Con­grat­u­la­tions to Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which tonight tied Ben-Hur and Titanic for most Acad­emy Awards won. A fairly enter­tain­ing tele­cast. Espe­cially liked the giant ele­phant from Lord of the Rings stomp­ing on Michael Moore in the open­ing video mon­tage. Sev­eral movie piracy jokes, but where was Jack Valenti?

Since every­one else in the blo­gos­phere will be com­ment­ing on the Oscars cer­e­mony, I’ll sim­ply chime in to say that New Zealand is a beau­ti­ful coun­try, well worth vis­it­ing. Our Kiwi friends Geoff and Coral Ben­nett, whom we vis­ited in 1998, are still two of our clos­est friends. (Coral sends a gift to Bobby each Christ­mas.) How accom­mo­dat­ing are the Kiwis? Coral loaned us her daughter’s car for four days so that Mary and I could drive around the north island — this, after only the sec­ond time we’d met.

Here’s the photo gallery of New Zealand locales that we hit, pre-Rings. Hope you like sheep.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

The New York Times’ pub­lic edi­tor, Daniel Okrent, has his best col­umn so far today, an exam­i­na­tion of the Times Magazine’s arti­cle on “The Girls Next Door,” about teen sex­ual slav­ery in Amer­i­can sub­urbs. I’ll let Okrent’s col­umn speak for itself (he basi­cally absolves the mag­a­zine of any wrong­do­ing, though he would have han­dled it dif­fer­ently). But the more inter­est­ing stuff is the dif­fer­ent approach to jour­nal­ism taken by the news side and the mag­a­zine staff.

News­pa­per reporters engage in a daily dialec­tic, and try to fol­low a con­tro­ver­sial dec­la­ra­tion with a bal­anc­ing state­ment from some­one on the other side. Mag­a­zine writ­ers, believ­ing in the pri­macy of nar­ra­tive, will with­hold con­trary views until the end of the piece — or, often, with­hold them alto­gether. Mag­a­zine writ­ing, says Ger­ald Mar­zo­rati, edi­tor of the Sun­day mag­a­zine, “encour­ages point of view and autho­r­ial opin­ion.” News­pa­per writ­ing does not. (Except, of course, when it does.)

Count me as on the magazine’s side in this one, and I sus­pect most blog­gers tend to back an author­i­ta­tive form of jour­nal­ism with a strong point of view.

Okrent also reveals that the Times has pub­licly posted its new pol­icy on anony­mous sources here. This is the most thought­ful dis­cus­sion of when and how to use con­fi­den­tial sources in a news pub­li­ca­tion that I’ve seen anywhere.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

An Edi­to­r­ial Observer essay in the NY Times today: The results are in and the win­ner is … who knows?

Defeated can­di­dates who think they were robbed are noth­ing new in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. But mod­ern tech­nol­ogy is cre­at­ing a whole new gen­er­a­tion of con­spir­acy the­o­ries — easy to imag­ine and, unless we’re care­ful, impos­si­ble to dis­prove. The nation is rush­ing to adopt elec­tronic vot­ing, but there is a dis­turb­ing amount of evi­dence that, at least in its cur­rent form, it is overly vul­ner­a­ble to elec­toral mischief.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

In today’s NY Times Book Review: a review of 40 Watts From Nowhere: A Jour­ney Into Pirate Radio.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

I got my check yes­ter­day from the Cal­i­for­nia Attor­ney General’s Office — a pay­ment for my claim in the class action law­suit brought by the attor­neys gen­eral of 43 states on behalf of those who’ve bought music CDs. The check in the Com­pact Disc Min­i­mum Adver­tised Price Antitrust Lit­i­ga­tion set­tle­ment came to a tidy $13.89.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

New York Times polit­i­cal cor­re­spon­dent Katharine Q. Seelye has been live blog­ging today’s debate spon­sored by CBS News and The New York Times. (Katharine was on the cam­paign bus with Bob Dole in 1996, Bill Clin­ton in 1992 and Al Gore in 2000.)

The blog and the live Web cast are being pro­moted off the Times home page. Nice. Wel­come to the live blog­ging club.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

From today’s Boston Globe:

AMONG TONIGHT’S OSCAR nom­i­nees for best pic­ture, “Mas­ter and Com­man­der” doesn’t have one. “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” squeaks by with “The Jour­ney Ends.” “Lost in Translation“‘s offer­ing (“Every­one wants to be found”) is cute, but lack­ing com­pared to last year’s crop: the pathos of “Music was his pas­sion. Sur­vival was his mas­ter­piece” (“The Pianist”), the cocked fist of “Amer­ica was born in the streets” (“Gangs of New York”), the sass of “If you can’t be famous … be infa­mous” (“Chicago”). …

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

From today’s Ideas sec­tion in the Boston Globe: The road to riches? Richard Florida has built a thriv­ing career on the the­ory that the ”cre­ative class” dri­ves urban eco­nomic growth. But crit­ics increas­ingly say his ideas just don’t add up.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Barry L. Ritholtz of the Maxim Group writes on the Inter­est­ing Peo­ple mail­ing list today:

The offi­cial talk­ing points out of the White House is that the Con­sti­tu­tional Amend­ment ban­ning gay mar­riage only came about after activist judges forced the Pres­i­dent to inter­vene (see, for exam­ple, this Op/Ed in today’s NY Times: href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/opinion/29SCHI.html”>How the Judges Forced the President’s Hand).

It turns out that’s sim­ply a giant lie, accord­ing to a GOP aide quoted in the Rocky Moun­tain News :

“Pres­i­dent Bush pledged to Rep. Mar­i­lyn Mus­grave that he would sup­port her pro­posed con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment pro­hibit­ing gay mar­riage three months before he made Tuesday’s pub­lic pro­nounce­ment, accord­ing to Musgrave’s top aide.

The White House has said Bush made the deci­sion only after offi­cials in San Fran­cisco and New Mex­ico presided over same-sex marriages.

Guy Short, Musgrave’s chief of staff, said Mus­grave dis­cussed her Fed­eral Mar­riage Amend­ment with the pres­i­dent dur­ing a Nov. 24 trip aboard Air Force One to Fort Car­son, where Bush vis­ited troops and met with sur­vivors of mil­i­tary per­son­nel killed in Iraq.”

Those con­fi­den­tial assur­ances by the pres­i­dent encour­aged Mus­grave and her staff to pro­ceed. “We wanted to respect his tim­ing, but we knew it was com­ing,” Short said.

For­get the pol­i­tics of this: My con­cern (I’m an inde­pen­dent) is the process of gov­er­nance: There is sim­ply a fright­en­ing over reliance on decep­tion and false­hoods from this admin­is­tra­tion. Any sci­en­tist under­stands the obvi­ous dan­gers of this in research. There is a sim­i­lar prob­lem with this form of gov­er­nance. We saw it with stem cell research, with Iraq (and you may recall I was pro Inva­sion but for rea­sons other than WMD), with the Med­ic­aid pro­gram, with tax cuts (many of which I sup­ported), and on the deficit projections.

And now, the same pat­tern arises with the pro­posed Con­sti­tu­tional Amend­ment pro­hibit­ing gay marriages.

This should be a con­cern for every US cit­i­zen. This impacts our cred­i­bil­ity in the world — and that’s impor­tant for a debtor nation whose finan­cial oblig­a­tions are 46% owned by for­eign investors and gov­ern­ments. … That’s why, set­ting aside the pol­i­tics of Gay Mar­riage or stem cell research or what­ever — the process of gov­ern­ment needs to be cred­i­ble and trans­par­ent. At present, it is neither.

In pol­i­tics, as in most endeav­ors, I expect to dis­agree with peo­ple. I
fre­quently engage in enthu­si­as­tic debate. Occa­sion­ally, I will even have some­one change my mind. But I never expect totally disin­gen­u­ous argu­ment with fab­ri­cated facts, time­lines, details and data. That is sim­ply and totally unac­cept­able — even in politics.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Clay Shirky has a new essay about Voice Over IP (Inter­net tele­phony): Plan A vs. Plan B. “Where Plan A is a fight between incum­bent and upstart phone com­pa­nies, Plan B says that we no more need a phone com­pany than we need a text company.”

Adds Clay: “The phone com­pa­nies are over­es­ti­mat­ing the threat of Von­age (which also wants to charge users to talk to one another) and under­es­ti­mat­ing the threat of Skype (which doesn’t.)”

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post