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Stretching credulity

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Surprise, surprise. Just as a surge of public disquiet mounts over our internet giants failing to respect our privacy and the security of our personal information, those giants move to be reassuring. It’s the forthcoming Congressional hearings on the matter, highlighted in THE MEDIA BEAT last week, that seem to have gotten the giants to act now.

The Goliath even among the giants, Microsoft (that all-too-familiar triumphant logo, far left) has announced that even though it will start this Fall what’s known as “third-party ad-serving” - that is, allowing advertisements to be directed at users on the basis of what information has been gathered about their internet habits through the use of so-called “spyware” - it will nonetheless offer consumers the chance to opt out of receiving those targeted ads. Well thank you, Microsoft.

 

In a further act of astonishing generosity, Microsoft is to set our minds at rest by making all search query data totally anonymous. After, that is, a period of 18 months.

 

Microsoft says it will, after such time has elapsed, stop keeping information about your and my net searches – by removing from its records all “cookie” identifications, our internet providers’ address, and the other kinds of detail that can mark out each one of us as an identifiable individual computer-user.

 

Those nice guys at Google, too (sorry to harp on it, though everybody does, but they must really now be regretting that “Do No Evil” placard they initially hung around their own necks) have similarly promised to automatically erase all user-identity markers and trackers – but in this case it’s after two years.

 

Just one problem occurs to me. The Google people caution that their cookie records will be deleted unless the user returns to a previously visited Google site within the two-year period (my italics); in such an occurrence the clock on a cookie file's lifespan will be re-set to zero. Given the number of times we all use Google, and the number of sites we'll visit, surely this is a recipe for the cookie to live pretty well forever, isn’t it?

 

 

 

MORE FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF NEAT TIMING. Just as I was protesting (doth protest too much, perhaps?) the undeserved hype surrounding David Frost’s famous interviews with Richard Nixon, the Random House imprint Harmony pitches a new book into the argument.

 

The source of my discomfort, you’ll know, has been the insupportable claim, repeatedly aired by publicists for the Broadway play FROST/NIXON and by others, that the 1997 interviews drove Nixon to an admission of guilt for his crimes against the nation and - still more exaggeratedly - to an apology to that aggrieved nation.

 

The book comes from James Reston Jr (above center), son of the New York Times’ late, great James “Scotty” Reston, who is an effective popular historian and a moving memoirist but who back in ‘97 was a specialist researcher on the Frost production team. I'm afraid his book’s title pushes rash claims for those interviews to new and questionable heights (or depths) of over-reach. The title is “The Conviction of Richard Nixon”.

 

Yes. Conviction.

 

Leaving aside the compositional merits or demerits of the book (the playwright Peter Morgan, who constructed his play largely out of Reston’s manuscript, disloyally described it as “quite unreadable”) I profess myself to be stunned by Reston’s assessment of the interviews’ effect.

 

For him (as in the play) the crunch point comes where Nixon - after being wrong-footed by some nimbleness from Frost, using previously unappreciated but incriminating material from the White House tapes that was creditably researched by Reston - finally says: “I let the American people down”.

 

In the book Reston calls this exchange “the final success” and says “I found it thoroughly satisfying”.

 

I would not have. (As I think I've made clear before in THE MEDIA BEAT.)

 

Reston’s introduction, written this year – unlike the book’s main text, which was compiled back at the time of the interviews – builds to a climax (of triumph, I suppose) when he concludes by quoting another Nixon line spoken to Frost. “I have impeached myself”. And this truncated expression is emblazoned on the book-jacket too.

 

Too bad Reston didn’t quote the rest of Nixon’s statement, which was reinforced at the time by Frost’s supplementary question:

 

FROST: How do you mean, ‘I have impeached myself’?

 

NIXON: By resigning.

 

Though Reston frequently reminds us that Nixon feverishly applied his lawyer’s mind throughout the tapings, he seems to forget (as we know the legalistic Nixon did not) that “impeach” means to accuse or to charge an office-holder, not to convict.

 

No way was Nixon ever – here or anywhere else – admitting that he was guilty.

 

Two-a-penny are the office-holders, private or public, who have resigned when accused of wrong-doing, and successfully managed to avoid ever being held accountable for their crime.

 

 

 

ALBERTO GONZALES’ RETURN FOR MORE HUMILIATION before the Senate Judiciary Committee has once again brought to the fore that doyenne of legal correspondents, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio.

 

Totenberg has gotten some bad press herself lately, at least in journalism’s own gossip sheets, electronic and otherwise. Stories are being put about of her high-handedness toward colleagues and rivals, especially on the Supreme Court press benches.

 

This doesn’t square with what NPR co-workers tell me about her (I confess complete personal disinterest since I’ve never met or worked with her) and it’s certainly belied by her conduct in recent days, which for me has put her into, at a minimum, the “good sport” league.

 

The public network’s comedy quiz program, very loosely based on the week’s news, Wait, Wait - Don’t Tell Me achieved a notable “get” in snagging as star guest federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald – who is notoriously loath to make media appearances, still less do interviews. (The show is aired from his home town of Chicago, and apparently he simply wanted tickets to attend; he was successfully ambushed by the producers, or forced at least to barter).

 

Totenberg’s role in this? As the network’s chief judicial expert, she recorded a droll broadcast message for the Scooter-convictor, spluttering mock dismay that the Special Counsel should favor “these jerks” at Wait Wait.

 

It’s just a coincidence, but the same day I heard an NPR promotional spot that my regular local public station doesn’t normally carry. Among the gee-jaws offered by the revenue-raising NPR Shop, alongside the Morning Edition Coffee Mug (of course) and the All Things Considered Teeshirt (come again?) there is also, I now know, a capacious canvas sack called The Nina Totin’ Bag (above right).

 

Whatever the snarks may say, this legal eagle evidently has a sense of humor.