I’ve been trying to resolve my comment spam problems, including false positives, but without much success, as you can see from the recent comments. Please bear with me, and put up plenty of real comments to push these guys off the front page, while I try to delete them once and for all.

Crooked Timber the mainly-academic group blog of which I am one-fifteenth, is back on air with a dedicated server and has published a big backlog of posts. Read and enjoy!

I’m having intermittent trouble getting access to the blog. For reasons i can’t fathom https://johnquiggin.com/ seems to work better than http://www.johnquiggin.com/, so if you’re having problems, you may want to try the same.

I’ve been in Melbourne for the last few days, giving seminars at university departments and talking to people at the Productivity Commission and a roundtable the ACCC. The ACCC event had some very interesting discussion of behavioral economics and its implications. When I get time I’ll do a post on it.

Meanwhile, the Internet has given me nothing but problems. I was trying to deal with comment spam and anti-spam overkill on flaky dialup connections, which was no fun at all. GMail was horribly slow and unresponsive. Then when I got home I got the news that Crooked Timber has been shut down by our hosting service for overloading the database.

All back to normal soon I hope.

Apologies yet again to everyone having trouble posting comments. My anti-spam software is too aggressive, but as soon as I relax it I’m flooded with spam. I’ll have another go at resolving this as soon as I can get some free time. One suggestion that seems to work for some is to use a different email address. If you can’t get through you can email me directly and I’ll post your comment when I get time.

Not surprisingly, a lot of bloggers are concerned about this report suggesting anyonymous blogging on political topics may be illegal. I had a few thoughts on this.

Closest to home, while I’m not anonymous[1], I welcome comments with or without anonymity. I don’t think there’s a problem here – any comments on this site are “authorised” by me, although I may not agree with them. As I’ve mentioned a few times, I reserve my right to delete or expurgate offensive comments, though there may be a delay for one reason or another.

Second, I don’t think it’s sensible to assume that the Internet is some kind of special free-fire zone where ordinary law does not apply. If a rule is right for print on paper, it’s probably right for text on a screen. If it’s wrong for the Internet, it’s probably wrong as applied to pamphlets.

Third, if a natural reading of the existing law is that it’s illegal to publish your political opinions under a pseudonym, the obvious question is: Why? I can’t see any possible justification for such a rule. It seems reasonable to prohibit dirty tricks like publishing something purporting to represent the views of your opponents, but the general tradition of writing as “Cicero” or “A modest member” is a well-established and honorable one. The idea that special rules are needed during election campaigns is an outdated relic, the kind of thing that used to give us a three-day blackout of electronic media.

Finally, where does Misha Schubert get off putting bloggers and spammers in the same headline? Maybe I should write something saying “state governments are considering uniform defamation laws, which would apply to journalists and spammers”.

fn1. That is, unless you believe the rumours that I’m really Imre Salusinszky posting under a false name and picture.

This NYT report shows how the Bush Administration has been producing covert propaganda, which is then shown on US TV stations as news, with actors posing as reporters. It would take much more than this to surprise me in relation to the Bush Administration, and in any case, the practice apparently began under Clinton.

What did strike me was that, while the NYT went in for plenty of handwringing about the government manipulating the news, the report showed no concern about the fact (news to me) that corporations have been doing this for years, more or less openly, to the extent that those involved in producing “video news releases” have their own association, annual awards and so on

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance.

Of course, reprinting press releases with minimal editing has been a standby of lazy journalists for decades. But the standard press release story opens with what is presented as a paraphrase of a quote “In Washington today, Senator X criticised the neglect of problem Y …” or whatever. Even if the reader is led to imagine that the statement was actually made to an audience of reporters, there’s no serious deception, though a well-designed press release can certainly ensure that the writer’s key points get prominently reported in a way that makes them seem like fact rather than opinion.

But the video news release goes way beyond this. The closest analog in the print world is those supplements, designed to look like news, with “advertisement” in small print at the bottom of the page.

I don’t know anything about the legality of all this. Here in Australia, radio commentators got into a heap of strife over “cash for comment”, accepting money from corporations to say nice things about them. But this was advertising presented as opinion. Presenting advertising as news seems far worse to me.

The issue of paid-for or sponsored political comment has already arisen in relation to blogging. It seems unlikely that commercial PR can be far behind, if it isn’t here already.