Mark Gimein argues that if local regulators are allowed to restrict AT&T's demand to have a monopoly, it will supposedly open the door for local regulations to restrict other things. The examples he then gives are a prosecutor in Tennessee seeking to sanction a pornographer in California, the U.S. government blocking the Web site of a casino in Antigua and China trying to shut down a pro-Taiwan Web site in New York. In all three cases, however, jurisdiction is the defining issue: The governmental body does not have its opponent within its domain, so its power to regulate simply doesn't exist. AT&T, however, having obtained an exclusive contract with the local government agencies (such as Portland) trying to regulate AT&T's never-agreed-upon use of cable lines, is most certainly under the jurisdiction of these local governments.

Gimein then tries to bring up the boogeyman of content suppression, indicating that allowing local governments the right to regulate business contracts opens up the door to restricting certain Web pages through its service. This again is a frivolous argument. Restricting Web pages is an issue of First Amendment rights, issues not even remotely involved with in the AT&T battle, despite the company's whine. This is an issue involving contractual rights, not constitutional rights. Last time I checked, AT&T did not have a constitutional freedom to screw customers on a whim with sweetheart business deals.

In fact, Gimein misses the reverse danger of giving AT&T free rein over Internet access: that the company may regulate access to the Net for its own benefit. It is quite possible that AT&T may restrict the access of Web pages critical to its business dealings or those high up in its corporate structure. Should local governments allow them to do this blindly?

-- Robert Sterling
Editor, the Konformist

Shootout among Arkansas Republicans
BY SUZI PARKER
(07/16/99)

Suzi Parker's story is shot through with errors. There is one significant error of fact that we'd like to discuss immediately below, but we feel that her errors of judgment and representation are at least as significant.

Parker alleges that our magazine, the Arkansas Review, stated that the governor of Arkansas "refused" to sign a fund-raising letter. This is false: We stated specifically that the fund-raising mishap "occurred without the governor's knowledge." She then suggests that we "didn't tell the whole story" and quotes a gubernatorial spokesman to the effect that the governor wanted to wait until after he had finished with an election campaign to get involved with a fund-raising campaign. This is also false: The Arkansas Review discussed exactly that gubernatorial explanation just two paragraphs after the one that Parker misinterpreted.

But the errors of judgment she made were in some respects more severe. For instance, her story uses three paragraphs to reproduce three different allegations from three different people that we made errors in the coverage of a local political campaign. But her story never discusses the errors we purportedly made. In a two-hour interview, she never bothered to ask us about any of the details of this story -- the one that she claims "appears riddled with errors." Although her apparent reportorial method -- reproducing controversial allegations without doing any work to see if they're true -- would make things a lot easier for journalists, it would also make journalism close to worthless.

Just as important, though, is her fundamental lack of fairness in her representation of the interview she conducted with our magazine's staff. We recall making a simple point, again and again, during this interview in tiresome detail: that our magazine's accuracy is extraordinarily important, we take great pains to get our facts right, and we take any suggestions that we fail to do that very seriously and are eager to make retractions if we get things wrong.

Through the magic of creative redaction, this was transformed into two remarkable epigrams: "'Factual mistakes will happen in any publication,' adds Greenberg. 'You can't take this too seriously.'" No fair-minded person who heard any significant portion of the interview would take this as remotely representative of our conversation. More generally, no fair-minded person would reproduce a pronoun as she does without being scrupulous about its referent, or reproduce what is obviously an extraordinarily ambiguous sentence without its appropriate context.

Hilariously, Parker's article is in large part a discussion and criticism of our "journalistic integrity and ethics." Some integrity. Some ethics.

-- Dan Greenberg
Editor, Arkansas Review

SALON NEWS EDITOR JOAN WALSH RESPONDS ...
The Review reported that the "governor's office refused" to sign the certificates in question. The Review article gave odds on various people as having been behind the decision not to sign the certificates -- including the governor. Salon reported correctly that the governor "was livid when the Review claimed he refused to sign" the certificates.

Uncle Sam wants you -- in the dark
BY JEFF STEIN
(08/18/99)

I was employed by Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, N.M., when the explosion on the USS Iowa occurred, and when one of our top scientists at the laboratory assembled a group that investigated the accident. The findings were published, in our company organ, "Sandia Lab News," as well as disseminated to the local media, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense and the Navy.

The report clearly pointed the finger at the Navy, even though it was somewhat embarrassing to the lab to do so, because as prime contractors to the Department of Energy, the lab works closely with the U.S. military in the design, development, oversight of production, deployment, retirement and dismantling of all nuclear weapons. The government funded the investigation, and the results -- clearly pointing at the Navy as responsible, and clearing the allegedly "gay" sailor -- could not be considered a coverup by the government. The full report should be available from: Sandia National Laboratories, Office of Information Services, P. O. Box 5800, Albuquerque, NM 87085-0165.

-- George W. Perkins
Apache Junction, Ariz.
salon.com | August 25, 1999

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