the forum in a traditional way to trot out wild and crazy ideas guaranteed to go nowhere. At least this one didn't begin with the tired boilerplate: "The State of the Union (is excellent! is superb! has never been better!). But Bush could not help himself from making an insider's jab as is his wont by referring to the "Democrat Party" -- which drives the Democrats nuts -- although published transcripts based on the released version says "Democratic Party." There is very little to dissect, but I can't help but think if Bush's next, and last, SotU will be any different. Iraq came up late in the speech, and wasn't mentioned in passing. As the NY Times rep

You've Come a Long Way, Baby?

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The talk-show host approach to "introducing" Sen. Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate doesn't seem entirely odd, given the tough political calculations the presumptive Democratic nominee must make. But it does reveal some clues about what trail she must forge to win. This early in a campaign a candidate is usually hoping to win undecideds while holding the base. But with 97% name recognition Mrs. Clinton has the difficult task of winning over voters who already don't like her. It wasn't just a Webcast -- nobody is talking anymore about how cool Sen. Barack Obama was to two-camera his exploratoriousness online. And in the spirit of keeping every aspect of a candidate's appearance under control, what is better than a closed set with no live audience? Put her at a desk in an office that isn't Oval and it fails. Put her in her living room and it just ... may ... work. But still, there had to have been some talk within the campaign about the symbolism o

Closing the Circle (Not Circling the Wagons)

David Schlesinger has dropped the other shoe from last August's incident involving altered photos from the Middle East . The Editor-in-Chief of Reuters discloses in his blog that the senior photo editor in the region has been fired and replaced, the code of professional conduct for Time is at a tremendous premium at a place like Reuters, where there absolutely no sense of a beginning, a middle or an end. photographers has been re-written and changes to vetting procedures instituted. "We called together our senior photographers to strengthen our existing exacting guidelines on ethical issues in photography and wrote a new code of conduct for photographers, appended to this note. "We have restructured our pictures editing operation to ensure that senior editors deal with all potentially controversial photographs, and we have ensured that shift leaders are focusing solely on quality issues instead of doing editing themselves. "In addition, we have invested in ad

Getting it Wrong

It's tough to be wrong, but it's tougher to deny an obvious truth. I'm speaking of myself, of course, and my naive hopes that President Bush was just giving his opponents no satisfaction before deciding to reduce the US military presence in Iraq as rapidly as possible. But I could just as easily be speaking of Bush, who, despite the clear logic of the Iraq Study Group's analysis and, perhaps most importantly, strong opposition by the U.S electorate to raise troop levels , thinks the best way to bring an end to US military involvement in Iraq is by first increasing it. Americans support folly and even things they don't understand -- if they have confidence in their leader. Sometimes that requires a leader to admit to fallibility. Bush has perhaps never come closer to this than in these woefully inadequate 10 words in his Iraq speec h : "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me." Is this the way to begin to re-build consensus? I dou

Killing the Messenger

It appears to be one of the great early successes in open-source journalism -- exactly what MSM futurists like Reuters' Tom Glocer seemed eager to greet and other news organizations welcomed with little visible trepidation. But the unauthorized video of Saddam Hussein being hanged is likely to result in some severe penalty for someone -- one hopes it is at least the "guilty" party -- and for the moment the media focus seems to be on the act of taping some pretty odd gallows behavior by official participants (or were they? see below) rather than the behavior itself. Ironically, the overarching issue is not whether TV would show the actual death. These days that discussion is quaint beyond words. The issue is that there is tremendous news value in the illicit recording of an historical event that could not have been obtained any other way. And, but for this, history would have been inaccurately recorded. Recall that the first video released of the execution, the official