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.
Saturday, February 15, 2003
Salon and Apple -- the
perfect match! The cash-starved webzine Salon
has pulled out of these crises before, but you've got to figure that
-- one of these times -- it won't. According to the San
Francisco Chronicle,
David Talbot and company may run out of money by the end of the month
after running up $81 million in losses during their nearly seven
years of publication.
If Salon actually, finally
fails, it would leave rival Slate
as the only big general-interest webzine that's not tied to a larger
media empire. Incredible. A half-dozen years ago, many people (okay,
me too), were predicting that by now there would be dozens if not
hundreds of such ventures.
Slate prospers the
old-fashioned way: as a part of the Microsoft empire, it doesn't have
to worry about making money. Indeed, such magazines as the New
Yorker, the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly,
Harper's, and the like all lose money every year or at least
most years.
So let me drag out an idea I first
floated a couple of years ago, when it first became clear that
Salon was not going to make everyone rich: talk Apple
Computer into acquiring its assets, and let the Salon-Slate
competition continue, this time as a proxy for the longstanding
Apple-Microsoft war.
Publishing Salon may be too
expensive for Talbot, but it would be pocket change for Steve Jobs.
And each webzine, culturally, is the perfect match: Salon is
hip, sexy, and alternative, much like Apple; Slate is a little
geeky, has a penchant for telling you what you ought to think, and
reaches a lot more people, just like Microsoft.
Is this a match made in heaven or
what?
posted at 9:10 PM |
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Goodbye, Dolly. What killed
Dolly? Premature aging related to her unusual origin as a clone? Or
just one of those things? If you read this morning's Boston
Globe and New York Times, you're still
wondering.
According to the
Globe piece -- which
carries Anne Barnard's byline, but which included reporting by staff
writer Gareth Cook as well as wire-service material -- cloning almost
certainly had something to do with the famous sheep's death at the
age of six, "well short of the normal 11- to 16-year sheep lifespan."
The report notes that Dolly "grew obese, developed arthritis, and
showed signs of premature aging" during her brief but celebrated
life.
Yet the
Times' Gina Kolata
reports almost exactly the opposite, writing that sheep that are kept
indoors, as Dolly was, may have about half the 11- to 12-year life
expectancy of those allowed to roam in pastures; that her arthritis
was not unusual for a sheep allowed to live past the typical
nine-month slaughtering age; and that her obesity was well under
control. Kolata writes:
Her illness and death, Dr.
[Ian] Wilmut [one of the scientists who helped create
Dolly] said, probably had nothing to do with the fact that she
was a clone. "It could equally well have happened if she was not a
clone," he said.
So which is it? This piece, by
James
Meek in the Guardian,
strongly suggests that cloning did, indeed, cause Dolly to age
prematurely, and that her true biological age might even have been 11
-- the six years since she had been born plus the six-year age of the
cell from which she was cloned.
Needless to say, the full truth won't be known for some time to come.
posted at 12:14 PM |
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Friday, February 14, 2003
And guess what? They're against
us. A few days ago I was listening to a radio talk show -- I
don't remember which one, but it was probably Bill O'Reilly's or Jay
Severin's -- when a caller began to talk about the Bush Doctrine,
which he defined as, "You're either with us or against us." The
caller was being neither ironic nor sarcastic; indeed, it was clear
that he was an admirer of the president's, and he spoke of the Bush
Doctrine in the same reverential tones that earlier generations may
have reserved for, say, the Monroe Doctrine.
The front page of today's New
York Times shows where the Bush Doctrine has gotten us so far in
regard to the war with Iraq. Our rift
with Europe is deep and
growing deeper. And, at home, a
new Times/CBS poll
shows that a broad expanse of the American public will support war
only with a favorable vote of the UN Security Council, an uncertain
prospect, needless to say. No doubt many will point to today's
Times as just another example of Rainesian liberal bias. But I
think it's evidence of far deeper problems.
Like many mainstream liberals, I've
been on the fence about this war, more against it than for it, but
nagged by the sense that something has to be done about Saddam
Hussein's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and of his
obvious lust to develop nuclear weapons as well. Besides, Saddam
presides over one of the cruelest regimes in the world. Would't his
overthrow advance liberal goals? Even without embracing the more
pie-in-the-sky
scenarios of some of Bush's
advisers?
Well, yes. But George W. Bush's
very approach -- you're either with us or against us -- makes
it impossible for me to say, "Okay, Mr. President, go ahead." He
makes it sound so simple, and it's never that simple. And what
about "Shock
and Awe," the Pentagon war
plan that may or may not call for the Hiroshima-style flattening of
Baghdad during the war's opening days? Not going to win too many
hearts and minds that way.
Earlier this week a friend of mine
asked whether I was starting to lean toward war. I replied that I was
still hoping it could be avoided. And we wondered: what would Bill
Clinton have done? We both agreed that, with his masterful touch with
the Europeans, the rift that Bush has helped create would be
nonexistent.
Of course, there's a chance that
Clinton would have smoothed over the differences by not being tough
enough. Indeed, conservative columnist Charles
Krauthammer today blames
all the troubles in the world on Clinton's eight years of inaction.
But there was no national consensus during the Clinton years for the
kind of effort that would have been needed to combat international
terrorism in a comprehensive way. As they say, 9/11 changed
everything.
We can't be sure that Clinton would
have been any more successful than Bush. But given the results that
the bullying Bush Doctrine have brought so far, it would be
interesting to see how different things might be with some
Clinton-style alliance-building instead.
posted at 10:13 AM |
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Thursday, February 13, 2003
Two more Kerry pieces.
Harold Meyerson has a good piece in the American Prospect on
why John
Kerry is well-positioned to
win the Democratic nomination for president. A bit early, isn't,
Harold? But his process-of-elimination logic is hard to argue with:
Gephardt's got too much baggage, Lieberman is too conservative, Dean
is too obscure (and perhaps too dovish even for Democratic
activists), and Edwards is too young. The New Republic's Ryan
Lizza offers a more negative take on Kerry, on the
hazards of being the early
frontrunner.
posted at 2:26 PM |
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The visions that hawks dream
of. Nicholas Lemann has an important piece in the New
Yorker this week on the cock-eyed
optimists who occupy the
high-middle layers of the Bush administration. Their hope: that war
with Iraq will result in a new, semi-democratic state that will lead
to significant, pro-Western change throughout the Middle
East.
Lemann talks with Douglas Feith and
Stephen Cambone, both of whom are leading hawks in the Department of
Defense. Feith is more expansive than Cambone, and this exchange with
Lemann is particularly instructive regarding the hawks' thinking:
I asked Feith whether the
United States, if it goes to war, would be doing so partly because
it wants to change the Middle East as a whole. "Perhaps I should
put it this way," he said. "Would anybody be thinking about using
military power in Iraq in order to do a political experiment in
Iraq in the hope that it would have positive political spillover
effects throughout the region? The answer is no. That's not the
kind of thing that leads a country like the United States to
commit the kind of military forces that we're committing to this
effort -- right now, to try to make our diplomacy work, but
ultimately, perhaps, if the diplomacy doesn't work, to take
military action. There's no way. What we would be using military
power for, if we have to, would be the goals the President has
talked about, particularly the elimination of the chemical and
biological weapons, and preventing Iraq from getting nuclear
weapons." He paused for a moment. "Now. Once you contemplate using
military force for that purpose, and you're thinking about what do
you do afterward, that's when you can think that if we do things
right, and if we help the Iraqis, and if the Iraqis show an
ability to create a humane representative government for
themselves -- will that have beneficial spillover effects on the
politics of the whole region? The answer, I think, is yes."
It is a lovely vision, which is
precisely why I'm so wary of it. As Lemann says of this and other
post-Iraq scenarios put forth by the hawks, "It is breathtakingly
ambitious and optimistic." And more to the point, it says nothing
about the other possible outcomes of a US invasion: thousands of dead
Iraqi civilians, and resultant cries for terrorist revenge; Saddam
Hussein's using his chemical and biological weapons against US
troops, as well as targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia; and a
generation's worth of chaos.
During the past week, Colin Powell
has done much to show that current efforts to contain Saddam are
failing. And it is clear that, like it or not, this war is going to
take place. It's going to take realism and humility (the latter
formerly one of George W. Bush's favorite words) to get through this
with as little damage to the Iraqi people and to the US as possible
-- not the beautiful visions of Pentagon dreamers.
posted at 11:47 AM |
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MSNBC hits new low (until the
next time). I've only heard talk-radio host Mike Savage for maybe
a total of 20 minutes. But this
summation, by the
media-watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, strikes me as
pretty much on the money (thanks to reader AS for the link). So does
his
own website, where you can
get a taste of his hate-filled rants and enjoy a photo of him
feeling up a wax figure of Barbra Streisand. So, naturally, MSNBC,
currently engaged in the longest and most expensive suicide in media
history, has added
him to its line-up of
talk-show hosts.
posted at 11:46 AM |
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A Mitt too far. Earlier this
week I praised Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman for
whacking Governor Mitt Romney in his Lowell
Sun column. Well,
yesterday, in the Salem News, Goldman
went too far -- actually
blasting Romney for his vow to shut down the filthy, dangerous
PG&E power plant in Salem. I hereby sentence Goldman to a dozen
consecutive viewings of Erin Brockovich.
posted at 11:45 AM |
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Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Kerry's got cancer? Kick him
again! If you're Kerry-hating
Slate blogger Mickey Kaus,
John Kerry's prostate-cancer operation isn't a signal that it's time
to lay off. No, it's a signal to step it up. Kaus sneers at how
slickly Kerry stage-managed his news conference yesterday at which he
announced that he has cancer, then adds:
Kerry's prostate cancer
operation "helps" him, in the unsentimental political sense, in a
way it might not "help" another candidate -- namely by emphasizing
to voters that he's in fact a liviing, breathing human being and
not a continually trimmed and positioned semi-holographic
self-creation.
Now, Kaus isn't the first pundit to
make this point. In fact, Kerry joked about it himself yesterday,
telling reporters that he was going to have his "aloof
gland" removed. But Kaus is
just so over-the-top mean that he dehumanizes the guy, and he does it
on a day when Kerry's recovering from what must have been some mighty
unpleasant surgery -- with, let's not forget, some might uncertain
prospects as well.
posted at 5:20 PM |
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NYT v. WJS.
Sorry to be feeding off Romenesko,
since I assume most Media Log readers are already Romenesko
junkies. But this is worth calling your attention to if you
haven't seen it: a piece by former Boston Globe business
columnist David
Warsh on the looming
national and international rivalry between the New York Times
and the Wall Street Journal. Thought-provoking.
posted at 4:57 PM |
link
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
A post in the Post.
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz includes a long quote from
my "celebrities
for peace" item in his
online Media
Notes column today (scroll
down about three-quarters of the way).
posted at 12:28 PM |
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Bechtel strikes back.
Romenesko
has posted a link to this San
Francisco Chronicle story
in which the hometown heroes at Bechtel whine about the
Globe's three-part series
on its alleged mismanagement of the Big Dig. Says Bechtel flak Howard
Menaker: "We are extremely disappointed in the article. We think it's
an extreme misrepresentation of the facts and the history of the
project." Whoa! Two extremes in the same quote! Must be
serious.
Meanwhile, as the Globe
series underscores, we just keep paying.
posted at 11:12 AM |
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"Working the refs."
Seriously under the weather today, but I did want to call your
attention to a longish excerpt from Eric Alterman's new book,
What
Liberal Media?, which
appears in this week's issue of the Nation. It's been online
for a few days, but I waited to read it until my copy arrived in the
mailbox.
This is very smart, very good
stuff. According to Alterman, the right bellows about "liberal media
bias" as a tactic, as a way to get the mainstream media to bend over
backwards in the interest of fairness -- thus his "working the refs"
analogy.
Essentially Alterman argues (as I
and others have) that though the establishment mainstream media may
very well have some liberal leanings, they are suffused with strong
conservative voices -- stronger, in many ways, than those of the
liberals. At the same time, the conservative press -- the Fox News
Channel, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Rush
Limbaugh's radio show, and the like -- is influential far beyond its
small numbers because it is openly, nakedly partisan on behalf of
Republican and conservative causes. And there is nothing similar on
the left.
I could quibble with some of
Alterman's labels. Joe Klein is a neolib, not a neocon, and Michael
Kelly is more of a neocon than a right-winger, although he is surely
"belligerent," as Alterman notes. But Alterman also gives Kelly a
well-deserved poke for tarting up the Atlantic Monthly -- "a
mainstay of Boston liberalism" -- with conservative commentators (the
talented but overexposed Christopher Caldwell and David Brooks leap
instantly to mind). And Alterman is right on the money in labeling
the loathsome Pat Robertson as "anti-American."
What Liberal Media? is an
important book coming out at an ideal moment: when liberals finally,
slowly, are starting to fight back against the phony charge that the
media are marred by liberal bias. You can learn more by
visiting
Alterman's website.
posted at 10:37 AM |
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Monday, February 10, 2003
Janis Ian, lost and found.
Reader DH has found Ian's
column on Internet music.
The Globe's website didn't list it with the editorials and
op-ed columns -- but
it's there, somewhere. Go
figure.
posted at 1:55 PM |
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Celebs for peace II. Patrick
Keaney, in his "Daily
Grasshopper" blog, doesn't
like my "celebrities
for peace" item one little
bit.
posted at 1:07 PM |
link
The troubling spectacle of
celebrities for peace. Last night I tuned in the Fox News Channel
to watch a
mini-debate on Iraq with
actress and peace activist Janeane Garofalo and the hawkish Ruth
Wedgewood, who's with an organization called the Committee to
Liberate Iraq. The phenomenon of entertainers' passing themselves off
as policy experts is enough to make one wince, and I admit I watched
mainly to see if a train wreck would occur.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Garofalo parried Wedgewood calmly, intelligently, and with a moderate
point of view, arguing not that the United States is evil, but that
war will bring unintended consequences, mainly in the form of renewed
terrorist attacks. (Isn't that what last week's Orange Alert was all
about?) Garofalo didn't claim to have any special knowledge beyond
being an intelligent, well-informed ordinary citizen. And she managed
to get her points across even though the buffoonish host, Rita Cosby,
kept trying to shout her down.
The low point came when Cosby asked
Garofalo if she would be willing to go to Iraq as a human shield -- a
question Cosby was so proud of that she actually promo'd it earlier
in the show. Garofalo, to her credit, simply sneered and said no, of
course not (you idiot!).
Still, I find it hard to understand
why celebrities keep doing this. Not long ago Sean Penn visited
Bagdhad in the name of peace. The New York Times did a long
piece on him (no longer online at the Times, but I found it
here),
and I was struck -- and surprised -- by how carefully he spoke, and
how insistent he was on refusing to say anything that could be
interpreted as helpful to Saddam Hussein. "You come here on a Friday,
you leave on a Sunday, and you start throwing out flamboyant and
inflammatory messages -- that doesn't seem to be of advantage to
anyone," Penn said.
But that didn't stop conservatives
from ripping Penn as naive or even unpatriotic. This
piece on National Review
Online was typical, if more well-reasoned than some I've
seen.
The whole notion of celebrity peace
activists is an interesting one. In the case of Garofalo and Penn,
the flak they've taken from the right has been largely unfair and
unjustified. But what good are they doing? Well-intentioned though
they may be, they help cement the image of the antiwar movement as an
idle indulgence for unserious people.
Following Colin Powell's
devastating report last week, it may no longer be possible to avoid
war. It doesn't help that the main antiwar voices that the public is
hearing from belong to Hollywood celebrities.
posted at 9:47 AM |
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Technology's unintended
consequences. The second-most-painful financial debacle of my
life involved a septic system at a rental property we
owned from the mid- to the late 1990s. The town of Topsfield ordered
us to replace the system after it failed in the midst of a massive
flood in late 1996. Rather than fight, we decided to sell the
property. It cost us about $50,000 -- $10,000 in engineering fees and
$40,000 for the actual system.
(Our most-painful debacle began the
day that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair talked down genomics stocks, a
debacle that continues.)
So I was riveted this morning by
Scott Kirsner's piece in the Globe on nascent sewage-cleaning
technology that could
greatly reduce the size of leaching fields, replacing much of a
septic system with a unit that is about half the size of a
water-heater. Even more important, it could bring the cost down to
somewhere in the $2000-to-$10,000 range. It's about time.
Unfortunately, though Kirsner
doesn't mention it, if this technology -- being developed by a Nashua
company called Ovation Products -- works, there will be an enormous
unintended consequence: vast pieces of property that are currently
considered unbuildable will get a second look. And efforts to control
sprawl will be dealt a huge blow.
posted at 9:46 AM |
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Society's forgotten child.
When I saw a column in the Globe today by Janis Ian about the
music industry's overwrought crackdown on Internet music, my first
instinct was to snicker. Who knew Ian was still alive? But then I
read it, and realized that her current obscurity is exactly her
point. Her piece is not online (guess she wouldn't sign the
freelancer's agreement!), but I found a long version of the same
argument here,
on her website.
posted at 9:45 AM |
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When bad things happen to bad
people. Tom Mashberg has a mind-boggling piece in this morning's
Herald about homicidal
hockey dad Thomas Junta,
who's filed an appeal of his conviction for involuntary
manslaughter.
According to Junta's lawyer and
Mashberg's own reporting, the physician who testified at Junta's
trial, Stanton Kessler, had said at a medical conference some time
before the trial that the sort of injuries Junta inflicted on coach
Michael Costin could have been the accidental result of "minor blows
to the head," and have even been associated with a vigorous session
at the chiropractor's office. Yet, at trial, Kessler testified that
Costin's injuries could only have been inflicted by a vicious, savage
assault.
Naturally, this information was not
made available to the defense in a timely manner. If this pans out,
it should serve as yet another caution that even in cases that seem
open and shut, the potential for prosecutorial abuse should never be
underestimated.
posted at 9:45 AM |
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The Goldman report.
Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman is writing a column
for the Lowell Sun these days. Yesterday, he documented
the obvious: that
change-agent Mitt Romney isn't changing much of anything other than
the names and faces. You know where Goldman, a Robert Reich
strategist last year, is coming from, but his take strikes me as
pretty much on target.
posted at 9:44 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
