TOO 2 : Z HARRIS

This blog, along with others, compiled some anecdotes and research to show how the New York Times had always called “waterboarding” torture - until the Bush-Cheney administration came along. Instead of challenging this government lie, the NYT simply echoed it, with Bill Keller taking instructions from John Yoo on a key, legally salient etymology. Now, we have the first truly comprehensive study of how Bill Keller, and the editors of most newspapers, along with NPR, simply rolled over and became mouthpieces for war criminals, rather than telling the unvarnished truth to their readers and listeners in plain English:

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27).

By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

So the NYT went from calling waterboarding torture 81.5 percent of the time to calling it such 1.4 percent of the time. Had the technique changed? No. Only the government implementing torture and committing war crimes changed. If the US does it, it’s not torture.

The editors who insisted on these changes remain liars and cowards and a disgrace to journalism and a free society. They should quit for this kind of open deception and craven cowardice in putting power before truth. They remind you that if you really want to understand what is going on in the world, the New York Times will only publish what the government deems is fit to print - even in its choice of words.

Ad Age: Can you give me an example of Huffington Post’s view on social advertising?

Mr. Coleman: One example is a terrific project we did with General Electric, where GE has this whole campaign on “healthymagination.” We allowed them to run advertising on anything tagged “wellness” across our site — they were looking for positive health information. We then created a special share bar for GE, and any time you tweeted that article or retweeted that article or shared it, the ad module would go with it. So when you shared it with your friends on Facebook, the GE ad module would go there. When you retweeted it, [you’d get] the hashtag “GE healthymagination.” … We’re trying to come up with the real metrics, but we believe that the reach of the campaign is far greater off of our site, as a result of the social tools on our site.

Ad Age: Can you give us a sense of how much inventory are you guys selling these days?

Mr. Coleman: We sell all of our inventory, and of course we have our direct reach sales and we have our ad networks, so Pubmatic is our optimizer for ad networks right now. We are blessed with a tremendous amount of inventory. We have no issues in “how are we going to get big enough to carry the advertising?” We went from seven people to 23 people in the last nine months. We’re clearly positioning ourselves in the marketplace. I’ve just been given more resources for the second half of the year, a lot of it is in support and account management and research, but we do have more sales people coming on. So, because we are large and growing and focusing on 20 different verticals right now, we can talk to almost any marketer, we would make sense for them. … In terms of our direct premium [sales], I’m not going to give you a percentage, but we have a lot of room to grow, and we’re really moving the needle down in terms of squeezing some of the inventory away from the ad networks.

Ad Age: How true is TechCrunch’s report that Yahoo wanted to buy Huffington Post?

Mr. Coleman: Of course we would never comment on those rumors. All I’ll say is that the team here is having a ball. We are having what I would say is an incredible amount of fun. So, if there was ever an event, we would only consider doing it if we were allowed to continue to have fun and, generally, people don’t write that into contracts.

Ad Age: What’s the long-term vision? Three years from now, what will Huffington Post be?

Mr. Coleman: We’ve been labeling ourselves America’s Internet Newspaper. With the brand we have online right now, if we’re 24 million unique visitors today, if we have now almost 3 million comments per month, our guess is that, in three years, we’re going to be a hell of a lot larger. We’re already preparing for 5 million comments within the next year and a half, and that’s required a whole layer of social badging with our users, who are actually moderating our site.

And moderation is really important to a business like ours, where we don’t want profanity, we don’t want people with conspiracy theories, you know, we have to keep it grown up. We’ll never moderate for opinion, but you have some people out there that you need to curate and to moderate. … We’ve had tremendous interest from other media forms, getting into the radio business, getting into the television business, because we have a point of view. And that is so important today, to have a distinct opinion and point of view, but to allow the users to be part of the conversation, that’s what they want.

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I went on Chatroulette this morning to verify its obsolescence. Time it took for someone to show me his unit: 10 seconds. I clicked the “next” button. There, in extreme close-up, was a penis. I clicked “next” again. And there was no one there at all. Just vast, empty nothingness. All that’s left of a once great civilization is dead air and a bunch of guys sitting around with their pants off. It was a wild ride, a magical, you had to be there time in human history, when it seemed everyone in the world was as close as a mouse click. We’ll remember you as you once were, young and full of song. But the party is over. And you can’t build an empire on dicks.

The projections suggest significant audience erosion. For the recently completed 2009-2010 season, for example, ad buyers had projected a 14.1 household C3 rating for ABC’s popular “Dancing With the Stars,” a 13.1 for CBS’s widely watched “NCIS” and a 13.7 for the Tuesday airing of Fox’s “American Idol.” But for the coming cycle, they envision those programs will generate household C3 ratings of 10.3, 10.8 and 10.37, respectively. At present, a single ratings point equals about 1.15 million households.

What’s the problem? Media buyers suggest the declines in viewership for commercials by the demographic most coveted by advertisers — consumers between the ages of 18 and 49 — fell in a range of 5% and 11% in the recently completed season, depending on which of the four networks was being measured. Simply put, they aren’t certain the TV networks can reverse the trend.

Few returning shows have a track record suggesting growth is in the offing, said one media-buying executive. Some veteran programs have simply matured, and some shows ready for their sophomore outing didn’t show much promise in their freshman year, this buyer said. Those programs that do have some growth potential appeal to an extremely loyal following, this executive said, making it tough to envision people who haven’t already caught on will try to get onboard. Broad-based general-entertainment networks are suffering from a similar fate, this executive said.

Here’s how Gates describes his activities: “Everything I do has sort of a common theme, which is ‘How do you organize innovation to have impact? How do you facilitate the innovation, get the right group of people together, get the right resources, and have it have this impact on a large scale?’ And innovation, in my case, has some type of science or software programming or online information component. I want to help cut years off of how long it takes to solve these problems.”

He has a term to describe the philosophy of his approach: creative capitalism. Like his own interests, creative capitalism has several dimensions, but in a nutshell, he defines it as striving to identify opportunities or challenges that technology could address, where a well-placed push will help jump-start market forces that will sustain them economically. As an entrepreneur, he knows first-hand how enormous new markets can be created out of thin air, especially adjacent to existing ones.