The hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider will be incommuniblogo for the next few days.

Play nice.

The daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney is fronting a website called Keep America Safe that is hazardous to America’s political health, according to some.

From a piece on the lefty site AlterNet:

The “al Qaeda Seven” ad released last week by Liz Cheney and her Keep America Safe cohorts has been roundly (and rightly) condemnedacross the political spectrum (or as one Salon writer put it, by “just about everyone who’s not a Cheney family member or close family friend”). The ad is an ugly ploy that does nothing less than smear Obama’s Department of Justice lawyers as shadowy extensions of al Qaeda. “Whose values do they share?” a male voice intones, as Osama bin Laden (or someone who looks a lot like him) flashes in the background.

(Here’s the “al Qaeda Seven” video, which the AlterNet story inexplicably omitted.)

So who are the al Qaeda Seven?

So, Liz, are we down to the Al-Qaeda Six?

Then again, our Liz isn’t exactly renowned for her cogent arguments. Consider this encounter in January with fellow conservative George Will over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s comments that (via the lefty Huffington Post) “Barack Obama could win the election because he’s a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’”  (Video here.)

WILL: I don’t think there’s a scintilla of racism in what Harry Reid said. At long last, Harry Reid has said something that no one can disagree with, and he gets in trouble for it.CHENEY: George, give me a break. I mean, talking about the color of the president’s skin…

WILL: Did he get it wrong?

CHENEY: … and the candidate’s…

WILL: Did he say anything false?

CHENEY: … it’s — these are clearly racist comments, George.

WILL: Oh, my, no.

Oh, my, no.

Pretty much the international symbol for Liz Cheney.

UPDATE: Via Wednesday’s Daily Beast

Former Attorney General Mike Mukasey may have served in the Bush administration with Dick Cheney, but he has a bone to pick with Cheney’s daughter Liz. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Mukasey calls the efforts of Cheney and others to smear Justice Department lawyers who have represented terrorists as “shoddy and dangerous.” He then states the should-be obvious: “A lawyer who represents a party in a contested matter has an ethical obligation to make any and all tenable legal arguments that will help that party.” Without ever mentioning Liz by name, Mukasey characterizes her “Al Qaeda 7″ campaign as trying to paint Justice Department lawyers as “in-house counsel to Al Qaeda” and “a fifth column within the Justice Department.”

Read it at The Wall Street Journal

So imagine our excitement when we received two – count ‘em, two – survey-related missives in one swell foop.

The first came from:

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

Economics and Statistics Administration

U.S. Census Bureau

It was our official 2010 Census Advance Letter, and it said:

Dear Resident:

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail. When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly. Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share. Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely, Robert M. Groves
Director, U.S. Census Bureau

Go to <2010census.gov> for help completing your 2010 Census form when it arrives. [Note: this sentence is repeated in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Russian]

Yeah, that seems like a good use of taxpayer dollars.

Yo – comin’ at ya!

The second letter we received, compliments of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, contained our official Republican Senate Leadership Survey (Registration #: 52.09.3365. Actual purpose: fundraising).

The salutation:

Dear Friend,

Your immediate attention is required on a confidential and time-sensitive matter.

You have been selected to represent your local voting district in the Republican Senate Leadership Survey.

No doubt much to the dismay of our local voting district.

It has long been the case that Republican Party surveys are True-False, while Democratic Party surveys tend to be multiple choice.

The Republican Senate Leadership Survey only reinforced that.

True: We love getting these fauxraising surveys.

False: We represent our local voting district.

Sorry.

The back-story, as deconstructed by Hoyt:

ZACHERY KOUWE, a Times business reporter for a little over a year,resigned last month after he was accused of plagiarizing from The Wall Street Journal. An internal review of his work turned up more articles — he said he was shown four — containing copy clearly lifted from other news sources.

The particulars, as presented by Hoyt:

In January, Dealbreaker, a competing Web site, scored a scoop by posting an internal Citigroup memo about a rumored joint venture. The same memo soon went up on DealBook, complete with two minor alterations that Dealbreaker had inserted as a trap to catch competitors ripping off material without credit. Dealbreaker’s editor, Bess Levin, posted a gotcha. I called and asked her what happened next. She said got a call from Andrew Ross Sorkin, the editor of DealBook, who explained that Kouwe had verified the memo with Citigroup and was going to get his own copy. Rather than wait, Kouwe grabbed it from her site, she said Sorkin told her. Sorkin immediately ordered an editors’ note inserted in the DealBook item that gave credit and explained what happened.

Sorkin said Kouwe had told him “it was an honest mistake. I told him that it was unacceptable, but I had no reason to believe it represented a larger problem.”

As they say in the Big Town, I got your larger problem right here.

And that is: Times business reporter and Dealbook editor Sorkin has himself been accused of ripping off Times colleagues in his book, Too Big To Fail.

According to slash-and-burn dishsite Gawker (via Politico):

The success of New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin’s tome Too Big to Fail has provoked a debate in the fractious newsroom: is he a plugged-in wunderkind or an in-over-his-head cub reporter who mooches off his veteran colleagues?

I don’t know which is true, but I do know Hoyt should have mentioned it.

The entire first page of The Los Angeles Times on Friday was an ad that looked, in part, like the front page of The Los Angeles Times, as the newspaper again tested the accepted limits on where ads can be published and how they can blur the boundary with news.

Here’s the offending Page Won, touting the cinematic release of Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland:”

This is business as usual for the LAT, which has also auctioned off its front page to the NBC drama “Southland” . . .

. . . and leased out Page One to the HBO series “True Blood” . . .

But this latest LA Times dalliance seems to be the worst:

The “Alice in Wonderland” ad, which also wraps around the paper, introduces a new wrinkle, lending the name and work of The Times to an advertiser.

For that reason, some Times journalists said they found it more troubling than the previous ads.

“Troubling,” at this point, is a vast understatement.

Money quote:

“A building like that would not be allowed to deteriorate that way and remain standing in any other city”

The Motor City: Crescent City without Katrina.

How does made conman Ahmad Chalabi get an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal?

Answer:

He opens his mouth.

Our humble offering:

This is the Mugwump Moment in the media world – mug on one side of the fence, wump on the other.

The fence, of course, is the Internet.

From journalism to television, from film to marketing, the new media are transforming the old, while endlessly recreating themselves.

“The decoupling of advertising from news”

Nowhere is the new-media dynamic more evident than in the newspaper industry. During the 1990s, most newspaper organizations made a dreadful miscalculation – they thought the Internet was the caboose, so they put their content on the Web for free.

To their everlasting dismay, newspapers subsequently learned that the Internet isn’t the caboose. It’s the engine.

In its State of the News Media 2009 report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism wrote,  “The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem. It is a revenue problem – the decoupling . . . of advertising from news.”

As audiences have migrated to the Internet in steadily growing numbers, they’ve also changed the way they consume news. These New Aggregators, who assemble their own version of the news, no longer need the traditional packagers in the mainstream media. The unit of value for today’s news consumer is the story, not the package.

That leaves news organizations claiming to be platform-agnostic regarding their content. Problem is, they need more revenue acolytes. Some see hope in the new wave of tablet computers like the iPad. Presumably, print publications will not repeat the mistakes of the past, but actually charge for their content in that format.

Small-Screen Play

Broadcast television networks are struggling to keep pace with cable channels, which have two sources of revenue – programming fees from cable operators, and advertising. Increasingly broadcast networks are seeking their own programming fees for cable retransmission, but so far the results have been modest.

On the TV advertising front, Ad Age columnist Bob Garfield has written:

“[T]he fragmentation of mass media creates . . .  an inexorable death spiral, in which audience fragmentation and ad-avoidance hardware lead to an exodus of advertisers, leading in turn to an exodus of capital, leading to a decline in the quality of content, leading to further audience defection, leading to further advertiser defection and so on to oblivion.”

That apocalyptic outcome is far from certain, but those elements are definitely in play. That’s led broadcasters to explore digital options as both a content platform and a revenue source – with some promising results on both fronts.

Film in 3-D: Dazed, Defensive, Depressed

“I think at the moment it’s a strange time to be a filmmaker,” Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson said recently, “because there’s a sense of depression in the industry. Studios feel DVDs are down and piracy is up, and the entire industry is being as defensive as they possibly can, which leads to movies not being as exciting as they possibly can.”

Which leads to audiences not being as large as they possibly can . . . which leads to . . . see death spiral talk above.

Things are also difficult in what’s been described as the “faltering independent film world.” But once again the Internet is opening up new opportunities and new ways there are currently initiatives by film festivals to use digital distribution and pay-per-view offerings at the same time the films are debuting at the festival.

Strike Up the Brand

The traditional one-way marketing that dominated the advertising and public relations field for so long is gradually yielding to participatory brand-building and relationship marketing.  The rise of social media has provided marketers with tools that both complement and supercharge mass marketing efforts.

Of course, the rise of social marketing brings its own challenges and risks, as these self-styled “citizen marketers” alter the balance of consumer power and operate as co-curators of brand images. This dual brand watchdog/brand ambassador function is a central part of what are no longer marketing campaigns as much as consumer conversations.

So there you have today’s media world – one half firmly grounded in tradition, the other half looking out at new horizons.

Welcome to the Mugwump Moment.

It was not at a pub or in an alley.

Instead, the confrontation occurred after a routine session of the Watertown Town Council on Nov. 10, when an ugly shouting match between the police chief and the Town Council president broke out in the council’s back office. A handful of witnesses looked on.

According to an investigative report made public this week, Police Chief Edward P. Deveau made a beeline for the council’s back office shortly after 10 p.m. that day to confront Clyde L. Younger, the council’s former president. Deveau was apparently upset Younger had alluded to “serious allegations’’ about the Police Department publicly without checking with him first.

Younger described Deveau as getting “right in my face’’ and “towering over me screaming and hollering,’’ according to a 17-page investigative report.

Younger said he finally responded to Deveau in similarly jocular language.

What?

I thought jocular meant (American Heritage Dictionary): 1. Characterized by joking. 2. Given to joking.

I must be wrong.

Starbucks Corp. and some other chain stores in the U.S. are finding themselves caught in the middle of a firearms debate, as gun-control advocates go up against a burgeoning campaign by gun owners to carry holstered pistols in public places.

The “open carry” movement, in which gun owners carry unconcealed handguns as they go about their everyday business, is loosely organized around the country but has been gaining traction in recent months.

Sounds more like a Dunkin’ Donuts thing, but why get technical about it.