Internet Bites CBS Journalist

CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg comes out of retirement to lay an old-school hurting on webloggers for releasing exit poll numbers, causing John Kerry's seven-hour presidency (sniffle):

While out on the campaign trail covering candidates, my own network's political unit would not even give me exit poll information on election days because it was thought to be too tricky for a common reporter to comprehend. If you are standing in the main election night studio when your network's polling experts start discussing the significance of a particular state poll, you the reporter will hear about three words out of one hundred that you will understand. These polls occur in the realm of statistics and probability. They require PhD-style expertise to understand. ...

When you the humble reporter are writing a story based on the polls you need one of these gurus standing over your shoulder interpreting what they mean or you almost certainly will screw it up. There is a word for this kind of teamwork and expertise. It's called "journalism."

Engberg believes webloggers should be more like, well, him, judicious in the information we share.

He doesn't understand that thousands of webloggers working independently of each other could never function as gatekeepers. Exit polls, privately spread by chatty cathy reporters for years, had as much chance of staying secret in 2004 as the name of Kobe Bryant's accuser.

From their perch at West 57th, Engberg and his CBS colleagues could guard the public from news that couldn't be reported for reasons of propriety, accuracy, or editorial timidity (FDR's wheelchair, JFK's bimbo eruptions, Queen Elizabeth's control of the international drug trade).

Like Engberg, I think that webloggers should behave ethically, whether we're journalists or humans. When information must not be set free, I'd love to man the gate.

But when you combine the teeming multitude of webloggers with the instant ability of any Matt, Markos, or Glenn to reach a global audience, I can't find a gate left to guard.

Journalism · 2004/11/08 · Comment · Link

Canning Comment Spam

Workbench has been under attack lately by a comment spammer linking to dozens of cheesy .info domains. The sites sell drugs like Cialis and Phentermine, offer Texas Holdem poker, and pimp a bunch of other get-rich-click schemes.

I'm writing my own software here in PHP and MySQL, so I'm trying to deal with this abuse as painlessly as possible.

For several hours at a time, a new comment spam is being posted every 1-2 minutes on the 2,300 weblog entries on this site. In a comment management tool, I added a Delete Comment and Ban IP button, which removes the message and blocks the IP address used by the spammer.

Unfortunately, the spammer has a wide range of IPs at his disposal. In the last three days, I've banned 40 different addresses in Spain, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and other countries. The comments are coming from new IP addresses as fast as I can ban them.

Plan B: I am now counting the number of hyperlinks in posted comments with the following PHP code:

if (substr_count(strtolower($comment), "a href") > 3) {
error_log("Attempt to post four or more links from $ip_address");
header("Location: /workbench/comment/$dex");
exit;
}

Comments with more than three links are not accepted.

Wordzilla · Php · 2004/11/08 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Jargon: Kidding on the Square

At the first press conference since he won a broad nationwide overwhelming landslide mandate, President Bush gave reporters a hard time for asking multi-part questions:

Question: Mr. President -- thank you. As you look at your second term, how much is the war in Iraq going to cost? Do you intend to send more troops, or bring troops home? And in the Middle East, more broadly, do you agree with Tony Blair that revitalizing the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political issue facing the world?

President Bush: Now that I've got the will of the people at my back, I'm going to start enforcing the one-question rule. That was three questions. ...

Question: Thank you, Mr. President. How will you go about bringing people together? Will you seek a consensus candidate for the Supreme Court if there's an opening? Will you bring some Democrats into your Cabinet?

Bush: Again, he violated the one-question rule right off the bat. Obviously, you didn't listen to the will of the people.

I thought it was funny for the president to throw around "will of the people" like an elderly Mickey Rooney constantly reminding people he was the "number one star in the world" from 1938 to 1940.

On Air America Radio this morning, Al Franken called Bush's joke an example of kidding on the square, an old expression he has been trying to popularize that means "kidding, but also really meaning it." He wrote this in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them:

If this book does two things, I want it to get "kidding on the square" into the lexicon, and I want it to get Bush out of the White House.

So I guess we'll have to settle for making "kidding on the square" popular.

Jargon · Politics · 2004/11/08 · Comment · Link

When News Breaks, He Fixes It

John Ellis criticizes the exit polls that suggested a big Kerry win on Tuesday:

The weirdest thing about Election Day 2004 was the seven or so hours, from roughly 1:30 p.m. to roughly 9 p.m. when Big Media's story-line was based upon fiction. Kerry never led Bush nationally by 4 points. He was never ever close in any Southern state save Florida (and he lost that by 5). Colorado wasn't close. Virginia wasn't close. Kerry never led Bush by double-digits in Pennsylvania. Everything that was hinted at, winked along, or implied by the deluded talking heads was, in fact, fiction.

Ellis neglects to mention the biggest blunder a TV network has ever made in a presidential election: Wrongly declaring a winner in Florida twice on election night 2000, first in favor of Gore and several hours later for Bush. As the official 537-vote margin demonstrated, the state was too close to call. (To put it in perspective, Iowa has yet to be called this year because of a 14,000-vote difference.)

When TV networks jumped the gun twice by declaring a winner, putting the legitimacy of the election forever in question, they committed one of the most egregious mistakes in media history.

The journalist most responsible for that mistake at Fox News? John Ellis. He has as much credibility on this subject as Jayson Blair on ethics.

Journalism · Politics · 2004/11/05 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Bang Your Senators

Here's a better list of e-mail links for Democratic senators, updated to add Obama and Salazar and remove the departing members:

Politics · 2004/11/04 · Comment · Link

Democrats: Make the Pie Higher!

In my political adulthood, I have voted for one presidential candidate who won: Bill Clinton in 1996. From Dukakis to Kerry, I know what it feels like to wake up on the first Wednesday in November and clean the tire treads off my back.

Everywhere but the Electoral College, Bush and the Republicans ran us over. They gained four seats in the Senate, four in the House, and might have gained one governorship, depending on the results of a Florida-close race in Washington.

This isn't the time for Democrats to follow our normal procedure and form the circular firing squad. We have a solid base that was 150,000 votes -- perhaps much less -- from turning Republican Ohio blue and winning the White House. The with-us-or-agin-us Bush gang pushes secular, tolerant, reality-based blue America further away with each passing day. We have to take advantage of that in Congress and state capitols, electing more Barack Obamas in the home-field half of the map.

The first step is to elect a Senate Minority Leader with a solid seat in a blue state. We can't have another Tom Daschle stabbing his own back with every effort he took to fight Bush, and it appears we're about to make that mistake again.

Before Harry Reid of Nevada wins the post when Senate Democrats convene on Nov. 16, we have to bang on our senators to choose Dick Durbin, a strong Democrat and the next-most-likely contender.

Durbin, in line to succeed Reid as Minority Whip, runs next in 2008 in Illinois. His state has such an inept GOP they imported the oddball Alan Keyes, who became the biggest loser in state history. Durbin can represent his party with as little fear of electoral payback as Bill Frist in Tennessee.

We only have 12 days. Here's some contact information for Democratic senators to bang on.

Politics · 2004/11/04 · 49 COMMENTS · Link

Handling 18.5 Janets of Web Traffic

The Drudge Retort was hammered yesterday, serving 10 gigabytes of traffic as thousands of people looked for exit polls and early election returns.

The unit of measurement for traffic here is Janet Jackson's right breast, the exposure of which maxed out the shared SDSL connection on my old server. For seventeen straight hours, it served 144 kilobytes per second of traffic (1 Janet) to people on a fruitless search for celebrity mammary.

Since that time, I have moved to dedicated server hosting with ServerMatrix. Yesterday between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, traffic hit a high of 2.61 megabytes per second.

That's 18.5 Janets, so by that metric the move to ServerMatrix has been successful, especially at the $59 monthly rate I'm paying (plus a $299 setup fee). I could serve 10 gigabytes a day in traffic for the rest of the month without running excess bandwidth charges, which begin at 1,200 gigabytes.

However, the software running my sites failed to handle the traffic. Users compared the performance of my hand-coded MySQL/PHP software to a 14.4K AOL dialup line circa 1997, and I spent the afternoon turning off template rendering in Movable Type 3.11 to keep the Drudge Retort online. The only software that could handle all those Janets without breaking down or dropping to glacial speed was Apache 2.0.46.

Clearly, I'm not being smart about caching dynamic database content so that most Web requests can be served statically by Apache. I'm going to work towards this goal in my LAMP software, Movable Type, and Manila.

I don't want to be caught unprepared on Nov. 4, 2008, when Howard Stern runs against Pat Robertson.

Wordzilla · Php · Movable Type · Manila · 2004/11/03 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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