CBS Snookered
It's official: CBS now says it was "deliberately misled" by fake documents. They haven't said they're sorry for being so snobbish about new media.
Dynamist Blog
Badvertising
Every time I'm in DFW Airport, I see Accenture's ad featuring Tiger Woods and think, "Wow. That is a stupid ad." Steve Yastrow, writing on the Tom Peters blog, agrees: "Somehow, I don't think that the kinds of businesses Accenture wants as clients will be motivated when told to 'Be a Tiger.'" Accenture, naturally, portrays the ads as wonderful. But Steve suggests a plausible mixed motive for the campaign.
Test-Driving Beds
Today's WaPost features a longish piece on baby boomers' demand for better beds and fancy bedding. The most interesting part reports on hotels as places to try, and in some cases buy, bed-and-bath amenities:
The Heavenly Bed, for example, is one example of a partnership between the Simmons Corp., which began selling 95-cent mattresses made with coils in 1876, and Westin Hotels, owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts.
In four years, Westin hotels in the United States and Canada have sold former guests 4,000 of the "Heavenly Bed" setups, which cost about $3,000 for an entire ensemble; and 30,000 of its feather pillows ($65 to $75 each). During a recent sales promotion, "the phones were ringing off the hooks," said Bill Yetman, director of sales and marketing for the two Westins in Washington.
Sheraton Hotels, also part of Starwood, sells its Sweet Sleeper beds and bedding to former guests through a toll-free telephone number. And Tempur-Pedic has its own partnerships. Its Web site sends potential customers to a selection of hotels around the country -- the Hyatt Regency in Washington, plus two Holiday Inn properties in Fredericksburg and Williamsburg -- where they can buy themselves a night of sleep on the foam mattress.
This relatively new kind of symbiosis allows hotel guests to "test drive" products from beds to lighting to showerheads to hand lotions -- and then buy the products for their homes. It also allows companies to pitch their products in a relaxed and sometimes luxurious atmosphere.
About four years ago, Moen Inc. asked the Marriott Courtyard across the street from its North Olmsted, Ohio, headquarters to let the faucet company test out its Revolution Massaging Showerhead in some of the guest rooms. Consumer reaction was so positive, the company said, that the hotel asked Moen to let it sell the showerhead right at the front desk before it was released to the market at large. The Revolution was introduced through Home Depot stores in late 2001.
Upcoming Appearances
Next week, I'll be speaking in New York City on Monday evening and Morristown, New Jersey, at Tuesday lunch. On September 28, I'll be giving an evening speech in Dallas. Click here for details on these and other future appearances.
The Variety Revolution
My NPR commentary on "the variety revolution" aired Thursday on All Things Considered. An audio link is here. The text is here.
Pajama Blog Thought of the Night
In Memoriam: Aaron Director
The WaPost has published a fascinating obituary of economist Aaron Director, who died at 102. Although he didn't publish lots of articles, Director had enormous influence on his students and colleagues and is often considered the pivotal figure in the Chicago School--though his brother-in-law, Milton Friedman, is, of course, its most famous representative. (Via Pejmanesque.) The University of Chicago's fuller obit--minus the fun stuff about Mark Rothko--is here.
Putin's Power Grab
Vladimir Putin's oh-so-convenient use of the school massacre to consolidate power reminds me of this rightly famous InstaPundit post from 9/11:
It's Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new "Antiterrorism" legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats' wish lists. They will be things that wouldn't have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That's what happened in 1996. Let's not let it happen again.
Some things are too predictable.
Voters with Dementia
The WaPost's Shankar Vedantam reports on a difficult legal dilemma: Should people who've lost their minds to Alzheimer's or other dementia be able to vote, particularly when they're concentrated in swing states like Florida?
Florida neurologist Marc Swerdloff was taken aback when one of his patients with advanced dementia voted in the 2000 presidential election. The man thought it was 1942 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The patient's wife revealed that she had escorted her husband into the booth.
"I said 'Did he pick?' and she said 'No, I picked for him,' " Swerdloff said. "I felt bad. She essentially voted twice" in the Florida election, which gave George W. Bush a 537-vote victory and the White House.
As swing states with large elderly populations such as Florida gear up for another presidential election, a sleeper issue has been gaining attention on medical, legal and political radar screens: Many people with advanced dementia appear to be voting in elections -- including through absentee ballot. Although there are no national statistics, two studies in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island found that patients at dementia clinics turned out in higher numbers than the general population
About 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia. Florida alone has 455,000 patients, advocates estimate.
While it's easy to say patients with dementia shouldn't be able to vote, the story makes clear how difficult drawing such lines would be. But reports like that do start to enforce a social stigma: You are a bad citizen if you are voting twice by taking advantage of your loved one's or client's dementia.
Hayekian Fact-Checking
Hayek scholar Steven Horwitz applies "competition as a discovery process" to the role of blogs in checking traditional media. Here's one paragraph from the piece:
None of this should be surprising to those of us raised on Hayek. After all, this is nothing more than the intellectual version of "Competition as a Discovery Procedure." Or better yet, it is Michael Polanyi's work on "The Republic of Science" transferred to current events. Even in the blogosphere, the commentary has talked about the "distributed intelligence" of the Net, or "open source journalism," or even the "hive mind" (a bit too Borg-ish for my taste, but it makes the point). The Hayekian lesson is that it is through the ability to enter the market and compete that knowledge gets created and made socially available to others. Just as in economic competition, where the process will tend to allocate resources better than alternative processes, so in the competition to produce news does the process tend to produce the best approximation to "truth." Markets are in that way examples of liberty defeating power. The very openness and competitiveness of markets makes any momentary hold on power tenuous, requiring that those who possess it continually act affirmatively (e.g. innovating, serving consumers well) to keep it. CBS and other Big Media simply have never had to face this sort of environment before and have become sloppy as a result.
In case you missed them, traditional journalists (and, remember, I am one) are starting to dig around on the forgery story--and are finding CBS's professional standards wanting. Here's the USA Today piece and here's the Baltimore Sun.
Good journalists care intensely about avoiding mistakes, and, despite all the blogosphere media bashing, there are a lot of good journalists. (You tend to notice the ones who get stuff wrong, for obvious reasons.) Reporting is a hard job, much harder than it looks from the outside. Digging out stuff people don't want you to know--not my sort of journalism at all--is particularly difficult. But even routine feature writing or explanatory journalism is a bit of a high-wire act. By definition, you know less than your sources. The profession has, after all, been called "getting your education in public," which is one thing I love about it. But every time I write a Times column, I worry that I've gotten something wrong. The editing process can catch some errors, but not ones that require a great knowledge of the subject. For that, I have to be careful and then hope that when the article hits print neither my sources nor some Hayekian fact checker out there in reader land finds something factually wrong. (Interpretations are another matter; there, reasonable plausibility is the standard, not certainty.) Fortunately, I have a good track record--in large part because I'm paranoid about making mistakes.