Politico has a great post on press bias. Their basic conclusion: political journalists face a lot of countervailing forces, and ideological bias has little if any influence in day-to-day reporting.

I think this is spot on. In 2004, for instance, the press were happy to aid and abet the right’s shameless character assassination of Kerry. They also consistently told a story of Bush winning and Kerry losing.

This is not to say that a reporter’s bias plays no role, Read more »

This week is the 10th Anniversary of the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Title I of the DMCA is the most controversial and important part of the act.

In a great post over at Freedom to Tinker, David Robinson has a great post on how the DMCA was born. He relies heavily on Jessica Litman’s fantastic book, Digital Copyright, but the post itself is quite worth reading.

Importantly, he talks about the process of policy laundering–negotiating international treaties behind closed doors as a vehicle for passing laws that would be politically unpopular if simply proposed as legislation at the national level.

Unfortunately, this seems to be an important motivating force behind the super-secret, back-room-negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA.

Over at the Public Knowledge blog, Michael Weinberg has a great post about the overzealousness of a webhost’s copyright enforcement: Music Label Shut Down for [not] Infringing Itself.

What is the role of citizen journalism in crisis situations? Some quick thoughts and anecdotal evidence suggests that the role citizens can play in crisis situations is becoming significant. Consider the example of citizens taking snapshots with their cameraphones during the London subway attack. Or think about how the Sichuan earthquake first ‘broke’ on Twitter, a micro-blogging tool. If you think about how journalists cannot be everywhere, but ‘citizen journalists’ certainly are *potentially* everywhere - it will be interesting to see how this further develops.

I had the great pleasure to have lunch with Patrick Meier and Kate Brodock the other day. In tackling the question what role citizen journalism plays in crisis situations, they worked on analyzing and mapping the crisis responses of citizen journalists, mainstream news organizations and Ushahidi reports over time and space during the Kenya post-election violence. They used that information to create a Google Earth map that shows visually how citizen journalists are becoming an important factor in crisis reporting. Check out their fascinating study.

YouTube’s impact on electoral politics was probably most felt by Senator George Allen (R-VA).  In an unguarded campaign moment, he pointed to an Indian-American supporter of his opponent, Jim Webb, at a campaign rally and called him “Macaca.”  Allen maybe didn’t know about YouTube.  The resulting firestorm contributed to his plummenting poll numbers and is widely credited as a decisive moment in Webb’s eventual narrow victory.

Political scientists with an interest in online politics have been widely discussing the impact that Youtube will have on the 2008 election.  There will be a conference on it in April, which will culminate in a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.  I expected to stay out of the fray with this one, myself, because my stance generally is that YouTube is just one in a whole suite of new tools that take advantage of the conditions of online information abundance and ridiculously low transaction costs to produce a new political environment. I would classify studies of “YouTube and the 2008 election” of running the same risk as studies of “canvassing and the 2008 election” or “phone banking and the 2008 election.”  Yes, it’s important.  But isolating it as a variable can be a tad bit weird.

That said, 2008’s “Macaca moment” pretty clearly just happened on Friday, and color me interested in the results.  Michelle Bachmann (R-MN06) was playing the role of loyal McCain surrogate on Hardball with Chris Matthews when the following exchange occurred:

MATTHEWS: So you think Barack Obama may have anti-American views?

BACHMANN: Absolutely. I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views.

[...]

MATTHEWS: How many Congresspeople, members of Congress, are in that anti-American crowd you describe? How many Congresspeople that you serve with?

BACHMANN: Right now —

MATTHEWS: How many are anti-American in the Congress right now that you serve with?

BACHMANN: You’d have to ask them, Chris. I’m focusing on Barack Obama and the people that he’s been associated with and I’m very worried about their anti-American nature.

MATTHEWS: But do you suspect there are a lot of people you serve with — well, he’s the United States senator from Illinois, he’s one of the people you suspect as being anti-American. How many people in Congress of the United States do you believe are ant-American? Is he alone or are there others? How many do you suspect of your colleagues of being anti-American.

BACHMANN: What I would say what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would be — would love to see an expose like that.

Wow.  “The news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look… into whether people in Congress are pro-America or anti-America.”  Wow.  On a scale of zero to stupid, Bachmann pretty much just broke the meter.  Of course, so far this is a cable tv effect — the 24-hour news networks need to be fed, they need a ton of surrogates, and that means that someone, somewhere, is going to eventually say something stupid.  Once they do, that becomes the topic of discussion for the news cycle.  It’ll be replaced and forgotten in a few days.  Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment is already such old news that I can barely remember it.  By April, that reference will basically have disappeared from the radar.

Ah, but the magic of YouTube.  Or, more specifically, the magic of embedded YouTube clips in the hands of elite progressive bloggers.  Like I said, YouTube is just one of many tools.  It contributes to a pervasive media environment in which information is nearly frictionless, and filtering is the dominant challenge.  The elite progressive blogosphere showed immense interest in this topic, seizing on it as the latest example of claw-your-eyes-out desperation on the part of the Right.  Did she just call for a renewed House Unamerican Activities Commision?  Joe McCarthy called, he wants his schtick back.

I argue in a totally-unpolished chapter of my dissertation that in the new online media environment, the central challenge to effective collective action is no longer the Free Ridership.  Wikipedia is a great example of a pure public good that, contrary to four decades of political economic theory-building, is anything but underprovided.  With transaction costs as low as they are, the overwhelming challenge to collective action lies in filtering.  The power law distributions that have been noted elsewhere as defining web traffic help to solve this mass coordination problem, leading to overwhelming hubs such as DailyKos and HuffingtonPost.

Bachmann has just become the latest example of what happens when a politician essentially volunteers as the coordination point for outreach and action from online activists.  Over the course of the weekend, Bachmann’s opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, received over $700,000 in online donations.  Visitors to DailyKos and OpenLeft were pointed in the direction of his ActBlue page, helping to funnel $300,000+ through that portal alone.  To put those numbers in perspective, Tinklenberg apparently raised roughly $1,000,000 for the entire 3rd quarter of 2008.  That’s simply a massive, game-changing tide of money.  The Cook Political Report reponded to all this action on Monday, moving the MN-06 race from “Leans Republican” to “Toss Up” status.  We’ll have to see in two weeks whether it bears electoral fruit.

Kos provides some great insight into the scuffle here.  In short, he points out that many elected officials have not adapted to the new information environment in which their attempts at spin can be placed directly next to their original words.  Bachmann has tried to claim that the liberal media is twisting her words.  That’s a lot harder to do when her words themselves are placed prominently on display, in context, at a moments’ notice.  The online information environment is one where data doesn’t dissipate into the ether.  Instead, it lies there in the soup, waiting for an elite actor with a giant audience to dip in and rescue it from obscurity.  And in this environment, losing the news cycle can have much greater consequences than it used to.  $700K in a weekend.  Game-changing money, and a potential change in electoral outcome, all because of a stupid TV interview.  That, my friends, is the effect of YouTube (looped in with a suite of other tools, and placed in the hands of an emerging set of new interest group elites) on 21st century electoral politics.

[And yeah, if Tinklenberg pulls this thing off, you can pretty much count on seeing this blog post, in updated form and with plenty of data behind it, as a conference paper submission from me in April.  For any other internet & politics researchers out there, this is me calling dibs!]

In a blog post over at The Publius Project, Judith Donath asks “Is Reputation Obsolete.”  It’s a provocative piece and well worth a read.  Honestly, I’ve spent the past week trying to dip into the literature on reputation systems and to call it the shallow end of the pool would be an insult to pools.  It’s shocking how little attention has been done on the topic, and Donath raises a lot of interesting points about the ill-fit between present day reputation systems and the total availability of online information.

It seems to me that her post could be best rephrased as “Is Reputation Tracking Obsolete?”  In that case, the answer would be a clear and definitive yes.

Reputation in its purest form is deep, contextualized, complex, and local.  I have a very different reputation with my colleagues in the Sierra Club than I do with other academics, and still another one with my drinking buddies.  All of those reputations are linked to different dimensions of my identity, and each is accurate in its own way.  They accrue over time, and they are exceedingly difficult to scale up from local context to general form.

Online, reputational data is put at a premium, because the purer the anonymity, the worse people are bound to act.  I haven’t seen any studies on this yet (I’ll get around to doing one someday, I suppose), but it’s pretty clear that when you require people to login before posting comments to a blog, they self-moderate a bit more, and when you add a Mojo system like they have at SlashDot and DailyKos, and “superuser” status contingent on high Mojo ratings, people behave better still.  That’s standard “Shadow of the Future” stuff, a basic finding from game theory, and replicated in a host of experimental settings.  So reputation systems incentivize good behavior while distributing the costs of punishing bad behavior.  As a basic example, consider how costly eBay would be if they had to provide top-down monitoring of all transactions.  Actually, you don’t need to bother considering it: without reputation tracking, there would be no eBay.  Period.

So is reputation obsolete?  Yes and no.  The thing we need to recognize is that when you divorce reputation assessments from their local, complex, and contextualized settings, you have to rely on rough proxies to fill in the gap.  Those proxies are not, themselves, reputation.  When an eBay buyer ranks the seller, that tells us relatively little about the seller.  When a DailyKos user contributes to a diarist’s “tip jar,” that functions as a “thumbs up.”  But real reputation isn’t the aggregate of online clapping and booing.  And as more diverse information becomes available online, the simplicity of aggregating clapping and booing seems like a coarse and outdated tool for measuring reputation.

I would suggest that the quality of reputation tracking is always going to hinge on three elements:

(1)relevance of the proxy data.  How good of an approximation does the online rating mechanism provide?

(2)Traffic levels.  I’m always entertained by low-traffic blogs that include recommended diary structures and such.  Online reputation tracking assumes huge inputs, but given the power law distributions of web traffic, we know that there are only going to be a select few webspaces that obtain that level of traffic.

(3)Gaming of the system or lack thereof.  This last one is long-term problematic.  Any high-traffic webspace is going to represent valuable online real estate.  The perverse incentives are there for actors to try to figure out the rules of the game and then innovate ways to get around them.  We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in reputations systems for years, and most of the literature seems to be focused solely on eBay.  So reputation tracking systems are probably obsolete at this point, simply because every system is going to have weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and there haven’t been many new developments (at least that I’m aware of — which is a decent indicator that if something great is out there, it sure hasn’t diffused very widely yet).

What we really need is reputation systems that take advantage of Metcalfe’s Law.  As processing speed and memory continue to double — as Information Abundance becomes still more abundant — we need to develop reputation tracking systems that use better proxies.  Donath asks whether “in a world where all action is recorded, is there still need for reputational information?”  I would respond, “Yes, all the moreso!”  If we broadly understand reputation data as a form of filtering and content management, we have little choice but to rely on reputation assessments, but we also need them to evolve along with the rest of the web.  In a world where all action is recorded, reputational information is all the more necessary so we can sort through the mess.  But likewise, as more types of data become available, we need to diversify the types of proxies we use for assessing reputation.  This will be particularly true as the mobile web comes into wider use, rendering whole new classes of data available.

The real challenge lies in figuring out how to sort and use that data, particularly keeping in mind the competing needs for reputational assessment/filtering and privacy.  The weaker the privacy norms, the stronger the reputation tracking can be.  I don’t think I particularly want my academic or Sierra Club colleagues to know my reputation among my drinking buddies, though (or vice versa, for that matter!).  The  tradeoff has steeply decreasing returns at some point, and there’s an important role for public scholars like Donath in helping to identify what that point might be.

This weekend, the Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed Barack Obama for President. In what I think is an unprecedented move, however, it also published a dissent making the case for John McCain.

The Times’ Caucus speculates that this was due to interference from management. Here’s a key excerpt:

Brian Tierney, chief executive of the company that owns The Inquirer, Philadelphia Media Holdings, and who sits on the newspaper’s editorial board, would not say. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Tierney would only say, “We don’t talk about what goes on on the editorial page.”

Harold Jackson, the editor of the editorial page, also would not discuss the deliberations or vote total, but did say that the board “had a vigorous discussion.”

But another member of the Editorial Board, who asked not to be identified because of possible repercussions, said that it was Mr. Tierney who pressed the case for Mr. McCain. After arriving at the meeting, the board member said, “we went around the room” and Mr. Obama was the “overwhelming winner.”

At that point, the person said, “Tierney weighed in and made the case for McCain.”

Tierney, a longtime Republican booster, reassured the reading public that he and the other owners would not interfere in content decisions when the paper was sold in 2006.

And I have a bridge to nowhere in which you may be interested…

Here’s another awesome XKCD comic, this one on music piracy, DRM, and the DMCA.

I cannot recommend against Globat.com strongly enough. After the break, you’ll find a complete and total telling-off of a company with some of the worst customer service practices imaginable.

Even if you don’t read it, avoid them at all costs. Will update w/ their reply. Read more »

Great blog post (and genuinely good comments) over at Xark! on the slow death of newspapers.

Source: DailyKos midday open thread (which also links to a great Atlantic story about the joke that is airline security).