The Press

Cited by Howard Kurtz (via Classical Values and Instapundit):

“The testimony, cited in a court filing by the government late Wednesday, provides the first indication that Mr. Bush, who has long assailed leaks of classified information as a national security threat, played a direct role in the disclosure of the intelligence report on Iraq at a moment that the White House was trying to defend itself against charges that it had inflated the case against Saddam Hussein,” says the New York Times .

“If Mr. Libby’s account is accurate, it also involves Mr. Bush directly in the swirl of events surrounding the disclosure of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer.”

Read more

Hurricanes Don’t Stop Tourists in Florida is the headline of this AP article linked by the ever-analytical Drudge.

Tourists visited Florida in record numbers last year, apparently undeterred by four hurricanes that lashed the state and caused widespread damage, officials announced Monday.

The tourists know what the author of the article doesn’t seem to, namely that Florida’s hurricane season is May through November while its main tourist season extends from approximately November through May.

Next: Oil Drilling Thought Responsible for Dearth of Alaska Winter Tourism

UPDATE: I should have made clear that the author of the AP piece missed two points that should have been obvious: 1) there isn’t much overlap between tourist season and hurricane season (the point I made) and 2) the 2005 hurricanes occurred late in the year and therefore could not have affected tourism during the preceeding nine months.

Suggestion: When you set up your website, make sure to display the name of your city and state prominently on each page, especially if it is not obvious from the name of your publication. Otherwise, non-local readers may have difficulty figuring out who you are and what part of the country or even world you are in. I can’t count the times I’ve followed a link to a story in a local paper and couldn’t immediately tell in what state the events I was reading about took place (e.g., this story).

You do want to attract non-local readers, don’t you?

Via Jim Miller comes a story about parents who made their daughter famous in a way they didn’t intend. Not a particularly compelling story, though as Jim notes one has to sympathize with the school administrators. What struck me was that ABC spelled the child’s name in two different ways in the first couple of paragraphs of the story. (Photo is highlighted to show the discordant spellings.) I know that anyone can make errors of this type, but how does a major news organization manage to bollix up someone’s name in such an obvious way and then not detect it? Aren’t there proofreaders? Let’s see how long it takes them to catch the error.

Don Hewitt, creator of “60 Minutes” and veteran TV-news guy, thinks that the way to entice viewers back to network news is to increase its proportion of opinion-based content. This is delusional thinking, given that

-Network news is already full of opinions. That’s part of why it has lost so many viewers.

-Making opinions explicit doesn’t insure an audience any more than starting a blog does. To gain viewers’ loyal attention (as opposed to merely riling them up and driving even more of them away), opinions have to be thoughtful and provide unique perspective. It’s not enough to be sincere, you have to add something to the public conversation if you want viewers to come back, and all of the good political bloggers and op-ed commentators know this. But does anyone think that the people who run network news are capable of doing it, given that many of them, like Hewitt, refuse to acknowledge that their networks’ biased, error-prone reporting is a large part of the problem?

-The Internet is awash in high-quality commentary, available from every ideological perspective and generally free. It’s difficult to make money selling something that a lot of other people are giving away.

UPDATE: Data