The future of journalism as a business is looking worse by the day, the practice of journalism less so. In the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing says that “the practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news.” It’s mostly true.

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This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet.

Sorority dvdrip Massing cites the reporting done by the likes of Josh Marshall and his staff at Talking Points Memo, the relentless fact-checking and analysis of the blogosphere, and the fact that some websites are actually a better source for information than your daily paper – for the protests in Iran, the best place to go wasn’t The New York Times but Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish.

“The idea that our work is parasitical is farcical,” [blogger Marcy] Wheeler told me by phone. “There’s a lot of good, original work in the blogosphere. Half of all journalists look at the blogosphere when working on a story.” At the same time, she said, “I’m happy to admit I’m still utterly reliant on journalists…We ought to be talking about a symbiotic rather than a parasitical relationship,” she told me.

The problem is money: it’s extremely difficult to make any on the internet. And the content that bloggers consume and filter and analyze comes mainly from newspapers, which have to make money. Massing’s own examples bear this problem out. John Marshall of Talking Points Memo was a reporter before he started his website; he brought his contacts with him. ProPublica, a successful online reporting service, has received millions in grants. Blogger Philip Weiss made a reporting trip to Israel, but on $8000 in reader donations. It’s going to be difficult to get people to pay for what they already get for free. Andrew Sullivan, for one, is optimistic about the future of journalism and thinks the complacent, consensus-driven world of traditional news is getting what it deserves. He’s surely right about its failures and its cowardice, but he’s popular enough to merit a salary. Ask Marcy Wheeler or Philip Weiss how much they make.

-Greg Waldmann

Now is a good time to recommend Margo Jefferson’s nonpareil On Michael Jackson

. She does what the past two afternoons of blog posts have been trying, she puts her finger on it:

Think of Michael Jackson’s mind as a funhouse, and look at some of the exhibits on display: P. T. Barnum, maestro of wonders and humbuggery; Walt Disney, who invented the world’s mightiest fantasy technology complex; Peter Pan (”He escaped from being human when he was seven days old”); a haggard Edgar Allan Poe (he was the only character besides Peter Pan that Michael Jackson planned to play in a movie); the romping, ever-combustible Three Stooges; a friendly chimpanzee named Bubbles who has his own wardrobe of clothes; and a python lying coiled between white llamas.

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Jefferson recalls watching the pre-teen Jackson thrust and roll on the Motown stage at exactly the point in his life (as in any boy’s life) when he was half man and child, half androgyne. He was also a high-pitched, non-threatening sex symbol for women, many of them white women. Because he was a charming boy, he was an innocent (think “I’ll Be There“). Because he grew up on the Motown stage, surrounded by screaming girls in the front of the house and burlesque acts in the back, he was never innocent. Made for Each Other movie

So he was a beautiful freak, a dangerous innocent, an aggressively masculine drag act. He was wonderful. And, of course, we’re free to remember him that way, now.

For the past few years, fans of his music have felt a little ashamed. I’ve been one of them. I jog to “Billy Jean.” I always play “Bad” on the Jukebox. But it had that rare whiff of the verboten that didn’t make it feel extra fun or extra good. It felt a little awful. I felt a little awful for enjoying it.

Andrew Sullivan wrote that Michael Jackson “died years ago.” It’s a good line but it’s hardly half true. I was shocked to hear the news, like everybody was, and I came home and found some of the dance scenes from The Wiz

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on You Tube and thought about his trademark breathlessness—his moves were nervous. I thought, like we always do, about phenomenal success, and how “the rich don’t have friends, they only have butlers.” Elvis also had a posse that kept him hopped up, and let him keep acting like an asshole.

A Perfect Murder Afro Samurai: Resurrection video But they’re playing “Smooth Criminal” and “Blood on the Dance Floor” today—which I always want them to do and which they never do—and of course both the songs and the videos are really good. (You know what else is good? “We’ve Had Enough” from The Ultimate Collection

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. Really.) Oh and “P.Y.T.” too.  And “This Place Hotel.” And “Dirty Diana.” Am I missing any?

We can go back over it all now. We can remember him (ironically? with relief?) at his best.

— John Cotter

A certain degree of fraud is to be expected in Iranian elections. In 2005, some electoral chicanery made sure that Ahmadinejad emerged from the field of right-wing candidates to challenge the more moderate Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. We still can’t be sure who would have won the elections one week ago, but the official results had Ahmadinejad beating his rival Moussavi by about two to one, almost laughably out of step with every poll done in the run-up to the vote.

We can’t know what Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah expected to happen, but it certainly wasn’t this – protests blanketing the country, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) marching in Tehran. Moussavi’s opposition has been joined by former presidents Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, along with several important members of the clerical establishment. They’ve been saavy in keeping the protests largely non-violent, and in portraying themselves as the true inheritors of 1979’s Islamic revolution. Marchers chant “Allahu akbar” as a rebuke to their government. Their goal is the removal of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, nothing less than the overthrow of the current government.

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have been slow to respond. A few days ago they banned foreign media coverage of the protests, and today the Ayatollah made an ominous and threatening speech at Friday prayers. All this seems preparation for a confrontation, as the demonstrations gain momentum.

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As far as I can tell, the best place to go for info is Andrew Sullivan, who’s been posting dozens of updates a day every day for the last week. This is, as he has said, “the central event in modern history right now.” This is the same Iran that many want to bomb or invade for their nuclear program. If America had done that – bombed and invaded a country primed for a mass democratic movement – Ahmadinejad wouldn’t have needed to rig the votes.

-Greg Waldmann

In February of 2007 the Internatinal Committee of the Red Cross delivered a secret report on the torture of CIA prisoners to the Bush Administration – the very government that was practicing it. Excerpts have trickled out, but now the full report has been published by The New York Review of Books, along with an excellent dissection by Mark Danner, the reporter who obtained it. Here’s a key section of the ICRC’s conclusion:

This regime was clearly designed to undermine human dignity and to create a sense of futility by inducing, in many cases, severe physical and mental pain and suffering, with the aim of obtaining compliance and extracting information, resulting in exhaustion, depersonalization and dehumanization.

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel inhuman or degrading treatment.

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The alleged participation of health personnel in the interrogation process and…in the infliction of ill-treatment constituted a gross breach and, in some cases, amounted to participation in torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

In other words, the Bush Administration created a detention regime that prescribed torture, and did so in a bureaucratized and systematic fashion – as is shown by (among other things) the participation of medical personnel. The facts seem beyond dispute, and not one torture apologist can verify a single instance where abuse produced useful information (here, the evidence is to the contrary). Few people, online or otherwise, have beat the drum for disclosure as consistantly as The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. For some excellent background and analysis, turn to these posts: here Adam’s Wall on dvd , here

, here, here Ice Blues ipod , and here. I reviewed

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Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side in our December 2008 issue; it’s by far the best introduction to the subject, but it’s not for the faint of heart. 

-Greg Waldmann

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