The Buie Knife

Social Media Revolution 2013

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Erik Qualman, the creator of this video, has certainly generated curiosity about himself. I've now Googled him and checked out his Wikipedia profile. He's coined a word, "socialnomics: word of mouth on digital steroids."

The video is a good promotion for the growing importance of social media: "90% of consumers trust peer recommendations," compared to only 14% who trust advertising. 

And I want to know more about how "we will no longer search for products and services...they will find us via social media."

I do think there's still a tangible sales pitch to be done on the ROI on social media, not simply that, as Qualman says, the ROI "is that your business will still exist in five years."

The quick factoids in this video raise a lot of questions:

In Social Movements, Media Often Makes A Difference

In the debate over whether the Internet (Facebook, Twitter) is making a big difference in the Middle East, Andrew Sullivan posted this video clip from Birmingham, AL. in 1963. 

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The new media of television certainly made a difference to the civil rights movement in 1963. "It took the horrific images of fire-hosed protesters being beamed into the TVs of Middle America to bring the crisis to a quick conclusion," Sullivan writes. "Media matters. It cannot create change or the social forces behind it or the need for strong networks to carry it out. But it can be an accelerant in ways few activists have ever doubted. Necessary, if not sufficient."

Clay Shirkey offers insights on the impact of social media on political change:

Wikileaks Hysteria: So Far, Much Ado About Not Much?

Watching this short, flattering video profile of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and reading Wikileaks coverage in The New York Times so far leads me to conclude that the initial doomsday characterizations of the leaks were hysterical. The leaks do not appear "catastrophic," nor "the 9/11 of diplomacy" and I doubt "countless lives will be endangered." As Lara Marlowe points out in the Irish Times, the "secrets" reported on so far are fairly innocuous -- not very surprising. 

• Some imprudent rıght-wing pundits such as Bill OReilly have even called for the "execution" of Assange. Ironically in this case they seem to be arguing for blind faith in unchecked big government power.
• Wikileaks, in releasing these documents, has given the public new insights into how the world works. Presumably, diplomats and government officials already had this information;
• According to the video, the Obama administration has tried as hard as the Bush administration before it to keep a tight lid on "national security" or diplomatic information leaks;
• Too much information is carelessly classified and held secret from THE PUBLIC;
• What has been released and summarized so far actually undermines conspiracy theorists who believe that betrayal and double-dealing are hallmarks of diplomatic relations. 
• These leaks are not nearly as shocking as the Bush administration's betrayal of American values by torturing detainees or "deep state" revelations in Turkey, in which the country's military allegedly planted bombs in its own country and assassinated its own people to advance its own political power. US foreign policy is working pretty much as it should in a democracy: fairly transparently.
• It will be weeks, if not months or years, before the full impact of the disclosure of hundreds of thousands of documents is fully known. 

• What is most troubling about these leaks: it's difficult to imagine that Assange exercised judgment or considered the full consequences of releasing a mass of hundreds of documents. (In contrast, the editors of The New York Times and other newspapers have exercised judgment in their reportage of the leaks, drawing on only a relatively small number of documents so far, and withholding information deemed too sensitıve.
• Assange considers Daniel Ellsberg, the US military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, a hero, and in the video (above), Ellsberg returns the compliment. 
• But Ellsberg's expose of the Vietnam disaster was strategic and thoughtful, designed to tell the public what it needed to know. Assange, on the other hand, seems bent on a far grander and possibly more reckless course --a permanent mission to impose transparency on world politics and diplomacy whether or not it is needed or warranted. David Brooks has a thoughtful column about the "fragile community" of diplomats whose relationships will probably be damaged, at least temporarily, by these leaks.

Paying to Sustain Good Journalism Is In Your Digital Future

I now gladly pay $3.50 a week or $14 a month to download the New York Times to my laptop, seven days of reading at a time. You might say I am a fool to do this since the Times is available for free online. But I really like the format of the Times Reader which now resides on my desktop. I tend not to read more than five articles from any web site at a time. I figure that if I read more than five articles a day from any one site, I ought to pay fair market value to sustain the site. And since I have time during the day without Internet access, I can read the downloaded edition then. I hope this is the future of journalism online. It requires that readers accept the concept that if they read more than five articles a month from a website, they should pay. The New York Times is going to start enforcing this concept in 2011 with paywalls.

Most online news readers use 5 sites or fewer. Shouldn't they be willing to pay something for sites they depend on?

But consumers have yet to accept this concept. According to a Pew survey, only 7 percent say they would pay to read a news site online. In 2009, the NYTimes stated that it had 53,000 subscribers to its digital edition, up from 24,000 in 2008. As for overall paid subscriptions, NYT dropped from over 1 million in 2008 to 927,000 copies in 2009, "marking the first time in decades that the paper’s circulation had fallen below seven figures." Other newspapers are in worse shape, losing 10 percent or more in paid subscriptions over just one year.

Related:

Hope for Online Content Payments If Consumers Slash Overall Communication Costs

Between Now and 2020: Great Time to Be A Reporter Covering Health Care Policy

I reported on health care policy for 12 years -- including the 1993-1994 Clinton health care reform plan -- but got frustrated by all the partisan posturing, windbaggery and lack of action to correct obvious flaws in the system. I could have built a huge bonfire from the reams of proposals and counter-proposals I collected that never went anywhere.

But the next 10 years, until 2020, are going to be very interesting times to be a health care reporter. There will be so much to report on as the health care system adapts (or doesn't adapt) to the historic legislation passed by the 111th Congress and signed into law by President Obama. 

Republicans are mounting a massive public relations campaign to inflame voters and portray the legislation as disastrous. Their hope is to win back control of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. But even if they do, chances of repealing the most popular provisions of the law are highly unlikely. Especially if Democrats mount a counter-campaign that persuades a majority of the public that the legislation passed represents real progress, and an increase in their personal security.

Of course few things in life are absolutely certain, and the legislation is far from perfect. Whether proponents' best hopes about the new law are realized remains to be seen. Opponents have a lot of complaints, which they will be pursuing in the courts, at the ballot box and in future Congresses. But for now, it's good to celebrate the triumph of action over inaction, after 100 years of proposals that went nowhere.

Here are some of the provisions of the new law, as proponents see it: 

In Mass Culture, Why Does Junk Crowd Out Quality?

Down a barren highway toward the Cappadocia region of Turkey, one comes across a lone billboard. See slide show of billboards by American corporations in Turkey.

"Mass culture is responsible for debasing our moral values," some 70 percent of Americans have consistently told pollsters. Not only that, but mass culture is the chief American export, so one could argue that American culture is debasing the world's cultures. 

People the world over tend to agree. But they still buy fast food which makes them fat, spend too much time computer gaming which make them fatter, and sit like couch potatoes for hours watching trash television entertainment rather than quality programming, which makes them even fatter and dumber.  

What is to blame for this sorry state of world affairs aside from consumers choosing the path of least resistance and the lowest common denominator? 

The Vilification of Walter Cronkite and Hawks' Vietnam Revisionism

The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl wrote in 1949, in a book on Napoleon, that "history is an argument without end." Proving the point, Greensboro blogger Joe Guarino suggests that the recently departed Walter Cronkite and CBS News led biased media coverage of the war in Vietnam, unjustifiably "turn(ing) the American people against...the American effort in Vietnam." He goes on to assert that national media should not be free to "undermine the war effort." Other posters on Joe's blog chime in on the failures of Cronkite and his team to be cheerleaders for U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and for "paving the way" for liberal opinion to dominate the media today.

It's not just local bloggers who are making these far-fetched points. In a bout of revisionist fantasy after Robert McNamara's death, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that Vietnam was "the liberals' war" but was salvaged to "a draw" by conservatives after liberals "lost their resolve." The WSJ's James Taranto followed up with a blog post on "The Cronkite Tragedy: How a Great Newsman Helped Undermine His Profession's Ethos." Matt Paterson, a National Review Washington Fellow, writes that Cronkite "has blood on his hands" because Vietnam doves like him were responsible for the bloodbath that occurred in the region after the U.S. withdrew. And Cliff Kincaid of AIM.org ("Accuracy in Media," from a conservative perspective) has published "The Terrible Truth About Walter Cronkite," resurrecting old charges that the "most trusted man in America" misreported Vietnam so badly that he "create(d) the conditions for a premature U.S. military withdrawal, leading to the loss of the lives of 58,000 Americans in vain, not to mention the millions of additional deaths caused in Vietnam and Cambodia by the Communists."

I could not disagree more strongly. With the benefit of hindsight and perspective, we can see that these arguments simply lack merit. The notion that the long war in Vietnam would have turned into an American success story were it not for the "loss of resolve" of American liberals, the liberal media, and consequently, the American people, is preposterous, as I documented in my responses on Joe's blog and in an earlier post here on "The Fog of War." And it's a bit shocking that Joe opposes the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press, apparently supporting government control of media coverage of war. (When I challenged him on this, he stated that all media should "voluntarily" support government war policies. If media isn't cooperative, he suggests independent journalistic reports from war zones should be jettisoned or eliminated.) 

Joe approvingly quotes an article from 1978 by Air Force Captain Don Bishop claiming that "the politicians, press, and peace advocates stabbed us in the back in Vietnam." Ed Cone points out the phrase "stabbed in the back" was used by Hitler and other German reactionaries after World War I in an effort to stir up a popular backlash against the German establishment who "betrayed" the German people by losing World War I. The right-wingers have forgotten that Cronkite was given a prestigious award by West Point for his war coverage. His speech is here.

Like their German counterparts, American reactionaries today hope they can stir up a backlash and a sense of "betrayal" and a feeling of being "stabbed in the back" by the American media and political establishment, which they say portrayed the Iraq war effort as a failure from early on, and turned the American people against it. According to this paranoid, conspiratorial analysis, the media establishment promoted an inexperienced, unqualified African American socialist to the White House (who would not have won without their support), told the American people that the government had no choice but to intervene in the free market, bail out banks, Wall Street financiers and auto companies, impose national health care on the people, create a huge deficit, raise taxes and bankrupt the nation.

People who make these reactionary arguments never learned the lessons of Vietnam, apparently never read seminal books like David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest or Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, and apparently do not accept the rights of the American press as enunciated in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1971 Pentagon Papers case.

They subscribe to a conspiratorial view of the media and the "eastern liberal establishment," ignoring the fact that the media establishment was an early cheerleader for both the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. 

On economic policy, they are essentially free market fundamentalists who don't realize or accept that their retrograde philosophy lost for good in the 1932 election and has been repudiated by many Republican presidents -- Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush -- and Republican presidential candidates, most recently John McCain.

I cannot imagine that these reactionary ideas are going to bring the American conservative movement back into political dominance. It's sad to see their vilification of Cronkite -- evidence of just how out of touch they are.

Yet they have more clout today than they did in Cronkite's time. One of the ironies of history is that instead of being hailed as a journalistic hero at his retirement in 1981 and then again at his death, if Cronkite had somehow managed to hang on to the anchorman's slot for another couple of decades, he no doubt would have been demonized by the right, and attacked by bloggers. Faced with declining ratings and lowered credibility, he probably would have been booted out of CBS News like his successor Dan Rather was. The power of the "mainstream media" ain't what it used to be.

Sarah Palin Still Represents Hundreds of Thousands of People

Sarah Palin remains overwhelmingly popular among Republicans. Some 72 percent of GOP members and GOP-leaning independents view her favorably, more than any other potential presidential candidate. Twitter is helping get her message out, with nearly 100,000 followers as of this writing. And she still has nearly 664,400 Facebook fans, though presumably many of those signed up during the 2008 fall campaign and cannot be taken for granted as future supporters. Even so, she gained 70,000 supporters on Facebook in 10 days, from July 6 to July 16th. An unofficial blog, Conservatives4Palin.com, seeks to harness the energy of supporters.

She has far more supporters online than any other potential Republican presidential candidate such as former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, current Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, or Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Her supporters will probably help her raise millions of dollars online.

She sees herself much like a "mama bear," according to her Twitter feed. But she's also putting her virtual foot in her mouth on Twitter. In a late-night tweet, Palin took Walter Cronkite's quote about the necessity of journalists to be "liberal" completely out of context. The Cronkite quote is actually an inspirational one about keeping free of political dogma, remaining "nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause - but examining each case on its merits."

Scanning the comments on Palin's Facebook fan page, I see many libertarian and religious right comments, people who believe that "common sense" is far more important than "elite education," people upset with health care reform, cap-and-trade, income taxes, illegal immigration, the "liberal media" and the Republican establishment (called RINOs -- Republicans in Name Only).  In short, Palin could easily find herself leading an anti-establishment, populist movement within the GOP not unlike previous "movements" led by Pat Buchanan in 1992, Barry Goldwater in 1964, or more successfully, Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980.

Though she's no longer governor of Alaska, Palin is not retiring from politics. There's every indication she's still planning to advocate for causes. She authored an op-ed in The Washington Post on the cap-and-trade energy plan, which she calls "cap and tax." Adversaries respond that she doesn't really understand the issue.

Those who presume that Palin is just "not smart," however, are probably underestimating her. She held her own in the debate with Joe Biden, and she's perfectly capable of winning a debate, especially if expectations for her are low.

Not a fan of Palin, Andrew Sullivan says: "Bring her on. She is the id of the current Republican party: pure identity politics, no serious ideas for reform, and utterly unserious as a party of government. She would be the ideal representative of the current GOP on television."

Polls suggest she is viewed unfavorably by a plurality of Americans, 45%, while 41% view her favorably. This could change, however, if she picks the right issues to emphasize.

Meanwhile, Thomas Franks in the WSJ observes that Palin has become a martyr to some segments of conservatism.

How Reporter Bob Woodward, Now Working on Book About Obama White House, Gets Reluctant Sources to Talk

So Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward is working on a book that's to be a behind-the-scenes look at the Obama White House. (See Gabriel Sherman's piece in The New Republic, "Plan of Attack: Bob Woodward Vs the White House." ) Woodward's ability to get high-level people to talk on the record and to reveal embarrassing details about government decision-making is legendary. Sherman quotes George Stephanopoulos' 1999 memoir, All Too Human to explain Woodward's reporting style:

"He flashes a glimpse of what he knows, shaded in a largely negative light, with the hint of more to come, setting up a series of prisoner's dilemmas in which each prospective source faces a choice: Do you cooperate and elaborate in return (you hope) for learning more and earning a better portrayal--for your boss and yourself? Or do you call his bluff by walking away in the hope that your reticence will make the final product less authoritative and therefore less damaging? If no one talks, there is no book. But someone--then everyone--always talks."

Drill Deeper:

• "Plan of Attack: Bob Woodward Vs the White House."
• Bob Woodward Wikipedia entry.
• 10 Things Obama Should Learn from Bush, by Bob Woodward

Despite Sensational Sound Bites, Awkward TV Interviews & TMI, Elizabeth Edwards Moves Crowd at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. She Writes Well, Offers Deep, Helpful, Inspiring Book

Elizabeth Edwards at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh (Video from WRAL).

As someone who met and was charmed by Elizabeth Edwards on several occasions, as I detailed in this blog post, I've been uncomfortable with the "too much information" in news articles and television interviews accompanying the release of her new book, "Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities." I have tended to agree with the critical remarks expressed in "Why, Mrs. Edwards?" at the Progressive Pulse Blog and even the dependably catty columnist Maureen Dowd in the NYTimes. The gossipy chatter with "the girls" about the "love child" on "The View" was the worst spectacle of all.

But presumably the TMI interviews are ephemeral. "All notoriety is fleeting," she said in a brief interview with The News and Observer. It is secondary and less enduring than the quality of the book, which the LA Times describes as a fine effort, with a lot of depth, an important contribution and source of support for people who've been through similar things. A reading she gave at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh was far more revelatory and truly spiritual than the sensational television interviews and sound bites.

While Dowd and others have characterized her media tour as a vengeful airing of dirty laundry in order to get back at her husband, that doesn't seem to be the case. She signed a contract to write the book long before John's "indiscretion," she says. The theme of the book is finding the strength to survive life's great disappointments and blows. If the book were released a few years from now, or after her death, some of her remarks in interviews would simply seem human, not sensational. But she does not have the luxury of time. The salacious material is a very small part of the manuscript.

Edwards’ book "is a treasure for women who are trying to sort out the pain of a husband’s affair," writes Betty Hooker in the comments section of a New York Times article. "There aren’t many books that share someone’s real experience. Elizabeth’s book will help a lot of people feel less alone. Less crazy. Less to blame. Of course it is wrong for anyone to cheat on their spouse. But in my experience the real character of the man is revealed in how much effort he is willing to put into repairing the damage he has done. If someone is willing to do the work, I do not see how others can criticize the wife for choosing to stay in the marriage. I believe children are damaged when they learn the lesson that problems and pains must be kept quiet so everything “looks good” to the neighbors. It is much healthier to learn that everyone struggles and it is OK to talk about it. I admire Elizabeth Edwards."

One of the better (and tougher) interviews Elizabeth agreed to was with Matt Lauer of NBC's Today Show. After asking hard questions of Edwards that are on the minds of many people, Lauer read the last paragraph of her book aloud: “I have said before that I do not know what the most important lesson is that I will ever teach my children, Cate and Emma Claire and Jack. I do know that when they are older and telling their own children about their grandmother, they will be able to say that she stood in the storm, and when the wind did not go her way — and surely it has not — she adjusted her sails.” He asked her if that’s still the message she hopes people come away with. “It is,” she said. “I hope that it is when bad things happen, you have the strength to face them.”

That model of resilience in the face of perceived public humiliation and lurking death is probably what Elizabeth Edwards is trying to communicate. She hasn't been humiliated -- she has stayed strong -- and the prospect of early death has not defeated her.

Related:

• My earlier impressions of Elizabeth Edwards
• Elizabeth Edwards reads her new book in Raleigh (N&O)
• Excerpt from awkward Edwards' interview on Oprah
• John Edwards Deserves Mockery, Ridicule