BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Saturday, January 18, 2003
Sex and the jealous
columnist. Bob Somerby's Daily Howler has a hilarious, dead-on
deconstruction of Brian
McGrory's column on John Kerry
that appeared in last Tuesday's Globe. Writes
Somerby: "Baby Boy Brian is
very upset because John scored some chicks in a bar." Not to
be missed.
posted at 11:58 AM |
link
Friday, January 17, 2003
It's Bill Gates's planet. The
rest of us are just visiting. For many years now, I've been able
to lead a digital life pretty much free of Microsoft's bloated,
expensive products. I use a translation program called MacLinkPlus so
that my MS Word-using editors can read my AppleWorks-generated files,
and though the solution isn't perfect, it's been good
enough.
Now, though, I'm dealing with an
editor who wants me to be able to take advantage of Microsoft Word's
"Track Changes" function. I've never seen it, never mind used it, but
apparently it will allow him to make comments and changes on my files
in one color, and for me to respond in yet another color. Actually,
it sounds pretty cool. But no matter how we've tried to translate
each other's files, it comes up in black and white on my
screen.
The point is that the single
biggest value of having a standard is that -- well, it's a standard.
Much as I prefer AppleWorks, as long as 95 percent of the universe is
using Word, my recalcitrance makes life more difficult both for my
editors and myself. I probably can't hold out forever. And thus does
Bill Gates chalk up another small victory.
Later today I'm going to try a free
trial version of something called ThinkFree
Office. It's supposed to be
100 percent file-compatible with Microsoft Office. Since this is
something other Mac users would be interested in, I'll post a
follow-up describing the results.
posted at 9:42 AM |
link
Right-wing bias at the New
York Times? Al Giordano has posted a fascinating inside look
at the
Times' coverage of the crisis in
Venezuela. The article, on
Giordano's NarcoNews.com website, reports that Caracas correspondent
Francisco Toro has resigned because of his ties to the oligarchs who
are attempting to overthrow Venezuela's democratically elected
president, Hugo Chávez. And though the Times certainly
was right to accept Toro's resignation, Giordano recounts a long list
of incidents in which the Times has casts its editorial lot
with the right-wing opposition.
posted at 9:41 AM |
link
Free Ellis. John Ellis has
posted his fine Wall Street Journal commentary on
the
future of AOL Time Warner
on his weblog. If you're not an online subscriber to the WSJ,
have
a look.
posted at 9:41 AM |
link
Thursday, January 16, 2003
Irony, incomprehension, and that
Mary Jo Kopechne reference. One of the many fine touches in
Charlie Pierce's recent Boston
Globe Magazine profile of Ted
Kennedy was this swift turn
of the knife:
That's how you survive
what he's survived. That's how you move forward, one step after
another, even though your name is Edward Moore Kennedy. You work,
always, as though your name were Edward Moore. If she had lived,
Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work
as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her
in her old age.
Brutally vicious, yes; unfair, no.
I certainly didn't think there was any mistaking Pierce's intent. And
it was confirmed for me last Thursday, when James Taranto, in his
"Best
of the Web" column on
OpinionJournal.com, wrote, "Charles Pierce must really hate Ted
Kennedy," and described the excerpt above as a "paragraph of pure
poison." Indeed, a letter published in the Globe Magazine last
Sunday described Pierce's piece as "truth, even though it is a savage
attack that strikes too close for comfort."
But it appears that not everyone
got it. Last Saturday, former Globe columnist John
Ellis ran just the last two
sentences of the poison paragraph on his weblog under the heading
"Only At The Globe" -- the implication being, I guess, that Ellis
thought Pierce was an addle-brained bleeding-heart who believed
Kennedy's lifetime of liberal legislating had wiped the slate clean
with regard to his role in Kopechne's death.
On Monday, Ellis acknowledged that
some of his readers had taken him to task for failing
to get it, and he ran a
lengthy e-mail from a friend of Pierce's. The next day,
Jay
Fitzgerald weighed in with
a long post on the affair, and came down on Pierce's side -- that is,
that the Kopechne reference was intended as harsh ironic criticism,
not as expiation. For good measure, Fitzgerald included an e-mail
from Ellis himself, who said he regarded Pierce's bit as "border-line
obscene" and "a spurious line of reasoning." Hmm. Well, okay, but
that's certainly not what I took away from the line "Only At The
Globe."
Yet Ellis's misreading -- if that's
what it was -- was minor compared to that of Mark Steyn, who wrote a
column about Pierce's piece on Monday in Canada's National
Post, which was passed on to me by a reader. Steyn quotes the
same Kopechne excerpt and then adds:
... Mr. Pierce's point is
a simple one: Sure, 34 years ago, Teddy fished himself out of the
briny, staggered away and somehow neglected to inform the
authorities until the following morning that he'd left some gal
down there. But, if he was too tired to do anything for her back
then, he's been "tireless" on her behalf ever since....
But among the orthodox left the
Clymer/Pierce view is the standard line: You can't make an
omelette without breaking chicks. This is subtly different from
arguing that a man's personal failings are outweighed by his
public successes. Rather, they're saying that a man's personal
flaws are trumped by his ideological purity, regardless of whether
or not it works. I doubt whether a 62-year-old Mary Jo would
regard Senator Kennedy as "bringing comfort" to her old
age.
(The Clymer reference is to New
York Times reporter Adam Clymer's biography of Kennedy from
several years back, once labeled by our only president as "a
major-league asshole.")
Steyn not only doesn't get it, he
twists Pierce's meaning beyond all possible recognition, making
explicit what Ellis had seemed to suggest implicitly. Taken within
context, Pierce is clearly, sneeringly saying that Kennedy's many
small accomplishments over the years can never undo his
reprehensible behavior at Chappaquiddick. Steyn, by contrast, asserts
that Pierce gives Kennedy a free pass. I wonder whether he even read
Pierce's entire article. Steyn is so sloppy that in his second
sentence he describes Pierce's piece as "a 10,000-word profile."
It is, in fact, about 8700 words. Not a big deal, but why say it if
you can't be bothered to get it right?
I sent Pierce an e-mail yesterday
asking him to comment. Here's his reply:
As to Ellis, whom I assume
is the Bush cousin whose
WSJ piece you
mentioned on Wednesday, well, we knew from Fox News that he
couldn't count honestly. Now we know he can't read honestly,
either. [Media Log aside: Whoa!] As for young Mr. Steyn --
what can I say? If he was Navajo, I'd blame it on the peyote. My
respect for Mr. Taranto grows by the hour.
Pierce adds that he may write about
this tomorrow when he fills in for Eric Alterman on his
Altercation
blog. Should be interesting.
posted at 10:17 AM |
link
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Oh, yes he did. Some curious
backtracking today about the investigation into Pete Townshend's
visits to child-pornography websites. (He admits that it's true, so
no "alleged.") Today's
New York Times
update includes this weasel paragraph:
Mr. Townshend, who says he
suspects he was abused as a child, said he had viewed child
pornography on the Internet -- but had not downloaded it -- while
researching his autobiography and as part of his longtime campaign
against child sexual abuse.
The Boston
Globe ran a correction
on page A2, blaming it all on the Associated Press and adding:
"Townshend said only that he had used his credit card to enter the
site and told a London newspaper he had never downloaded child
pornography." And, yes, the
AP has "corrected" its
original report.
Geez. Don't these people know
anything?
If Townshend "viewed child
pornography on the Internet," as the Times reports, then he
downloaded it. Every page you visit on the Web downloads to your
computer. When the little "E" or "N" is moving in the upper right
corner of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, it's telling you
that the page you've requested is in the process of being -- yes --
downloaded.
Townsend apparently means that he
didn't save any of the images he'd downloaded to his hard drive, but
that's a distinction without a difference. As his lawyer has no doubt
explained to him by now, the images he admits to having looked at may
actually be on his hard drive, whether he realizes it or not.
Unfortunately for Townshend, his computer is currently in the hands
of the authorities.
If the editors at the AP, the
Times, and the Globe had an ounce of understanding
about the way the Internet works, they would have realized that no
correction or clarification was needed.
posted at 9:43 AM |
link
John Ellis's Case history.
Former Globe columnist John
Ellis has a terrific piece
on the post-Steve Case future of AOL Time Warner that appears on the
editorial page of today's Wall Street Journal. Paul Gigot must
agree, since it's been left off the free OpinionJournal.com site and
is available to paid subscribers only. (In case you do
subscribe, here's
the link.) Here's my
favorite part:
The notion that the
company can now coalesce around a common purpose is laughable.
Time Warner has always been about egomaniacs running fiefdoms and
raiding each other's turf. Division heads collaborate only to kill
off rivals. They collaborated to kill off former COO Robert
Pittman and Chairman Case. Now they'll start on each other.
posted at 9:42 AM |
link
Baby maybe, doggie
definitely. One way to tell whether or not a couple ought to be
allowed to adopt a child is if they would choose a dog over a baby.
Maybe the state has no right to tell prospective parents that they
can't have a German shepherd in the house. But it is one way
to sort out the ones who are serious from the ones who
aren't.
Kathleen
Brophy and Maria Melchionda
chose their dog over a baby. That's fine. But would someone please
tell them to shut up?
posted at 9:41 AM |
link
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
BU J-school prof: Edit pages are
partisan. Get over it. The Globe's Mark
Jurkowitz today has an
overview on the controversy at the Herald over the hiring of
longtime Republican politico Virginia
Buckingham as deputy
editorial-page editor. The editor of CommonWealth magazine,
Bob Keough, gets off the best quote, telling Jurkowitz, "If she were
going to get a desk in the newsrooom, that would be a problem. I'm
not sure it raises that many red flags to be on the editorial page."
But Buckingham made me wince in saying, "My dream has always been to
pursue a writing career," which only highlights the yawning gap
between her complete lack of experience and the plum job she's been
handed.
Meanwhile, Boston University
journalism professor Mike Berlin can't understand what all the fuss
is about. He sent a long and thoughtful e-mail to Media Log, which
appears below:
I heard about the
Buckingham conflict at the Herald on "Beat the Press," and
found myself quite puzzled about why reporters took it upon
themselves to voice a protest, and what conflicts of interest
there could possibly be for a person whose job it is to reflect
the views of the publisher/owner and commit those views to
print.
When your boss writes about
expanding Fenway Park to swallow the Phoenix office, there
are conflicts of interest inherent in his viewpoint. But as the
owner he is entitled to express it in an editorial or have an
editorial writer express it for him, and since they are his views,
it doesn't much matter who the writer may be.
If he were a former state
commissioner with some link to a party or a faction, one would
expect him to reflect the viewpoint of that party or faction, very
much the way that Herald publisher Pat Purcell is linked to
various people, issues and ideology and is expected to reflect
that viewpoint on the editorial page of the Herald, or
through the people he chooses to hire to do the writing for him.
If they can't write very well, then that's his problem, and
perhaps he will get an editor to look over their copy before it
runs, or perhaps he won't and people will think less of his views
because they are not well expressed.
Readers should be aware that the
editorial page reflects the views of the owner. If they are not
aware, that is their lookout, not his. He already has an ideologue
of his choosing as the editor of the page, and columnists who
reflect the views he wishes to have expressed. It should be clear
where the Herald stands. If Purcell is generous enough to
listen to other voices before expressing the paper's views, that
may be a bonus, but no one should expect it.
But you want people on the edit
page who have strong opinions and advocate causes, not people who
are neutral, cautious and dull, and write editorials that waffle
and don't come down on one side or another.
But why should this matter to
the reporters? Their concern is to maintain the wall between news
pages and editorial pages; ensure that readers are aware of the
difference; and fight to prevent the editorial-page views from
slopping into their own copy and their editors' news choices. That
is what they should be fighting for. When I worked at Dolly
Schiff's New York Post, Paul Sann, the executive edtior,
reveled in running stories that made Dolly's viewpoints, and thus
Jimmy Wechsler's editorials, look silly. It was his way of showing
the city that the news/editorial wall was impregnable.
The bad rap on Rupert Murdoch
and his style of journalism is not that he hired
frothers-at-the-mouth to run his edit page and sound like
ideologues. That was well within the American tradition. The
problem with his journalism was that he didn't let the news pages
run on the basis of journalistic choices, but forced out stuff
that he didn't like editorially (stories about environmental
threats, or stories that made Jimmy Carter look good) and forced
in stories that were politicized. And in a modified form, that
remains true today of both Boston newspapers; readers do think
that they pull punches on news stories to match editorial-page
views.
By protesting the choice of an
edit writer, Herald reporters are suggesting to the public
that what is printed there does in fact tarnish the news coverage.
They are admitting a link that they should be rejecting and
denying.
I speak as someone who wrote
edits as a summer replacement both under Dolly and under Rupert,
when he attended the weekly editorial meeting personally and had
long arguments with Jimmy Wechsler about abortion, afffirmative
action and other issues (he was against capital punishment) and
then went back to my job as a reporter, fighting as best I could
to get stuff into the paper that the boss wouldn't like, and to
keep stuff out of the paper that was propaganda for the boss's pet
projects.
Buckingham is simply a reminder
that all editorial pages are appropriately opinionated, slanted,
biased, and reflect the viewpoint of the owner (or the owner's
willingness to allow a range of viewpoints to be expressed),
rather than fair and balanced and open to all viewpoints, as the
news pages should be.
posted at 9:28 AM |
link
Media Log goes policy wonk!
People don't want smaller government and lower taxes. They want
bigger government and lower taxes. They want it all, and they
want it right now. Politicians can choose between trying to explain
that, you know, stuff costs money, or they can pander. The latter is
a sure route to success. Mitt Romney last year pandered his way right
into the corner office.
During the campaign, Romney said he
could close the state's gaping budget deficit by putting his
world-class management skills to work, by slashing the bureaucracy
and eliminating duplication while not raising taxes and not cutting
"essential" services. (Essential services are things that you need.
Non-essential services are things that somebody else needs.) Of
course he couldn't, and he began backtracking the moment he was
elected.
Now he wants the legislature to
give him the authority to cut local aid to the bone, which will force
schools to close early and police officers and firefighters to be
laid off. (Click here
for today's Globe coverage, and here
for today's Herald coverage.)
Since the legislators lack both
guts and brains, they're almost certain to go along, notwithstanding
their plaintive cry to Romney to explain what he's got in mind. But
they shouldn't. Here's what they ought to do:
- Borrow the $600 million needed
to get through the rest of the fiscal year without any further
cuts.
- Reform the state tax system.
That means going ahead with the voter-approved mandate to return
the state income tax to five percent, but rethinking and possibly
repealing the $3 billion to $4 billion in tax breaks for
corporations and the wealthy that were passed during the 1990s.
That's where the money is. Here's a good place to start:
reversing the special-interest tax break that Fidelity got in the
mid-'90s. Wonder what former Fidelity executive Robert Pozen --
currently receiving all
kinds of praise for
serving in the Romney administration without pay -- would think
about that?
- Go after the hackerama head-on.
Today's Herald reports that MDC commissioner
David
Balfour continues to run
amok, and that virtually the first act of Tim
for Treasurer was to
reward one of Tom Finneran's coat-holders with the six-figure job
of "running" the Lottery. Ugh.
posted at 9:27 AM |
link
Monday, January 13, 2003
Give Buckingham a chance.
She has no
obvious qualifications, as
I wrote last month. Her conflicts
of interest make one's head
spin, as Northeastern University School of Journalism director Steve
Burgard argues. Certain elements of the newsroom are skeptical, to
put
it mildly (third item). But
the Herald today, as expected, announced
that former Massport director and Republican political operative
Virginia Buckingham will be the paper's new deputy editorial-page
editor.
So let me be counterintuitive for a
moment. Buckingham is young, smart, and hardworking. She's a moderate
conservative, presumably live-and-let-live on cultural issues. One
fear is that she'll serve as a mole -- a back channel from the
Herald to her Republican friends. But is that really fair?
After 9/11, Buckingham was pretty much hung out to dry by everyone.
The Weld-Cellucci-Swift crowd (though not Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci
themselves) piled on. As for the new crowd, Mitt Romney has
surrounded himself with aides to former state treasurer Joe Malone,
against whom Buckingham fought as a top political aide to Cellucci in
1998.
In other words, there's every
reason to believe that Buckingham is finished with politics and wants
to do a good job at the Herald. She deserves a chance to prove
it.
posted at 9:37 AM |
link
Steve Case's amazing
swindle. Steve Case's epitaph is that bamboozling Time Warner --
the largest media company in the world -- was an insufficient
qualification for running it. Case
quit as chairman of AOL
Time Warner last night because the company's stock price has tanked
since Case's AOL acquired Time Warner two years ago.
But as James Surowiecki observed in
the New Yorker a few months ago (no link; I'm going by memory
here, so bear with me), Case actually did spectacularly well by
his shareholders -- that is, the folks who held hyperinflated
AOL stock before the merger. AOL Time Warner's stock at this moment
is $14.88, which is a lot lower than the $56 or so that it commanded
at the time of the merger. But if Case hadn't gone out and bought a
real company with his pile of AOL funny money, his crappy and
outmoded online service would probably be trading for less than $5
right now.
Of course, the real reason I'm
writing this item is so that I can recycle a bit from
Tina
Brown's debut column last
fall in the Times of London, in which she quoted Time
magazine art critic Robert Hughes's priceless letter to former Time
Warner chairman Gerald Levin, the man who, more than anyone, got
swindled by Case. Hughes's letter begins:
How can I convey to you
the disgust which your name awakens in me? The merger with Warner
was a catastrophe. But the hitherto unimagined stupidity, the
blind arrogance of your deal with Case simply beggars description.
How can you face yourself
knowing how much history, value and savings you have thrown away
on your mad, ignorant attempt to merge with a wretched dial-up
ISP? . . .
I don't know what advice you
have to offer, but I have some for you. Buy some rope, go out the
back, find a tree and hang yourself. If you had any honour you
would.
Is that great or what? Thanks to
Joe
Conason for the
link.
posted at 9:31 AM |
link
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
