Illegal Immigrant from Mexico Helps Crash Survivor

Illegal immigration continues to be a hot topic for politicians, as evidenced by the amount of time spent on it at this week's Republican debate. To some, it seems "illegal-alien bashing has become a national sport," as Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts puts it, and she and others are pointing to the story of illegal immigrant Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes as a counterpoint.

Cordova, a 26-year-old Mexican bricklayer, was "two days into his walk and about 50 miles from Tucson" on Thanksgiving when he came across a boy whose mother had been killed in a van crash, The Associated Press reports.

Cordova gave up his chance to "disappear" into the United States to help 9-year-old Christopher Buztheitner, who had walked away from the crash. Cordova got a fire started, found food in the van for the boy and waited while he slept. Fourteen hours later, a group of hunters found the pair and called for help.

"I am a father of four children. For that, I stayed," Cordova told AP. "I never could have left him. Never."

Cordova was taken into custody and deported. Roberts writes that Cordova is "probably nobody special." And that's the point.

I don't know if anything should be done for Cordova. He did what any human being should do. Maybe what we can do in appreciation is to reclaim the debate that has been taken over by the extremes, those who would have you believe that every person here illegally is out to rob us and cheat us and steal our country.

The Tucson Citizen reports that the response to the story from its online community has been mostly positive. But about a quarter of the readers weren't swayed by Cordova's "act of compassion." One wrote that the media are "heaping praise" on the story to further an immigrant-loving agenda.

11:57 AM ET | 11-30-2007 | permalink | comments (49) | e-mail post

Is the Blogosphere Just a Lot of Sound and Fury?

Like the cherry blossoms appearing each spring on the Washington Mall, it is now a regular occurrence for someone in the traditional media to fire a broadside at the blogosphere.

The problem with these attacks -- the latest from Michael Skube of Elon University on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times -- is that they rarely seem to plow any new ground. Critics used to make similar riffs about the Internet itself: traditional media pleading that we had to hold back the 'Net barbarians at the gates, when we were already inside having a beer. Now we're seeing the same kind of rants against the blogosphere.

That's not to say they don't make valid points. I liked what Skube wrote about bloggers' lack of doubt about their opinions. It does sometimes seem that bloggers can have their own little cults of personality.

My own bugaboo about bloggers is that I think sometimes physical isolation can lead to cultural and political nearsightedness. I would love to see "newsrooms" for bloggers in various cities.

I know, I know, there are lots of "virtual" places where this happens, and it's easier to arrange. Those are good, too. But I'm talking about a physical place where they could regularly throw ideas at each other before they actually go out and publish them online. One of things I enjoy the most about this job is tossing around ideas with the editors and reporters I work with.

We've heard all the old arguments about blogging, so I want to hear fresh criticism or praise. Got any?

5:46 PM ET | 08-20-2007 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post

Tonight We Pull the Plug on the 30-Second Ad

I'm sure you wouldn't dare miss Friday Night Smackdown on the CW tonight, but be careful not to rush to the bathroom during the breaks. Tonight, we bid farewell and good riddance to the 30-second ad.

The video game company Electronic Arts will debut 10-second ads in the program. Which matches up with the attention span of the teenage audience they hope to reach.

But there's something serious going on here. The CW network calls them "cwickies" and hopes to sneak these ads in before you can reach for the remote. And just to totally throw you off your fast-forwarding rhythm, the company will have a 90-second ad at the end of the program. Ad Age points out how revolutionary this is:

Model-busting ad ideas, such as the cwickies and "content wraps" -- CW's series of long ads placed over the course of a single night -- do something that gives network executives the willies. They make one marketer's commercials more memorable than others airing in the same program, threatening to ruin a decades-old ad system. In the past, one TV ad had as good a chance as any to get noticed. Now, as the old saying goes, some ads are becoming more equal than others.

Thank God. It's hard to believe that the 30-second spot has gone unchallenged this long in a revolutionary media environment. And who knows what's next? Advertisers have already floated some other ideas: company logos dancing on the bottom of your CSI episode, split-screen ads during Grey's Anatomy. In order to save TV, sounds like they are willing to destroy it.

- Robert Smith

1:26 PM ET | 08-10-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

We're Still Trying to Deal with 'Data Smog'

Slate has posted an interesting retrospective from David Shenk about his famous book, Data Smog.

Back in 1997, Shenk wrote that, thanks to the information revolution spawned by the Internet, we were in danger of being overwhelmed by too much information. Now, 10 years later, Shenk finds that, while he was just plain wrong about some of his concerns, his main theme has proven all too real. We are increasingly struggling with too much data and how to process it -- "a nonstop orgy of connectedness that can sometimes crowd out tenderness and meaning."

Shenk's reflections were posted Wednesday, the same day that I interviewed Josh Ehrlich of BeamPines in New York, who works with top-level executives on just this "data smog" issue -- how to avoid being overwhelmed by technology when you're trying to lead an organization.

His job is to help business leaders learn to turn off technology's siren call, so that it won't distract them from important issues. (Ehrlich's profession probably wouldn't have even existed before data smog came into our lives.) It's tough because, as he says, Americans are not that good at being able to sit back and reflect. He says it's important to learn do this in external and in internal ways.

"We have to change the environment," he told me. If focus is needed for an important task, "turn off the computer screen or the TV or the BlackBerry. And then internally, we have to discipline our minds to slow down."

He recommends taking in a "mindful" breath, to borrow an idea from Buddhism. When the cell phone rings or the instant message comes in, pause a moment to decide if you want to interrupt what you're doing to answer, and then take a deep breath to help you shift away from the previous task and focus on the new one.

The trick is, he says (and I love this line), don't get on every thought train. "You have to control your own attention and not let the technology control it."

2:55 PM ET | 07-26-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Family Finds Not Buying Chinese Products Difficult

As I drove my son to his summer camp this morning, we listened to a Morning Edition story about a family that spent a year trying not to buy products made in China.

Sara Bongiorni, a business writer, turned her family's experiences into a book, A Year Without "Made in China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy. In it, she details her problems buying things like tennis shoes or a new coffee pot.

Even before I heard about the family's difficulties avoiding Chinese products, I anticipated them. The domination of our lives by Made in China is overwhelming. Not just the pet food and toothpaste that we've heard so much about lately, but toys, computers, clothes, cell phones, birthday candles, shoes, you name it. You can't escape that label.

As my son and I listened to the story, he asked why it made a difference where these things are made. So I gave him my personal answer: A lot of these goods from China are manufactured in conditions that we would find horrible. Safety is often ignored to save money. And more than a few of these goods are made using prison labor.

He nodded. Then he asked, so why don't people stop buying things from China? That brought us back to the Bongiorni family's experience. You can try to do it, but it's more expensive and takes more time. And if there are two things that matter to American consumers, it's time and price. We want it now, and we want it cheap.

2:45 PM ET | 07-18-2007 | permalink | comments (31) | e-mail post

Living in "Snitchtown"

Forbes has a cool package this week on 21st century cities. It talks about slums, defends sprawl, a whole bunch of stuff. But the piece I really found interesting is titled "Snitchtown" by Cory Doctorow. For those of you who don't know, he's one of those really smart, prolific guys that you almost want to hate because of it. He's the co-editor of BoingBoing, writes science fiction books, teaches college courses, is active in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, etc.

His piece in Forbes argues that there is a basic social contract to living in cities:

The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social animal in tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not seeing. You take care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of you on the way out of the subway, and you might take passing note of her most excellent handbag. But you don't make eye contact and exchange a nod. Or even if you do, you make sure that it's as fleeting as it can be.

Checking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but staring and pointing at the schmuck next to you who's got his finger so far up his nostril he's in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad form--worse form than picking your nose, even.

That makes sense to me. I was riding the subway this morning and sat next to a large man. The seats were small enough that we were pressed up against each other, leg to leg, which in almost any other circumstance would have been uncomfortably intimate. But we successfully ignored each other's presence: I with my newspaper, he with his Spanish Bible. We were in separate realities, a shared social convention that lets us ride the train each day.

But I disagree with Doctorow when he argues that closed-circuit television cameras violate this agreed-upon social contract:

Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you."

Doctorow goes on to point out that these cameras are anything but effective: everyone ignores them, criminals go uncaught and the cameras only serve to violate our privacy. While I also think the cameras accomplish very little, I guess I see the nature of privacy itself changing. With recording equipment and storage getting cheaper and cheaper, it's inevitable that basically just about everything you do will be caught by some recording device and be available on the Web. Some folks are even trying to do it themselves, a trend that some are calling "Life Caching" -- storing everything you do, see and listen to.

Privacy, in my mind, will soon be protected not because it's not being recorded, but because everything is being recorded by everyone, including you. Your privacy will exist in plain sight, along with everyone else's, and be just as lost in the morass of information. Call it the "Purloined Letter" theory of privacy.

- JJ Sutherland

12:33 PM ET | 06-13-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Multimillionaire: Environmental Hero or 'Heritage' Thief?

After writing about U.S. diplomacy in the last post, here's a look at how an individual American is being received for his "good deeds" in South America.

Douglas Tompkins is a man who changed the way America dresses -- not once but twice, according to a 2004 U.S. News & World Report story. As a ski bum, he started The North Face, and after selling that business in 1968, he helped his then-wife, Susie, start the Esprit clothing label.

The Associated Press reports that Tompkins has used his wealth to buy huge areas of land in Chile and Argentina, saying his purpose is to protect it. In Argentina, for instance, he bought half a million acres of the Esteros del Ibera, a marshland full of wildlife. He has left the area untouched and says he eventually plans to turn it over to the government as a land sanctuary -- the same promise he made about his land in Chile. (The government there gave his land sanctuary status in 1995.)

But local politicians, business leaders and even farmers are complaining that he has stolen their land and heritage. Conservative Chilean senator Antonio Horvath asked in an article in the New Statesman earlier this year how Americans would feel if Horvath bought a huge section of land in Florida and then told Floridians they couldn't go there. "I think the U.S. would kick me right out of there."

Tompkins told AP that he intends to keep his promise and return the land to both governments to be preserved. He will, however, hold onto it for now "as a very good example of what private conservation can do." Maybe the locals would appreciate Tompkins more in the meantime if he offered to help them start their own brand of brightly colored, easy-to-wear clothing...

4:47 PM ET | 06-11-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

How Our Media Choices Reinforce What We Believe

A comment posted in response to Wednesday's post on American Muslims pointed out that 60 percent of those surveyed said they didn't believe Arabs were involved in the Sept. 11 attack.

That's an interesting point to note from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press' report on American Muslims, which overall showed the group is mostly mainstream. I would like to venture the theory that part of the reason this belief persists is that we choose media that reinforces our personal beliefs about world events, whether right or wrong, and that helps us to continue to believe them even if they are disproved.

Many Arab-Americans watch Arab-language satellite channels that originate in the Middle East. These channels often interview politicians, religious leaders or commentators who promote the view that Arabs had nothing to do with the attack. That makes it easier not to believe that people from a similar background would commit such a horrendous act.

Or take another example -- the belief that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were working together before the Sept. 11 attack and Iraq was involved in the attack.

These perceptions have been discounted by many sources: the CIA, the 9/11 Commission and declassified Defense Department documents to name three. Yet according to a poll taken in March 2006 by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, 49 percent of Americans still believed that Saddam's Iraq was involved in the attacks or gave substantial support to al-Qaida.

And the media connection? In a study in late 2003, the Maryland program found that media choices directly affected the way people viewed three myths about the Iraq war, including "There's clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists."

Eighty percent of Fox News viewers were likely to hold one of the three incorrect beliefs identified in the study. Seventy-one percent of those who relied on CBS for news held a false impression, as did 61 percent of ABC's audience and 55 percent of NBC viewers. Fifty-five percent of CNN viewers and 47 percent of Americans who rely on the print media as their primary source of information also held at least one misperception. Twenty-three percent of the NPR/PBS audience held one of the three incorrect beliefs.

The report attributed the results to several factors. For instance, supporters of the war in Iraq were more likely to hold one of the misperceptions. So it would appear that many war supporters turned to Fox News, which had the highest percentage of viewers with misperceptions, to find support for their assumptions about Saddam and al-Qaida.

5:41 PM ET | 05-24-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

The Fall and Rise Of John Ashcroft

Jonah Goldberg has, as they say, hit the nail on the head. Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online writes that he is amazed by the way former Attorney General John Ashcroft has been redeemed in the eyes of official Washington because of one simple act -- he said no to Alberto Gonzales.

In 2001, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) led the Democratic opposition to Ashcroft's nomination, casting Ashcroft as a terrifying religious zealot lacking the integrity, temperament and racial "sensitivity" to be attorney general. Last week, Schumer saluted Ashcroft's "fidelity to the rule of law." The liberal Web site Wonkette praised Ashcroft's "heroic stand." ... Ashcroft's rehabilitation was sealed by a Washington Post story about how the former AG was often the only firebreak against the Bush White House. Even Ralph Neas, the hyperpartisan president of People for the American Way, managed to mumble to the Washington Post that Gonzales had managed to make Ashcroft look like a "defender of the Constitution."

It made me think of my dad, who worked in politics for much of his life. He once told me about the "six-month rule" -- the public never remembers what happened more than six months ago. Anybody can be redeemed if they just wait long enough.

Richard Nixon did it ... twice. Barry Goldwater. Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton. Now John Ashcroft. It'll be interesting to see what people think about George W. Bush six months after he's left office.

5:08 PM ET | 05-23-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

The Debate Over the GOP Debate

I sure wouldn't want to be Ron Paul these days. The GOP congressman came under the full glare of the media spotlight this week after he was accused of saying America invited the Sept. 11 attacks at Tuesday's GOP debate in South Carolina. But now some people are questioning that interpretation of his remarks.

Media Matters looks at how Paul's comments about the role U.S. foreign policy plays in the Middle East were questioned by Fox News co-moderator Wendell Goler and then, it says, "distorted" by fellow candidate Rudy Giuliani.

Paul first said that terrorists had attacked the U.S. because "we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East." Goler then asked if he meant that the U.S. "invited" the attack. Paul responded, "I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it." Giuliani then called Paul's remarks "an extraordinary statement ... that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq."

During a post-debate interview, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Paul: "Are you suggesting the United States of America caused the attack on 9-11?" Paul replied: "No, I think that's a cop-out." Hannity then asked: "Are you suggesting that our policies are causing the hatred of people that would cause them to want to kill us?" Paul responded: "I think it contributes significantly to it, and this is exactly what our CIA tells us."

The 9/11 Commission, in fact, also made the same point.

Media Matters particularly singles out CNN's American Morning program on May 16 for perpetuating the idea that Paul said America invited the attacks and not mentioning the clarifications he made about his remarks.

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic's Daily Dish argues that the reaction to Paul's comments, "that he's cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs," shows the intellectual fear gripping the GOP about discussing the war on terror.

2:41 PM ET | 05-18-2007 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post

Journalists Die in Iraq Attack, Cameroon Plane Crash

I have to be honest about something. When I hear that a journalist has been killed in the line of duty, I always feel a bit queasy for two reasons: It hits closer to home when it's somebody in your line of work -- you wonder if you know or have worked with the person. Or worse, if it's a friend. Then, however, I also get an uncomfortable feeling when I draw focus to the journalist's story when he or she is not the only one killed at the time. This is especially true when we focus on the Westerners killed and gloss over other victims like so much driftwood.

In Anthony Mitchell's case, his story is certainly worth telling. Mitchell was an Associated Press reporter well-known for his work in Africa.

Mitchell made global headlines last month with his in-depth investigation into the illegal detention and transfer of terror suspects from Kenya to Somalia and eventually into Ethiopian prisons. His work forced U.S. and Ethiopian officials to acknowledge a program that until then had led to the secret detention of dozens of people, including women and children.

Human rights groups praised the story, which won an internal AP award for breaking news, but it was stridently criticized by the Ethiopian government as coming from an "ivory tower" where the war on terror was not understood. It was not the first time Mitchell's stories angered Ethiopian authorities.

Still, Mitchell was only one of 114 people from more than 20 nations killed when a Kenyan airliner crashed in the Cameroon jungle over the weekend. Many families, most of them African, are mourning their losses today.

In Iraq, six U.S. soldiers and an embedded reporter were killed Sunday by an IED explosion in the province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. The Russian news agency Itar-Tass reports the reporter killed was Russian news photographer Dmitry Chebotayev, who had worked with several news outlets.

But they were not the only ones killed in Iraq Sunday. Here is a report from McClatchy on others in Iraq who also died Sunday.

Dhiya Abu Mohammed ran to check on his son when he heard the booms of two car bombs resonate near his house in the Shiite neighborhood of Bayaa. Pools of blood covered the pavement in the marketplace and outside a bus station. Fruits, vegetables and body parts covered the road, and Abu Mohammed wept as he rushed to help the wounded into pickup trucks.

In one minibus, a mother and her two daughters were dead, the children still clutching their teddy bears. Sprawled on the road was a bleeding pregnant woman, shrapnel piercing her belly.

1:19 PM ET | 05- 7-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post