July 27, 2004

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

7:07 p.m. Tuesday (Blogroll)

Convention coverage TV schedule.

The Washington Post covers me covering bloggers covering the convention. (Got that?) I found this by following a link from Dave Barry complaining that the Washington Post blog critic was calling his blog "threadbare." That's way down. This blog is the lead. (No the Washington Post blog critic doesn't call me anything. He likes the name of the blog, and quotes me quoting bloggers.)

Enough. With 15,000 journalists and 30-some bloggers in Boston, and the rest of the press and the blogosphere covering them, there's too much information now.

Watch TV tonight: Primary sources. Watch, listen, let your feelers wave and make up your own mind.

Fresh: Credit to David Sifry (founder and CEO of blog index technorati.com) who's blogging a daily roundup at CNN:

Cameraphone coverage: Leave it to six smart USC students and their professor to take a technology to a new level. They're walking the convention floor with cameraphones, taking instant snapshots along with commentary and posting the information as it happens. The Wireless Election Connection Moblog looks to be one of the surprise hits of the weblog coverage here at the convention.

Grownups acting stupid #1: Newspaper culture doesn't bat an eyelash when the executive editor says, "Our policy is that everyone must submit to editing."

So should it be a surprise that acidic Ann Coulter makes up a "Spawn of Satan convention in Boston" screed and USA Today spikes it? According to the New York Observer, "The paper’s 36-year-old Op-Ed page editor, John Siniff"... (apparently unaware that Coulter's column had been held, and before she was replaced by Jonah Goldberg as the opposition columnist)... "said, 'I’ve had this job two months and this was my first big idea.' "

Did Siniff realize that the conservative publication National Review Online had fired Coulter in 2001?

The other half of the idea -- Michael Moore at the GOP convention -- gets its chance to walk the plank at the end of August.

Grownups acting stupid #2: Dueling AP photos. GOP heehaws (muttering "Dukakis") widely e-mail photos of Kerry (and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.) in funny suits (as they toured a sterile facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral,) vs. Dem heehaws (muttering "Mission Accomplished costume") widely e-mailing a photo of Bush in a kimono with the Australian prime minister, and just to raise the ante, another in which he's picking his nose. Use your imagination on that one, I'm not publishing it.

Teacher no more: Blogger "Pusillanimous" writes with more information on Atrios (see below):

"Duncan B. Black holds a PhD in economics from Brown University. He has held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics; the Université catholique de Louvain; the University of California, Irvine; and, recently, Bryn Mawr College. He also has been involved with grassroots political activism. Black is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America."

He adds,

Also, if you scroll to the bottom of Eschaton, you now see "Eschaton -- a weblog by duncanblack". I think he got his new job with Media Matters and can safely "out" himself now (who wants their boss to know they spend their work hours blogging to 80,000 people daily?) He had to know that by going to the convention he would be found out anyway.

MMfA describes itself as "a Web-based, not-for-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."

Pusillanimous's blog is about science, theater and nature, and he runs great pictures large. Check out the blue roses.

Link dump:

Dan Gillmor: Why I Wouldn't Bid on Google IPO
Nickelodeon to Urge Kids to Play Outside
SPACE.com Cam: Sun Snapshot: Updated every four hours. A sunspot cluster 20 times the size of earth is clearly visible. (1bn megaton solar storm 'to hit Earth')
The Tease of Memory: Psychologists are dusting off 19th-century explanations of déjà vu. Have we been here before?
How-To Turn your iPod in to a Universal Infrared Remote Control
"My Beef With Big Media" by Ted Turner
Disk drives from World Trade Center could yield clues
Guiness Stout Ice Cream
What if Mozilla were to win in the end?

2:00 p.m.
Blogger Atrios of Eschaton: Anonymous no more. I wrote yesterday about "Atrios," whose highly partisan blog, Eschaton, reports having collected $276,741 for John Kerry as of July 21, and nearly $75,000 for other Democratic causes and candidates -- all from people who don't even know his name.

Yesterday, reporter Frank Cerebino of the Palm Beach Post casually reveals the identity of Atrios without seeming to know he has a scoop (Convention coverage reaches into 'blogosphere')

The stars of the blogging world are here, too. They are the bloggers who are so successful that they sell ads on their Web sites, and make enough money to blog for a living.

"I would like to see bloggers treated like the regular press," said Markos Moulitsas, 32, of Berkeley, Calif., whose dailykos.com gets 100,000 hits a day. "Some of us get more readers than newspapers."

Moulitsas was talking with Duncan Black, 32, an economics teacher from Philadelphia, whose atrios.blogspot.com has made him one of the nation's most well-read political commentators.

Black left the bloggers' gathering early and blogged: "Too many boring speeches, so we went off to an event sponsored by the New Democrat Network discussing the right wing money/media machine."

The photo of Black above comes from Jeralyn (spelling fixed) Merritt's TalkLeft. She identifies her fellow wall-hugger -- these bloggers are in the cheap seats -- as Atrios, as Duncan, but with no surname.

And what's Atrios blogging? He's reading other blogs, calling out AP for writing that "(Barack) Obama would be the first black Democrat to serve in the Senate" (remember Carol Moseley-Braun, D-Ill., 1993-1999), defending his role as activist rather than reporter, and explaining how Michael Moore got in the Presidential box:

But, anyway, since drudge is excited that Michael Moore sat in a "presidential box," I'll report that story as far as I know it. The skyboxes are only accessable through a fairly well-guarded separate escalator. The corridor outside the skybox was more mobbed and more chaotic than just about anywhere else in the convention - unsurprisingly everyone's trying to scam their way into there, and it was a bit full. From what I understand, Moore's gang was wondering around trying to find a skybox they were supposed to go to and someone in the Carter box pulled them in. So, this was not a case of "Jimmy Carter invites Moore to his box." I don't think Carter knew he was there until he arrived about an hour or more after he gave his speech.

But, Moore was more than a little thrilled to meet Carter, and the reverse appeared to be true as well. One of Moore's security people teared up a bit during Carter's speech.

Word trivia: "Eschaton is defined as the moment when the World ends. This word is derived from the Greek word eskhatos which means last...." From there it gets theological.

From Atrios, we learn that blogger Steven Gilliard is complaining about the bloggers' coverage:

Why am I irritated? Because I read the National Journal and found out only bloggers have decent wi-fi access. And it took the BBC to report how veteran political reporter Walter Means was laughed out of the room when he said he was objective. Uh guys, that's something I want to read about. And not in the BBC, either.

About those 14 Syrian musicians: They're back in the Middle East, but not before the mystery of what happened on Northwest Flight 327 deepens (Background in last week's long item: "Annie Jacobsen published an account of her flight from Detroit to Los Angeles in WomensWallStreet.Com: Terror in the Skies, Again?"):

-- Eric Leonard at KFI AM in Los Angeles: Air marshals say passenger overreacted (Link is from the Google cache)

LOS ANGELES | July 22, 2004 – Undercover federal air marshals on board a June 29 Northwest airlines flight from Detroit to LAX identified themselves after a passenger, “overreacted,” to a group of middle-eastern men on board, federal officials and sources have told KFI NEWS.

The passenger, later identified as Annie Jacobsen, was in danger of panicking other passengers and creating a larger problem on the plane, according to a source close to the secretive federal protective service.

...The source said the air marshals on the flight were partially concerned Jacobsen’s actions could have been an effort by terrorists or attackers to create a disturbance on the plane to force the agents to identify themselves.

Air marshals’ only tactical advantage on a flight is their anonymity, the source said, and Jacobsen could have put the entire flight in danger.

-- Dallas Morning News reported (Misbehaving Syrians carried expired visas) that 13 of the 14 musicians had overstayed their visas. This would have been an infraction permitting them to be detained, but authorities cleared the musicians of suspicion.

-- Snopes.com, the net's arbiter of what is real and what is urban legend, has declared the story false:

Origins: The "Terror in the Skies, Again?" article written by Annie Jacobsen and published on WomensWallStreet.com, in which she details her experience with passengers (whom she viewed as terrorists) on a 29 June 2004 flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, caused quite a stir, to say the least. That article contained a good deal of supposition, and a follow-up article, identified as an "Opinion Piece," didn't offer much to validate author's assumptions.

As things turned out, although the events Ms. Jacobsen claims to have witnessed on her flight did occur (more or less), her interpretation of them (that they involved a group of terrrorists making a dry run for building a bomb in-flight) was erroneous. The men she observed on her flight were exactly what authorities told her they were: a group of Syrian musicians who had been hired to play at the Sycuan Casino & Resort near San Diego. Like any other group of passengers, the men in musical ensemble talked to each other, moved around, ate food, and used the restrooms while the flight was in progress.

-- Gambling Magazine: Infamous Syrian Musicians Performed At Sycuan Casino

(Nour) Mehana’s Sycuan show was listed on booking agent James Cullen’s Web site. But Cullen, who produced the event, wouldn’t confirm the gig. "Sorry, we were told by Homeland Security not to talk to the press," Cullen said via e-mail.

I've thought about this a lot, since the pieces are bizarre. If Homeland Security imposed a gag on the musicians and their agent... perhaps this was a security test that everyone but the passengers were in on.

Newbot at MSNBC challenges Google News. Go check it out for yourself.

More later. I have a news budget to make for our designers.