From CNN today:

The founder of the U.S. Christian Coalition [Pat Robertson] said Tuesday he told President George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq that he should prepare Americans for the likelihood of casualties, but the president told him, “We’re not going to have any casualties.”

I hope Kerry goes big with this, along with Bush’s statement that he’s not too concerned about Bin Laden. Daddy Bush may not have known how much a quart of milk costs, but sonny-boy’s fiction-based presidency is getting us killed.

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When you come down to it, Jon Stewart’s segment on Crossfire was actually sort of lame. He told the hosts that they’re playing into the hands of the politicians and corporations, but he didn’t tell them how. He called them hacks but didn’t explain in what sense. He said they were degrading democracy but not what an alternative might be. When people replay this segment in ten or fifty years, they’ll wonder why it mattered.

Nevertheless, I believe this was a seminal moment in the re-framing of the media. To be precise, the moment came when Stewart refused to be Tucker Carlson’s funny “monkey.” Now who’s the entertainer and who’s the seeker?

“The outing of Cross Fire is an underground hit,” as Jock Gill says. The fact that Stewart’s appearance was lame and yet so powerful is evidence of just how important his appearance was. We are so desperate to hear someone say the simple truth: The mainstream media is as unknowing about itself as a 14-year-old admiring himself in a mirror, convinced his new haircut makes him cool.

And then Jock connects this, correctly IMO, to the fate of the “master narrative.” Jock points to one important feature of the new framing that’s developing: We are beginning to view ourselves as the media. “We the Media,” as Dan Gillmor says it in the title of his book.

But Stewart’s got it even right-er. In fact, Jock puts it well in the title of his blog piece, taken from Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man“: “Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is … [sneer] do you, Mr. Jones?” (Damn you, Jock! That’s the cliche I was going to use for the title of this piece!) The new frame that’s developing, I believe, isn’t just that we are the media. It’s that the media are the last to know.

That’s why Stewart is the perfect messenger: The media are in the business of telling us what’s going on, but it turns out they don’t have any idea what’s going on with themselves. Now that’s funny!

And so the old framing will end not with a bang but with a giggle.

(And so blog entries will end not with a thought but with a cliche.)

Does anyone have a contact at The Daily Show? If so, can you suggest that they get Jay Rosen as a guest so he can talk about master narratives? (And, yes, I know I’ve used the phrase loosely in this piece.)

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Chuck Olsen’s Blogumentary about blogging is being shown as part of the Get Real festival on Nov. 5 at 7pm in Minneapolis. I haven’t seen it yet, but Chuck did send me a link to this clip which not coincidentally shows me. He informs me that this was shortly before, through the magic of digital editing, I’m crushed by Chris Locke in a Godzilla suit.

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Natalie Davis (GratefulDread) is leading a workshop in Boston on “Blogging for Women and Girls” November 13 and 14. Here’s a snippet from description:

Blogging is emerging a powerful opinion-making force, but though the technology is fairly cheap and widely available, most blogs are still written by men. This workshop will teach women and girls the basics of blogging, from the technical aspects of blog publishing and maintenance, to developing a personal voice, style, and area of focus, to how to drive traffic to your blog. (At Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston)

Admission requires submitting a written statement by October 22. See the Center for New Words site for details.

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The Washington Post has an article on the followup to Jon Stewart’s blurting out the truth on CNN’s Crossfire.

Note: While the Washington Post article is quite amusing, it avoids blurting out the truth: Crossfire, as Stewart puts it, “blows.”

(Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.)

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Here’s a part of the world — Somaliland — I knew nothing about, but, now, thanks to this blog, I know at least a little. Ah, the power of a single voice.

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US citizen Ilya Mafter has been detained by the Belarusians for committing the crime of Voice over IP. The government says that he caused about US$100,000 in damage to the country’s telephony providers ” as a result of illegal communications services using IP telephony that were organized by Mafter.”

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The Next Billion conference raised one question above all others (and thanks to Ethan Zuckerman for pointing this out): Will the companies feeding the world its first billion cell phones be the ones to provide the next billion? The answer seems to be no; the markets and its needs and the necessary business models are just too different.

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Roxanne Roberts, Style columnist for the Washington Post, writes about the art of making small talk, and, oddly, cites me. Her three rules:

1. Shut up and listen.

2. When in doubt, repeat Rule 1.

3. People, even the really shy ones, like to talk about themselves and will do so if you know how to draw them out. You have to be genuinely interested. You have to check your ego. If this is done right, they walk away thinking you’re great.

Sounds right, unless, of course, the person has also internalized Roxanne’s first two rules.

Roxanne interviewed me because in a previous issue of my newsletter, I defended small talk. I appreciate the mention. But I have one small correction that matters to nothing but my vanity. Roxanne writes: “Weinberger says he didn’t become skilled at making small talk until he was 40…” Not quite. I am still bad at small talk. Those who have met me will attest to the awkward silences and the extended bouts of conversational twitching. What I actually told Roxanne is that until I was in my 40s — embarrassingly late — I had totally the wrong idea about how to talk with people I don’t know. I would talk about something interesting to me instead of trying to find what was interesting to the other person. D’oh. But “skilled at small talk”? Just ask the person whose shoes I’ve been inspecting.

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I was on a panel with Ethan Zuckerman and Colin Maclay (moderated by John Palfrey) about the obstacles to spreading VoIP connectivity. We spent most of our time talking about Ethan’s opening statement in which he said that if you want to get VoIP into developing nations, you’re probably going to have to compromise a little. For example, he’s proposed to Ghana that they tax calls outside of the country in order to give a small and temporary subsidy to entice providers to provide access to rural areas. The group here apparently doesn’t like the idea of any subsidies. Ethan doesn’t particularly like them either. His point was that systems are being put into existing infrastructures that are typically over-regulated and that are not going to go overnight to no regulation. (Ethan, if I get this wrong, please correct me!) [I personally am a liberal and not a pure free market extremist like many here, so I’m not always against subsidies.]

Judith Meskill has blogged will be blogging the session.

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