Todd Stadler's blog

Wow. That's a lot to think about in one post. I can't say I welcome the return to the browser wars. It always has and still does feel like less of a technical thing and more of an identity thing.

And although I disagree with you on some of the points you raise here, and although a certain large oil company* helped put me through school, I will agree with you on one thing:

Our media is too dependant on commercial revenue. That's why I believe it's very important to support commercial free news outlets like NPR. Of course, any media outlet that reaches millions of people needs millions of dollars to operate. But knowing NPR gets so little of its financing from corporations is reassuring. Incidentially, although I don't like TV enough to subscribe, I think viewer supported cable networks are superior for the same reason: They are almost solely beholden to the people that consume their content.



* I would put in a link, but they have one of those web sites that never lets you go back, which may say something about said oil company or my browswer. This makes the first two paragraphs of this comment all somewhat ironic. If you must know, it's Mobil.

Hmm. That CATO Institute article was interesting to read. Supposing that everything it claimed is true, I would probably have to change my current opinion on the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Of course, it would be nice if those in the Bush administration would bother telling us why they so vehemently oppose the ICC, other than the "protecting our soldiers" bit. But then openness and dialogue haven't exactly been hallmarks of George Bush's administration.

But when you look at the CATO Institute's arguments against the ICC — no right to a trial by an impartial jury, no guarantee of a speedy or a public trial, and no right of defendants to confront their accusers — it becomes clear why these may not the most played-up points in Bush' arguments: they are, in fact, injustices being perpetrated against two American citizens (so far) accused of being "enemy combatants".

Which would seemingly make the Bush administration big, fat hypocrites for despising the ICC and yet detaining Hamdi and Padilla. A good article to read about this is over at Findlaw.

On a rather different note, I'm not sure what you mean by a "return to the browser wars". I am familiar with that reference to the early days of commercial web browsers in which companies created their own proprietary quirks and attempted to make them de facto standards through sheer market share.

But that is not the situation today. Standards are now defined by a more-or-less independent body, and most major browsers' latest versions do a decent job of conforming to those standards, including the two parties of the earlier browser wars, Netscape and Microsoft.

While I may tell you that I like Mozilla better, I am not implying that I only develop for that browser. It's just my favorite one to use.

Regarding NPR: I can only partly agree that they are truly "commercial-free." It seems like every thirty minutes, they say something like "The Jim Lehrer Newshour is sponsored by..." and they cut to an advertisement/promotion for Archer Daniels Midland, "supermarket to the world" and convicted price-fixers.

And I'm not sure how I feel about that. It was Ira Glass last year who did an entire piece on NPR about ADM's price-fixing convictions, so clearly NPR knows about it. But they continue to take their advertising money. And ADM continues to contribute even after NPR's report. I feel like I'm missing something here.

I guess my point is that even organizations that don't formally sell advertisements are still beholden somehow to their donors. I don't think there's much of a way around that.

Yep. And it gets even worse- even if a news provider tries really hard to maintain integrity by not letting their sponsors influence their opinion or programming, they have to make daily decisions about what news to show and what news to ignore. They choose based on what their audience is interested in (what will sell), which reflects the biases and leanings in their audience. And of course this is on top of the journalist's and editor's own biases that they may or may not be aware of. All of this is why we, for example, get told the name, profession, and favorite hobby of every Israeli who is killed, but only the number of Palestinians who are killed. And we probably won't be told about it at all if fewer than 10,000 Africans die at once.

And there's yet another reason to be uncomfortable- despite naming their sources, you can never be sure where journalists are getting their information or the reliability of that information. Odds are that most journalists won't be able to get into some Afghani village that just got bombed, so they'll take the military's version of what happened. Or they'll talk to a few villagers, who might be telling the whole truth, or exaggerating, or lying outright. And many US reporters will come in hoping to see that the harm done to civilians was minimal, and many Europeans will come in grimly expecting a slaughter of innocents.

And on top of everything, we have to trust journalists to summarize and distill complex situations for us, because we don't have the time, ability, or inclination to follow all the threads and gather all the viewpoints ourselves. Who knows if the synopses they have developed for us are complete, or even-handed, or accurate.

Sigh. I think that most of us have at best a foggy understanding and awareness of the world outside our immediate scope.

The best you can do is try to read as many sources as possible, and build up a sort of amalgam of information. In a typical week, I end up reading the weekend edition of one major newspaper, 2 major news magazines from different countries, and several different websites. All of this adds up to a large part of my free time. It's exhausting. I've found myself reading less fiction because I just don't have time. Is this happening to anyone else?

Dangit, my basic grounding in humanities is kicking in instinctively and demanding that I make reference to Plato and his stupid cave.

But you are right, Josh. We have no choice but to choose those filters we trust. Even "open source" reporting such as that at indymedia.org is filtered by those who would participate in it.

While I'm a big believer in objective truth, actually arriving at that truth about any given event can be daunting at best.

I'd like to say I read a lot of news, but I'm not sure.

I did recently change my browser's start page to NYTimes.com, because I thought CNN was getting too entertainment-heavy, or maybe just stupid, going the way of Newsweek and Time.

And I have all sorts of bookmarks that I wish I had time to read, but don't. Usually, I feel good if I have time to read Tom Tomorrow's blog, and that is a rather skewed filter, itself, although he tends to find things I am interested in that I would not find myself.

Having just returned from a long weekend, I now have several newspapers in my room that I intend to read, so as to not miss any stories that occurred while I was gone, but I somehow think this will not happen, as there is too much news that has happened since the newspapers were printed.

In short, it's hard to be an informed member of society. I certainly don't feel very qualified to vote sometimes.

And yet I'm reasonably certain most people who do vote know even less about what's going on. Sigh.

:)
There's Plato, but then there's a whole slew of post-structuralist, post-modernist, post-bleah bleahs who say that there is no objective truth.

But that's not really what we're talking about.

I just wish it wasn't so hard to believe what I hear.

I'm down with Julia on the NPR thing. I have so many unprintable things to say about Merck that I can't stand listening to (good) programs sponsored by them.
Which makes KPFT , the recently reclaimed Houston Pacifica radio station, one of my favorite things about Houston.
But, of course, KPFT just proves the rule. It was slowly overrun by its "Sound of Texas" management that had realized that a lot more listeners (and with them donations) were interested in Texas country music and David Wilcox than in the aggressively pacifist and liberal news/information/commentary content that I think was the original mission of the station.
Fortunately, it seems like some good, old-fashioned wacko lefties have stormed back into control (by somewhat questionable tactics, supposedly) and reinstated the more politically interesting content. They even got me to donate again.
But then again, they know I'm giving them money, so I figure they're gonna give me what they think I want to hear. Hopefully, that will be hard news that I can't get from corporate media outlets and commentary that comes from valuing the rights of man over the corporation, with a long-term view toward sustainability, but you never know. I've got preconceptions and hot-button issues to pander to, and I'm sure they can find them.
In fact, it seems like there's a cult of personality developing around Amy Goodman, the host of what I think is the best news program in any medium, Democracy Now . The first fund drive with her back (the old KFPT/Pacifica management kicked her show off the air for like half a year or so) sounded really great; they were getting truckloads of pledges. She even broadcast special segments just to the Houston donating audience, and that's the part that started to make me feel uneasy. There just seemed to be so much celebration and back-slapping and giving-away of trinkets ("We found a box of old 'Democracy Now' watches, surely a collectors item, that you can have for a $100 pledge") that I just felt like everyone was way too satisfied with themselves. But it's still a great program.

Anyways, hopefully no one will read this as it's hopefully rambling and I really forget what the original point was. But how ya doin', Todd? Good, good!

Dig the Web site, man. Have you heard KPFT News? And if so, what do you think?