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George Bernard Shaw died too early to enjoy the fruits of 24-hour TV news channels, but his famous condemnation of newspaper journalism would apply: "Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." Tonight's election coverage is sure to provide plenty of fresh examples. While you're wincing at the usual cacophony, click over to Slate's interactive delegate counter and see for yourself whether it's possible in the remaining primaries for Hillary Clinton to catch up with Barack Obama. Nicely done.

I wasn't going to comment on the McCain story, but my friend Howard Owens has pulled my chain by dismissing it as "nothing but gossip from either unnamed sources or pure speculation." He aims that charge at the lead, but implies that there isn't any substance to the story. There is.

I am as puzzled as anyone by the construction of the NYT story. The focus on the Iseman anecdote obscured the point for many people instead of illustrating it.

The nut graf is here:

"Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest."

This is a legitimate story because the candidate, who has created his own public brand as that of a maverick, a reformer, and a champion of ethics, has surrounded himself with lobbyists, some of whom are actually running their lobbying operations out of McCain's own campaign bus.

He flies on corporate jets, intervenes in public affairs on behalf of his lobbyist friends, and then denies that he does it.

In the current campaign he has borrowed money against public funding, then tried to back out of public funding, which could put him in a position of having committed bank fraud.

As the Times and others continue to follow this story, it will become clear that this is not a story about sexual innuendo but rather a story about a candidate with real problems that voters will have to evaluate in making their decisions in November. The story is going to continue to come out, and it's going to require real reporting that will include some anonymous sources.

At every turn there's going to be a chorus of politically motivated protest. The protests can be fierce, and journalists and their institutions have to stand up to them.

When I was at the Star Tribune in 1990, the newspaper was approached by legal counsel for some teenage girls who said they had been swimming nude with Jon Grunseth, the Republican candidate for governor. Publication of that story -- which first was checked out by an investigative team -- prompted a storm of accusations from the right far worse than anything I've heard in the McCain case.

But it wasn't sensationalism. It was a story of substance, because Grunseth had positioned himself as the "family values" conservative. He was part of a fundamentalist religious right-wing effort to take over the Independent-Republican party.

Over the next few weeks other facts emerged, other women came forward, and there turned out to be a broad pattern of inappropriate behavior by Grunseth that included three-way sandwich sex in his Ecolab office.

Grunseth was forced off the ballot. At the last minute the centrist wing of the party was able to get Arne Carlson, a moderate, on the ticket. Carlson narrowly won the election and in my opinion turned out to be one of the state's better governors in his two terms.

I'm not suggesting that anything like this is going to happen to John McCain. But it's entirely appropriate for the New York Times -- and others -- to inquire and report about who the real John McCain is, and not accept at face value the image he's crafted for himself.

We should not rush to write off reporting that includes anonymous sources or jump to the conclusion that the New York Times is part of some left-wing conspiracy. There's going to be a lot of screeching from the right-wing blogosphere and talk-radio blowhards but it's meaningless. Let the process run its course.

I generally don't regard Alexa to be a reliable source of traffic data for local websites due to sampling methodology and size issues, but when applied to the presidential race, it may provide a fairly accurate indication of enthusiasm about the candidates. Here's a snapshot of the last month's traffic for the Obama, Clinton and McCain campaign websites. It certainly doesn't look good for Clinton.

You can see the live data at Alexa.com.

[Update: I had generated a graph for hilaryclinton.com, which apparently is owned by a domain squatter, not the correct hillaryclinton.com domain. I've fixed that and the Clinton line is somewhat higher, but still badly behind Obama.]

Aaron Smith at Pew muses about the effect YouTube is having in the presidential primary race as Barack Obama's powerful Iowa caucuses speech is relayed around the Internet:

"it's likely that relatively few people, outside of the most inveterate political junkies, actually did watch the speech live and in its entirety. And prior to the days of broadband access and easily accessible online video, it's likely that most voters would never have seen more of the speech than an odd clip here or there on the cable and network news shows. Instead, more than 160,000 people have watched just the official campaign YouTube clip alone in the twelve hours since it was posted, in addition to the tens or hundreds of thousands more who watched from other video or news sites."

Things are different this time around. On the one hand, the explosion of media choices has fractured the audience so we have relatively few common experiences. On the other hand, the "word of mouth" power of the Internet allows an occasional experience to spread quickly, based on a chain of recommendations by individuals, not media power brokers.

One of the effects of this transformation is an increased volatility in public opinion. Three or four months ago most pundits claimed, and I tended to agree, that Hilary Clinton was an unstoppable juggernaut.

No longer.

I first encountered this effect in what I consider to be the first major campaign truly altered by the Internet: Jesse Ventura's 1998 election as governor of Minnesota.

Ventura's backers, many of them former Ross Perot followers, were able to connect, organize, recruit and communicate through the Internet in ways that previously had not been possible.

Political parties, pundits and mainstream media were caught off guard by a grassroots process that unfolded under the conventional radar, and Ventura, not taken seriously in the months leading up to the vote, "shocked the world."

In hindsight it was possible to find clues in the raw Minnesota Poll data about the volatility and dissatisfaction with the conventional candidates (Skip Humphrey and Norm Coleman). Lessons from that experience undoubtedly helped the Iowa Poll folks sharpen their pencils and come up with a much more accurate prediction in the final hours before this year's caucuses.

Now we have all sorts of predictions that Obama may become the new juggernaut. Maybe. But keep in mind that public opinion today is more volatile than ever, and a slip or unexpected turn of events could change everything again.

Tim Berners-Lee has this to say about net neutrality and why it's important:

"When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA. ...

"Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry."

Every time I dip a toe into the reality-distortion field that is Washington, DC, it make my head spin. I was just in Washington for an API seminar, and it happened again.

Washington has the world's largest collection of special-interest spinmeisters trying to warp the political agenda.

Wherever you go, there are TV commercials, newspaper ads, billboards, selling something that's ultimately targeted at Congress and the pseudolegislative machinery of regulatory bureaucrats. Nobody tries to sell ladies' underwear in the Washington Post any more. Instead, these these ads sell poison, depicting an alternate universe in which facts have been rewritten to the advantage of one power-hungry cartel or another.

As I dissected a Comfort Inn waffle for breakfast I encountered a big display ad in the Washington Post, and later as I flipped on the TV I was hit by a video ad with the same message from a mysterious "public interest" group: Those evil people at Google are conspiring to rob all of us by keeping us from having more video choices just when Santa Claus was going to crawl through our broadband connections with lots of new goodies. Google wants consumers to pay! Google is a giant California technomonster (cut to a photo of the sprawling Googleplex headquarters). Stop Congress from regulating the Internet!

I think I know who's picking my pocket, and it ain't Google.

It's the big cable and telcos that are behind this fake grassroots movement, spreading this lie in an attempt to stop net neutrality.

Until now, the Internet has been a fast, basically unmetered, level playing field where new ideas can be easily tried. Ideas like Skype (free telephony), YouTube (free video sharing), Shoutcast (free audio channels).

The cable and telcos want to be able to selectively discriminate against content providers that do not pay tribute or become business partners.

These price-gouging monopolists are no friend of you and me. They want the "freedom" to selectively degrade certain Internet services, especially realtime streaming media such as audio, video and telephony unless the content providers pony up and pay for guaranteed performance.

For entrepreneurial, individual and peer-to-peer multimedia, this means death. And that death is to the advantage of cable and telcos, which have their own programming and telephony services they want to sell you.

The net effect would be to turn back the clock to a pre-Internet era when a few powerful corporations controlled what we could see and how we could see it. That's not hyperbole. It's the goal. If you don't believe the cable giants are against individual publishing, read your broadband terms of service.

Content providers do pay for Internet service, as do consumers, and the cable and telcos aren't going to stop charging for broadband. They just want even more money.

How can they do that? Isn't the Internet huge, and competitive?

The Internet is very big, but the cable companies -- and it is primarily cable companies who provide the "last mile" broadband connections into the home -- have control of key choke points.

If they are allowed to demand tribute from everyone who wants to offer fat content or provide streaming services to their customers, it will come at the expense of every individual who tries to watch, listen, or talk on the net.