Happy Independence Day, folks.

And just to prove what we all already thought, newspaper management just has no sense of humor....

"...You can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon..."

Have fun!

This from Howard Kurtz's latest excellent 'Media Backtalk' online discussion:

Long Beach, Calif.: Does the fact that #10 Downing St. and the BBC are at each other's throats over Iraqi intelligence bending make our press look like poodles by comparison?

Howard Kurtz: I wrote a column about this recently after returning from a trip to London. I wouldn't use the poodle word, since some American reporters have done some hard digging on the WMD issue. But the way the British press relentlessly pounds Tony Blair over Iraqi weapons does make the American media look tame by comparison. This is in part because the war was more unpopular in Britain, because the left wing of Blair's own party is rebelling against him and because the Fleet Street press has a long tradition of savaging politicians. In a way, I think there's been blowback across the Atlantic, prompting US news organizations to make this more of an issue.

(There's also an exchange later in the discussion about the US media failing to hold elected representatives accountable over the WMD issue, and whether this says more about the media or the public....)

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Eric Goldman in the San Jose Mercury News thinks spam is an inevitable by-product of our "irrelevancy-filled reality". Quite.

He doesn't, though, think the torrent of spam constitutes a "major social crisis". Let's see....

It seems a short leap from everyone complaining about how much spam they get to voluntarily paying for a two-tier, spam-free, promptly-delivered mail platform - a first and second class mail system, if you will.

And if that saves everyone from setting up more and more email addresses to get around the deluge, then that might be an option.

The interesting thing about the IT department at my paper's approach to incoming spam on the Notes mail system is its complete and unfathomable arbitrariness.

Each day I get about five or six messages from the IT department saying incoming mails have been quarantined. Looking at some - certainly not all - of the subject lines, I can understand why. But how come the other hundred or so daily inquiries about my virility make it through?

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Interesting piece in OJR by Mark Glaser about Dan Weintraub's email newsletter, on the competing audiences between print and online for political news. Particularly interesting since it's a California-related issue, with all the implications that has for the relative proportions of wired readers.

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* June cable ratings (prime-time): Fox News Channel, 1.4 million viewers; CNN, 763,000 viewers; MSNBC, 257,000 viewers. It was FNC's 18th consecutive month as cable's #1 news channel - Reuters

Also, we've come a long way from the Super Doppler 4000....

But maybe this is a step back in the right direction - CNN have announced that Headline News will turn off its ticker and various on-screen graphics for an hour at 9pm.

Let's face it - given the figures above, they need to try something.

See also 'Graphic Packaging Hinders Understanding' by Deborah Potter and Tom Grimes at NewsLab (no direct link to the piece- scroll down on their home page to find the article); on research showing that :

"...participants who watched the original format remembered significantly fewer facts about the stories than participants who watched the manipulated version that eliminated the layers of graphics. This held true even when the participants were specifically told what to focus on"

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Howard Dean says donations to his campaign have surged in the last few days, since he won the so-called MoveOn primary and appeared on Meet The Press.

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