BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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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, February 28, 2003
Did Iraq disarm after the Gulf
War? The media-watch organization Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting
is focusing attention on a
report in the current
Newsweek suggesting
that Iraq had destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction as of
1995. The article, which has gotten little notice, "may be the
biggest story of the Iraq crisis," according to FAIR.
Newsweek's John Barry
reports that Saddam Hussein's son-in-law General Hussein Kamel, who
defected to the West in 1996 and whose interviews with US
intelligence officials are often cited as evidence of Saddam's
weapons programs, had actually told his interrogators that Iraq had
destroyed all of its chemical and biological weapons, as well as
missiles forbidden under the terms of the Gulf War
surrender.
Was Kamel merely doing his
father-in-law's bidding? Not likely. Kamel eventually decided to
return to Iraq -- and Saddam had him executed.
Where does this information fit
into the current debate over war and disarmament? It's hard to say.
Even if Kamel's testimony is completely true, Saddam has had since
1998 -- when UN weapons inspectors were kicked out of the country --
to rebuild his stockpile.
Still, the possibility that Iraq
was weapons-free as recently as eight years ago is significant
information, and it should have received more attention than it
has.
posted at 9:46 AM |
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Those who don't understand
history are doomed to repeat it. And Governor Mitt Romney wants
to get rid of the state inspector general's office (Globe
story here;
Herald story here),
which is dedicated to rooting out the waste, fraud, and corruption
around which Romney has constructed his permanent campaign. Yes, the
IG's office been too low-profile and more political than perhaps
originally envisioned. But this is madness.
posted at 9:46 AM |
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Thursday, February 27, 2003
A "difficult public face for NBC
in time of war." Phil Donahue's now-canceled MSNBC talk show will
not be long lamented. Still, there remain questions as to whether he
was done in solely by his show's pathetic ratings or for more
sinister reasons. Rick Ellis, writing for the television website
allyourtv.com,
says that MSNBC executives concluded that Donahue
had to go because they
didn't want an antiwar liberal in their prime-time line-up at a time
when the White House is preparing to launch a war against
Iraq.
Ellis cites an internal report that
criticizes Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with
the current marketplace," and that goes on to call Donahue a
"difficult public face for NBC in time of war." What's interesting
about this is that Donahue's ratings, though miserable, were rising
at the time that his show was canceled (as the
New York Times reported
earlier this week), and that his audience share was also bigger than
that of longtime MSNBC host Chris Matthews. To be fair, Matthews has
also been a persistent war critic; but his over-the-top anti-Clinton,
anti-Gore diatribes of a few years back presumably give him some immunity among
conservative cable news viewers.
But aren't they all watching Fox
anyway?
posted at 10:43 AM |
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The Three R's: reorganization,
reform, and Romney. So what to make of Governor Mitt Romney's
budget/reorganization plan? Not to cop out, but it strikes me that an
instant reaction would be foolhardy. I don't know if it's "bold" (the
word of the day in the Globe and the Herald), but it
certainly is sprawling, encompassing everything from a drastic
repositioning of the state's higher-education system to new Medicaid
fees.
At first glance, much of the Romney
proposal appears to be a mixed bag. There is, of course, a certain
amount of psychic satisfaction in seeing UMass president Bill Bulger
squirm as Romney tries to eliminate his job. (Globe coverage
here;
Herald coverage here.)
By most accounts, the former Senate president has done an excellent
job in building up UMass. But his high salary ($309,000) and his
refusal to testify before a congressional committee about his
homicidal brother (understandable on a personal level but
incompatible with holding high public office) make him an inviting
target.
Still, forcing out Bulger is one
thing; doing away with the UMass president's office and
decentralizing the state's high-education system is quite another. Is
it a good idea? It's too soon to say. The Globe's
Joan
Vennochi is already calling
it "a fraud and an insult," and compares Romney's plan to "setting
off pyrotechnics in a low-ceilinged nightclub." Wow. That's, uh, way
more than a bit much.
In a considerably more measured
column, the Globe's Adrian
Walker criticizes Romney's
"cynicism" and observes: "Part of the beauty of the assault on Bulger
is that his fate -- not education -- becomes the story line." Indeed,
the get-Bulger angle is more than enough for the Herald's
Peter
Gelzinis, who cackles, "The
Napoleon of South Boston would appear to be fading away right before
our very eyes." (Gelzinis also laments that Bulger's powerful friends
may yet save his job.)
But let's be honest. Can anyone
really say for certain right now that Romney's higher-ed plan will be
good or bad for the state and the students who depend on
it?
Or take local
aid. Romney proposes both
to reform it, so that communities that have not been pulling their
fair share will have to cut spending or raise taxes (good), and to
cut it by five percent (bad). When Romney promised during his
campaign not to cut core essential services, or whatever his slippery
phrase was, he apparently didn't count cops, firefighters, and
teachers as being essential.
Finally, the Globe today
reports a Romney initiative that is so bizarre that I'm wondering if
it's really true. According to the article, by Cynthia
Roy, the state Department
of Public Health will start charging a $50 fee for tuberculosis tests
-- and "a $400 fee for those who test positive." Can this be
right? A quick perusal of Romney's budget proposal on the state
website sheds no light: it merely shows a new line item for
tuberculosis
testing that would bring in
$300,000 in fiscal 2004.
I'm trying to imagine how this
would work. Would you have to pay $450 in advance, and then get a
$400 rebate if you test negative? ("Congratulations! You've won!")
Would you be billed an extra $400 if you test positive?
This is so screamingly insane that
I'm going to assume that there's at least a chance that the
Globe got it wrong or left something out. But if it's true,
then Romney ought to find out who put this in his budget and add him
or her to the long list of state employees who are getting laid
off.
posted at 9:37 AM |
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Okay, so call it a tie.
Jonathan Last, the online editor of the Weekly
Standard, takes issue
with my item
praising the New
Republic's new
digital-delivery system. Last writes:
While TNR has done a great
job with both their print and web redesigns, I'm not sure if they
really go us one better. They only part of the magazine we don't
put into HTML is the letters page. TNR now puts their letters page
on the web, which is great, but we make much more of our HTML
magazine content available to non-subscribers.
A fair observation. For some
reason, I had thought that the "Contents" column on the left-hand
side of the Standard's website consisted only of highlights,
not the entire magazine (minus letters). I've also learned that not
all of TNR's print articles are available in HTML -- the other
night, when I tried to read a Robert Kaplan piece, I was greeted with
a message that I had to download the entire issue in PDF format if I
wanted to read it.
So, my revised assessment: the
Standard and TNR both have very good websites. Each
could be improved. (Since TNR's print articles are now
available to subscribers only, why can't they all be in HTML?
And why can't the Standard put its letters up in HTML?) And
the third political weekly, the left-liberal Nation,
really needs to get with the program and start making all of its
content available to the people who pay the bills. No, I don't mean
Paul Newman! I mean the subscribers.
posted at 9:36 AM |
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Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Giving up on Donahue. So
there were Phil Donahue and Peter Jennings last night, having a
civilized conversation about Iraq on MSNBC. Earlier in the day,
Donahue's
show had finally been put
out of its misery, which was no surprise, since it hadn't attracted
much in the way of ratings since its debut last year.
I can't say I shed any tears. I
almost never watched it, and am not much of a fan of Donahue's
arm-waving, hectoring style. But was it really necessary to give up
this quickly on the only liberal talk show on cable news? As
Bill
Carter points out in this
morning's New York Times, Donahue's ratings were bad, but they
were getting better, and he actually had the highest ratings of
MSNBC's sorry prime-time line-up.
MSNBC, of course, is completely and
utterly lost. Soon it will debut a Saturday talk show by right-wing
hatemonger Mike
Savage. Donahue's slot may
eventually go to new celebrity hire Jesse
Ventura, who proved to be a
more compelling wrestler than political leader. The network is also
talking about a prime-time newscast to be anchored by Sam Donaldson
-- not a terrible idea by any means, but it was only last year that
it allowed Brian
Williams, a far more supple
anchor than Donaldson, to flee to sister station CNBC.
Donahue's show wasn't particularly
inspired, but it was better than much of the trash that's on cable
news.
posted at 9:28 AM |
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Tuesday, February 25, 2003
The return of the $43 million
error. In an otherwise impressive essay for the New
Republic's "Liberalism and American Power" issue, Samantha Power
recycles a hoary old canard. As an example of the Bush
administration's inconsistent foreign policy, Power writes, "We can
go to war against the Taliban, never acknowledging our previous aid
to the regime -- we offered a grant of $43 million as late as May
2001 -- for its help quashing opium production." (Power's piece
is online here,
but is available only to TNR subscribers.)
As
I reported more than a year
ago, and as others have reported as well, this was simply not the
case, an inconvenience that has not prevented it from attaining the
status of accepted truism. The fact is that the US distributed $43
million through the UN and non-governmental organizations to help
feed starving Afghans. Even in announcing the aid package, Secretary
of State Colin Powell pointedly criticized Afghanistan's Taliban
government.
Unfortunately, this is one error
that has been repeated so often, and has been so rarely challenged,
that it has taken on the color of truth. Surely the Bush White
House's foreign policy has been cynical enough without having to tar
it with a grotesque misdeed that it did not actually
commit.
posted at 11:08 PM |
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This isn't good, either.
Former Boston Globe columnist John Ellis is giving
up his weblog, one of the
more consistently entertaining and informative of such ventures.
Ellis will be a scholar at the new Combating
Terrorism Center at West
Point. Cosmo
Macero, who got to this
before I did, is so broken up that he's going to keep his Ellis link
in tribute.
posted at 2:21 PM |
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This isn't good.
Salon editor/founder David
Talbot is begging. His most
desperate statement: "If every one of our 53,000 subscribers brings
in just ONE additional subscription, Salon will finally break even
this year." And if every magazine could double its paid circulation,
then dogs would be performing neurosurgery.
Paging Steve
Jobs!
posted at 11:49 AM |
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From Pony Express to instant
delivery. The New Republic has finally, and quite
intelligently, solved its biggest problem: getting itself into the
hands of paying subscribers in a timely manner.
Last year, I wrote an item urging
TNR to emulate the Weekly
Standard, which makes
its entire issue available to subscribers as a PDF download as soon
as it comes off the presses. TNR, which unveiled
its
upgraded website yesterday,
has gone one better than that.
Not only will the PDF edition of
TNR be available on Friday mornings, many days before the
print edition arrives in your mailbox, but the entire issue is being
made available to subscribers in regular HTML format as well. (The
Standard makes much of its content available in HTML, but not
the entire magazine.)
There are two advantages to the PDF
format: it looks exactly like the printed magazine, and since you can
save the whole thing to your hard drive, you can take it with you and
read it on your laptop without an Internet connection. But the latter
advantage is actually less important than it was even a year ago,
which is why I think the HTML alternative is such a great
idea.
Increasingly, Internet connections
are becoming untethered from wires, thanks to high-speed wireless
networks (Airport in Apple lingo, WiFi to everyone else). That means
more and more people can take their Internet connection with them.
And since PDF files can be fuzzy and difficult to read unless you
print them out (quite an undertaking except for those who have
high-speed laser printers), the HTML files are actually more
usable.
The downside of TNR's new
digital strategy is that very little of the print-edition content
will be available to non-subscribers. As a reader, I don't care. But
it does make it less enticing to write about TNR articles in
Media Log, since I will not be able to link to them. (On the other
hand, TNR is selling digital-only subscriptions for just $20,
one-fourth of the usual subscription cost -- an interesting insight
into how much money a magazine blows on printing, production, and
postage.)
The print edition of TNR is
unveiling a new design this week as well, which surely demonstrates
that its last redesign -- just a few years old -- was seen as
unsuccessful by editor-in-chief/owner Marty Peretz, as well as his
new co-owners, Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt. Blessedly, those
thick black vertical lines are gone from the "TRB" and "Diarist"
columns.
There's also been a lot of chatter
lately about TNR's supposed ideological revamping. Both the
New York Observer's Sridhar
Pappu and the Washington
Post's Howard
Kurtz report that the
magazine's publicists have been touting the magazine's move to the
right. The nominally liberal TNR strongly supports the Bush
administration's Iraq policy, and has been lambasting the Democratic
presidential candidates as well.
Please. TNR has been
lurching back and forth between neolib and neocon for years. ("Here
we go again," is how Pappu begins his piece.) With Peretz's friend Al
Gore now off the presidential stage and a young, right-leaning
editor, Peter Beinart, at the top of the masthead, it's hardly
surprising that TNR is tilting more conservative than it did
under Beinart's predecessor, Charles Lane, now of the Washington
Post. But Lane's predecessor, Michael Kelly, was seen as so
hostile to liberalism that even Peretz could not abide him.
Conservative Andrew Sullivan is a former TNR editor as
well.
If TNR can even be said to
have a consistent ideology, it would be generally liberal on domestic
policy, except affirmative action, which it staunchly opposes; and
neoconservative on foreign policy. No wonder it's been seen as
swinging back and forth over the years.
posted at 10:11 AM |
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A pyro warning. The
Boston Herald's Tom
Mashberg has a terrific
story today on Paul Vanner, the sound man at the Station, who says he
warned co-owner Michael Derderian months ago about the pyrotechnics
being set off at his club. But it's hard to know where this
information fits into the investigation, since Mashberg also reports
that Vanner says Derderian appeared to take his warning seriously,
and stopped booking bands that use pyro. A fascinating tidbit, but
we're still a long way from knowing the truth.
posted at 10:11 AM |
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Can't get enough of those
feuding sportswriters? The Herald's Jim
Baker has an entertaining
roundup today, beneath the laughably false headline "Bickering
Writers a Turnoff." The Phoenix's Chris
Young, in his online
"Sporting Eye" column, weighs in on the Shaughnessy/Buckley/Edes
contretemps as well.
posted at 10:10 AM |
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Monday, February 24, 2003
The terrible aftermath.
Blute & Ozone had me on for a few minutes this morning on
WRKO Radio (AM 680) to talk about the media's treatment of one of
their own: Jeff Derderian, co-owner (with his brother) of the Station
nightclub in West Warwick, the scene of last week's horrific, deadly
fire. The question: have the media gone too easy on Derderian because
he's a reporter for WPRI-TV (Channel 12) in Providence and a former
reporter for WHDH-TV (Channel 7) in Boston?
I don't know. Derderian may have
initially gotten more benefit of the doubt than someone else might
have, but it strikes me that it's not going to matter much. His
claims that the club had never given permission to Great White to set
off fireworks on stage are now in serious doubt, and Rhode Island
officials are going to push this until they get some
answers.
Maybe Derderian wasn't given the
full media treatment -- camera crews haven't staked out his house,
and he hasn't been chased down the street by rampaging TV reporters.
But it's not going to matter in the end. This is a terrible story,
and it's not going to come out well for Derderian, regardless of how
questions involving criminal and civil liability are ultimately
resolved.
The Providence
Journal has done some
interesting stuff online to expand its coverage of the tragedy,
including a fire-related
weblog, photo slide shows,
and links
to additional information. (Free registration required.)
I've seen several well-executed
stories on the long road ahead for survivors who've been seriously
burned. Stephen Smith's piece in yesterday's Globe on
firefighter
Raymond McNamara is
worthwhile. Here are two other truly exceptional pieces:
- The 2001 Pulitzer Prize for
feature photography was awarded to Matt Rainey of the Newark
Star-Ledger for his photos of two college students who were
badly burned in a dorm fire. The Pulitzer website has
a
portfolio of Rainey's work.
- The Austin
American-Statesman website has an in-depth report on Jacqui
Saburido, a young woman whose face was virtually burned off in a
terrible car accident several years ago. Written
by David Hafetz and photographed by Rodolfo
Gonzalez, this is very
difficult to look at. But it's not sensationalistic in the least
-- rather, it's simply the heartbreaking truth.
posted at 9:31 AM |
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Finneran's wake. Scot
Lehigh's profile of House
Speaker Tom Finneran in
yesterday's Boston Globe Magazine serves as a reminder of what
a talented and brilliant person Finneran really is. Unfortunately,
Lehigh offers no reason to hope that Finneran has learned what he
should have learned from his power-crazed mistakes of the last
several years, mistakes that have damaged his reputation and driven
out many talented House members.
The most telling anecdote is
offered by former Senate president Tom Birmingham, talking about the
endless budget discussions that the two men held in 1999, when the
state's spending plan was finally approved five months
late:
"I tried to make the case
that we were doing irreparable harm to our institutional and
personal reputations by not concluding this," Birmingham says.
"And I said, using more scatological words, 'Everybody thinks we
are a couple of jerks.' And he said, 'No, I disagree. I think
everybody is saying, "Those two guys really know what they are
talking about." ' This is like five months into the stalemated
budget. Nobody knew what we were talking about."
Birmingham laughs in disbelief
at the memory, repeating the remark as though it's the punch line
of a favorite joke: "No, I think everybody is saying, 'Those two
guys really know what they are talking about.' "
posted at 9:30 AM |
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The Blog Mattress. Barry
Crimmins sends word that the sublime Charles
Laquidara, the legendary
disc jockey for the old WBCN Radio who's now living in Hawaii, has
started his own weblog.
Lots of antiwar stuff, as you would expect from Charles. He's also
posted some great cartoons and pictures -- check out the prices at
Tom's Shell.
Barry himself has posted a
righteous
rant about his recent
unsuccessful effort to write and read a commentary for On
Point, an NPR-distributed talk show emanating from WBUR Radio
(90.9 FM) in Boston. They invited him, I should point
out, but his observations about the burgeoning 2004 presidential
field were obviously too caustic for a segment that the show likes to
keep lite and cheery. Crimmins writes:
Two years into the
court-appointed Bush administration's destruction of our way of
life and the first call I received from NPR was a request to
belittle Democrats. Ostensibly they wanted me to make fun of the
fact that the field of candidates had grown very quickly in recent
weeks. That's right; NPR was soliciting me to satirize democracy
for showing signs of vibrancy. And so this young producer tried to
steer me that way. She started by mentioning the size of the
Democratic field and then asked, "Do you think any of them has the
stature to take on George W. Bush?"
I said, "My dog Lloyd has the
stature to take on Bush." But then I allowed, "Of course, I raised
him myself."
Obviously Media Log will be happy
to post a response from WBUR.
posted at 9:29 AM |
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At CNN, quality counts -- until
it doesn't. So now CNN's goal is to position itself as the
quality alternative to Fox News, making up in demographics what it
lacks in sheer numbers. The New
York Times reports this
morning that Connie Chung and her cheesy tabloid show may ultimately
become the victim of this new strategy. I'd say "good," except that
it seems CNN changes direction every six months. So let's just call
this good news for the short term, with the understanding that there
is no long term -- or even medium term.
posted at 9:28 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
