Unbelievable! The goon squad is going after veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, one of the few people in the White House Press Corps who actually still remembers how to ask an intelligent question or engage in critical thought.

Earth to Planet Bill O’Reilly: do you and your “colleagues” need a refresher course in the First Amendment?

It goes like this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You say we’re in Iraq to to fight for democracy–well, how about a little democracy at home?

Thomas was absolutely in line to ask why GWB took us to war in Iraq. After all, nobody’s found any weapons of mass destruction, Al Queda had no significant presence there until after the US attacked (though it certainly has one now, thanks to the predictably myopic policies of the Bush administration), and the enemy that had attacked us was thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.

Bush, who almost never calls on Thomas and rarely calls on other reporters he can expect to ask hard questions (such as NPR’s Don Gonyea), gave a rambling, unfocused, and materially incorrect answer, and then patted himself on the back for taking a question from Thomas. Did he get attacked for this shameful, embarrassing performance? No–the attacks were against Helen Thomas.

O’Reilly:”I would have laid into that woman, and I don’t care how old she is,”
Don Imus: “The old bag should shut up and get out. I’m sick of her.”
Ticker Carlson: “Propagandist.”

Hey, pundits–the reason we have a First Amendment is that our Founding Fathers recognized the importance of an open press wiling to examine critically the actions of those in power whether in government or in the private sector. Questioning a policy based on lies and foggy vision is a high act of patriotism, IMHO.

Or perhaps the O’Reillys and Imuses of the world think that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were unpatriotic scum. King George would have agreed with them, but he had some reasons. the ability to criticize was written into the Constitution by these true American heroes over 200 years ago, and thank goodness for their foresight.

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Once again, that line between paid PR and actual journalism is getting kind of blurry. This time, the New York Times reports, the culprit is Wal-Mart.

At least Wal-Mart does not appear to be paying the bloggers who are spouting its press releases and pretending to raise independent voices of indignation–and to my mind, that’s an important distinction compared to the “news” people planted and paid for by the white House (e.g., Armstrong Williams)–but still, it’s deeply disturbing

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I wrote on January 29,

Meanwhile, the author claims he originally submitted it as fiction, the publisher–no tiny little outfit but Doubleday, one of the biggest in the nation–first called in creative nonfiction and when that didn’t fly, said that Frey had hoodwinked them.

It would be very illuminating to see Frey’s original book proposal and see where the truth lies. Meanwhile, the thing stinks.

Yesterday, Publishers Weekly interviewed Frey’s agent, Kassie Evashevski, who had this to say:

I think the confusion over fiction vs. nonfiction may stem from the fact that early in the submission process, James raised the issue of whether he could publish it as an autobiographical novel–ONLY, he said, to spare his family undue embarrassment, NOT because it wasn’t true. I told him I would bring it up with a few publishers, which I did, and the response was unanimous:if the book is true, it should be published as a memoir.

James personally explained to his editor that the events depicted in the book took place as described. Based on the information given us by the author, [editor] Sean McDonald and [publisher] Nan Talese believed in good faith they were buying a memoir, just as I believed I was selling them one.

I guess the only way we’ll know for certain is if someone can turn up his original correspondence–but of course, even that will have to be scrutinized, as in this case, it would be all-too-easy to pull the kind of faked-memo shenanigans that got Dan Rather in so much trouble back in ’04.

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I’ve been quietly following the James Frey flap for a couple of weeks now. This is the guy who got Oprah’s endorsement for his “memoir” of addiction, jail time, and so forth (I will not make it easier to locate by naming the book here)–only it turned out to be fiction.

When this was revealed, Oprah first defended him for creating a gripping read that addressed deep issues, etc. The other day, she snapped out of the trance and tore him apart on camera.

Meanwhile, the author claims he originally submitted it as fiction, the publisher–no tiny little outfit but Doubleday, one of the biggest in the nation–first called in creative nonfiction and when that didn’t fly, said that Frey had hoodwinked them.

It would be very illuminating to see Frey’s original book proposal and see where the truth lies. Meanwhile, the thing stinks.

Best commentary I’ve seen on it is from Pat Holt of Holt Uncensored–she is always worth reading.

As of this writing, she hasn’t archived the column yet, but she has some great suggestions:

  • Offer a refund for any reader who wants one, and make that process very easy
  • Hire website muckrakers like smokinggun.com to vet any book that claims to be nonfiction
  • Get Frey to rewrite the book and send him out on tour to flog the vastly different rewrite, which would be priced at half of the original
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    We’ve all shared a laugh as improbable images cloned together in Photoshop make their way across the Internet. The problem is that image manipulation can be used very unethically–to fudge scientific results, for example

    A Boston Globe story documents how editorial staff at the Journal of Cell Biology is running all submitted photos through Photoshop to detect fraud. (The New York Times ran a rather clearer article, but it requires paid access.)

    And they’ve discovered fraud is rampant enough that they’ve had to yank 14 accepted papers. In some cases, they’re even notifying the institutions sponsoring the research to check into the accuracy of the researchers’ findings.

    After the scandal with Hwang Woo Suk and his faked stem cells, such caution is unfortunately necessary. And form a science point of view, I find it fascinating that Photoshop can not only alter images, but tell you if an image is already altered.

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    The New York Times reports that China
    pressured Microsoft to take down a blog that mentioned a journalist
    strike at a Chinese paper following the firing of a journalist
    . The blog was hosted on a server in the U.S.

    Mr.
    Zhao said in an interview Thursday that Microsoft chose to delete his
    blog on Dec. 30 with no warning. “I didn’t even say I supported the
    strike,” he said. “This action by Microsoft infringed upon my freedom
    of speech. They even deleted my blog and gave me no chance to back up
    my files without any warning.”

    Tacky, to be sure.
    But some bloggers speculate this could lead to much worse: Gridskipper
    claims the Chinese threatened to convert the whole country to Linux and
    Movable Type, e.g., non-Microsoft. That site won’t let me copy and
    quote, but here’s the link.

    And
    I’ve just spent ten minutes trying unsuccessfully to locate the comment
    I saw that wondered if MS would be equally cowardly in the face of
    illegal requests from our own US government–which, considering all the
    stuff coming out about illegal White House-authorized spying, etc., is
    not such a big leap.

    One of Microsoft’s own most public bloggers, Scobleizer, the “Microsoft Geek Blogger”, had this to say:

    OK,
    this one is depressing to me. It’s one thing to pull a list of words
    out of blogs using an algorithm. It’s another thing to become an agent
    of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the
    consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of
    dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right.

    He
    goes on to talk about moral courage, his grandmother who stood up to
    the Nazis in Germany, and his own action contacting higher-ups at
    Microsoft about this issue. Good for him!

    Meanwhile, a message to all bloggers, and all who rely on any outside hosting for your data: Keep backups on your own system!

    I maintain this blog on two different servers–but maybe I should keep a file on my hard drive, as well.

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    Some historical perspective on spying, as recorded in the New York times obit for Frank Wilkinson, McCarthyite scapegoat and First Amendment activist who went to jail to defend his principles

    But
    Mr. Wilkinson was not finished with the federal government. When he
    discovered, in 1986, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been
    compiling files on him, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request
    for their release.

    He was sent 4,500 documents. But he sued for
    more, and the next year the F.B.I. released an additional 30,000
    documents, and then 70,000 two years later. Eventually, there were
    132,000 documents covering 38 years of surveillance, including detailed
    reports of Mr. Wilkinson’s travel arrangements and speaking schedules,
    and vague and mysterious accusations of an assassination attempt
    against Mr. Wilkinson in 1964.

    Meanwhile, yet
    another right-wing extremist, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has entered a
    plea bargain and promised to implicate a number of his buddies in
    Congress. He admits to influence peddling–and former Republican
    Senator Ben Knighthorse Campbell accuses him of trying to rig elections
    on Indian reservations, as well. Abramoff has close ties to former
    House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, current House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
    Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and other ultra-right honchos. The Wall
    Street Journal has said the number of US Representatives implicated
    could be as high as 60, most of them on the Republican side, but so
    far, only Robert Ney of Ohio has been specifically named. (Sorry, WSJ’s
    website structure doesn’t allow me to copy the link)

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    To me, the most scandalous part of this latest Bush administration scandal–that GWB personally authorized and oversaw illegal spying on American citizens–is
    not event he spying itself, though that’s certainly bad enough (and one
    more reason why these dangerous and immoral people ought to be
    impeached). This program is so “out there” that a lot of prominent
    Republicans, including Arlen Spector and John McCain, are deeply
    concerned.

    But what’s really shocking to me is that the New York
    Times apparently knew at least a year ago, and chose to hold back on
    the story. Yes, of course, they’d need to thoroughly check their facts,
    in case it was another attempt to entrap and discredit journalists, a
    la the Dan Rather situation. But once they were sure, I would think the
    story of a US President knowingly and deliberately breaking the law
    would be considered news.

    It’s unclear to me whether the story
    was in the Times’ hands before the 2004 election–but surely, if they
    knew, going public with that data might have changed the course of
    history, given that the results were already not only close but highly
    questionable.

    The Times utterly failed in its responsibility to
    its readers and the world. Is this the same newspaper that was so
    active in reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate?

    Moral
    choices in business lead to business success, says Shel Horowitz in his
    award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People
    First.

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    I suppose we should be grateful: this time, it’s not the government who’s paying pundits being. Still, it is disturbing to find out from both Business Week and the NY Times’ Paul Krugman that Tom DeLay’s good friend Jack Abramoff has been paying off think-tankers at the Cato Institute and elsewhere to spin op-eds that benefit his clients. And once again, there was no disclosure. Cato op-ed writer Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley, took payments of up to $2000 for each of at least 12 and as many as 24 columns promoting Abramoff’s clients.

    At least he has the good sense to say he made a mistake, as does his boss. What’s truly disturbing is the statement by another of Abramoff’s beneficiaries, Peter Ferrara (a noted architect of Social Security policy), who is completely shameless: “I do that all the time. I’ve done that in the past, and I’ll do it in the future.”

    Oh, and Ferrara’s boss at the Institute for Policy Innovation, Tom Giovanetti, hasn’t figured out the problem either. Giovanetti accuses critics of a “naive purity standard…I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.”

    Ugly, ugly, ugly.

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    If I’m a tad schizophrenic in my feelings toward search engine
    giant Google, it’s because the company sometimes seems like a
    many-headed hydra whose various heads have no clue what the others are
    up to.

    On the positive side: Google last October announced a wonderful plan
    to donate one percent of its stock value–just a whisker under a cool
    billion at the time of the announcement–to various change-the-world
    charities
    –and to donate various other streams that push the total value well above that amazing $1 billion mark.

    This
    is wonderful! It makes sense both to advance founders Larry Page and
    Sergey Brin’s vision of the kind of world they want to live in, and to
    advance Google’s corporate goals of continued market dominance. (One of
    the initiatives, for example, is to help MIT develop $100 computers.
    Guess how they’ll link to the world?).

    Also on the positive side
    is Google’s ability to create a powerfully positive user experience.
    How did I find the above article? I received a Google News alert by
    e-mail for ethical business, that linked to a blog post by Joseph Newhard.
    After reading the article, which was more commentary than news, I
    wanted a more authoritative source to quote from, so I typed the
    following string into Google

    google “$1 billion” healthcare

    About three seconds later, I had the San Francisco Chronicle article I referenced earlier.

    Oh
    yes, and I’m typing this on a Blogger blog, owned by Google. If you’re
    reading it on my own site, I use Word Press for the mirror blog. And I
    switched my site-specific search engines to Google a couple of years
    ago, because it didn’t need me to tell it each time I added content.
    Though I’d love to see them add the feature of searching a few sites at
    once under common ownership that my old, clunky search engine offered.

    And
    I think it’s fabulous that Google now has a share value of $100 billion
    and profits of $968 million–because those profits are built on doing a
    lot of things right–first of all, creating a search engine that gives
    the right results if you know what to ask for, and gives them
    instantly. Second, not bothering with a revenue model until “usership”
    had built up. And thirdly, introducing its primary revenue model–a
    modification of the old failed model of web ads–as the brilliantly
    successful low-key, non-intrusive contextual advertising, with millions
    of partner websites who are benefiting from Google’ success. Obviously,
    it works.

    But then there are those other heads: Google
    Book, for instance, *almost* works. The ability to search books’
    complete text is great. The it’s-a-big-pie model that shares revenue
    with publishers by directing purchasers to publisher websites to buy
    the book is great. But what’s not great–and the Authors Guild is suing
    over it–i that Google insists it has the right to take books into the
    program without consent of the copyright holder.

    If there is
    any justice in the courts, Google will lose this case–and it will be a
    big, expensive mess. Just as an example–I’m delighted to have the text
    of my most recent book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People
    First, in the program; I think that can only help sales. But I have
    deliberately refused to put in my older e-book, The Penny-Pinching
    Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook–because
    with that book, appealing to a self-defined frugal audience, it’s much
    more likely that a searcher would find the specific piece of
    information wanted and feel no need to then spend $8.50 to own the
    content. For authors of cookbooks, reference manuals, travel
    guidebooks, etc., involuntary participation in the program could be a
    disaster. Google could, I think, easily develop a form to submit to
    publishers enabling them to quickly import their entire catalog and
    check yes or no for the program. By saying “we have the right unless
    you opt out,” they’re acting like spammers, violating copyrights
    unnecessarily, and depriving publishers of the right to make decisions
    about how their copyright-protected material is used.

    And then there are some serious concerns about privacy. See for instance “Google as Big Brother” on the Google-watch site (scroll down to “Google’s immortal cookie”). If you want to find more, here’s Google’s own results page on a search for google privacy. Stories on Wired and elsewhere raise cause for alarm.

    Of
    course, Google isn’t the only company to be a bit erratic in its
    ethics. I could have easily written a similar article about Microsoft,
    or Ford, for instance.

    But Google does so much that’s right–I
    just have to wonder about their blinders on the copyright fronts, and
    take a watch-and-wait attitude on the privacy front.

    Shel Horowitz’s Business Ethics Pledge campaign
    seeks to create a climate where future Enron/WorldCom scandals will be
    impossible. He’s the author of the Apex Award winner, Principled
    Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books.

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