Category Archives: The Media

When the Inexplicable Strikes

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Apparently, this is the hot new Internet joke du jour: Bill O’Reilly – Can’t Explain That Meme.

Posted in The Media | 4 Comments

Something is Wrong at the Washington Post

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

No, not what you think.   Something new — this:

I’m used to seeing certificate error mismatches here and there, but “(Error code: sec_error_revoked_certificate)” sounds more serious. I wonder what happened?

Posted in The Media | 1 Comment

Units of Measure

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

As coined by Atrios, a “Friedman” or “Friedman unit” is famously six months — the amount of time that the columnist keeps telling us it will take before we know whether Iraq turns the corner, finds the lights at the end of the tunnel….but when the time passes, we just get the same prediction again and again.

Is it time to define a new unit of measure, “the DeLong” — as the five years he predicts the Washington Post has before it craters (unless it changes)?

Admittedly, what makes the Friedman a Friedman is that we’ve had so many of them since he first made that ill-fated prediction. And as far as I know, the first sighting of Brad’s prediction may be March 7, 2007, which is pretty recent. So it’s not quite the same thing.

But I bet the Post lasts longer than five years despite all its dreadful editorial flaws. It has a lock on the local classified ad market, and its web site is a category killer that will smother local competitors. That’s going to be monetizable some day and will help keep the print paper afloat.

[Original draft 4/18/2007.  In preparation for my blog redesign, I found draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: As a prediction, I think it’s looking good. As a newspaper, though, the Post really is looking awful.

Posted in The Media, Zombie Posts | Comments Off on Units of Measure

NYT Overdoes the Etymology of Morton’s Fork

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

This has to be the most bizzaro sentence in my newspaper in some time. Explaining the origins of 'Morton's fork', prose stylist Clyde Haberman may have gone slightly overboard on the pop culture:

It is named for John Morton, an English lord chancellor in the 15th century who shaped a make-everyone-pay policy for tax collection under Henry VII, one king too soon for Herman's Hermits.

Get the context at On New York Ballot, Questions With No Good Choices.

Incidentally, I also think the basic conceit of the article is wrong: there is no Morton's Fork (“two alternatives that will produce equally unpalatable results”) here as one of the choices is better than the status quo, which is the other choice.

Anyway, what's wrong with Hobson's Choice?

Posted in The Media | 3 Comments

Half Way to Pledge Week

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

I've said for years that I wasn't going to give to NPR until they canned Juan Williams and Cokie Roberts, two wastes of airspace who routinely parrot conventional wisdom (leavened with the weekly GOP talking points) and call it “analysis”.

Well, we're 50% there: NPR Ends Juan Williams' Contract After Muslim Remarks.

One more to go.

Posted in The Media | 11 Comments

Surveillance and Resources

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

The St. Petersburg (FL) Times has a good story today by Jamal Thalji, Should authorities need a warrant to put a GPS tracking device on your car?.

I'm quoted towards the end:

Those conflicting rulings mean the U.S. Supreme Court will likely decide the issue.

The real issue is resources, said University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin. When the courts first gave the government the right to remotely track suspects, no one thought they'd one day have the money or technology to do so constantly.

“There was an unstated assumption behind a great deal of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in our history that says surveillance is expensive and therefore has natural limits,” he said. “That unstated assumption that people took for granted is no longer true.”

And therein, I think, lies the problem — we are working with doctrine that doesn't fit the new technical and economic realities.

Posted in Law: Privacy, The Media | 5 Comments