Free Republic

Ed’s absence was planned.

Have any of you ever paid attention to his daily guests? Invariably three Democratic members of Congress — usually Byron Dorgan — plus a lefty/labor/think tank person. It’s AWFUL radio.

The owner of the Forum is a Republican, yes, but he is hands-off. Has very little inter-action with the newsroom. Ed did use to be on WDAY, a Forum property, but he left.

He’s a jerk and a besotted bully. I wish only bad things for him.

Yeah, not worth the time.

I did slip, though. The Cuban commie-paper quoted Lindauer as praising those members of Congress who opposed U.S. policy vis a vis Iraq (not Cuba, as I wrote).

Hey, Castro's official newspaper thought she was great! From January 2003. Essentially it says she was the founder of a group, Citizens for Public Integrity, that praises 122 members of Congress who signed a letter protesting U.S. policy in Cuba. My Spanish isn't good enough to go beyond that.

Don't mention the war!

Yeah, I wondered about billig. I'll defer to any native speaker, obviously, but billig as cheap seemed too literal to me. And it really didn't make sense.

Germans love their sausage, their culture is peppered with a number of sausage-themed phrases. I bet "SPIEGEL ONLINE: Beleidigte Leberwurst?" is a play on the saying "Spiel nicht die beleidigte Leberwurst" which means "lighten-up" (literally "Don't play the part of the offended sausage".) Ah, that makes sense! Thanks. (Wasn't in my dictionary; I need a Dudens.) Das ist mir wurscht = That's sausage to me = I don't care.

Spiegel p***** me off. Smug, anti-American, tendentious, and clueless. Did I mention smug? Really, more smug and lecturing than leftist.

They must have been outraged to have been screwed with.

As for "amis" and translations, I used "bloody Americans," 'cause it sounded foreign and only mildly insulting. Some things you can't translate exactly.

Anyway, hope to screw with 'em in the future.

Medienkritik, who started this all, has a translation of a FAZ-NET (online Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) commentary about the Internet sputterings over the Spiegel survey.

The Conservative Click Guerilla This is serious, and the tone that Spiegel uses to report on it is serious… “Help drive the left crazy,” is what the blog entry on the site “Little Green Footballs” called it, and David Kaspar of Davids Medienkritik is pleased: “The Bush-haters at “Spiegel Online” will have a heart attack tomorrow morning.” The editorial staff of “Spiegel Online,” that spearhead of the German left, has yet to report any health problems. … There they are wrinkling their foreheads – and writing not only about dirty tricks such as replacing the placards of one party with another by night while disrupting their public rallies by day with boos. Instead – “and not any less significant” – the falsification of internet polls. Such activities are apparently called “freeping” in America and “Spiegel Online” reports on these subversive activities with great seriousness and detail. At the same time, “Spiegel Online” certainly could have won-over some American supporters with a “ha, ha, okay you guys got us!” for an answer and left it at that.

Reasonably enough. P.S. FAZ is pretty conservative by German standards. A finance-oriented publication, with a cooperative agreement with the Wall Street Journal last time I looked.

You're welcome. I try to keep my German fresh by reading and translating, but the spoken language has gone all kaput. The man I honor, upper left.

"Amis" is not always a derogatory term.

Agreed. It can be the equivalent of Yanks. In this case, I think it was intended in a derogatory fashion, but I could be wrong.

You preview and preview and preview, and .... Antepenultimate paragraph should read:

The "attack" of the Freepers on the Spiegel-Online vote has, without exagerrating it, news value. If it were just this one case of one Vote, that news value would be limited. But in the case of the Freepers, it's about an organized group that engages in a massive undertaking, whereever they can, to manipulate "expressions of public opinion" like Votes.

"There are a lot of us, too"

The story about the Vote-manipulation by the users of a conservative U.S. website led to the manipulation of the manipulated votes -- and a massive readers response. While many greeted the "Vote War," others called for a more reasoned handling of Votes and expressions of opinion in online-journalism.

At 5 p.m. Monday, the "report card" Vote on the presidency of George W. Bush totaled 38,449 votes, 59.6 percent gave the U.S. President a "one" [the highest grade], about 13 percent gave him a "six" [the lowest].

These numbers in and of themselves demonstrated that something wasn't normal with the Vote. "Taken purely from a statistical standpoint," wrote Hans Wegener on Monday evening, "one could see that something was up with the above-mentioned survey. The division of votes with the maximum at one and six (a reverse bell curve) demonstrated that the voting had deteriorated into two groups. From this perspective, it's easy to surmise that a voting war had broken out among two extremes in the political spectrum."

That's indeed the way it looked, and, based on the Spiegel-Online article about the manipulation of the Bush-Vote by readers of the weblog "Davids Medienkritik" and the hard-core conservative U.S. website, "Free Republic," that's the way many saw it: as a challenge. "There are a lot of us too," one reader's letter declared. "We'll show those bloody Americans." [The term was "Amis," which is really the equivalent of calling Germans, Krauts.]

The results were there for all to see on Tuesday morning: At 9:25 a.m. the vote stood at 291,164, with 29.38 percent grading Bush with a "one," and 59.04 percent with a "six." We can freep too. And quod erat demonstrandum? [What has been demonstrated?]

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Stuffin' nonsense. [The idiom is "insulted liver sausage." Got me.]

Not a few readers perceived it this way: They regarded the publicizing of the Vote-manipulation as a knock-down rebuke against those who started the process. The driving motivation? Spiegel Online simply couldn't accept that a Vote would produce a result [a picture of public opinion] that didn't coincide with the "positioning " of their presumed readers. And that's OK, actually.

Others objected, saying that the whole incident demonstrated clearly that Votes are "not a serious tool," that one simply can't take seriously, are never representative -- and for that reason don't belong on a journalistic website: "What's more unspeakable? The counterfeiting of this vote or perhaps the vote itself, that could be nothing other than unrepresentative and should have no place in serious journalism?" (From a reader's letter by Stefan Kraemer.)

A minority criticized the critics of those whose behavior first led to the Vote-manipulation. In fact, they argued, the action's legitimate; you can't pre-select your readership. "Their voting didn't achieve the desired result," wrote one reader, Peter Kneer. "But to impute purposeful falsification by the voters is a sign of the leftist conception of democracy. A mature, engaged citizen is one who only carries his cross on the left."

So what's this all about?

Is it an ideological battle? About a tool, that deserves no place in "serious journalism?" About the attempt to correct a "false" portrayal of public opinion?

The overwhelming majority of letter writers were of the opinion that you shouldn't overvalue the worth of the Vote "tool." "As your 'Votes' note, I don't view this ballot as a representative picture of public opinion." (From a reader's letter submitted by Peter Kneer.)

Exactly.

And for that reason, this isn't about the correcting an account of some public opinion that the editors presumably couldn't accept for ideological reasons.

In online-journalism, these sorts of votes are an element of communication or interaction with the reader -- admittedly on a very formalized level. Many Votes are the kind of thing you'd see in the tabloids and send a signal that they're really not trying to be a representative survey of public opinion. They're "part of the fun." For a lot of people, this informal approach is too casual: One reader criticized a Vote, in which George W. Bush received school grades, for "reducing the president to the level of a schoolboy."

You can take it that way, but that's not the intention. In Germany, it's not unusual for surveys to rate politicians according to the system of report card grading. It has nothing to do with lack of respect, but rather with an uninhibited approach toward so-called authorities. Why should "all those people up there" be protected from having their achievements measured by their employers, the citizenry?

The basic question is and remains, why would one publicize a "vote manipulation" at all, or in the form of an article. "Can't you simply prevent this kind of manipulation?" many readers asked.

Of course you can.

You can factor out multiple votes that come from a single ISP number. You could simply filter out any votes that came from certain ISPs. You could attempt to ascertain where the voter came from before he set his hooks -- Davids Medientkritik and the Free Republic linked not to the original article, in which the vote could be found, but rather direct to the voter-interface. Spiegel-Online could have easily minimized the "false picture of opinion" and replaced it with a supposedly "desired one."

"Just ask yourself seriously this question," challenged reader Thomas Schröder. "How would you have reported it if Bush opponents had similarly rigged a survey on the White House or Fox's homepage?"

The answer to that is simple: Either exactly the same way or not at all. For there are only two notable thing pertaining to the topic we reported.

First: The fact that there are political groups that take things like Votes so seriously that, in service of their goals, their will reach out around the world in order to "make public opinion."

Second: The fact that these sorts of things happen, and can happen, with Votes -- and what sort of implication that has for their use in online-journalism.

The first point deserves journalistic coverage, yes, even if it were to affect another website (and yes, even if "left-wing" groups had "attacked a "right-wing" publication in the same way).

The second point one is more likely to address when it affects you directly. Those who sit in glass houses, shouldn't throw stones. To admit your vulnerabilities against it is, in fact, legitimate.

The "attack" of the Freepers on the Spiegel-Online vote has, with exagerrating it, news value. If it were just this one case of one Vote, that news value would be limited. But in the case of the Freepers, it's about an organized group that engages in a massive undertaking, whereever they can, to manipulate "expressions of public opinion" like Votes.

"Manipulative handling of the Internet for political purposes must be made public," reader Hans Wegener observes.

We agree entirely.

Oh brother. Forgive me if this has been posted already, but I'm in a rush, and wanted to make sure you folks saw it. It's the Spiegel's response to the back-freeping, which I guess would be to peerf. Wir sind doch auch viele Don't have time for full translation right now. Here's the last paragraph:

Der "Angriff" der Freeper auf ein Vote bei SPIEGEL ONLINE hat, ohne ihn überbewerten zu wollen, Nachrichtenwert. Ginge es nur um dieses eine Vote, wäre er gering. Im Fall der Freeper aber geht es um eine Gruppierung, die massiv versucht, wo immer sie kann, "Meinungsbilder" wie Votes zu manipulieren. "Manipulative Handhabung des Internet für politische Zwecke", meint Leser Hans Wegener, "muss öffentlich gemacht werden." Das sehen wir genau so.

Translation:

The "attack" of the Freepers against the Spiegel-ONLINE vote has, without overstating it, news value. If it were just this one Vote, it would be minimal. But in the case of the Freeper it is a question of an organized group that attempts massively, where ever possible, to manipulate the picture of public opinion, such as the Votes. "Manipulative handling of the Internet for political goals must be made clear to public (publicized)," reader Hans Wegener comments. We see it exactly so.

Criminy. The most blatant manipulators of public opinion are the mass media. Freepers are just fighting back. I noticed the author removed the hyperlink to his e-mail on this column, as opposed to the first piece. It may take some time, but if anyone's interested, I can revisit the translation this evening. The sanctimony is infuriating.

I wonder if they'll update their article with the swing back to anti-Bush, no doubt promoted much the same way. (Although it's just as likely European lefties are doing this, rather than lefty blogs.)

Free Republic == Freie Republik

So, they've been freiped. (sounds like friped)

Martial Monk is exactly right on every point. And I am so sorry for these children. (I've been on quite a few reservations over the years, and no, not to gamble.)

My ancestors used to live in a tribal society, but that was, oh, 1200 years ago. This social arrangement simply cannot function in a modern, Westernized world.

And yet, by dint of the treaty status of the tribes, faulty leadership, and powerful sentimental attachment to an antiquated culture, change will not come.

What the tribes need is perestroika, glasnost, and then, the collapse of the entire system that props them up.

But it will not happen.

Were I a religious man, I'd pray for them. Instead, I only sorrow.

Here are Ed's stations, as noted on www.kfgo.com

Here is the List of Stations carrying the Ed Schultz Show

KTOX / Needles CA
KNDK / Langdon ND
KBSR / Billings MT
KHDN / Hardin MT
KQLX / Lisbon ND
KQDJ / Jamestown ND
WAAM / Ann ARBOR MI
WSGW / Saginaw MI
KUGN / Eugene OR
WATA / Boone, NC
KBUR / Burlington IA

XM Satellite CH 166
Sirus Satellite CH 143

Oh, yeah, on Herr Schultz. http://southdakotapolitics.blogs.com features an Ed Schultz Watch, so if you want to catch up on his idiocies, that's a good place to start.

There have been good comments over the last couple of months here at freerepublic, too.

Of course!

Sorry. I'm being sloppy tonight.

Full article is not in English. The excerpt about NASCAR dads (the lower-case spelling is the German version) is my translation, also a bit sloppy.

Spiegel often translates its cover stories into English. I'll keep looking for it.

The whole story is simply exaggerated, painting an over-the-top picture of America in the throes of a culture war. That said, it gives Bush some due.

Sorry. Wrong link. Link to summary in German of the story, which was on the cover, is here. Full story was not online. Cover portrays Bush in cowboy fear, staring up fearfully, framed by the legs of a gun-slinger. Caption is "Five before 12 for George W. Bush."

Cover story of the latest Der Spiegel provides coverage of John Kerry pre-Super Tuesday, playing up Kerry's strengths. It's not quite as fawning as last week's Stern, but still clearly anti-Bush.

The story also has a weird analysis of Bush's supporters, the "neo-conservatives," which it defines as soccer moms and Nascar dads.

Anyway, I thought the cliched view of Nascar fans as southern racists was interesting and, yes, outrageous.