Tagged: Washington Post
Longing for drunks with cigars at Wapo
The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten longs for the way newspapers used to operate.
On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.
These days, by contrast:
Every few days at The Washington Post, staffers get a notice like this: “Please welcome Dylan Feldman-Suarez, who will be joining the fact-integration team as a multiplatform idea triage specialist, reporting to the deputy director of word-flow management and video branding strategy. Dylan comes to us from the social media utilization division of Sikorsky Helicopters.”
Hat tip: Dave Whynacht via BT
WaPo unmasks a hidden, top-secret America
The blogosphere is agog at a Washington Post series that uncovers the astonishing, bloated, secret, and likely ineffective national security apparatus that has grown up in the United States following 9/11. Two crack WaPo reporters, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, spent two years tracking down the story, an increasingly rare example of what the dead-tree media can do when it taps its traditional strengths. Here’s the opening sentence:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
Some highlights:
– Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on Top Secret programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security, and intelligence at over 10,000 locations across the country. Over 850,000 Americans have Top Secret clearances.
– Redundancy and overlap are major problems and a symptom of the ongoing lack of coordination between agencies.
– In the Washington area alone, 33 building complexes for Top Secret work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.
Andrew Sullivan rounds up blogger reaction. Money quote to Glenn Greenwald:
We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.
Flowingdata highlights the infographic:
Click the image (or here) to activate the graphic and explore that the Post calls, “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” [Note: the graphic was sluggish this morning, presumably owing to heavy traffic.]
After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine…
Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications….
The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.
9/11 happened not because intelligence agencies hadn’t detected elements the plot, but because inter-agency secrecy meant no one could put the pieces together. A core finding of the WaPo investigation is that this inability to connect the dots is worse than ever. They detail how various agencies collected ample evidence about alleged Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hassan and attempted Christmas Day bomber Umar Abdulmutallab, but didn’t recognize its significance.
PBS even has a “making of” video:
A short history of the search engine
In 1230, French Cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher (and 500 of his colleagues) completed the first search engine. The Washington Post’s Brian Palmer has a neat piece on the evolution of search tools since. Money quote:
Brin and Page’s billion-dollar realization was that users would rather see a reputable page that matched their query reasonably well than an obscure page that matched perfectly.
These innovations remain the backbone of today’s search engines, from Google and Yahoo to Bing and others. But the Web is changing at a staggering pace. The 1994 index for Lycos, one of the Web’s first search engines, had only 54,000 pages. To put the proliferation of electronic data in perspective, humankind had generated 5 trillion megabytes of data by the year 2003. We now produce that volume every two days.
Hat tip: Research Buzz
Anonymity in news stories
A mea culpa in yesterday’s Washington Post, criticizing the use of anonymous sources in a story widely regarded as a puff piece on Obama lieutenant Rahm Emanuel, sparked these comments from Salon.com’s excellent Glenn Greenwald:
In very limited circumstances, anonymity is valuable and justified (e.g., when someone is risking something substantial to expose concealed wrongdoing of serious public interest). But promiscuous, unjustified anonymity — which pervades the establishment press — is the linchpin of most bad, credibility-destroying reporting. It enables government officials and others to lie to the public with impunity or manipulate them with propaganda, using eager reporters as both their megaphone and shield. It is the weapon of choice for reporters eager to serve as loyal message-carriers and royal court gossip columnists. It preserves and bolsters the culture of secrecy that dominates Washington — exactly the opposite of what a real journalist, by definition, would seek to accomplish (though most modern journalists seem to prefer anonymity, as it makes them appear and feel special and part of the secret halls of power, and allows them to curry favor with powerful officials as their favored loyal message-carrier). In sum, petty or otherwise unjustified uses of anonymity are the hallmark of the power-worshiping, dishonest, unreliable reporter (which is why its most indiscriminate practitioner is Politico). As Izzy Stone put it about the Vietnam War: ”The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen. . . .”
The folly of security theatre
I’m late getting to this, but Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria captured the fundamental fallacy of Washington’s reaction to the Christmas Day [un-]Bomber.
The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn’t work. Alas, this one worked very well.
Hat tip: Cameron Bode, Excerpticize.
What 10 years did to the US Economy
The Washington Post looks at what happened to the US economy over the last decade:
For the first time since the 1930s, no growth in jobs, a decline in household net worth, and falling middle-class earnings. Moneyquote:
There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.
Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 — and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.
And the net worth of American households — the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts — has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s.
Calling bullshit
This week, the Washington Post, a once great newspaper that has descended deep into neocon territory, fired Dan Froomkin, a blogger whose column on the White House appeared on the Post’s website.
Post editors and columnists frequently belittled Froomkin as “liberal” or “opinionated,” but his real sin was doing what was once thought to be a journalist’s main job: challenging the factual assertions underpinning White House policies and pronouncements. He was a rare exception to the craven press corps cheerleading in the run-up to the Iraq war, and he had begun holding Obama’s feet to the fire when the Post dropped him.
Froomkin himself defined his role as, “calling bullshit.”
Salon.com‘s Glenn Greenwald offers this analysis of the ensuing furore. Replete with useful links, it is a must read for anyone interested in the state of journalism.
