Opinions

(Gerry Broome - AP) There’s a story line emerging from the case United States of America v. Johnny Reid Edwards that’s even more compelling than its underlying facts. There’s flirting going on in the courtroom, and it revolves around an alternate juror and the defendant.

Here’s how the Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia puts the matter:

One of the alternates, an attractive young woman, has been spotted smiling at Edwards and flipping her hair in what seems to some to be a flirtatious manner. On Friday, she wore a revealing red top with a single strap and an exposed right shoulder.

And here’s ABC News:

The juror clearly instigated the exchanges. She smiles at him. He smiles at her. She giggles. He blushes.

The flirtation has become so obvious that even Edwards’ attorneys have to work to suppress their laughter at the absurdity of it all.

In an interview yesterday on his legislation against anonymous Internet commenters, New York State Sen. Tom O’Mara (R) expressed an openness to address any pitfalls in his bill. “We’ve got a great deal of thinking to do on this issue,” he told me. And when I threw out one practical problem with the effort, he responded, “That’s a good comment, and we should think of ways to deal with that.”

O’Mara should be willing to address many concerns. That’s because this is the regulation he’s talking about:

A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST SHALL REMOVE ANY COMMENTS POSTED ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONYMOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE POST AND CONFIRMS THAT HIS OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE.

Here are some riffs on issues that could arise in the implementation of this requirement:

Weight limit: 800 lbs. (Matt Cardy - GETTY IMAGES) Anna Maria Virzi is the executive editor of ClickZ, a site whose work was one of the apparent vic tims of Arnaud de Borchgrave’s alleged cutting and pasting. Today she writes about the experience, with a series of “do’s” and “don’ts” of Internet attribution. Here’s the background:

In a Jan. 3 United Press International column titled “Youth Bulge,” de Borchgrave included this passage:

Facebook is the global 900-pound gorilla of social media networks. It reaches 55 percent of the world’s global audience, accounting for roughly 75 percent of time spent on social networking sites. That’s one in every seven minutes spent online all over the world (comScore’s 10/11 data indicate).

Virzi’s ClickZ.com a week earlier had posted an item titled “10 Social Media 2011 Highlights (Data Included),” featuring this passage:

Facebook remains the global 900-pound gorilla of social media networks. Facebook reached 55 percent of the world’s global audience accounting for roughly 75 percent of time spent on social networking sites and one in every seven minutes spent online globally according to comScore’s October 2011 data.

Virzi finds plenty of fault with de Borchgrave, not to mention a little with her own people:

Using unique phrases from another author can bring you grief. De Borchgrave’s sin: borrowing the phrase “900-pound gorilla” from ClickZ. It’s a cliché that’s not quite right since gorillas are typically 800 pounds. And it should have been avoided by both de Borchgrave and ClickZ alike.

In case you missed it — The Daily Caller’s new gun promotion pairs Web entre­pre­neur­ship with a gun manufacturer who’s written some out-there stuff.

Also: New York State Sen. Tom O’Mara, champion of anti-anonymous-commenter legislation in New York, defends the spirit behind the bill, which is to launch a dialogue about cyberbullying. He acknowledges a need to “tighten the language.” Understatement right there.

Elsewhere:

*Jack Shafer of Reuters gives us the encouraging news that the cable news, such as it is, and all the fireworks around it have plateaued:

Bill O’Reilly? Peaked. Chris Matthews? Peaked. Anderson Cooper? Peaked. Democratic Party outrage over what Fox News said about the president? Peaked. Maddow, Hannity, O’Donnell, Sharpton? Peaked, peaked, peaked, peaked.

*Have a look at today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune.

*In Fox session, NewsBusters’ Tim Graham bashes networks for insufficient coverage of Catholic lawsuits against the Obama administration. Of the three, Graham says, “This is a group of people who all want Obama to be reelected, and they’re going to simply say ‘Look, this whole Catholic lawsuit just seems like a Republican publicity stunt to us, and we’re not gonna touch it.’”

*Nielsen breaks down Web news users.

*Former publisher of the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader gets sued for an alleged “pattern of causing The Times Leader to transfer cash to him for personal use and causing The Times Leader to satisfy personal credit card charges.”

*The New York Times points out an important consideration in the move by the New Orleans Times-Picayune to go mostly digital and publish a print edition only three times per week:

According to a 2010 report from the Kaiser Foundation, 36 percent of residents in New Orleans still do not have Internet access at home. “Both my subjects and my neighbors are always looking for a print copy of what I do,” said one reporter.

The reporter added: “One of the charms of New Orleans is that we are 10 years behind in everything, and that includes the Web.”

*And despite what Jack Shafer says about cable peaking, Chris Matthews, complete with distracting tie-and-shirt combo, puts in a fine performance for the medium via his interview with Newt Gingrich.

Legislators in New York are tired of all the anonymous jerks out there saying unfathomable things about other people on the Internet. They want something done, and now, about these scurrilous, nameless, feckless, worthless, nasty, scum-sucking bastards. The legislation they’ve put forth to do just that has a central requirement, as follows:

A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST SHALL REMOVE ANY COMMENTS POSTED ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONYMOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE POST AND CONFIRMS THAT HIS OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE.

One media analyst out there posited that such a rule would sail through just fine, provided that we repeal the First Amendment. And that’s stating things modestly. Take a look at the sort of transaction that the legislation appears ready to trigger: A Web administrator would have to investigate the identity of a commenter in order to keep the comment on the site. News outlets would quickly face a choice between hiring huge staffs of comment investigators or just shutting down comment sections altogether. Wonder which outcome would prevail.

Didn’t the sponsors of this legislation understand its friction with a free society, or at least a bit of trouble with freedom of expression? Tom O’Mara, the Republican sponsor of the bill in the New York Senate, says he “assumed” there’d be such “concerns.” O’Mara represents towns such as Elmira, Cornell and Ithaca, in the state’s Southern Tier. And boy are the comments in that part of the country ever fierce. Here, for instance, is one from a recent piece in the Elmira Star-Gazette about plans for compressed natural gas offerings at Dandy Mini Marts, a project for which U.S. Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) made an appearance:

Rep. Reed calls for a comprehensive energy policy but doesn’t explain. We can probably guess what he has in mind; he doesn’t mention protecting the environment. Reed refers to 27 bills but doesn’t say what they are. In fact, they are political bills crafted for partisan purposes. Congress will do little this year but play politics. As we have real problems crying out for responsible solutions, we should insist that the parties work together on a bipartisan agenda. Rep. [John A.] Boehner has threatened to rerun his clown act from 18 months ago, possibly doing further damage to America’s credit rating. This isn’t responsible.

The commenter is ID’d by name, via Facebook.

O’Mara says the bill isn’t motivated by personal animus. He has never been slimed too much by Internet trolls — “until I introduced this legislation.” Some impolite e-mails have reached his inbox since the bill started drawing publicity.

As for the First Amendment crisis posed by the bill, O’Mara says, “We have no intention or desire to infringe upon that and realize that we’ve opened up a can of worms with this issue, and so we’ve got a great deal of thinking to do on this issue.”

The idea behind it, he says, is that “if you’re an individual that somebody makes a false claim or accusation against or is harassing . . . the person who’s the target of that would be able to contact the Web site and say this is untrue or call attention to the fact that it’s harassing.”

In what can only be an understatement, O’Mara says there’s a need to “tighten up the language on who is the permissible one to make the inquiry to the Web site — you have to be the victim or the target” of the anonymous slur, he says.

Well, what if someone else falsely claims to be the victim? How would the legislation deal with such a scenario? “That’s a good comment, and we should think of ways to deal with that,” says O’Mara. “It’s all part of the dialogue that I would like to see.”