I like Glenn Reynolds, and I think he’s usually pretty fair-minded. But to the extent he’s being serious with this post, I have to take him to task for it. It reads:

NOT ANTIWAR, just on the other side: “Disturbed anti-war protester can’t find soldier, kills civilian with axe instead.”

“Not antiwar, just on the other side” is something of a catchphrase, generally used to point out particularly egregious instances of bad behavior by the most radical of the antiwar crowd. For example, giving money to Iraqi insurgents, or chillin’ with suicide bombers, or suggesting that coalition soldiers are legitimate targets. In those sorts of cases, it’s an appropriate moniker, the point being that these traitorous idiots are claiming the mantle of “antiwar” and if the real, legitimate antiwar crowd — the loyal opposition — doesn’t want its good name smeared, it should condemn them in no uncertain terms.

In this case, though, I think Glenn has gone rather too far. The story he linked is about an obviously deranged person whose actions clearly have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with either psychological illness or sociopathic evil — with politics being nothing more than an excuse or a trigger. I’m no psychologist, but that’s fairly obvious, isn’t it? I mean, he walked into a train station and killed some random guy with an ax. That’s not really what I would call a political act. There is no indication that he’s involved with any antiwar group, nor that his actions are in any way consistent with others in even the most radical extremes of the antiwar crowd. So I think it’s a rather significant stretch to use the “not antiwar, just on the other side” label on this particular story. It would be a bit like saying, nine years ago:

NOT SO PRO-LIFE after all: “Sniper Kills Abortion Doctor Near Buffalo.”

That would be highly inappropriate, and so is this. There’s some serious guilt-by-association smearing going on here, and I guess I just draw the line at holding political groups (of whatever persuasion) implicitly responsible for the depraved acts of deranged murderers.

Now, in Glenn’s defense, maybe he’s just having a little fun (albeit with regard to an event that isn’t terribly funny, but hey, I like dark humor as much as the next guy) and isn’t trying to make a serious point, and I’m reading too much into his post. That’s certainly happened to me before, so I can sympathize if that’s the case. However, given how he and others have used the phrase “not antiwar, just on the other side” before, I think he needs to be careful, because that phrase means something very specific in the right-blogosphere, and so people are going to assume that’s how he’s using it in this case too.

Heh:

I don’t like Daily Kos, but Dodd is right: O’Reilly makes the anti-Kos position seem cartoonish and ridiculous. Oh, and O’Reilly did in fact say what Dodd claimed he said.

Occasional Irish Trojan commenter “DC,” a.k.a. Dave Chung, a fellow USC Daily Trojan alum and proprietor of the blogrolled More Thoughts From the Shower, is a finalist in the Billboard Mobile Beat contest (written up last month by the New York Times). Basically, as part of a cell-phone promotion thingy, he gets press access to a bunch of concerts in his area, blogs about them on Billboard’s site, and competes against 25 other finalists to try and drive the most traffic to his corner of the, uh, Billboard-o-sphere. Sounds like a pretty sweet gig. Anyway, I’ve added his Billboard blog to my blogroll, along with his personal site. You can find it here. Good luck, Dave!

Margie Kieper is giving up her blog “to more thoroughly immerse [her]self in the tropical meteorological community.” I’m totally bummed — with the demise of Charles Fenwick’s blog (and, before him, Steve Gregory), Margie had become one of my top two go-to hurricane bloggers, along with Dr. Jeff Masters. She was a great source of information and analysis, and her rhetorical flair made her blog consistently fun to read. But I certainly understand how life and blogging can sometimes conflict. Anyway, you’ll be missed, Margie.

Pink-pistol-toting, heterosexual-hating lesbian gangs terrorizing America? Bill O’Reilly is on the case — and by “case,” of course I mean “nonexistent bunch of baloney made up by a Fox News ‘expert’ who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.” (Hat tip: Becky, via Fark.)

UPDATE: Here are some photos of the lesbian evildoers! And here’s their anthem!

P.S. As long as I’m blogging about ridiculous nonsense on Fox News… remember my firmly tongue-in-cheek post about how “if we adopt nationalized health care, the terrorists will win” because the U.K.’s National Health Service “breeds terrorists”? Well, Fox’s Neil Cavuto had a guest on his show yesterday who actually argued that! With a straight face!

Confederate Yankee looks at the AP’s odd double standards when it comes to reporting on violence in Iraq. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

Remember when I demonstrated the laziness and gullibility of some journalists by showing that a Procter & Gamble front group, posing as an independent research “foundation,” had repeatedly hoodwinked major news outlets into running bogus stories about a “new” “scientific” “study” showing that redheads are going extinct — and the reporters didn’t catch it, even though the “new” study had been described in virtually identical terms (presumably copied from press releases) by media reports in January 2007, November 2006, March 2006, May 2005, August 2004, March 2004 and November 2003?

Well, it seems the same thing can happen with more significant news stories, like bogus reports of decapitated bodies in Iraq. On three separate occasions now, major media outlets (specifically, the AP, Reuters and the New York Times) have credulously parroted thinly sourced reports of gruesome mass beheadings near Baghdad, only to learn that nothing of the sort occurred. It’s a blatant propaganda effort by extremists hoping to incite more sectarian violence, and the MSM is falling for it — hook, line and sinker. Repeatedly.

Reporting from a war zone is hard, as NBC’s Karl Bostic noted in his blog post about the second of the three “bogus bodies” incidents last year. No question about that. And there’s lots of gruesome violence in Iraq these days, so reports of mass beheadings aren’t inherently unbelievable. But neither of those realities make it excusable to pass off unconfirmed urban legends and/or insurgent propaganda as news, especially when the very same reporters would doubtless cringe at the thought of treating their own government’s official statements with anything other than a healthy dose of skepticism. As well they should — but healthy skepticism (not to be confused with cynicism, of course) should apply to all sources of information, not just the ones associated with the Bush Administration.

Independent confirmation: learn it, live it, love it.

Connecticut’s own Mika Brzezinski, formerly a news anchor at WTIC and WFSB in the Nutmeg State and now a co-host with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, made a stand for, well, actual journalism, by refusing to lead off the news with the Paris Hilton story:

Heh. (Hat tip: Becky.)

The company that owns the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the leading daily newspaper in town, has bought out the local alt-weekly, Metro Pulse. Here’s the Sentinel article about it; here’s the Pulse article. (Hat tip: Jay.) Says Glenn Reynolds: “It’s probably a good business move for them, but it makes Knoxville even more of a one-newspaper town.”

Of course, everyone is solemnly promising to preserve the Pulse’s editorial independence, and most of the people saying that probably even mean it. But regardless, this is a terrible trend in journalism, and it’s happening everywhere. It happened not so long ago in Hartford, when the Hartford Courant bought the Hartford Advocate. Big national developments like Rubert Murdoch’s bid for the WSJ get all the headlines, but it’s the consolidation of ownership and lack of competition in local markets that upsets me most, because local newspapers, TV and radio are the predominant non-Internet news sources for the average person, and the realities of the modern market have robbed them — particularly the newspapers — of the journalistic vitality they once had.

There is just nothing good, from a journalistic perspective, about this sort of consolidation. It sucks, but that’s the direction the industry’s moving in, and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. It’s actually one reason (of many) that I decided not to go into journalism. In so many ways, idealistic journalists in this country — and there’s no good reason to go into journalism if you’re not an idealist about it — are fighting an uphill battle against forces they can’t control: ownership consolidation, lack of local competition, increasingly unreasonable profit-margin demands (which, in concert with the lack of local competition, creates totally perverse incentives and priorities), unfriendly legal developments, sensationalism and bias (and the perception thereof), the general dearth of fellow quality journalists, the overall decline of the industry as the Internet grows, hostility to the profession from all corners, etc. etc. Why work crazy hours for crappy pay in service of an unattainable ideal that nobody really cares if you achieve? Hence my going to law school. At least as a lawyer, you get paid well to work ridiculous hours and have everybody hate you. :)

This is what happens when I don’t pay attention to my web stats: the New York Times’s “The Lede” blog linked to me on Thursday evening, bringing in a bunch of extra traffic — nearly a third of my last 4,000 hits have come via the NYT post — but I didn’t notice till just now. (The post references my coverage of the alleged Harry Potter spoiler, and links to my “That Which Must Not Be Blogged” post. The body of the NYT post doesn’t contain any Potter spoilers, but I can’t vouch for the comments or the other linked URLs.)

Anyway, it seems the New York Times has a serious problem with the spelling of my name. You may recall that my name was spelled “Brendon Loy” in the Times print edition on Sept. 6, 2005, in a correction to a rather more significant error in the previous day’s Times article about my Katrina coverage (the article had mixed up the first names of my wife and my dog). This resulted in the highly amusing spectacle of a correction-to-the-correction regarding the misspelling of my name. Well, now the Times has found a new way to misspell my name: Thursday’s blog post says I’m “Brenden Loy.”

I’m not terribly sensitive to misspellings and mispronounciations of my name — I’m accustomed to them, and will generally not bother to correct people who call me “Brandon” or the like, let alone get offended by their error — but for f***’s sake, the Times’s link goes to a domain called brendanloy.com, and the byline says the post in question is “by Brendan Loy.” In fact, my first name appears nine separate times on the linked page, spelled correctly in each instance. Is it that hard to copy-and-paste the correct spelling into your article?

P.S. Not related to the Times, but while I’m on the topic of misspellings, who could forget this:

Heh.

You know, when I was in journalism school at USC, I once got a zero on an assignment that I’d spent an entire week (and an enormous amount of emotional energy) working on — traveling all around the L.A. area, interviewing the wife of a murder victim, even attending the man’s funeral, all to write an article about the murder for Aaron Curtiss’s reporting class — because I misspelled a proper noun in the article. Just one proper noun. The name of a city or bridge or somesuch, as I recall. Because of that one mistake, all my effort was wasted. Methinks some New York Times (and MSNBC) journalists could use a little bit of Curtiss-style training.

In keeping with the recent trend of posts about First Amendment rights, Becky has a post about a freedom-of-the-press snafu involving Angelina Jolie. The actress, who plays Daniel Pearl’s widow in a new movie about the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded by Islamic extremists, has ironically decided she can order the press around:

[Jolie’s] lawyer required all journalists to sign a contract before talking to her, and Jolie instructed publicists at first to ban FOX News from the red carpet of her premiere. …

Reporters were asked to agree…that “the interview may only be used to promote the Picture. In no event may Interviewer or Media Outlet be entitled to run all or any portion of the interview in connection with any other story. … The interview will not be used in a manner that is disparaging, demeaning, or derogatory to Ms. Jolie.”

If that wasn’t enough, Jolie also requires that if any of these things happen, “the tape of the interview will not be released to Interviewer.” Such a violation, the signatory thus agrees, would “cause Jolie irreparable harm” and make it possible for her to sue the interviewer and seek a restraining order.

I am told that USA Today and the Associated Press were among those that canceled interviews, and eventually Jolie scotched all print interviews when she heard the reaction.

“I wouldn’t sign it,” a reporter for a major outlet said. “Who does she think she is?”

Obviously, this isn’t actually a constitutional issue, but it’s “the most hypocritical move ever,” in the words of a blog called The Superficial, which notes that “the premiere was a benefit for the organization Reporters Without Borders and she’s got a tattoo on her back that says ‘Know your rights.’ How did she go from the hottest woman on the planet to the most annoying one? Nobody would even care about this except that she’s running around the world pretending to be better than everybody else.”

As I said, Becky has more.

Becky and I met up with Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. InstaPundit, a.k.a. The Professor, a.k.a. The Blogfather — like Gandalf, he goes by many names!) and one of his former students, now a prof at Samford University’s Cumberland Law School, Brannon Denning (who is visiting UT for the summer session, and guestblogging at Concurring Opinions), for drinks at La Costa this afternoon. (How’s that for a run-on sentence?) Here’s a photo of me with the Blogfather himself:

Hey, that’s actually kind of artistic — I like the reflections in the window behind us. Nice going, Professor/Photographer Denning!

First impressions? Glenn in person is exactly what you’d expect: supremely personable, affable, intelligent, well-spoken, and just a wee bit geeky. :) Brannon seemed like a great guy, too, and both are very easy to talk to, about whatever subject you can think of — the range of topics covered during our chat ranged from the niceties of First Amendment Law to our respective memories of middle school.

Anyway, I feel at last that I’ve officially arrived in Knoxville, now that I’ve finally met the InstaPundit.

I say “purports” because the policy is unenforceable, absurd (so people won’t obey it voluntarily), and probably unconstitutional when applied to games played at public school venues. Nevertheless:

A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events.

Gene McArtor, a representative of the NCAA baseball committee, approached C-J staffer Brian Bennett at the University of Louisville’s Jim Patterson Stadium in the bottom of the fifth inning in the U of L-Oklahoma State game. McArtor told him that blogging from an NCAA championship event “is against NCAA policies. We’re revoking the credential and need to ask you to leave the stadium.” …

U of L circulated a memo on the issue from Jeramy Michiaels, the NCAA’s manager of broadcasting, before Friday’s first super-regional game. It said blogs are considered a “live representation of the game” and that any blog containing action photos or game reports would be prohibited.

“In essence, no blog entries are permitted between the first pitch and the final out of each game,” the memo said. …

“It’s a real question that we’re being deprived of our right to report within the First Amendment from a public facility,” said Jon L. Fleischaker, the newspaper’s attorney.

“Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV. Everybody sees it. (The NCAA) can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis.”

During the middle of yesterday’s game, Courier-Journal representatives were told by two members of the U of L athletic staff that if the school did not revoke Bennett’s credential it would jeopardize the school’s chances of hosting another NCAA baseball event.

“If that’s true, that’s nothing short of extortion and thuggery,” Ivory said. “We will be talking to our attorneys (today) to see where we go from here.”

Michael Silence asks, “Does this apply to someone talking on the phone and telling the other person about the game?” Analytically, it must, at least if the speaker is “telling the other person about the game” with the knowledge and/or intent that the other person will turn around and post those updates to a blog. How can one draw a principled distinction between that and what Bennett did — or for that matter, what I do with my audio-, photo- and text-based liveblogging of games from the stands at Notre Dame Stadium and elsewhere? Indeed, how can one really distinguish between “liveblogging” and telling friends about the game, even if those friends don’t have a blog? Is there really an analytical difference between giving phone updates to five friends and posting an update via phone to a blog that gets five readers? Where, and how, does the NCAA draw the line?

Because the NCAA is not a state actor, I suppose the policy isn’t unconstitutional on its face. So, I probably wouldn’t have a First Amendment leg to stand on if ejected for blogging, say, a Notre Dame-USC game. (Although I guess that wouldn’t happen if the policy only extends to “championship” events, as opposed to regular games between NCAA member institutions.) But when the game involves public universities’ teams, playing in a publicly owned stadium, policed by public employees (ushers, law enforcement officials, etc.), that’s much more questionable.

This actually relates back to a recent discussion about limitations on photography in public places. Can a government entity (i.e., the university) contractually condition a person’s entry to the press area — or to the stadium itself, in the case of a non-MSM blogger like me — on a prior restraint of free speech? Prior restraints are the most disfavored of all government actions with regard to speech, so I don’t think they access to a public facility can be conditioned on them without a pretty damn compelling interest (like the sort of interest that would arise when someone enters a military base, not a baseball stadium).

That said, I’m shooting from the hip with my legal analysis here, and I could be wrong. I’m curious what our other resident legal scholars think, if they haven’t all sworn off the blog for bar study. :)

Legalities and constitutionalities aside, the policy is self-evidently ridiculous, and if it wasn’t the NCAA enforcing it, I’d have full confidence that pressure and outrage from the public, media and blogosphere would lead quickly to the policy’s elimination. However, given that a remarkably high percentage of the NCAA’s policies are self-evidently ridiculous and yet remain in force, I’m not sure why this would be any different.

(Hat tip: Lisa. Sorry, Scientizzle and InstaPundit, I found about the story from Lisa first. :)

P.S. One blogger wonders why we’re only hearing about this policy now, and why the heck the NCAA would enact and enforce something so self-defeating:

The NCAA claimed that it does not allow live-blogging during its championship events.

That’s news to me, someone who has live-blogged during UK’s games in the NCAA Basketball Tournament and during the Final Four the past two years. At no time was I presented with any regulations by the NCAA that prohibited live-blogging during its events.

If there is such a rule, it is an asinine one — another in a long list of misguided NCAA rule-making. The Courier-Journal is in the business of reporting. That was what Bennett was doing during the Super Regional, posting periodic updates on the C-J website during Louisville’s games, just as I do during UK football and basketball games. Just as some bloggers do from their couches at home while watching games, or TV shows, etc.

Does anyone actually believe that such reporting/commentary is the same as the immediacy of a television broadcast, etc.? Especially for a sport such as college baseball, you might think the NCAA would welcome all the coverage it could muster. From what I understand, the city of Louisville went nuts over the baseball Cards success, a fact that obviously helps the NCAA in promoting its events. The more coverage the better. Instead, the corporate spoil-sports in Indianapolis appear more interested in shooting themselves in the foot.

In her latest effort to get the media to stop paying attention to her, Paris Hilton called Barbara Walters from jail yesterday.

Heh.

Paris Hilton, in a statement obviously written for her by someone else that she released through her attorney Saturday, said she is “learning and growing” from her time behind bars, and although “being in jail is by far the hardest thing I have ever done,” she will not appeal her 45-day sentence. She added:

I must also say that I was shocked to see all of the attention devoted to the amount of time I would spend in jail for what I had done by the media, public and city officials. I would hope going forward that the public and the media will focus on more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq and other places around the world.

Neither Don Imus nor the ghost of Anna Nicole Smith could be reached for comment.