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Monthly Archives: April 2004
What oversight?
Don’t you love having democracy as a beta tester?
Buried amid the controversy swirling around Diebold electronic voting equipment in California is this gem:
According to the Oakland Tribune:
State rules say local governments can use entire, experimental voting systems without state approval.
Diebold’s attorneys were trying to use this loophole to justify the uncertified code used in machines during the spring primary. There should be a decision this week on the future of these machines in California.
Links:
Oakland Tribune (20 Apr)
Pentagon ban broken
The knee-jerk reaction of Maytag Aircraft — its firing of Tami Silicio (Edmonds WA) and her husband, David Landry — may have been requested by the Pentagon.
But neither entity realized that they were about to turn a regional story into an international one. This is a great example of horrible PR/crisis management and yet another example of grassroots journalism turning mainstream media on its ear.
Note: I refuse to call these flag-draped coffins “remains” because, to me, that connotes photos of an open casket or corpses such as those of civilians killed in Iraq earlier this month (those photos were not subject to the Pentagon ban because they pictured civilians).
A non-event
When the news broke Thursday that Silicio had been fired, no wire service had picked up the Sunday Seattle Times front-page story which featured her photo of flag-draped coffins (per a Google search). Nor had any major US media outlet.
Continue reading
War comes home
When I returned to Seattle Monday night, I immediately saw that I’d forgotten to suspend our subscription to The Seattle Times. Little did I know that the Sunday paper had broken a story that would topple the ban on photos of casualties of the Iraq war.
When I saw the front page story Tuesday morning, I didn’t realize that it was a Seattle Times exclusive. That tidbit would wait until today, when I read that the Edmonds, WA resident had been fired (they canned her husband, too) from her contract job in Kuwait as a result of the photo being published and the Pentagon putting pressure on the contractor (Maytag).
This recent military ban on photos applied to “news media,” but how do we define news or media in an age of personal publishing (blogs) and camera-enabled cell phones?
Continue reading
Broadband use rises
The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Sunday that 24 percent of all American adults now have residential broadband. Most of the growth in broadband use is DSL, which now accounts for almost half of broadband access.
The report noted that 55 percent of all American adults have high-speed access either at home or at work. More than half (52%) of college educated people age 35 and younger have broadband connections at home.
However, only 10% of rural Americans have high-speed connections at home.
Links:
Seattle Times (19 Apr); Internet.com (19 Apr); Pew Internet (19 Apr)
