i L i n d . n e t

Okay, at 5 a.m. it still seemed like it was Monday, hence the erroneous title that greeted earlier readers. Thanks to the alert reader who hit me on the side of the head a while ago. The error has subsequently been corrected.

Today’s Washington Post reports on the growing use of YouTube by politicians and interest groups courting public opinion and, indirectly, the attention of decision makers. It’s a brave new electronic world out there.

Advertiser Editor Mark Platte had a Sunday column that raised a more serious question than the one it was intended to answer. Platte was apparently responding to readers who wondered why the newspaper gave so much attention to “The Bachelor” television show, and he explains how the Advertiser tried to balance its coverage.

Fair enough. But then Platte goes on:

From the beginning, dealing with ABC was not going to be fun and indeed, they put many restrictions on Baldwin, dictating when he could talk and what he could talk about. What made coverage difficult is that Baldwin kept contacting us but ABC was telling us we had no approval to interview him.

For instance, even though Baldwin was in our office and we shot video of him, we could not use any of it because of his agreement with the network. We weren’t concerned with ABC, but we did not want Baldwin to get tossed off the show before it began. It was clear that Baldwin wanted the publicity — he was appearing at functions all over town — but was having issues with ABC and the limitations they wanted to place on him.

What I don’t understand here is why the Advertiser yielded so willingly to ABC’s restrictions when it had what it considered a newsworthy topic and a willing source.

Reporters often deal with sources who, according to their employers or superiors, are not supposed to talk. Generally, I think it’s fair to say that if a source is willing and telling the truth, then they’re fair game as news. Would this bachelor have been fired had the Advertiser proceeded with its interview? Unknown. Was that the Advertiser’s problem to the extent that it controlled coverage? I’m not convinced.

I ran into an interesting article in quite an interesting source. The article is a book review of an account of a CIA intelligence analyst battling to get the Agency to get it right during the Vietnam War. The review conveys a sense of the political terrain involved in the kind of behind-the-scenes battle that happened during Vietnam and again before and during the current war in Iraq. The source–a set of unclassified articles based on classified studies appearing in Volume 50, No. 4 of the CIA’s “Studies in Intelligence, Journal of the American Intelligence Professional.” A fascinating read.

I took this photo of Ms. Annie over the weekend. She is perched on top of our television, one of the reasons that we haven’t migrated to one of those cool new thin LCD models that lack any cat landing zone. We have nightmares of cats pulling the whole thing over while scrambling up and trying to get a foothold. In any case, behind Annie is a small oil painting looking up the street next to the Kaaawa fire station towards our house and the mountains beyond. It was painted by Kaaawa artist Rebekeh Luke soon after we moved out here in 1988.