CBS News Whores for Cheap Hits from Google
Yesterday, the CBS News web site ran a five-paragraph story on the fact that Susan Dey was absent from a Partridge Family reunion:
The Partridge Family cast was one member short when they reunited on television Tuesday morning.
The cast of the popular '70s sitcom appeared on the Today Show as part of their "Great TV Families Reunited" series, but actress Susan Dey, who played eldest daughter Laurie Partridge, was not in attendance.
Danny Bonaduce, who in the years after his child stardom faced drug addiction and legal troubles, was present for the reunion.
The show, which centered around a widow and her five children who embark on a music career, aired from 1970-1974.
A similar absence occurred Monday morning, when the cast of Eight is Enough reunited on the morning program minus actor Adam Rich. The actor endured many personal issues after his time on the show, including arrests and substance abuse.
This story, which contains no quotes and looks to have been written in about five minutes, was published solely for one reason: Dey was a volcanic search term on Google Trends yesterday. People wanted to know why Dey was absent, so they looked on Google.
CBS is promoting a rival network with the story and even links to video on NBC's web site.
There are a lot of online news sites and blogs that use Google Trends as their assignment desk, churning out poorly researched stories quickly to capitalize on a hot news search term. Weak-ass Dey stories were filed by such august journalistic enterprises as Puggal, Associated Content and Thaindian News.
So the network of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow is in good company.
Real-Time Twitpic Images Coming from Chile
When news breaks such as today's massive earthquake in Chile, one of the first places where images show up from the scene is on Twitpic, a popular image-posting service for Twitter users. You can find links to these images on Twitter search by including "twitpic" as one of your search terms, but that's not as useful as seeing thumbnails of the actual images. You have to click each link to see what it contains.
To make it easier to see the images being posted about Chile, I wrote a Java application this morning that uses the Twitter and Twitpic APIs to download thumbnails and display them in reverse chronological order. Each thumbnail can be clicked to open the photo on Twitpic's site.
The application produces a web page and RSS feed, updated every two minutes.
The application is a mashup that does the following:
- Downloads a search feed of "twitpic chile" from Twitter in Atom format.
- Extracts Twitpic URLs from tweets in that feed.
- Calls the Twitpic API to get the thumbnail of each photo as a JPEG image.
- Saves the thumbnail to a directory on my server.
- Produces a web page and feed of the saved thumbnails, sorted using the creation time of its file.
I'll be releasing it under the GPL when it's done. This application includes support for PubSubHubbub, so subscribers can see new photos show up in real time with clients such as Google Reader.
SeaWorld Killer Whale Kills Second Trainer
Dawn Brancheau, a 40-year-old trainer at SeaWorld in Orlando, was killed today by a killer whale at the beginning of a performance. Eyewitness accounts differ, but she was reportedly dragged into the water, shaken violently and kept underwater until she drowned. The whale, Tilikum, is the largest in captivity and has been involved in two fatal incidents prior to this one. In 1999, a park visitor hid at SeaWorld until closing and jumped into the pool with the whale. The man was found dead in the pool the next morning and had suffered hypothermia and scrapes from being dragged along the pool's bottom. Eight years earlier, Tilikum was one of three whales who drowned Keltie Byrne, a 21-year-old trainer, at Sealand of the Pacific, after she slipped and fell into the pool.
The PBS series Frontline did an story on the issue of killer whale trainer safety in 1995, A Whale of a Business. The web site for the story includes a chapter from the 1992 book The Performing Orca: Why the Show Must Stop by Erich Hoyt.
The chapter makes interesting reading in light of today's events, since it focuses strongly on Byrne's death. Hoyt accuses SeaWorld of covering up training injuries and disregarding evidence that killer whales don't like to be ridden:
... it was all too late for Keltie Byrne. Her parents have decided so far not to sue Sealand, preferring to put the tragedy behind them. The jury at the public inquest was unable to agree on the real cause of Byrne's death, beyond drowning. Why did orcas, which had never killed a trainer in marine parks or in the wild despite thousands of encounters, suddenly kill a human? Was it "an accident waiting to happen," if not at Sealand, then at Sea World or almost any park, especially one where basic safety procedures are overlooked? ...
In September 1991, Sealand owner Bob Wright put the three orcas up for sale. But what marine park wants to take three orcas that killed their trainer? Even before Sealand announced the whales were for sale, Sea World was preparing an application to NMFS to import them.
Hoyt has a web site and remains active on the issue of using killer whales in performances. I asked him a few questions and here's what he told me in email:
I think that this is an awful tragedy for the trainer and her family. But that it is avoidable: orcas do not belong in captivity. What I worry about is that things will be focussed on Tilikum, that he is an older male, and his history of having been involved in the death of two other people. Sea World or others may try to say that it is this one older male whale's fault. There are quite a number of other accidents that could well have been fatal that were caused by other captive orcas, females and males, although they do tend to be animals that have been in the parks for awhile. As I reported in The Performing Orca and also in some detail in Orca: The Whale Called Killer, trainers have noted that orcas start to get bored and go a bit crazy after a few years in captivity. You must imagine a highly intelligent social mammal and a big predator normally travelling 100 kms or more a day, then taken from its family, stripped of its ability to socialize normally, to hunt and to travel. What it has left is its relationship to the trainer, but how long can that really keep them interested? It is not surprising that an animal starved of company and stimulation will pull a trainer into the water, or try to keep them in the pool...even to the point of drowning them. Very sad, but again, we know how to correct this situation. Orcas are too big, too social, too wild to be kept in captivity.
The picture of Dawn Brancheau ran Dec. 30, 2005, in the Orlando Sentinel.
Review: Russell Baker's 'Growing Up'
On a recent trip to the local Barnes & Noble, I was surprised to see Russell Baker's Growing Up in the autobiography section. The book came out 26 years ago and Baker has faded from the public spotlight since his retirement in 1998 from the New York Times, where he was a popular columnist. I picked the book up, figuring it must be a pretty good memoir to have outlasted the author's fame, and noticed a week later that the bookstore had already reordered a copy.
Baker's book is a great memoir. He tells the story of his childhood growing up in the Depression, which takes him from a rural Virginia shack without electricity or running water to stark poverty in Belleville, New Jersey; and Baltimore, where his widowed mother must rely on the charity of family members to feed the family. Baker, born in 1925, frames the story with his 84-year-old mother's lapse into dementia at a nursing home, which has untethered her from the present and drops her into random points in her life. One day he comes to see her and is met with the question "where's Russell?" In her mind, she'd become a young mother again with a three-year-old boy and a younger sister. Russell's father, who she met when his car broke down leaving the local moonshine distillery, had not yet died in his early thirties from diabetes because insulin wasn't available.
Although the specifics of Baker's childhood are often grim, he writes with a sense of humor about himself that reminded me of Jean Shepherd's narration in the movie A Christmas Story. This is particularly true when he describes how his lack of aptitude for anything else led him to journalism. "The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer," he writes, "and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."
Baker's modesty about his own abilities is misplaced. He writes well, telling the human cost of the Depression through the lives of his relatives. He focuses in particular on his mother and her diminishment of opportunities. A college-educated schoolteacher, she remains jobless for years and can't fulfill her dream of putting the family in their own home until he's almost in college. The Bakers are so poor that at one point she gives up her third child, still an infant, to be raised by childless relatives.
Baker's mother ends up living through her children, leaning hard on Russell to make something of himself and putting him to work on the streets selling the Saturday Evening Post when he's just eight years old. She's so miserly about affection and praise that by the end of the book, I needed a hug. Unfortunately, the story ends with Russell as a newlywed who has not yet made anything of himself as a journalist, so there's never the cathartic third-act moment where the mother makes clear that her sacrifices on behalf of her only son were worth it. That bummed me out.
Although he's retired from the Times and a second gig hosting PBS' Masterpiece Theatre, Baker still writes occasionally for New York Review of Books.
New Retort Feature Dies Horrible Death
After banning the same person more than a dozen times from the Drudge Retort, I decided to experiment with a new site feature this afternoon that turned into a failure of epic proportions. I'm documenting it here so that other people who run online communities will avoid making the same mistake.
Throughout its history, the Retort has attracted a small number of users who delight in creating a large amount of trouble. They want to prove that no moderation system has ever been devised that can hold them. I am not questioning their decision or their singleminded pursuit of this goal. It is important to have hobbies.
When I see a new user show up who acts like somebody I've kicked off, I have written code that determines whether other users have connected to the server with the same IP address. Nine times out of 10, this reveals the user's real identity and I drop the account.
Since Retort users are conscientious about flagging offensive comments, I thought it would be a good idea to let users check whether a user has shared an IP address with others on the site. No IP addresses were revealed. My site checked the addresses associated with a user and posted a report like this:
ToniTennille has used the same IP address as the following users:
- TheCaptain, user level user
- MuskratLove, user level user
Within an hour, it became clear that this was a terrible idea. So terrible, in fact, that I must downplay my own poor judgment by using the passive voice.
Mistake was made.
If an Internet service provider, employer or school assigns IP addresses to its users from a small pool of addresses, people who don't know each other will share the same IP. I thought the Retort wasn't particularly large -- the site has 18,900 users, 1,700 of whom have logged in the past 90 days -- so the chances were slim that users who don't know each other at all would have ever shared an IP address.
Inaccurate conclusion reached.
As it turns out, there are a lot of people who share IP addresses for entirely innocent reasons completely without their knowledge. This was particularly true on my site of people using BlackBerries. Before I took the new feature offline, there were a dozen false positives. The flaw in my thinking is that I only was looking at shared-IP information when I already had reason to suspect that a user was bogus. So I could tell pretty quickly whether I had caught a troublemaker or not. When I wasn't sure, I ignored the information.
Retort users, on the other hand, gleefully checked out everybody and reported back the results, whether or not they made any sense.
I have a good track record with user privacy on my sites. As a general rule, I don't provide any personal information about my users to people who ask, no matter what the reason. As I've told a few lawyers and one police agency, I only would reveal a user's IP address or similar identifying information in response to a court order.
The new feature never revealed any IP addresses. But it was still staggeringly stupid and misleading, and all I can say in my defense is that I recognized the error and killed the experiment 1 hour and 43 minutes after it began.
Apology offered.
The Car for the Man Who Hates His Wife
Here's an interesting message for 100 million Super Bowl viewers: If you hate your hectoring shrew of a wife ...
... you'll love a Dodge Ram Charger!
Article by O'Keefe May Explain Senate Stunt
On Jan. 25, James O'Keefe and three other conservative activists were arrested after a weird incident in which they entered Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-La.) office in New Orleans dressed as telephone repairmen and attempted to gain access to the closet where the phone system was serviced. They were charged with "entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony," according to an FBI press release.
There's been a lot of speculation about the motives of O'Keefe, who led an attempted sting of ACORN offices last fall that was widely publicized and helped spur Congress to drop millions in funding for the voter registration and lower income charity. Messing with the telephones in a federal government official's office is a serious felony, whether O'Keefe and his associates were planning to bug the phones, vandalize them or achieve some other purpose. If they are convicted, the four men face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
On a web site published by Andrew Breitbart, who has O'Keefe on his payroll but denies involvement in the Landrieu incident, O'Keefe issued a statement after the arrest claiming that "[n]o one tried to wiretap or bug Senator Landrieu's office. Nor did we try to cut or shut down her phone lines."
This statement doesn't explain why some of them were dressed as repairmen and tried to access the telephone closet, as the FBI alleges.
An article that O'Keefe wrote in November 2008 for the online conservative magazine New Guard may shed some light on his actions. In the article, O'Keefe describes a past sting project where he and a young anti-abortion activist named Lila Rose contacted Planned Parenthood offices seeking to donate money to fund abortions and reduce the number of black babies in the United States.
We were able to donate money to the organization for the explicit purpose of reducing the number of black babies born in the United States -- in line with the intentions of Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger.
We carefully chose a dozen or so "one party consent" states, where it is legal to audio record someone without their consent. Not a single Planned Parenthood employee we spoke to was disinterested in the prospect of a donation for our stated purposes.
As he did later at ACORN offices, O'Keefe targeted low-level employees of liberal leaning groups and tried to get them to say something damning while he was taping the interactions. Although he says that the Planned Parenthood taping was legal, he also writes this in the article:
Leaders taking on power structures need to be raw, confident, fearless and impermeable. Lila received a letter threatening to prosecute the group for violating wiretapping laws, but it did not stop her from continuing the investigation. After the investigation aired nationally on Fox News, Planned Parenthood could no longer press charges, as Lila would appear the victim.
O'Keefe believed that even if he and Rose were putting themselves in legal jeopardy, the fear of bad publicity would make it impossible for charges to be pressed against them.
I don't know what O'Keefe and his fake telephone repairmen were planning to do at Landrieu's office, but he seems to believe that when you break laws in pursuit of a media stunt, the coverage will shield you from prosecution. That hasn't worked out for him this time around.
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