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In an about-face, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Saturday that he was sorry for lambasting as a "prostitute" a Georgetown University law student who spoke publicly in favor of the Obama administration's policy on contraception coverage.

Limbaugh published the apology on his website, a day after President Barack Obama telephoned the student, Sandra Fluke, to say he stood by her in the face of personal attacks on right-wing radio. The apology came as several advertisers said they were leaving the program.

"For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke," he wrote. He then reiterated his opposition to the Obama administration policy, which requires health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women.

On the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday editions of his show, Limbaugh attacked Fluke, alleging she was sexually promiscuous, politically motivated and "an anti-Catholic plant."

Fluke had testified to congressional Democrats in support of their national health care policy that would compel her college to offer health plans that cover her birth control.

"My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir," Limbaugh said on his website. "I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices."

Attempts to reach

Fluke had been invited to testify to a House committee about her school's health care plan, which does not include contraception. Republican lawmakers barred her from testifying during that hearing, but Democrats invited her back and she spoke to the Democratic lawmakers at an unofficial session.

The issue has been debated in the presidential race, with Republican candidates in particular criticizing the Obama plan's requirements for employers such as Catholic hospitals. Democrats - and many Republican leaders, too - have suggested the issue could energize women to vote for Obama and other Democrats in November.

Limbaugh was not swayed by Fluke's statements before the House panel.

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Limbaugh apologizes for string of 'insulting word choices'

CFOs are a pretty conservative lot, when it comes to the march of investor relations toward social media. In the case of one relatively new type of dissemination --- video --- to get out the word about that most sensitive of disclosures --- an earnings restatement --- it seems it may pay to stick with the good old press release.

"Announcing a restatement online via video is likely to benefit firms only when top management apologizes for the restatement and accepts responsibility by making an internal attribution for the error," according to a study in the March/April issue of The Accounting Review. "When management apologizes but denies responsibility by making an external attribution," the study goes on, "announcing a restatement online via video is likely to have unintended negative effects on investors."

The results in the magazine, published by the American Accounting Association, may not be too surprising. After all, as the AAA says in a press release, that "for all its vaunted powers, video can present special hazards for a company when those powers are most needed -- namely when there is bad news to report."

Digging Into the Details

But the degree of work that went into the research, and some of the details with in the findings, are worth considering.

"Managing the response of investors to events as negative as restatements is a formidable undertaking. Doing so via video over the Internet makes it all the more formidable," according to Frank D. Hodge of the University of Washington's Foster School of Business, who carried out the study with W. Brooke Elliott of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Lisa M. Sedor of DePaul University.

The study -- titled "Using Online Video to Announce a Restatement: Influences on Investment Decisions and the Mediating Role of Trust" -- note that the General Accountability Office has estimated that restatements reduced market capitalization of companies by $36 billion over a three-year period.

Restatements have a long tradition of causing difficulties for investors -- a tradition that grew along with the number of restatements in the years after Sarbanes-Oxley took effect a decade ago.

The study in The Accounting Review, however, makes a start at quantifying the damage, both in cases of the company taking responsibility, and cases of it placing responsibility elsewhere. Asked to gauge the trustworthiness of CEOs accepting responsibility via video for their companies' flawed financial statements, for example, professional managers gave the CEOs an average rating of 6.15 on a one-to-seven scale (with seven being highest.) Asked to rate a chief who blames external accountants, the managers bestowed an average of 4.0.

Admitting Versus Ducking

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YouTube No Substitute to Press Release to Restate Earnings

02-03-2012 13:12 Check out highlights of Kid Cudi and Dot Da Genius at the Project X premiere party. Then catch Project X in theaters today and continue the party with the new album WZRD in stores and on iTunes now: bit.ly Follow Kid Cudi @wizardcud and Dot Da Genius @DotDaGenius on Twitter. Like Kid Cudi on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com Find out more about Project X, in theaters now: http://www.projectxthemovie.com & http

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Kid Cudi and Dot Da Genius of WZRD rage with the cast of Project X - Video

03-03-2012 07:02

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Someone like you practice - Video

Last month I mentioned essays by Dave Winer, John Battelle, and Keith Woolcock on why the growth of "social media" threatened the survival of the original social/individual/international medium known as the Internet. Short version of net history, as they present it:

-Back in the AOL era, people did their communicating within separate, proprietary "walled gardens" of the cybersphere -- AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc.

-During the Google era, they did business across proprietary boundaries (though sometimes within national boundaries, as under China's closed system) via the open Internet.

-In the emerging Facebook era, their growth and activity is channeled back into proprietary spheres.

The argument did not contend that Google was less profit-minded than any of the others. The point was that its model for profit-maximization (usefully) involved maximizing openness and connections on the Internet. Whereas the Facebook model, like the AOL model long before it, maximized separateness in proprietary spheres.

A new essay today, by Tristan Louis at his site, extends the logic. It begins thus: The essay connects individual user behavior, click-by-click, with the larger trends in the Internet's growth. Worth reading and reflecting on.

More From The Atlantic

Read more here:
'I Killed the Internet': Click by Click, the Internet Grows, or Dies