Wednesday, December 22, 2010

RAHASIA SUKSES DAFTAR GOOGLE ADSENSE: Buat yang sudah putus asa dalam daftar google ades...

RAHASIA SUKSES DAFTAR GOOGLE ADSENSE: Buat yang sudah putus asa dalam daftar google ades...: "Anda tidak perlu putus asa karena selalu blog anda ditolak oleh mbah google, padahal anda sudah belajar sana-sini, bikin trok-trik jitu sepe..."

PANDUAN BELAJAR INTERNET MARKETING: Salam Blogging Bagi Anda Yang Ingin Kaya Dari Inte...

PANDUAN BELAJAR INTERNET MARKETING: Salam Blogging Bagi Anda Yang Ingin Kaya Dari Inte...: "Tidak ada yang mudah dan instan baik di dunia maya dan didunia nyata. Didunia nyata okelah kita semua udah paham, gak ada yang gratis, mau g..."

PNPM MANDIRI PERDESAAN: Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Desa

PNPM MANDIRI PERDESAAN: Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Desa: "PENYUSUNANRENCANA PEMBANGUNAN JANGKA MENENGAH DESADAN RENCANA KERJA PEMBANGUNAN DESA &nb..."

heruleaks(dot)com: Bagaimanakah cara menyusun daftar kata kunci yang ...

heruleaks(dot)com: Bagaimanakah cara menyusun daftar kata kunci yang ...: "Bagaimanakah cara menyusun daftar kata kunci yang efektif? Anda dapat selalu menggunakan Alat Kata Kunci guna mendapatkan gagasan untuk ist..."

PNPM MANDIRI PERDESAAN: Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Desa

PNPM MANDIRI PERDESAAN: Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Desa: "PENYUSUNANRENCANA PEMBANGUNAN JANGKA MENENGAH DESADAN RENCANA KERJA PEMBANGUNAN DESA &nb..."

Monday, December 20, 2010

Bagaimanakah cara menyusun daftar kata kunci yang efektif?

Anda dapat selalu menggunakan Alat Kata Kunci guna mendapatkan gagasan untuk istilah penelusuran dan topik Jaringan Display untuk menjadi target kampanye iklan Anda. Anda juga dapat mengikuti langkah-langkah berikut ini untuk menyusun daftar kata kunci yang lebih efektif:

1. Ketika Anda membuat daftar, berpikirlah seperti pelanggan atau pengunjung situs web.

Istilah atau frasa apakah yang akan dipakai pelanggan untuk menggambarkan produk atau jasa Anda?
* Untuk kata kunci penelusuran, jangan lupa cantumkan kata kunci yang mungkin ditelusuri pengguna di Google untuk menemukan bisnis Anda. Lalu perluas daftar untuk menyertakan beberapa variasi relevan yang mencakup variasi ejaan (misalnya, sistem, sistim), bentuk jamak, sinonim dan salah ejaan. Untuk meringkankan proses curah pikiran, gunakan Alat Kata Kunci. Untuk menggunakan Alat Kata Kunci dalam akun, pilih tab Kata kunci dan klikTambahkan kata kunci, lalu tautan Alat Kata Kunci.
* Untuk kata kunci Jaringan Display, pastikan memilih kata kunci yang paling terkait dengan konsep pusat grup iklan, sebagaimana iklan pada Jaringan Display ditargetkan menurut keseluruhan tema daftar kata kunci, bukan istilah kata kunci. Pilih tema kata kunci yang berkaitan dengan konten pada situs web yang mungkin dikunjungi target pemirsa Anda.

2. Pertajam atau hapus kata kunci yang mungkin terlalu luas atau tidak relevan.

Kata kunci yang terlalu luas dapat menurunkan kinerja dengan menghasilkan banyak tayangan iklan namun sedikit klik.
* Untuk kata kunci penelusuran, hapus kata kunci umum pada daftar yang bisa dikaitkan dengan rentang produk atau jasa yang luas. Kata kunci satu kata cenderung terlalu umum; jadi, cobalah gunakan frasa dua atau tiga kata. Misalnya, menggunakan kata kunci umum tas untuk mempromosikan koper dapat menayangkan iklan ke pengguna yang menelusuri barang tak terkait seperti tas sekolah dan tas pesta. Agar kata kunci lebih khusus, tambahkan kata-kata yang menggambarkan barang atau jasa. Alih-alih menggunakan kata kunci tas , cobalah kata kunci yang lebih relevan dan menggambarkan seperti koper, tas tangan, dan beli koper di internet.
* Untuk kata kunci Jaringan Display, hindari ini dengan menghapus kata kunci yang tidak terkait erat dengan tema grup iklan utama. Hindari membuat daftar kata kunci yang memiliki makna ganda. Misalnya, membuat daftar kata kunci bertarget Jaringan Display menggunakan istilah Toraja, Luwak, dll. dapat membuat sistem AdWords menempatkan iklan pada situs-situs yang berkaitan dengan kopi maupun lokasi wisata Tanah Toraja dan binatang Luwak. Atau, pastikan menggunakan kata kunci bertema sempit pada setiap grup iklan sesuai konten yang pemirsa target Anda akan lihat, seperti Kopi Toraja, Kopi Luwak.

3. Untuk Jaringan Penelusuran, pertimbangkan menggunakan Laporan Istilah Penelusuran untuk menyempurnakan daftar kata kunci. Laporan ini akan memberi informasi tentang kueri penelusuran sebenarnya yang digunakan orang untuk menemukan iklan Anda. Dengan informasi ini, Anda dapat menambahkan kata kunci atau menghapusnya dari daftar.

4. Mempertimbangkan opsi pencocokan kata kunci lainnya.
* Pada Jaringan Penelusuran, Anda dapat memilih empat macam opsi pencocokan kata kunci guna menargetkan iklan ke pengguna: pencocokan luas, frasa, persis, atau negatif. Jika Anda tidak menetapkan opsi khusus, setelan bawaan kata kunci adalah pencocokan luas. Beralihlah ke salah satu opsi jika Anda ingin menyaring pemirsa yang lebih relevan. Dengan menerapkan opsi pencocokan yang lebih terfokus, Anda dapat menjangkau pemirsa yang lebih berminat pada apa yang Anda tawarkan, mengurangi biaya per klik (BPK), dan meningkatkan ROI.
* Akan tetapi pada Jaringan Display, semua kata kunci hanya dianggap pencocokan luas, sistem AdWords tidak menggunakan kata kunci individual untuk menargetkan iklan pada Jaringan Display, namun lebih ke seluruh tema dari semua gabungan kata kunci. Maka, hanya opsi kata kunci pencocokan luas dan pencocokan negatif yang tersedia untuk grup iklan yang ditargetkan untuk Jaringan Display.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

While Democrats across the country are anguished about the bitter fight for their presidential nomination, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn't appear to be losing any sleep over it.

That's all the Nevada Democrat would say about it.
Reid also weighed in on the controversy over Michigan and Florida, states whose Democratic convention delegates were stripped when they scheduled primaries before Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, without permission from the DNC.
The DNC authorized only Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to hold nominating contests before that date. Those four states teamed up to demand successfully that the Democratic candidates not campaign in the two renegade states.
The punishment was intended to be symbolic, on the assumption that a nominee would be decided early and delegate counts wouldn't matter.
That has turned out to be a bad assumption. Now Hillary Clinton, who won both states and trails in the delegate count, says Michigan and Florida shouldn't be left out, even though Barack Obama wasn't on the ballot in Michigan.
Both states came to the conclusion last week they couldn't hold new primaries.
"Michigan and Florida wouldn't play by the rules," Reid said. "They're not my rules. They're not the caucus' rules. They're DNC rules. They broke the rules."
Adding delegates for those states, he noted, would alter the number of delegates needed to get the nomination, currently 2,025. It wasn't crystal clear, but Reid seemed to suggest that delegations from those states should get to attend the convention, but not vote.
"Michigan and Florida delegates are going to be seated. They're going to be a part of the convention," he said. "It's a question of whether anything can be worked out to change this prior to the 2,025.
"They're the ones causing all the problems. No one else did. And so they will be seated. They're big states. They represent 29 million people. We want to make sure their delegates are part of the convention that takes place in Denver."

TIME MACHINE
Remember when the United States had to take out Saddam Hussein because he was part of the shadowy enemy that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, and was doing his darnedest to get nuclear weapons?
The Bush administration has acknowledged that the Iraqi dictator wasn't linked to al-Qaida, and inspectors have determined his nuclear program was defunct. But the Nevada Republican Party makes it sound like 2003 all over again.
In a statement attacking the "anti-war left," state party Chairwoman Sue Lowden last week said politicians who advocate "surrender" like to avoid "facts that we, as Republicans, clearly know, understand and will never forget."
"It is a fact that Saddam Hussein was a terrorist and Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism," Lowden said. "It is a fact that Saddam Hussein had and utilized weapons of mass destruction. It is a fact that Saddam Hussein's government paid tens of thousands of dollars to families of terrorist suicide bombers who killed innocent men, women and children."
Nevada Republican Party Executive Director Zac Moyle said the sponsorship of terrorism was a reference to Saddam's funding of Palestinian suicide bombers and to his actions against his own people, which included the use of weapons of mass destruction.
But the statement appears carefully worded to imply something different, said Max Bergmann, deputy policy director for the National Security Network, a nonpartisan anti-war group.
It's accurate to call Saddam a terrorist who used weapons of mass destruction if you're referring to his terrorizing his own people: Saddam in the 1980s used biological weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq. And in an attempt to curry favor with other countries in the region, Saddam did give money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
But Lowden's statement appears to suggest something different, Bergmann said. It reads as though it is reasserting the debunked rationale for the war, linking Saddam to anti-American, Islamic extremist terrorism.
"Saddam terrorized his own people. That is fundamentally true. He was a tyrannical, authoritarian dictator who tortured people and ruled with an iron fist," Bergmann said. "But if you're going to imply that that's why the invasion of Iraq was necessary and urgent, does that mean the United States should be taking out all leaders who terrorize their own people, from Mugabe in Zimbabwe to the military junta in Burma? The fact is that in invading Iraq, we attacked a regime that had nothing to do with September 11th."
War observers on both sides of the partisan divide, including Democrats who supported the war, have largely abandoned those arguments, Bergmann said.
"I'm sort of surprised a party would still be pushing this line that's been so thoroughly discredited. It's like they're living on another planet."
Moyle defended the statement, saying Saddam "paid for suicide bombers and things of that nature. He used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. That shows he was capable of that. He was a terrorist, a dictator, someone who was a potential threat, and we believe we are better off having him not in power."
Asked whether the statement implied an association with al-Qaida, Moyle declined to comment. As for whether other cruel tyrants should be targeted by the U.S. military, Moyle said he wouldn't engage in speculation.

RIGHTS AND WRONGS
As a politician who opposes legal abortion but seeks the support of pro-choice constituencies, Harry Reid walks a fine line.
He attempted to explain the balancing act at a Democratic event last week, when an activist asked him about the issue of affordable birth control.
"It's very unusual for someone like me, because of my stand on abortion, but I have the support of all the feminist groups in Washington," Reid noted. The reason, he said, is that he found common cause with such groups in working to stop unwanted pregnancy.
Some Reid critics have questioned his pro-life bona fides, given his good marks from pro-choice groups. For example, in 2007 he got a 100 percent "Pro-Choice Score" from NARAL Pro-Choice America. Reid has said he hasn't had to vote directly on whether or not abortion should be legal, because the matter has been settled by the Supreme Court.
"It seems common sense to me that if we can lower the number of unwanted pregnancies, we can stop a lot of abortions," he said last week.
Reid explained that he was the author of a bill to mandate that health insurance companies cover birth control.
"After I came out with this legislation, I did a national radio program, and a woman from Texas called," Reid recalled. "She said, 'I don't believe in contraceptives.' I said, 'Nobody forces you to use them.'"
That's all well and good, but he didn't answer the question, the questioner, Annette Magnus of Planned Parenthood of Southern Nevada, noted after Reid's appearance.
The group is urging its supporters to e-mail and call Reid's office to urge him to take up the birth control issue. Because of an apparently unintentional provision in a federal law that took effect last year, the average cost of a month's supply of birth control pills went from $10 to $50.
Planned Parenthood says that change most affects college students and low-income women.
There is a bipartisan bill in Congress to fix the provision at no cost to government or taxpayers; even opponents of abortion rights don't oppose it. But the bill is languishing because it hasn't been taken up as a priority, the group says.
Pressed on the question later, Reid spokesman Jon Summers said the senator is aware of the issue and is committed to solving it.
"We support a no-cost technical fix to get it done as soon as we can," he said.

By Molly Ball

Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Long Journey White Shoes

The Long Journey White Shoes and the Couples Company
Tifa Asrianti , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sun, 03/28/2010 11:42 AM | Music

A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step, a proverb says. For White Shoes and the Couples Company, the fruit of the journey they started in 2002 is now available for their fans to devour in Album Vakansi (Holiday Album), due out early next month.
And by journey, members of the White Shoes and the Couples Company mean a musical one. They promise their latest album will bear traces of all of their influences to date.
Besides, no one would consider the White Shoes and the Couples Company to be trailblazers who have torn down all rock clichés and have built a new musical genre of their own.
In fact, White Shoes and the Couples Company thrive on cliché. The band members’ penchant for wearing wedding party get-ups and their cheeky quoting of Indonesian idioms from the 1970s did much to bolster their retro-is-the-new-cool cred. Sonically, some of the band’s memorable tunes are reminiscent of Indonesian pop tunes from the days gone by, ones that were sung by Tetty Kadi, Dara Puspita and Koes Plus.
Ben Sisario of the New York Times, who caught White Shoes and the Couples Company’s gig at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, in 2008, said tunes from the band drew from the 1960s and 1970s bubblegum and easy-listening, with big nods to Neil Diamond, the Carpenters and disco.
White Shoes and the Couples Company at Haight Street, San Fransisco Courtesy of White Shoes and the Couples Company
For their current project, White Shoes and the Couples Company seem to be torn between two options: living up to the cliché or pursuing a new artistic direction.
Lead singer Aprilia “Sari” Apsari said that the new album had a more diverse selection of songs and by having “journey” as its main theme, Sari admitted her band wanted to give fans a new experience and take them on a journey back in time.
“The inspiration for this album comes from a variety of sources, music from 1950s, jazz, pop, ethnic music, funk even traditional Papuan music,” Sari told The Jakarta Post after a photo shoot for their album cover art in an upmarket joint in Central Jakarta recently.
Bass player Ricky Surya Virgana was convinced that all songs in the album, collectively written by band members, were their best shot at songwriting and it would be a filler-free record.
One notable difference in the new record is the presence of old timers from across the musical genre who lent their craft.
“One thing about this album is that we have had collaborations with musicians like pop legend Fariz Roestam Munaf and jazz maestro Oele Pattiselanno. We are serious about this collaboration, and we meticulously arranged the compositions,” Ricky said.
White Shoes and the Couples Company met the two musicians when they shared the bill at the 2006 Java Jazz Festival. White Shoes and the Couples Company were among a handful of non-jazz outfits invited to perform for the festival.
One of mainstays in Jakarta close-knit indie scene, the White Shoes has had high-profile gigs, including one where they performed at the SXSW music festival in March 2008.
Later in the same year, the band received an invitation to play at the CMJ Festival in New York. This weekend, White Shoes and the Couples Company is expected to open for Kings of Convenience for the Norwegian acoustic duo’s gig in Jakarta.
Before charming the international crowd, White Shoes and the Couples Company — a moniker they adopted to refer to a popular trend in the Jakarta Art Institute (IKJ) campus for wearing white shoes and an allusion to the fact that there are two couples in the band — has long been a darling of the Jakarta indie scene.
The band’s debut single Senandung Maaf (Ballad of Apology) was featured in the soundtrack to the movie Janji Joni (Joni’s Promise) in 2005. Two songs from their early period Tentang Cita (About Aspiration) and Senja Menggila (Crazy Dusk) were used as soundtrack for teen flick Heartbreak.com. In 2009, the band was nominated for the best cutting-edge artist at the MTV Indonesia Award.
After conquering the local market, the next logical step is to break into the overseas market. In October 2007, White Shoes and the Couples Company signed a record deal with the Chicago-based Minty Fresh record, which agreed to re-issue the band’s self-titled debut album and their second release, an EP titled Skenario Masa Muda (Scenario of Adolescence) for the US, Mexico, Canada, Australia and Japan.
November last year, White Shoes and the Couples Company signed a similar deal with Taiwanese label Avant Garden Record that will reissue their debut album for the country’s market.
In spite of the international recognition, White Shoes remains true to their indie roots. When Aksara Records, the band’s record label for five years folded earlier this year, the White Shoes and the Couples Company resisted the temptation to move to the other side by signing to a major label. For the new album, the White Shoes will remain in the fold of a Jakarta-based independent label.
The band also adopts a guerilla-style marketing campaign. Given the high cost of marketing through television, Ricky said his band would stick to the media that has served them well so far, the Internet. White Shoes and the Couples Company is apparently savvy enough to put links to their Youtube videos, MySpace page, Facebook account and Twitter page on their website.
“I think the Internet is more effective for promotion because it can reach our target market and fans. Besides, televisions are already inundated by pop performers,” Sari said.
To promote the new album, White Shoes and the Couples Company will send advance copies to radio stations. These radio stations are free to pick any songs to be on their playlists. In fact, fans will be offered with a chance to shoot videos for the album.
But the band will also embark on the tried and true marketing strategy of performing for gigs.
“We have a plan to do promotion in small venues, so that we can be more intimate with our fans. We plan to tour in cities where we had performed before, such as Yogyakarta, North Sumatra’s Medan and South Sulawesi’s Makassar,” guitarist Yusmario Farabi said.
White Shoes also plans to end this year with a bang. Rio said the band expected to stage a big concert in Jakarta later this year.
They also set their eyes on foreign market by planning to have a Southeast Asian tour. Rio said that the band would have shows in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
Of the three countries, Thailand proved to be the hardest terrain for the band.
“From the Internet, we could learn what the American audience expected of us. But for Thailand, it’s a bit difficult, because the language is so different,” Ricky said.
To tear down the language barrier, the band has commissioned electric guitarist Saleh Husein Machfud to learn Thai. Saleh has used this language skill when the band performed their last gig in Thailand, when he sung one song completely in Thai.
“Well, many people say I’m a genius,” Saleh deadpans.
After eight years together, a sense of camaraderie is palpable among band members. Band members even decided to live close to each other in Tebet neighborhood in South Jakarta.
“We are living in the same neighborhood, so we will know what the others are doing or the music they are listening to,” Rio said.
Being in the same neighborhood allows members to look after each other, literally.
“The good thing about living close to each other is that I can ask them to babysit my kids when I got important things to do,” said multi-instrumentalist Apri Mela Prawidiyanti, who is also a mother of two.
Being close to each other could also weigh them down but the friendship that they had formed since college helped a lot to prevent the band from breaking up.
“I think the reason we have survived this long is because we can talk to each other on issues other than music. We’ve been friends for a long time, back to when we’re still in college,” Sari said.

The Photos Trickled

One by one the photos trickled in; then they came in torrents. On a piece of cardboard draped over a makeshift stretcher, the corpse of a Haitian man lay caked in dust like a powdered doll, a woman's dark legs in capri pants striding past him. In another image, a young man was digging his way out of a collapsed school building after the quake. As he picked his way through the rubble with hand tools, trying to rescue a teacher trapped inside, he looked up at the camera, seemingly unaware that he was flanked by a schoolgirl kneeling lifeless at her desk, her head and neck pinned by blocks of collapsed concrete.
The photos displayed by dozens of U.S. newspapers and Web sites showed tiny Haitian orphans crawling and playing in tent cities. There were hundreds and then thousands of photos of dazed, poorly bandaged victims; of nude or partially nude bodies falling out of pushcarts; of men in surgical masks dragging by legs and arms the bloated dead to parking lot morgues. The cinderblock houses and government palaces had been leveled by a seismic blast; there were images of body parts and screaming people, collapsed grocery stores and looters shot in the act.
It was hell, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, killing an estimated 230,000 people, leaving perhaps 3 million injured or homeless.
American news photographers with digital cameras and satellite phones rushed to the scene. This was not like Afghanistan or Iraq, with countless rules of embedding and the continual threats of bullets and roadside bombs. And editors generally loath to publish graphic and disturbing images saw justification for doing so in the case of the catastrophe in Haiti. This time, photographers and videographers went all out, loading their digital cameras with as much grief, hope and horror as they could bear.
"One of the reasons the pictures were more graphic in Haiti was that the Haitian people wanted the journalists to photograph the dead bodies and tell their stories. They wanted the world to see, to know how horrible it was," says Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for photography at the New York Times, which initially sent five photographers, including Pulitzer Prize-winner Damon Winter, to cover the disaster.
But Valérie Payen-Jean Baptiste, a Haitian elementary school principal who lost every possession, her home and school, and nearly her family in the quake, was sickened by the images. "I'm tired of it; the photos are too much," she says. "I know that [news outlets] took pictures, and that enabled people to raise money. But what I see is that people in Haiti are really upset. Some view the photos as an insult, a disaster, since we have already suffered so much."
"I'm not criticizing journalists [who] talk about the facts of the earthquake," she wrote in a follow-up e-mail. "But my critique is about the tone of unnecessary pictures and videos that show pieces of bodies, dying people, the nudity of people, or the misery/tragedy of people in line for food and water. Seriously, is this cruelty really necessary to mobilize massive humanitarian action?"
Photojournalists and their editors thought publishing the photos was an essential aspect of covering the news. "At the Herald, and at most publications, I suspect, we try to strike a balance, delivering not only what readers want to see but also what they need to see. We must act with sensitivity but, more importantly, our mission is to create a complete and accurate visual report. In this story in particular, images of death were inescapable. Death was everywhere," says David Walters, the Miami Herald's deputy editor-photos and video. He says the more graphic images made up "only a small portion of what we publish."
Walters works with Patrick Farrell, who won a Pulitzer for his stunningly poignant black-and-white images of the Haitian survivors of Hurricane Ike and other storms in 2008. Farrell once again was dispatched to Port-au-Prince right after the earthquake to document fresh heartache. "I thought [the quake] was the worst thing I'd ever seen. I was thinking if it gets worse than this, it's the end of the world," he says. "You can't tune it out; until you're looking at your pictures on the computer, you're thinking this is a movie, it isn't real."
And he adds emphatically, the Haitian photographs are essential. "I'd say there were not enough images of Haiti; I would say you can never have enough," Farrell says. "People need to know that the suffering continues; they're suffering just living a normal life. They get slammed with four storms, and now this. It's cruel and unlucky."
From the Miami Herald to the Palm Beach Post, the Birmingham News to the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times to the Lincoln Journal Star, the New York Times and more, the verdict was the same. Unvarnished stories and images of Haiti's horrific loss and the rare, miraculous rescue of victims dominated A sections and front page real estate for several days--in some cases, a week to 10 days and more. Many journalistic boundaries were crossed on television. CNN's Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon, was photographed performing brain surgery on an injured Haitian girl; Anderson Cooper of the same network interrupted his on-the-scene newscast to sweep up a boy in the midst of a violent looting incident. Other newscasters were filmed giving water to the trapped and weeping.
The more images of unimaginable suffering were published, the more international aid poured in.
Photo coverage of the quake touched off an intense debate about the role of the explicit photo--the iconic, bloody shot--in a media world of surprisingly delicate sensibilities. Did news outlets publish images that were too graphic, and too many of them? And what of stark depictions of other disasters, natural or man-made? Or U.S. military casualties? What about victims of terrorism or crimes of passion? Should all of them get the same treatment?
Readers and newspaper ombudsmen in January engaged in spirited exchanges about whether the media had gone too far. And if the public was surprised by the tone and volume of the photography, that shouldn't come as a shock. Because in recent years, for a variety of reasons, powerful, iconic images of national and international events have been harder to find in many American newspapers.
Many dailies have taken a hyperlocal approach to news coverage. News managers say that rather than publish national and international news that is widely available on the Internet, news organizations should heavily emphasize material that they are best suited to dominate: local news. Generally, newspapers with heavily local orientations avoid large-format foreign news photos and packages on their front pages and inside their A sections.
Another factor: Editors, troubled by sinking circulations, are wary of alienating their remaining readers by publishing images they may find troubling. In particular, many news outlets are reluctant to spotlight photos of dead or wounded U.S. troops or foreign civilian casualties.
Yet that doesn't mean compelling photography isn't widely available. News organizations publish powerful photographs by professional photojournalists and citizen journalists alike on their Web sites. The computer is considered a more private viewing arena than the newspaper. Online images may be edgier and more graphic than what appears in print, and they are viewed by millions of people who flock to photo galleries and slide shows.
"The Internet has become the saving grace of photojournalism," says Donald Winslow, editor of News Photographer magazine, a monthly publication of the National Press Photographers Association. "What you see in the daily newspaper today is the lowest common denominator of what a photographer is willing to print."
Tim Rasmussen, assistant managing editor for photography at the Denver Post, says the unlimited space online has greatly deepened photojournalism's ability to tell the story. "We put far more compelling, important news photos for the U.S. and the world on our Web site now than we ever put in the newspaper," he says. "We've built a good online audience for our photography with high-end photo blogs and galleries... There is more emphasis online on national and international news than in the newspaper."
Despite the abundance of material on the Web, the timidity of many news organizations is a source of concern for some journalists. "The truth is that there is a lot of visual censorship that goes on," Washington Post picture editor Bonnie Jo Mount was quoted as saying in a column by Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander. "We're in a culture that censors visuals very heavily. I think that sometimes works to our detriment because we don't run visuals that people need to see."
Haiti, though, was an exception. The country's rich culture and frequent natural disasters have spurred graphic coverage before--particularly photos of naked children who had been killed during the tropical storms of 2008. "In the past I've objected to this graphic coverage, particularly in regards to children," says Leonie Hermantin, a deputy director of Lambi Fund of Haiti, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on Haiti's economic development. "But the earthquake was of such apocalyptic, horrible dimensions that, in this case, it's OK to show what those who remain alive have to deal with. This is what children are seeing on a daily basis. The images afford an opportunity to be there vicariously, and at that level I do not object."
But, she adds, some images did go too far and showed no respect for the dead. "There has always been a sense among photographers that everything goes in Haiti," she says. "You can take whatever shot you want, because the people are poor and the government never reacts with outrage when these images are displayed." Hermantin does not fault the photojournalists, though. The news and photo editors who decide what gets published "should think they are not dealing with animals, but with people who care very much about dying with dignity. People from Haiti want to be buried clothed."
Hermantin and Farrell agree that Haiti's nightmare was beyond anyone's imagining. "You could write a million times that there are 100,000 people dead in the streets," Farrell says. "But if you don't see it for yourself, or in pictures, you won't believe it. It just won't register."
But it did register. It registered with billions, and for some the light it cast on the country and its multiple catastrophes was unnatural. Payen-Jean Baptiste, the Haitian elementary school principal who was trapped with her husband and two small daughters in a car during the earthquake, says she and her extended family needed no more graphic reminders of falling buildings or crushed bodies. "We lived through it," she says. "I have nightmares, and I am fighting these images. I just can't imagine what this is like for my two little girls, who are also dealing with nightmares. Two or three days after the quake, my four-year-old fell down because she was running, and she started crying nervously, thinking that she will die. So I can't understand the purpose of publishing such pictures or watching such horrifying things on TV for entertainment."
Payen-Jean Baptiste doubts that media coverage of the disaster will provide any more than a temporary Band-Aid. "As for helping Haiti," she says, "Haiti has been 'helped' by nations for 25 years... The country is becoming poorer and poorer all the time. Thanks to the media, who will be motivated to go to Haiti in the next decade after seeing how 'ugly,' 'poor' or 'insecure' it can be?"
Many American news consumers wondered the same thing. Christa Robbins of Chicago wrote a letter to the New York Times protesting the graphic images of corpses and destruction published by the paper. The letter was quoted in a column by Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt. Robbins wrote, "I feel that the people who have suffered the most are being spectacularized by your blood-and-gore photographs, which do not at all inform me of the relief efforts, the political stability of the region or the extent of damage to families or infrastructure."
Robbins and other readers suggested that Haiti was considered fair game because it was other – black, poor and foreign. "If this had happened in California, I cannot imagine a similar depiction of half-clothed bodies splayed out for the camera," Robbins wrote. "What are you thinking?" A Washington Post reader wrote to Ombudsman Alexander: "I wonder if the editors of the Washington Post would run pictures of charred smoldering bodies or of a young girl crushed to death if those bodies had been of a 12-year-old girl from Chevy Chase or a 45-year-old father of three from Cleveland Park," referring to two largely white, well-off local communities.
At the same time, some readers defended the use of graphic images. One of them, Mary Louise Thomas of Palatka, Florida, wrote to Hoyt that a photo of a dead baby lying on her dead mother impelled her to cry for an hour. "But run from it? Never," Hoyt quoting her as saying. She added that those repelled by such images "should really try staring truth in the face occasionally and try to understand it."
While Alexander and Hoyt defended their papers' Haitian imagery, arguing it underscored the gravity and urgency of the situation, both also acknowledged that there are multiple standards for choosing photographs. One standard – proximity to readership – prevents most newspapers from publishing pictures of dead bodies with local stories because of the "likelihood that readers may be connected to the deceased," Alexander wrote.
The sheer magnitude of a disaster also influences editors' willingness to publish images of pain, according to Hoyt. During the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for example, "The Times ran a dramatic front-page photo of a woman overcome with grief amid rows of dead children, including her own," he wrote. Though some readers protested, Hoyt continued, "the newspaper's first public editor, Daniel Okrent, concluded the paper was right to publish the picture. It told the story of the tsunami, he said."
National newspapers like the Times, however, do not have the same strictures as many local and regional dailies, which readily invoke reader demographics to help winnow out certain disturbing images. "It's weird what offends people, what actually bothers people over breakfast," says Torry Bruno, associate managing editor for photography at the Chicago Tribune. At his newspaper, he says, decisions about graphic photos depend on the circumstances: "In each case, we have long, thoughtful conversations about whether or not publishing is the right thing to do," he says. After the quake, for example, "We published an image of an arm coming out of some rubble with a weeping person behind it," Bruno recalls. It was a decision that Tribune editors felt was warranted, given the depth of the catastrophe.
Haiti aside, there is widespread agreement among those who practice and monitor photojournalism that America's newsrooms have become far more cautious when it comes to choosing photographs. "The kind of enlightened editor I used to have at the Palm Beach Post doesn't exist anymore," says Winslow, the NPPA photojournalist. News editors "today don't want to offend readers, and they don't want to piss people off, and they don't want to take the phone calls [from irate readers] the next day."
Kenny Irby, visual journalism group leader and director of diversity at the Poynter Institute, says the shift in newspaper photojournalism is a byproduct of economic flux. "There is a declining commitment to quality photojournalism today in mainstream media," he says. "But it's not part of a sinister plan. It's the reality of an industry..where print publications are all struggling. Photography is an expensive endeavor; it costs to deploy and support photographers in remote locations."
Another factor: "There is less training and less of the intellectual photo editor thinking about the assignment," says Michel du Cille, the Washington Post's director of photo/multimedia/video. At some, though not all, newspapers, he continues, "the editors are going for the gimmicky photograph over a storytelling photograph. Yes, that's happening around the country, and we are fighting it in the newsroom."
The transformation of American photojournalism didn't happen overnight. "I started to see the change in photo editing after I retired in 1990," says James Atherton, a former Washington Post photographer who took many iconic photographs of U.S. and world leaders, from President Truman to Martin Luther King Jr. to Pope John Paul II to Jimmy Carter. "Newspaper photos are less high quality than they used to be because they're [mostly] feature pictures, not breaking news pictures," he says.
Moreover, Atherton says, the U.S. military has often handcuffed the press by restricting access to citizen casualties in foreign wars in which U.S. troops are involved. An exception: an April 29, 2008, Associated Press photo of the death of a 2-year-old Iraqi child, Ali Hussein, who died in Baghdad during a U.S. bombing raid. The image of a suffocated child appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. Although the photograph was beautifully framed and shot – a potential icon – a survey of U.S. newspapers suggests that Ali Hussein's image was rarely used. The photograph, on the other hand, was commonly distributed and published in foreign media.
"It's taken a long time for us to suddenly realize that when we lose soldiers over there that civilians are dying too," Atherton says. "Civilians should be counted."
But even if news organizations wanted to publish such pictures, it's become increasingly difficult for their journalists to get access to them. During Vietnam, for example, "U.S. photojournalists had virtual carte blanche to photograph whatever they wanted," Winslow says. Journalist Malcolm Browne recorded the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc setting himself on fire on a Saigon street in 1963 to protest the corruption in the Diem regime. The image ended up on the front page of the Washington Post.
Photographer Eddie Adams produced the chilling, split-second capture of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a suspected Viet Cong prisoner in 1968. These images, along with Nick Ut's iconic 1972 photo of a young South Vietnamese girl fleeing after a napalm attack, were published and helped change the course of the war.
But the U.S. military altered rules of journalistic access after Vietnam. "The first [Persian] Gulf War had 100 percent photographic censorship; the military kept you on boats," Winslow recalls. "Then the military came up with the idea of 'embedding' in Iraq." Today, journalists who embed with U.S. troops in Afghanistan or Iraq are governed by military regulation limiting where they can go.
U.S. photojournalists went to Haiti to document the enormity of the battered island nation's misery.
For Haitian citizens who wanted their privacy respected, and who seek a long-term international commitment rather than charity, the graphic photography may have a tarnishing effect. "People in Haiti are strong," Payen-Jean Baptiste says. "There are people [here] fighting alone to recover and try to get back on their feet. They are used to dealing with such unfairness. But if there is a way we can stop humiliating them by taking away their dignity while they are suffering, that would be the best help forever we can bring to this nation."
The Miami Herald's Walters sees a broader issue. "Some people, both readers and journalists, find some of the images from Haiti to be gut-wrenching and undignified. These graphic, hard-hitting photos always spawn debate in our newsroom..careful debate. But the fact remains that the devastation in Haiti is gut-wrenching and in many instances, tragic circumstances have stripped away the dignity of victims who were so mercilessly affected by this disaster. That part of the story must be acknowledged in both words and pictures or the story is incomplete."

By Arielle Emmett

Car Loans

By Christian Phelps
Used Car Loans

The implementation of new loans every time has made life very easier for one today. Whatever your financial problem is, whether it is an immediate small need or bigger requirements, these loans of various types are right there to make one feel good through monetary assistance. You will, in fact, derive support for buying a used car too and these loans are known as the used car loans.

These types of loans are available for all bad credit holders and at times it works really great as bad credit car loans UK as there is no restriction regarding the bad credit holder borrowers. All those allowed adverse credit records include arrears, defaults, skipping of instalments, late payment, County Court Judgements or IVA.

These loans are generally available in tow forms and it depends totally on you as to which type of loan you wan to go for. The secured forms are the one that will facilitate you with a comparatively higher financial support. Through these loans you will be buying a used car only but still you can at least think of raising your budget. But for obtaining these loans you will have to provide your valuable asset as collateral for sure. The rate of interest in it is low.

The unsecured loans will not ask you to provide any collateral and you can easily draw a supportive amount. But the amount offered in it is smaller than the secured loans and you will also be charged with a comparatively higher interest rate. But the best thing is that for drawing the anoint offered in it you will not have to place anything as security.

The used car loans will assist you through a 90 to 100% support in buying the car of your choice. But for that you must get all documents and the real price of the car ready in front of the lender. In fact, that is not all and you will also have to ensure the lender that the car you are going to buy is not older than 5 years. So, all these aspects and factors of the bad credit car loans UK have made these such popular loans in the loan market.

Psychological Rules And Joint Venture Thrive

Simple Psychological Rules to Help Your Joint Venture Thrive
by: Christian Fea

Many small business owners experience great sales success when they form a joint venture, but some do not. What is the difference between a successful JV and an unsuccessful one? It could be the consumer psychology used to sell JV products and services! Read below to discover some simple tricks to help increase your JV sales.

1. Don't Give Consumers a Choice

Consumer research has proven that too many choices can deter consumers and actually drop sales. Choices can cause the dreaded "analysis paralysis" in consumers. Rather than providing all things to all customers, a JV that markets a wide variety of similar products may do more harm to their sales because consumers would rather make no choice than make a complicated one.

Too many choices may also cause buyer's remorse. Why? Consumers will wonder whether they should have made a different choice and possibly regret the buying decision. So why drive your customers away? Don't give them too many choices. Rather, provide a quality product each and every time that will satisfy customers and give them reason to return or tell others about your JV business.

2. Customers Buy Happiness

Customers will spend more money when they feel good about their purchase. Even if your JV sells a product, the experience that the customer feels during the purchase can make the sale very worthwhile. What does that mean for your JV business? Focus on customer service and atmosphere.

When you greet customers and treat them as friends, they enjoy the experience more than with a sour-faced and bored clerk. Customers always appreciate good customer service, even if they do not acknowledge it in the moment.

If your JV runs out of a brick and mortar location, provide a welcoming place for your customers as well. Hire an interior designer if necessary to create an atmosphere where customers feel comfortable. A fine five-star restaurant is a good example of a place that may create a welcoming dining atmosphere. Consider all the senses, good lighting, creative décor, soft music, and pleasant aromas.

3. Focus Advertising on Your Product

Some general consensuses believe that certain elements in advertising will help sell a product, such as sex or comedy. The belief is that attaching attractive women to a product primarily bought by men will help its recall and sales.

However, researchers at the University College London found that product recall was no better when sexual or comedic elements were used in advertisements on television ads. Therefore, focus on your JV product and its benefits and problem-solving usefulness in your ads. There is no need to spend more money on clever gimmicks that do not help sell a product.

Your JV can experience more sales if you know how to effectively advertise, display your products, and treat your customers. Try these simple yet effective psychological tricks and see how your sales climb.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Hepatitis C Treatment and Recipients

Hepatitis C Treatment in Liver Transplant Recipients

In the June 2007 Journal of Hepatology, M. Angelico and colleagues reported data from a randomized trial of pegylated interferon alfa-2a (Pegasys) monotherapy versus Pegasys plus ribavirin in 42 non-cirrhotic liver transplant recipients with recurrent hepatitis C; participants were treated for 48 weeks. In an intention-to-treat analysis, early virological response (EVR, defined as an HCV RNA decrease of at least 2 logs at week 12) occurred in 76% of the monotherapy patients and 71% of those in the combination therapy group. Sustained virological response (SVR, defined as undetectable HCV RNA 24 weeks after completion of therapy) was achieved in 38% and 33%, respectively. EVR had positive predictive values for SVR of 50% and 47%, respectively, and none of the patients who failed to achieve EVR went on to become sustained responders. Six patients in the monotherapy group and seven in the combination therapy group discontinued treatment prematurely, while seven and eight subjects, respectively, required Pegasys dose reduction. The researchers concluded that Pegasys, with or without ribavirin, led to sustained response in one-third of transplant recipients with recurrent hepatitis C, adding that, “The low SVR rate is mainly due to inability to sustain full doses of antivirals and lack of the booster effect of ribavirin.”

Ursodeoxycholic Acid for Liver Inflammation
Many patients with hepatitis C – especially those with genotype 1 – fail to achieve SVR with interferon-based therapy, and could thus benefit from treatments that reduce liver inflammation and fibrosis. As reported in the June 25, 2007 advance online edition of Gut, M. Omata and colleagues assessed the effect of oral ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) on serum biomarkers in nearly 600 prior non-responders with elevated ALT levels; participants were randomly assigned to receive UDCA at doses of 150, 600, or 900 mg/day for 24 weeks. Levels of the liver enzymes ALT, AST, and GGT decreased by week 4, then remained constant for the remainder of the drug-administration period. All three biomarkers decreased significantly less in the 150 mg/day arm compared with the two higher dose groups. While overall changes in ALT and AST did not differ between the 600 and 900 mg/day groups, GGT was significantly lower in the 900 mg/day group; however, ALT decreased significantly more in the 900 mg/day group among patients whose baseline GGT level exceeded 80 IU/L. Adverse events were reported by 19% of the patients in all three dose groups, and serum HCV RNA levels did not change in any group. “A 600 mg/day UDCA dose was optimal to decrease ALT and AST levels in chronic hepatitis C patients,” the researchers concluded. “The 900 mg/day dose decreased GGT levels further, and may be preferable in patients with prevailing biliary injuries.”

Chronic Liver Disease and Cardiovascular Risk
Past studies have produced conflicting evidence regarding the prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors in people with chronic hepatitis C. As reported in the June 2007 Journal of Hepatology, G. Targher and colleagues analyzed carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) – a measure of the health of the carotid arteries in the neck, and an early indicator of atherosclerosis – in 35 patients with chronic hepatitis B, 60 with chronic hepatitis C, 60 with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and 60 healthy control subjects. Carotid IMT measurements were lowest in the healthy controls, intermediate in patients with HBV or HCV, and highest in those with NASH. These differences were minimally affected by adjustment for age, sex, body mass index, smoking, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels, insulin resistance, and presence of the metabolic syndrome. “These data suggest that NASH, HCV, and HBV are strongly associated with early atherosclerosis independent of classical risk factors,” the investigators concluded.


Treatment in HIV/HCV Coinfected Patients
Two recent studies assessed response to hepatitis C treatment in patients with HIV/HCV coinfection, a population that typically does not respond as well to interferon-based therapy. As reported in the May 15, 2007 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, C.M. Behler and colleagues assessed whether interferon and/or ribavirin dose modification due to side effects, or the use of hematopoietic growth factors, influenced treatment outcomes in the ACTG A5071 study. A total of 133 coinfected participants were randomly assigned to receive ribavirin plus either conventional interferon or Pegasys for 48 weeks. Doses were modified in patients with adverse events including hematological toxicity (e.g., anemia or neutropenia), and growth factors were administered as needed (e.g., erythropoietin for anemia, G-CSF for neutropenia). Patients treated with Pegasys were more likely to require dose reduction or treatment discontinuation than those treated with conventional interferon. The majority of interferon dose reductions were due to neutropenia, while most ribavirin dose reductions were due to anemia. The incidence of side effects did not differ with regard to CD4 cell count or the use of antiretroviral therapy – including AZT (Retrovir), which is known to cause anemia. Participants who underwent dose modification for any reason were significantly less likely to achieve SVR and/or histological response. Hematological toxicity itself was not directly linked with clinical outcomes, but use of hematopoietic growth factors was associated with increased SVR and histological response rates. “Dose modifications for anti-HCV therapy may adversely affect the outcome of treatment of HCV in individuals who are coinfected with HIV,” the investigators concluded, adding that, “The use of hematopoietic growth factor support may be associated with an improved clinical response to therapy.”

Importance of Adequate Ribavirin
In the second study, reported in the June 2007 Journal of Viral Hepatitis, B. Ramos and colleagues analyzed the relationship between ribavirin dose and treatment outcomes among HIV/HCV coinfected patients in three trials. In the Spanish PRESCO study, coinfected patients received Pegasys plus 1000-1200 mg/day weight-based ribavirin. In the PISG trial, HIV negative subjects were treated with the same regimen. In the Pegasys combination therapy arm of the pivotal APRICOT trial, coinfected patients received a fixed dose of 800 mg/day ribavirin. Among genotype 1 patients, rates of rapid virological response (RVR, defined as undetectable HCV RNA at week 4) were 33.3% in PRESCO, 31.2% in PISG, and 13% in APRICOT. For patients with genotypes 2 or 3, the corresponding RVR rates were 83.7%, 84.2%, and 37%. Both RVR and EVR rates were similar in the two studies that used the higher weight-based ribavirin dose, but lower in the trial that used the lower fixed dose, leading the researchers to conclude that, “Prescription of high ribavirin doses enhances the early virological response to HCV therapy in HCV/HIV coinfected patients, with results approaching those seen in HCV-monoinfected patients.”



By: Liz Highleyman

Facing The Islamic Menace

Facing the Islamist Menace
Christopher Hitchens
Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call.
In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis, ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer and the pedestrian social-democratic politician are for Steyn dual exemplars of his book’s main concern: the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.
I might quibble about Steyn’s assessment—Amis has written brilliantly about Mohammed Atta’s death cult, for example, while Jack Straw made one of the best presentations to the UN of the case for liberating Iraq. But it’s more useful to point out two things that have happened between the writing of this admirably tough-minded book and its publication. Jack Straw, now the leader of the House of Commons, made a speech in his northern English constituency in October, in which he said that he could no longer tolerate Muslim women who came to his office wearing veils. The speech catalyzed a long-postponed debate not just on the veil but on the refusal of assimilation that it symbolizes. It seems to have swung the Labour Party into a much firmer position against what I call one-way multiculturalism. Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed the shift with a December speech emphasizing the “duty” of immigrants to assimilate to British values. And Martin Amis, speaking to the London Times, had this to say:
There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
I know both of these men to be profoundly humanistic and open-minded. Straw has defended the rights of immigrants all his life and loyally represents a constituency with a large Asian population. Amis has rebuked me several times in print for supporting the intervention in Iraq, the casualties of which have become horrifying to him. Even five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to picture either man making critical comments about Islamic dress, let alone using terms such as “deportation.” Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.
The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization [italics mine].
As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.
Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call “replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to Western societies. Anticipating Harris in a way, Steyn writes:
Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
This is a highly reductionist view of the origin and nature of the Bosnian war—it would not account, for example, for Croatian irredentism. But paranoia about population did mutate into Serbian xenophobia and fascism, and a similar consciousness does animate movements like the British National Party and Le Pen’s Front Nationale. (Demographic considerations do not appear to explain the continued addiction of these and similar parties to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.)
Nor can there be much doubt that the awareness of demography as a potential weapon originates with the Islamists themselves. Anybody who, like me, has publicly criticized Islamism gets used to the accusation that he has “insulted a billion Muslims.” A vague but definite threat underlies this absurd charge, and in parts of Europe it already intimidates politicians. Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, once told me that when he lectures in North Africa his listeners often ask how many Muslims live in France. If he replies that he believes the official figures to be mostly correct, scornful laughter erupts. The true figure, his listeners say, is much higher. France is on its way to becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb (“House of War”), but without a fight. Steyn has no difficulty producing equally minatory public statements from Islamist triumphalists. And, because his argument is exponential, it creates an impression of something unstoppable.
Yet Steyn makes the same mistake as did the late Oriana Fallaci: considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion (as Iraq reminds us). Little binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes—seeking asylum and to build a better life. A young Afghan man, murdered in the assault on the London subway system in July 2005, had fled to England from the Taliban, which had murdered most of his family. Muslim women often demand the protection of the authorities against forced marriage and other cruelties. These are all points of difference, and also of possible resistance to Euro-sharia.
The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq and aware of their own distance from “the struggle,” now regard the jihadist version of their religion as the “authentic” one. Compounding the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s “real” spokesmen. As Kenan Malik and others have pointed out in the case of Britain, this mind-set cuts the ground from under the feet of secular Muslims, encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish.
Steyn cannot seem to make up his mind about the defense of secularism in this struggle. He regards Christianity as a bulwark of civilization and a possible insurance against Islamism. But he cannot resist pointing out that most of the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak of Muslims as another “faith community,” agreeing with them on the need for confessional-based schooling, and reserving their real condemnation for American policies in the war against terrorism.
This is not to deny Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization. His gift for the illustrative anecdote and the revealing quotation is evident, and if more people have woken up to the Islamist menace since he began writing about it, then the credit is partly his. Muslims in one part of England demand the demolition of an ancient statue of a wild boar, and in another part of England make plots to blow up airports, buses, and subway trains. The two threats are not identical. But they are connected, and Steyn attempts to tease out the filiations with the saving tactic of wit.
I still think—or should I say hope?—that the sheer operatic insanity of September 11 set back the Islamist project of a “soft” conquest of host countries, Muslim countries included. Up until 9/11, the Talibanization of Pakistan—including the placement of al-Qaida sympathizers within its nuclear program—proceeded fairly smoothly. Official Pakistani support for Muslim gangsters operating in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India went relatively unpunished. Saudi funds discreetly advanced the Wahhabist program, through madrassa-building and a network of Islamic banking, across the globe. In the West, Muslim demands for greater recognition and special treatment had become an accepted part of the politically correct agenda. Some denounced me as cynical for saying at the time that Osama bin Laden had done us a favor by disclosing the nature and urgency of the Islamist threat, but I still think I was right. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had to trim their sails a bit. The Taliban will at least never be able to retake power by stealth or as a result of our inattention. Millions have become aware of the danger—including millions of Shi’a Muslims who now see the ideology of bin Laden and Zarqawi as a menace to their survival. Groups and cells that might have gotten away with murder have wound up unmasked and shut down, from Berlin to Casablanca.
Of course, these have not been the only consequences of September 11 and its aftermath. Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection.
Steyn ends his book with a somewhat slapdash ten-point program for resistance to Islamism, which includes offhand one-line items such as “End the Iranian regime” and more elaborate proposals to get rid of the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Authority, and (for some reason) NATO. His tenth point (“Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself”) is barely even a makeweight to bring the figure up to ten.
Steyn is much more definite about the cultural side of his argument, in other words, than about the counterterrorist dimension. If I wanted to sharpen both prongs of his thesis, I would also propose the following:
1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.
2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.
3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.
5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.
6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.
7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.
When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.

Facing The Islamic Menace

Facing the Islamist Menace
Christopher Hitchens
Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call.
In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis, ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer and the pedestrian social-democratic politician are for Steyn dual exemplars of his book’s main concern: the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.
I might quibble about Steyn’s assessment—Amis has written brilliantly about Mohammed Atta’s death cult, for example, while Jack Straw made one of the best presentations to the UN of the case for liberating Iraq. But it’s more useful to point out two things that have happened between the writing of this admirably tough-minded book and its publication. Jack Straw, now the leader of the House of Commons, made a speech in his northern English constituency in October, in which he said that he could no longer tolerate Muslim women who came to his office wearing veils. The speech catalyzed a long-postponed debate not just on the veil but on the refusal of assimilation that it symbolizes. It seems to have swung the Labour Party into a much firmer position against what I call one-way multiculturalism. Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed the shift with a December speech emphasizing the “duty” of immigrants to assimilate to British values. And Martin Amis, speaking to the London Times, had this to say:
There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
I know both of these men to be profoundly humanistic and open-minded. Straw has defended the rights of immigrants all his life and loyally represents a constituency with a large Asian population. Amis has rebuked me several times in print for supporting the intervention in Iraq, the casualties of which have become horrifying to him. Even five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to picture either man making critical comments about Islamic dress, let alone using terms such as “deportation.” Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.
The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization [italics mine].
As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.
Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call “replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to Western societies. Anticipating Harris in a way, Steyn writes:
Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
This is a highly reductionist view of the origin and nature of the Bosnian war—it would not account, for example, for Croatian irredentism. But paranoia about population did mutate into Serbian xenophobia and fascism, and a similar consciousness does animate movements like the British National Party and Le Pen’s Front Nationale. (Demographic considerations do not appear to explain the continued addiction of these and similar parties to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.)
Nor can there be much doubt that the awareness of demography as a potential weapon originates with the Islamists themselves. Anybody who, like me, has publicly criticized Islamism gets used to the accusation that he has “insulted a billion Muslims.” A vague but definite threat underlies this absurd charge, and in parts of Europe it already intimidates politicians. Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, once told me that when he lectures in North Africa his listeners often ask how many Muslims live in France. If he replies that he believes the official figures to be mostly correct, scornful laughter erupts. The true figure, his listeners say, is much higher. France is on its way to becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb (“House of War”), but without a fight. Steyn has no difficulty producing equally minatory public statements from Islamist triumphalists. And, because his argument is exponential, it creates an impression of something unstoppable.
Yet Steyn makes the same mistake as did the late Oriana Fallaci: considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion (as Iraq reminds us). Little binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes—seeking asylum and to build a better life. A young Afghan man, murdered in the assault on the London subway system in July 2005, had fled to England from the Taliban, which had murdered most of his family. Muslim women often demand the protection of the authorities against forced marriage and other cruelties. These are all points of difference, and also of possible resistance to Euro-sharia.
The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq and aware of their own distance from “the struggle,” now regard the jihadist version of their religion as the “authentic” one. Compounding the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s “real” spokesmen. As Kenan Malik and others have pointed out in the case of Britain, this mind-set cuts the ground from under the feet of secular Muslims, encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish.
Steyn cannot seem to make up his mind about the defense of secularism in this struggle. He regards Christianity as a bulwark of civilization and a possible insurance against Islamism. But he cannot resist pointing out that most of the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak of Muslims as another “faith community,” agreeing with them on the need for confessional-based schooling, and reserving their real condemnation for American policies in the war against terrorism.
This is not to deny Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization. His gift for the illustrative anecdote and the revealing quotation is evident, and if more people have woken up to the Islamist menace since he began writing about it, then the credit is partly his. Muslims in one part of England demand the demolition of an ancient statue of a wild boar, and in another part of England make plots to blow up airports, buses, and subway trains. The two threats are not identical. But they are connected, and Steyn attempts to tease out the filiations with the saving tactic of wit.
I still think—or should I say hope?—that the sheer operatic insanity of September 11 set back the Islamist project of a “soft” conquest of host countries, Muslim countries included. Up until 9/11, the Talibanization of Pakistan—including the placement of al-Qaida sympathizers within its nuclear program—proceeded fairly smoothly. Official Pakistani support for Muslim gangsters operating in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India went relatively unpunished. Saudi funds discreetly advanced the Wahhabist program, through madrassa-building and a network of Islamic banking, across the globe. In the West, Muslim demands for greater recognition and special treatment had become an accepted part of the politically correct agenda. Some denounced me as cynical for saying at the time that Osama bin Laden had done us a favor by disclosing the nature and urgency of the Islamist threat, but I still think I was right. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had to trim their sails a bit. The Taliban will at least never be able to retake power by stealth or as a result of our inattention. Millions have become aware of the danger—including millions of Shi’a Muslims who now see the ideology of bin Laden and Zarqawi as a menace to their survival. Groups and cells that might have gotten away with murder have wound up unmasked and shut down, from Berlin to Casablanca.
Of course, these have not been the only consequences of September 11 and its aftermath. Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection.
Steyn ends his book with a somewhat slapdash ten-point program for resistance to Islamism, which includes offhand one-line items such as “End the Iranian regime” and more elaborate proposals to get rid of the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Authority, and (for some reason) NATO. His tenth point (“Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself”) is barely even a makeweight to bring the figure up to ten.
Steyn is much more definite about the cultural side of his argument, in other words, than about the counterterrorist dimension. If I wanted to sharpen both prongs of his thesis, I would also propose the following:
1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.
2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.
3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.
5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.
6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.
7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.
When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The Democrat-Gazette

By : Bret Schulte

On a cold January Thursday, an unusual scene unfolded with no great fanfare at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. A man and woman, she in a pink sweat suit and he in jeans and a brown jacket, stepped into the lobby and asked to meet with a representative of the paper. The reason: They wanted to place a classified ad seeking a missing person. And they wanted it to run on Sunday, in the print edition.

Their decision made sense because people in Little Rock read the Sunday paper. (I am one of them, and I worked for the Democrat-Gazette from 1999 to 2001.) While the industry has seen readers leave in droves in markets all over the country — the nearby Dallas Morning News' readership dropped a third from 1998 to 2008 — the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has stayed steady. Over the same period, the paper lost a mere 1 percent of its circulation — now about 196,000 on weekdays and 281,000 on Sunday. In fact, the Democrat-Gazette's city edition has the highest Sunday penetration of any major newspaper in the country, at 63 percent. And by offering free want ads years ago, this paper beat craigslist at its own game before craigslist even had a game.

The Democrat-Gazette has always been considered a perfectly fine regional news outlet. Now the paper, or more specifically, its owner and publisher, Walter E. Hussman Jr., is being hailed as a visionary and as an industry leader. In November, the Atlantic slotted him at No. 14 on its list of 25 "Brave Thinkers." In 2008, Editor & Publisher named him "Publisher of the Year."

His brave thought is simple: Protect the value of your product. When his paper launched its Web site, it followed the industry lead and gave everything away online. "People started coming up to me saying, 'I really appreciate you putting up that content for free. I don't have to subscribe to your newspaper anymore,' " Hussman says. "I thought this was crazy. We're teaching them they don't have to subscribe to the paper." So in 2002, he erected a pay wall around the site. Print subscribers get free access; everyone else has to pony up $5.95 a month. And for the next several years, when most other news organizations were dreaming up ways to monetize the new platform, Hussman focused on expanding the circulation of the retro old print product. "I think for a long time there people kind of laughed at us and thought we were kind of stupid for what we were doing," Hussman says.

Nowadays, Hussman is looking pretty smart, and not just because his notion of charging for online content is now in vogue. He's the owner of a sizable media empire — a newspaper chain that includes the Little Rock paper and the Chattanooga Times Free Press as well as several small dailies and weeklies in Arkansas and nearby states — all under the umbrella of Wehco Media. And he's ready to expand his print holdings: Hussman recently attempted to buy the Austin American-Statesman, but the effort collapsed when the owner, Cox, decided not to sell the paper.

He considers himself equal parts businessman and newspaperman — a handy hybrid for these troubled times. And while his paper is suffering like everyone else's, his defiantly print-centric focus in the Internet Age has buffered the blows.

For the past few years, the Democrat-Gazette has consistently performed better than its peers. In the third quarter of 2009, the industry average for ad revenue was down 28 percent. The Democrat-Gazette was down about half that. Because it is privately owned, the paper doesn't have to disclose its profit margin — and it doesn't. Asked about it, Paul Smith, president of Wehco Newspapers, replied, "Profits decreased significantly over the last couple years, but we are still profitable." He added that 2009 turned out to be a better year than executives had expected — the company provided Christmas bonuses, which had been in doubt — and he expects 2010 to be pretty similar, with the wild card being the price of newsprint.

The Democrat-Gazette has trimmed its staff — the newsroom roster is now 167, 10 of them part time — but the carnage has not been as severe as at some other newspapers. Hussman has sliced 10 percent of the Democrat-Gazette's editorial staff since the big newspaper shakeout began in 2007. Other papers have shed 30 percent and more. Some have shut down.

The Web strategy was not the first time Hussman defied conventional wisdom and came out on top. The Arkansas native and scion of one of the state's oldest newspaper families has a famous contrarian streak — one that lurks under a huge grin, a modest personality and an old-fashioned courtesy. "He's so darned polite. He's so darned nice," Smith says. "There are a lot of aggressive people. Walter is the most dangerous kind, because you never know he's very aggressive."

Hussman showed just how aggressive he can be in 1991, when he stunned the news industry by bringing the mighty Gannett empire to its knees in a fabled newspaper war in Little Rock. Gannett ended the bloody battle by selling Hussman the beloved Arkansas Gazette, which he then merged with his own paper, the Democrat. Later that decade, he moved into Chattanooga, which also had a competitive market, snatched up one of the papers, and then pushed enough money at his rivals to persuade them to sell as well. Those rivals, by the way, were hardly cash-strapped. They were members of the Ochs family, of New York Times fame. Hussman recently ended another newspaper war in northwest Arkansas after gobbling up two local papers and merging on his own terms with a third paper, the Morning News, owned by the Stephens family, one of the few Arkansas families with more money than Hussman. Put simply, Hussman doesn't lose. His aggression has a lot to do with it, but so does his restraint.

At lunch, eagerly sopping up salad dressing with Melba toast, Hussman hardly seems fierce. He looks more like an English professor than a hard-charging executive, preferring corduroy pants and a tweed blazer to a power suit. But make no mistake, Hussman is very wealthy. In 2001 the weekly Arkansas Business estimated his net worth at $890 million; Hussman says the actual figure is much lower today. He drives a snazzy Mercedes, and he lunches at the Little Rock Club, a private establishment that is 30 floors in the air and offers stunning vistas to the city's elite.

In an age of razzle-dazzle executives, corporate shareholders and global media, he is an anachronism: an old-money, local publisher who believes in traditional news values. He keeps his office at the Democrat-Gazette, a squat box of a building that used to be a YMCA. He is notoriously frugal: His office is large but filled with worn furniture, including a '60s vintage couch that serves as an open-air, horizontal filing cabinet. The best part of his day, he says, is proofing the paper's stridently conservative editorial page. Hussman is also invested in his community, and while he's hardly universally beloved, he is active in civic groups and is a crusader for education reform in the state.

Because Hussman owns 100 percent of the company's voting stock, he answers to no one. He takes staggering risks and has absorbed equally staggering losses to prevail in his business endeavors. "Walter has succeeded because people always underestimated him," says Griffin Smith, the Democrat-Gazette's executive editor. At 63, Hussman remains a dangerous, and perhaps still underestimated, foe. Even as the industry seems to be collapsing, Hussman wants more newspapers. That has left many people wondering what he knows that they don't.

This is what Hussman knows: The Democrat-Gazette works because "we've always had a really large newshole. We've always had a larger than normal staff. It sounds simple but the reason people buy and read newspapers is there's news in it. And if you have more news in it, more interesting news, more relevant news, news with more context, news with more details, people are going to feel a greater affinity for the paper and they're going to be more likely to renew their subscription and your circulation will be greater."

Hussman keeps it simple. He believes in investing money in his Web site, but it's not his primary focus. Circulation is key, he argues, because it allows you to charge more and make more from print advertising, which is still where most of the money is. Early on, Hussman saw the online model of advertising offering at most $6 to $8 per thousand readers, often half that. On the other hand, there is print.

"Every single Sunday, Best Buy is going to have an ad in the Sunday paper, and they're going to pay somewhere around $40 a thousand," Hussman says. "Why wouldn't they take those ads and run them online? The fact is they get results from that print ad they run in the paper." So Hussman pushed print, partly by opening a theater of battle in northwest Arkansas. His company president, Paul Smith, says, "I think one of the biggest problems in newspaper companies today is people in those companies have decided that newspapers are dying." Obviously, he and Hussman have decided differently. And today, their paper in Little Rock has a bigger circulation than dailies in Memphis, Cincinnati and Miami.

It's tempting to dismiss Hussman as simply out of step or intractable. But people who know him say he'll try anything to see what works, which has been his formula for success. At the request of editors at the Chattanooga Times Free Press, he's letting them experiment with free access to their Web site to see if they can find other ways of generating revenue online. Hussman is toying with the idea of allowing readers to donate to his reporters — essentially an online tip jar, an idea the Miami Herald recently tried and quickly scrapped — to motivate his staff.

Early in his war with the Gazette, he did the unthinkable by risking the loss of millions in revenue by giving away classifieds. He gambled that the boost in circulation would be worth it. He was right. Even after he merged the Democrat and the Gazette, he still offered free classifieds but in limited number. That means spots quickly fill up. If you're too impatient to wait, you can pay to get the ad in immediately. The "free" want ads policy is now earning his paper $2 million a year.

Hussman also eschews national aggregators like Cars.com and Apartments.com, which he argues have trained readers to turn away from local newspaper classifieds and drains them as a source of revenue. Hussman has instead been an outspoken advocate of newspaper collaboration. But despite the bully pulpit of the Associated Press board of directors, on which he long served, his pleas went largely unheeded. So he's moved forward on his own. Recently, the Democrat-Gazette joined forces with the Oklahoman in Oklahoma City to combine their classifieds and offer greater choices to regional readers.

Even with Hussman's myriad ideas, his basic business plan still comes down to people's willingness to buy and read news printed on paper. And that model has plenty of doubters. Hussman's strategy "cannot save the Arkansas paper if print volume and print advertising continue to decline at the pace it is now," says Ed Atorino, a media analyst at The Benchmark Company. Naysayers argue that Hussman is able to rely on an old business model because Arkansas is behind the times. Hussman counters that Little Rock is a typical midsize American city in terms of per capita income and household sales. But the fact remains that for all the buzz about Hussman, few papers have followed the same path when it comes to charging for news online (the Wall Street Journal is a notable exception). In the past year, however, pay walls have attracted a great deal of interest as a way to help save newspapers, and the New York Times announced in January that it would start charging for online content in 2011.

Hussman won't go so far as to say he's sure he's right. After lunch, it's not too long after he laid out his analysis of the industry's woes and his pay wall solution that he blurts out, "This may be wrong, though! I mean, we got to keep an open mind! Maybe we're all going to be free [on the Web] at some time!"

The decorous Hussman grew up in the conservative, tightly knit Southern town of Camden, Arkansas, about a hundred miles south of Little Rock. The Presbyterian Church was a focal point of community life, and Hussman's family, particularly his mother, Betty, were active members. Walter was the youngest of three children and the only boy. People who knew him as a youngster say he was smart, reserved and serious.

Walter's maternal grandfather, Clyde Palmer, was a newspaper pioneer in south Arkansas and a local legend. While honeymooning with his bride in 1909, Palmer stopped in Texarkana for a night, decided to stay and purchased a newspaper. In what would become a family trait, Palmer bested his Texarkana competitors and consolidated them. Over the next few decades, he expanded his holdings to several towns in the region.

Walter's father took over and expanded the family business in 1957. Considered a no-nonsense businessman, Walter Hussman Sr. also exhibited the family's characteristic good manners. On one occasion, he agreed to allow an upstart competitor who had launched a weekly newspaper to use the services of his Camden newspaper's press. The new rival was a young man named David Pryor, whose mother was a close friend of Walter Hussman Sr.'s wife. Even with Hussman Sr.'s help, the paper didn't last long.

"Mr. Hussman was smart enough to know that with a daily newspaper in town, 95 percent of all ads would go to him every time," Pryor says. "And that was the case. It was just a matter of time." But favors from the Hussman family only went so far. When Pryor, a Democrat, launched his political career, which eventually took him to the Arkansas governor's office and the U.S. Senate, he got little help from Hussman's papers. Pryor posits this was because his politics were more liberal than the Hussmans'. "I don't know if any of their papers ever endorsed me," he says. "At that time I felt like I was not getting a proper shake. In retrospect they could have been a lot rougher on me, if they had wanted to."

Young Walter attended an elite prep school, Lawrenceville, in New Jersey, whose notable alumni include Michael Eisner, Randolph A. Hearst and Huey Lewis(!). Hussman's classmate Howard Kelsey recalls him as sociable and as someone who enjoyed competition. They both went to the University of North Carolina, where Hussman majored in journalism. Hussman "was always up to something," Kelsey says. "He didn't stay in his room." Back then, students were not allowed to have cars, and Hussman and Kelsey, who were suitemates, had a long walk to class. In a move that perhaps portended Hussman's knack for problem-solving, he bought himself a scooter and thereby swerved around the rules. "That [solution] became pretty popular," Kelsey says. "If there was a problem, he would fix it."

Hussman earned an MBA from Columbia University and worked briefly for Forbes magazine before coming back to the small towns of south Arkansas in 1970 to help out with the family business. Four years later, interested in a new opportunity and craving a metropolitan area, Hussman persuaded his reluctant father to buy the Arkansas Democrat, a conservative-minded afternoon daily in Little Rock that by most accounts was near death. Its liberal and somber rival was the Arkansas Gazette, owned by another local newspaper family, the Pattersons. It dominated advertising and had double the circulation of the Democrat. At age 27, Hussman became the Democrat's publisher. "I thought it would be an exciting challenge," Hussman says. "It turned out to be more of a challenge than we thought."

Hussman determined that for the Democrat to be successful it had to get down to basics: increasing circulation to increase advertising. He enlarged the newshole and hired more staff. But he didn't gain any readers. He then proposed a joint operating agreement with the Gazette that would guarantee his paper just enough revenue to keep breathing. The Gazette refused. So Hussman got creative.

He hired a bombastic and battle-hungry former AP Little Rock bureau chief named John Robert Starr to lead the newsroom — and as it turned out, wage a nasty ideological war with the Gazette (among other targets) that lasted for years in a regular column. While his personality couldn't have been more different from Hussman's, it gave the paper a voice and persona it desperately needed to attract readers.

It was then that Hussman decided to offer free want ads — an idea he borrowed from the Winnipeg Tribune — recognizing they would be popular with readers. It did wonders to boost his paper's profile. He also allowed big advertisers to duplicate their Gazette ads in his paper for a nominal fee so that readers would see the same sales and specials advertised in the Democrat. Hussman was notoriously thrifty, and veterans of the paper in those days recall fights for office supplies and available telephones. In 1986, the Pattersons caved and sold the paper to Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in America. As everyone knew, Gannett didn't lose newspaper wars. "They had $40 to every $1 of ours," says Paul Smith.

Smith, who was with Hussman as a top executive throughout the war with the Gazette, says he's rarely seen his boss get mad. But one occasion stands out, and it demonstrates Hussman's knack for brinksmanship. Soon after Gannett came to Little Rock, the Democrat planned a promotion that asked readers to vote for their favorite radio disc jockey by buying a newspaper, filling out a ballot and sending it in. The winning DJ would get $10,000 donated to the charity of his or her choice.

A few days before the promotion was set to launch, the Gazette launched a similar promotion, offering the winning DJ a Pontiac Fiero. "They had stolen the idea," Smith says. Hussman summoned his executives to demand answers. He wadded up the Gazette, threw it against the wall and announced the Democrat was not going to roll over. He said, "We're going to give away a Porsche!" And a lucky reader would get a Mercedes. Both promotions went forward, but when DJs on the air lobbied for votes, they would say, "If you only have one quarter, buy a copy of the Democrat. I'd rather drive a Porsche than a Fiero!"

When Gannett offered free classifieds to rival the Democrat's, Hussman decided to make the war about service. He hired new operators, extended the hours of operation every day and opened the office on Saturday. He also had a secretary call the Gazette classifieds line hourly to time how long it took for someone to pick up. The secretary did the same for the Democrat. Before long, Hussman says, it took three or four seconds to get a response from his paper; the Gazette took three or four minutes. His relentlessness eventually convinced Gannett shareholders that the battle wasn't worth the Little Rock market. In 1991, the mighty newspaper chain surrendered and sold to Hussman. No one knows how much he spent winning that war; some local industry experts estimate $200 million to $250 million. Hussman doesn't talk about it. He talks about the fact that he won.

The Democrat-Gazette today is, like its owner, something of an anachronism. Hussman is succeeding by sticking with traditional newspaper values. Though it has cut its book review section and slashed other features pages, the Democrat-Gazette is still stuffed with news. On Sunday, it prints two news sections, the second focused primarily on international news. Hussman continues to subscribe to multiple wire services, and his wire editor regularly weaves together reports on national and international news from the New York Times, Washington Post, AP and other sources to give readers as many facts as possible in a single story. Hussman believes that this is the sort of thing that gives legacy media an advantage over the Internet and keeps readers coming back, as opposed to the prevailing wisdom that papers must go local, local, local.

The Democrat-Gazette's front page routinely features stories that readers could get online from other sources. "When newspapers get away from the traditional model and start having giant stories about the parks or something on the front page," Hussman says, "I think readers start to question what's going on with their news judgment."

The wounds from the newspaper war have not healed in Arkansas. The Gazette was the dominant paper for decades because it was beloved by many, particularly liberals. It won two Pulitzers for its coverage of and editorials on the Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957. Its editorial page was as unapologetically left-wing as the Democrat-Gazette's is now right-wing. Ernest Dumas, who was a reporter and editorial writer for the Gazette, was one of scores who lost their jobs when the paper folded. Today, he says, "I don't think much of the Democrat, but I think [Hussman] has spent money probably more generously than certainly Gannett would have to try to maintain a good paper."

Recently, Dumas took a trip to San Francisco, where he regularly read the Chronicle. "I suspect on a daily basis there is at least three times as much news in the Democrat-Gazette than there is in the Chronicle," he says, "and that's true across the country."

Joel Gambill, chairman of the journalism department at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, watched the Democrat and the Gazette duke it out from his perch in the northeast corner of the state. He questions whether the Democrat-Gazette today can truly call itself a statewide paper, as it provides little coverage and has few subscribers in his region. "If you compare it to 10 years ago, it doesn't cover the state nearly as thoroughly," Gambill says. "But for what other papers are doing today, I think it still does a good job. It has more international and national news than almost any other paper I look at."

Hussman says the old-fashioned values extend to the proverbial wall that separates news coverage from business interests or political inclinations. He acknowledges that as a local owner, he gets leaned on by powerful interests in the community for favors. His response is that he doesn't control the news operation. Reporters say they respect him and are grateful to work for a local publisher who has sheltered their place of business from financial ruin. But while his top editors and executives have stood by his side for decades, Hussman doesn't seem to inspire the same devotion among the rank and file. In 2009, the paper implemented mandatory furloughs. The move no doubt saved jobs, but it also hurt reporters' incomes, already considered low.

Executive Editor Griffin Smith says Hussman is an ideal owner who is accessible but who stays out of newsroom affairs. Hussman will, however, suggest looking at stories from particular angles. Smith says that "when [Hussman] gets a hold of something, sometimes we have a hard time telling him there's nothing there."

Hussman's willfulness manifests itself in other ways, such as not allowing members of the news staff to have company credit cards. In 1996, the Democrat-Gazette planned to cover President Bill Clinton's reelection campaign, but all expenses had to be charged. Hussman wouldn't waver. Finally, Griffin Smith went to then-General Manager Paul Smith. After some time, Paul Smith came back with a credit card number and said, effectively, guard this with your life. "Years later, I found out Paul had just given me his own credit card number," Griffin Smith says. "The company hadn't relented."

After all these years of newspapering, Hussman sometimes thinks about retirement. He has children who are perhaps interested in getting into the business. A college-age daughter is now interning at the San Francisco Chronicle. His 26-year-old son is working for him in Little Rock. The top brass at Wehco, which has been with him for decades, has recently started to groom their replacements. But Hussman is hesitant to dwell much on the subject.