Along with heat waves and other evidence of a climatic shift, we have a shift in the media climate this summer. In the trade, August is generally known as the “silly season” because it offers little in the way of real news: Congress is in recess, everybody important is on vacation, that sort of thing. So it’s usually the month when you read about two-headed calves and UFO abductions.
But this year, Israel us invading Lebanon. There’s a robust public debate over stem-cell research. Turmoil increases in Iraq. Fidel Castro is sick. New immigration laws just took effect in Colorado. There’s so much real news that it threatens to drown out the usual silly stuff, like what an actor bellowed after his arrest for drunken driving.
And fortunately, other inane items have survived.
For instance, there is the case of Kinderstart, a website with a search feature that appears to help insecure parents find ways to spend money on their children, versus Google, the well-known Internet search engine.
If you install the Google toolbar on your browser – something that neither I nor anyone I know has done – then you can see a “page rank score.” At some point, Kinderstart’s score came up at zero, and so Kinderstart sued Google.
Google is not a public utility. It’s private enterprise. It may dominate the search-engine market, but that’s still a very competitive market, what with Yahoo!, Ask.com and Microsoft’s MSN Search, as well as many others.
This should mean that Google is free to list whatever it chooses and to express opinions (such as the page rank). What else does free speech mean? If people don’t like Google’s results, they’re free to try some other search engine – in theory, anyway, the competitive market will reward the search engine that produces the best results.
In other words, the Kinderstart lawsuit was the sort of litigation that inspires lawyer jokes. I manage a website, and while I’m pleased when Google points people that way, I can’t imagine that it has any legal obligation to do so.
The good news is that this silly lawsuit was dismissed by a California judge last month. The bad news is that the judge left open the door to an amended complaint.
Another piece of inane Internet litigation is a $30 million lawsuit recently filed by the family of a 14-year-old Texas girl who joined MySpace.com and attracted the attention of a 19-year-old boy, who arranged to meet her and then sexually assaulted her. The boy had lied about his age and occupation, and the suit alleges that MySpace should have done more to check ages and protect minors from adult sexual predators.
Just how can an online company check ages and identities? And just how did MySpace force her to meet this guy in person so that the crime could be committed? If he had, say, met her in the food court of a shopping mall, lied about himself and persuaded her to go to his apartment, would the shopping mall be at fault?
Closer to home in this silly season, we have the effort to recall LeRoy Johnson from the Greeley City Council. There was a six-hour hearing about historic designation for the Cranford neighborhood.
A six-hour municipal hearing can provoke bizarre and irrelevant comment from all parties, and at some point Johnson said, “They have some pretty good-looking women who live there.”
He said he was just trying to inject some levity into a tedious evening, but others have seen this as “an insult to every woman in the community,” and they have started gathering signatures on a recall petition.
So first we have Johnson’s silly statement, of no relevance to whether the Cranford neighborhood should get historic designation. Then we get the overheated response.
Something clearly must be done so that the Greeley City Council can get back to municipal business. The best I can come up with is for Johnson to apologize. “I’m sorry,” he should say. “You’re right. There are no good-looking women living there. And I’m sorry I offended anyone in saying there were.”
The silly stuff this summer is indeed irritating – but it’s certainly easier to handle than the real news.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
