BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
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For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Friday, December 20, 2002
Nyhan calls Romney's bluff.
Retired Globe columnist David Nyhan takes a look at Mitt
Romney's suddenly inoperative promise to steer the state through the
budget crisis without raising taxes or cutting services in any
significant way. Nyhan's column appeared in yesterday's Salem
News; you can try
following this link,
although if past practice is any guide, it will expire long before
the end of the day.
Nyhan goes easier on Romney than he
should, given that the parameters of the current crisis were
well-known before Election Day. You could even argue that Romney won
because he reassured voters that they had nothing to worry about
while his opponent, Shannon O'Brien, was somewhat more honest. (I
think Romney would have won anyway, but maybe by a smaller
margin.)
Still, Nyhan is unsparing in
reminding readers that Romney was claiming a $1 billion deficit when
everyone else was using a figure of $2 billion -- a number that
Romney has now embraced -- so that he could mouth his phony promise
to eliminate that deficit through reorganization. No one, including
the highly credible Massachusetts
Taxpayers Association,
believes Romney can save anywhere near that much without slashing
services. Nyhan also notes that the deficit was fed in large measure by $4 billion in tax breaks for the affluent during the Weld/Cellucci/Swift years. Nyhan writes:
Mitt had to lowball the
deficit during the campaign if he was to have any credibility at
all with his no-new-taxes approach. He even went so far as to vow
to roll back the $1 billion in new/old taxes that the Legislature
forced upon acting Gov. Swift in facing up to the deficit
avalanche swooping down on the state.
But if Mitt is to have any
future in national politics as a Republican candidate for
president, vice president, or the Bush cabinet, he has to go the
no-new-taxes route.
Nyhan's conclusion: "So what does
all this amount to? Politics as usual, I'm afraid. Yep, it's even
worse than we thought."
And by the way, Dave, let's make a
deal: get your son or one of his friends to put together a website
collecting your columns so that they don't disappear into the ether
within a few hours of their being posted, and I promise to add a link
somewhere.
posted at 8:58 AM |
link
Thursday, December 19, 2002
NU J-school director whacks
Buckingham. Steve Burgard, the director of Northeastern
University's School of Journalism and a former editorial-board member
at the Los Angeles Times, e-mails Media Log on an additional
reason why Virginia
Buckingham would be a poor
choice as the Herald's deputy editorial-page
editor:
The Boston Globe
has reported that Virginia Buckingham, a former head of the
Massachusetts Port Authority, has been talking to the Boston
Herald about becoming deputy editorial page editor. Let's hope
that the lunch meeting she was spotted having with Rachelle Cohen,
the editorial page editor, was that and only that. Lunch.
To see why having Buckingham as
number two of one of the city's major daily editorial boards is a
bad idea, look no further than today's (Dec. 19) Herald. In
a story headlined "Logan
hit hardest post 9/11,"
the newspaper reports on a study that found that Logan
International Airport lost almost a quarter of its flights since
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Massport's spokesman was quoted as
citing drastic agency actions such as cutting budget, laying off
15 percent of its work force and delaying capital
projects.
Readers look to major editorial
pages to make sense of important stories like this. How much stock
could they put in an institutional voice spoken by a former
political appointee whose fingerprints were all over Massport and
its troubles?
Editorial pages can and should
have a point of view, but they will cheat readers of clear,
independent thinking if they are too politically connected or
ideologically rigid. Make no mistake either about the clout
inherent in a deputy editor's position. At major newspapers,
deputies exercise enormous influence over the daily editorial
line, and when the boss is out of the office, they often set
it.
Burgard's letter has already been
posted
by Romenesko, too. The
Globe item described Buckingham as a "shoo-in." But you've got
to wonder if the opposition of someone as respected as Burgard might
make Cohen and publisher Pat Purcell pause.
posted at 11:35 AM |
link
Larry and Rummy,
kissy-kissy. Here's my favorite exchange from Larry King's
on-his-knees interview last night with Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
KING: Morale is
high?
RUMSFELD: Excellent, just
excellent.
Of course, it's too easy to make
fun of King. You can't deny that there's value in letting someone
like Rumsfeld talk unimpeded for the better part of an hour. You
might even learn more than you would if an interviewer with an agenda
kept trying to steer the interview in his direction. Given
Rumsfeld's refusal to answer any questions about the inner workings
of the administration, it's easy to see how someone other than
easy-going Larry would have turned the entire hour into a testy
exchange over the Defense secretary's penchant for secrecy. Okay, but
he's still not going to answer the question.
But even given King's low
standards, I was nevertheless stunned that he failed to ask about the
single biggest Rumsfeld story of the week. Veteran investigative
reporter Seymour
Hersh has a piece in this
week's New Yorker on Rumsfeld's controversial efforts to push
the military into carrying out smaller, faster operations aimed at
taking out terrorist cells -- operations that his critics call
"assassinations."
Hersh is often criticized for
becoming a prisoner of his sources, but this piece is better balanced
than some of his previous efforts. I came away impressed with how
dangerous it is to carry out operations like the recent missile
attack in Yemen, where Al Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi
and five other men were killed. Hersh's sources make it clear that
Rumsfeld risks (a) making mistakes and killing innocent noncombatants
and (b) elevating assassination to the status of a legitimate tool of
warcraft that can just as easily be used against the US.
Yet Hersh also takes note of the
danger of not acting as well. He quotes a "Pentagon adviser"
on Rumsfeld's frustrations in dealing with his cautious -- overly
cautious? -- generals: "The idea of not wanting to go after
the senior leadership of a paramilitary group that has declared war
on you is such a perversion that it's mind-boggling. The problem of a
peacetime military is that they cannot conceive of doing what they
are paid to do. 'Going after the leadership of Al Qaeda -- that's
a serious problem.' My God!"
It's an important and fascinating
look at one of the most momentous debates going on inside our
government, and Larry had an hour to interview one of the principals.
Too bad he didn't ask him about it.
posted at 8:39 AM |
link
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
A Bulger defender checks in.
The Dorchester Reporter's Bill
Forry finds some things to
like and some things to object to in my recent commentary on UMass
president Bill Bulger's refusal to testify before the Burton
committee. (Click here,
here
and here
for what I wrote.) Forry doesn't have a whole lot of nice things to
say about the rest of the media regarding the Bulger Chronicles,
either, except for Globe columnists Brian McGrory and Tom
Oliphant. Worth a read.
posted at 1:29 PM |
link
Yes, Virginia, there really is a
Santa Claus. The Globe reports this morning that the
Herald is wooing former Massport director Virginia
Buckingham to be its deputy
editorial-page editor. Why? I am not a Buckingham-basher. Yes, she
got her last job through political connections, but so did all of her
predecessors, and she was more professional and diligent than many of
them. To blame her for 9/11 is ludicrous. But her only published
piece that I'm aware of was a self-pitying essay for the
Globe's Sunday magazine last fall. And if she has any
ideological convictions other than being a Republican, she's done a
good job of hiding them.
For some reason, the Herald
has never seemed willing to turn its editorial and op-ed pages into a
smart, conservative alternative to the Globe. Of the local
columnists who write for those pages now, Wayne Woodlief and Tom
Keane aren't conservatives, and Beverly Beckham belongs in the
lifestyle section. The departed Don Feder was a conservative, but his
screeds were boring, lazy, and predictable. If publisher Pat Purcell
really wants to give the Globe a run for its money in the
pundit department, he should give editorial-page editor Shelly Cohen
the budget to expand from two pages a day to four (giving her
approximately the same square footage as the Globe) and to
sign up some bright new columnists.
Hiring Buckingham sounds like a
sideways move -- and an expensive one at that.
posted at 9:57 AM |
link
You've got Cosmo. Jay
Fitzgerald's Hub
Blog beat me to it (I
overslept), but Boston Herald business columnist Cosmo Macero
has unveiled a personal
website and a
weblog.
No doubt Macero will make it worthwhile. But it's unusual, and a
little dangerous, for a newspaper staffer to write a blog that's not
connected to his newspaper's website.
Earlier this year, the Houston
Chronicle fired Steve Olafson for his extracurricular blogging
activities (but not before reportedly being told to "take the fucking
site down"). Brit commentator Andrew
Orlowski referred to
Olafson's firing as an example of "America's constipated 'journalism
ethics.'"
Be careful, Cosmo. It can
get ugly out here in Blogland.
posted at 9:56 AM |
link
Monday, December 16, 2002
Now, Kerry versus Lieberman.
The New Republic's Ryan
Lizza, in a dispatch today
for TNR Online, makes the case that Joe Lieberman will be the chief
beneficiary of Al
Gore's decision not to run for
president in 2004. Of
course, Lieberman's right-of-center Democratic Leadership Council
credentials make him a favorite of TNR. In the current print edition,
editor Peter
Beinart actually urges
Lieberman to run against Gore, a personal friend of the
magazine's editor-in-chief and chairman, Marty Peretz.
Still, Lizza is right. What Gore
may have guaranteed is a showdown between John Kerry and the liberal
wing of the Democratic Party versus Lieberman, the best hope of the
moderates. With a primary schedule even more front-loaded than
2000's, there will be a huge premium on candidates who are already
well-known and who can raise vast amounts of money before the first
vote is cast. No dark horses need apply. Sorry, Howard Dean, Dick
Gephardt, Tom Daschle, John Edwards, etc., etc. (Although
John
Ellis, interestingly, sees
it as Lieberman-Gephardt.)
The New
Yorker has already
published long profiles of Kerry (marred by a rare lapse by writer
Joe Klein, as reported by the Globe's Alex
Beam) and Lieberman (by
Jeffrey Toobin). Both pieces were positive, to say the least. But you
can't understand the candidates unless you first understand how they
see themselves, before the political and media spinners start ripping
them apart. A plea to editor David Remnick: put the pieces
online!
posted at 10:07 AM |
link
Bored pundits, outraged
public. All-purpose quote machine Larry
Sabato makes some smart
observations about Trent Lott on Newsweek's website. The most
important is that the media are so bored and cynical that they had to
be reminded by the public that Lott's racist remarks were truly
outrageous. Says Sabato:
Public officials
frequently say things that are out of the box and those who are
covering it can slough it off and say, "there he goes again."
Average people have a different, much more human reaction which is
to take a more genuine offense.
David
Brooks's contribution to
the Newsweek package is an assertion that Republicans really
don't wax nostalgic about cross-burnings and segregation when
they get together and no one else is around. I'm sure that's true of
Brooks's well-educated neoconservative crowd. But the question
remains: what do Southern Republicans such as Lott talk about among
themselves? Lott's comments are racist enough even when the cameras
are rolling.
The problem with the Republican
Party today is not that it is racist -- the genuine outrage over
Lott's remarks expressed by George W. Bush and a range of
conservative commentators is evidence of that. The problem is that a
cadre of hardcore racists make up a small but important part of the
Republican coalition.
Put it this way: the reason that 95
percent of African-Americans routinely vote for Democratic
presidential candidates is not because they don't want a tax
cut.
posted at 10:07 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
