I was reading an article in the 12/6 Sunday New York Times Magazine about Rudolph Giuliani...sorry, can't find a link to it on the Times website...one line in particular caught my attention and made me extrapolate...regarding Giuliani's future political prospects...and the idea of him running for President...

"At this stage, most Republican consultants think that Giuliani has as much chance of being elected Pope as he does President...He has done no national polling, has no national mailing list and no national organization...His small band of advisors can tell you everything about the Republican machine in Staten Island and almost nothing about Republicans west of the Bayonne Bridge..."

The point is - office holders, national and local organizations, lobby groups, pollsters and pundits, contributors and watchdog groups all keep databases and spreadsheets, phone trees and financial records on those pesky little computers. There's an election in 2000. A BIG one. That's right, you get the picture...

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), December 07, 1998

Answers

No, I don't get the picture.

Do you think that the Republicans and Democrats at the State and local levels keep their data on mainframes? I'll tell you right now, most of the data is on compliant PCs and on paper.

You should spend your time making real world preparations (like filling buckets with rice and beans), rather than wasting your time reading the NYT -- and then wasting our time with your bogus interpretations.

-- citizen (drop@thecrack.pipe), December 07, 1998.

Actually, citizen, I was thinking in terms of all the spreadsheet and database programs on those compliant PCs (can you say "Microsoft Issue"?) and the data interchanges between them. Imagine some pol searching for, downloading and installing the patches necessary to make all that software work properly. (not to mention banking, telecon and power issues that will affect everyone else). Just one more of those many strands in the spider web.

Oh, and I do spend too much time reading the New York Times. It is. after all, my local paper as well as "the paper of record."

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), December 08, 1998.

BTW which is the best "quality" national newspaper in the states. Here in the UK the so-called qualities have become considerably dumbed down to increase circulation. The tabloids have completely deteriorated to the extent that headlines consist often of a single word, four at the most, short ones at that. I could never work out why it takes hundreds of staff to produce the Sun or Mirror, when much of it is competitions, standard features etc, actual words in columns must amount only to a few hundred. The papers can be "read" in about 3 mins tops. I have seen someone on a train thumb through the Mirror for about 3/4 hour. Presumably your tabloids are just as bad (reminds me of a latrine joke).

-- Richard Dale (rdale@figroup.co.uk), December 08, 1998.

RD,

I would say the NYTimes and the Wall Street Journal are the two "most responsible papers" (depending on your perspective) though the Times is after all a local paper, and the Journal is business oriented. The Times, in my opinion, has been dumbed down in the past few years. I think USA Today (owned by Gannett) has the largest in the country. The big wire services distribute news and features to many local papers, and there are lots of chains. (Knight-Ridder, News Corp. you know all about that, Gannett, etc.) The New York Post, which was started by Alexander Hamilton, is now owned by Rupert Murdoch.Lots of those one or two word screaming headlines...

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), December 08, 1998.

PS

Thanks for the info. I've given up newspapers and TV for that matter. I prefer to work on being a subject for news rather than being a reader. Only one success so far. I've had plenty of letters published in various mags (yes its me who writes them), "disgusted of Tunbridge Wells". No not really.

-- Richard Dale (rdale@figroup.co.uk), December 08, 1998.

RD,

I can understand your motivation (and other people's) for giving up on TV and printed news. I go through waves of that myself. However, more often than not, I find the subtext of news stories and the unstated connections between seemingly unrelated news stories to be more interesting than the stories themselves. Also, I occasionally like to watch TV news with the thought in mind that "this is how most people get their news." And believe me, I'm usually doing something else at the same time...

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), December 08, 1998.