Busy 0

We were busy today in the greater software and hardware support sphere. The boss asked me to take a look at our website (“Frank, do you know HTML?” “I know HTML 3.0; I’m weak on HTML 4.0 and xml.” Then I showed him my website–with the swimming mermaid–and he said, “Take a look at the website.”)

So when I wasn’t answering phone calls from persons who had broken our application or couldn’t find Windows Explorer with both hands, I was diagramming the website to get a feel for it, using Dia. which is an Open Source flow-charting program.

(Almost all the software I use on my PC is open source. Slackware rocks.)

But I did get a chance to do a little reading over lunch, and I thought that Dan Froomkin’s column from yesterday is worth a glance. Note that Froomkin does not cover the White House; that is, he won’t be found at White House briefings and the like.

He covers coverage of the White House.

I guess in the geeky world that Opie and I inhabit, it would be referred to as Meta-Coverage.

On the dominant issue of our time, the president is in denial.

By most reliable accounts, three and a half years into the U.S. occupation, Iraq is in chaos — if not in a state of civil war, then awfully close. But President Bush insists it’s not so. White House Briefing

He says the people he talks to assure him that the press coverage about how bad things are in Iraq is not to be trusted.

You might think that the enormous gulf between Bush’s perceptions and reality on such a life-and-death topic would be, well, newsworthy. But if members of the Washington press corps consider it news at all, apparently it’s old news. They report Bush’s assertions about Iraq without noting that his fundamental assessment of the situation is dramatically contradicted by the reporting from their own colleagues on the ground.

And in the rare circumstances when they directly confront the president with observations that conflict with his own, they let it drop too quickly.