BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
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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, July 19, 2003
Summer vacation. Media Log
will go into suspended animation this week. There will be no posts
until July 28 or thereabouts.
posted at 10:06 AM |
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It's winter down there! Greg
Tingle, the proprietor of a website called Media
Man Australia, has
published a
long Q&A with me. He
was kind enough to let me flog my book, Little
People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter's
Eyes. Please have a
look -- and check out his site.
posted at 10:06 AM |
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No blood for oil
redux. Media Log has always found ridiculous the
notion that the war in Iraq was all about oil. No doubt oil had
something to do with moving Iraq higher up the priority list than,
say, North Korea or Congo. But if the Bushies really wanted Iraq's
oil that bad, then how come they didn't grab it 12 years
ago?
But now I'm beginning to think the
"no blood for oil" crowd might have been right all along. ER passes
on this
link to Larry Klayman's
Judicial Watch website, which reports that documents turned over
under court order by Dick Cheney's secret energy task force include a
map of Iraq's oilfields and pipelines, as well as similar maps of
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The documents are dated March 2001,
according to Judicial Watch. Hmm. Do you suppose Cheney might have
believed the US would have access to Iraqi oil at some point in the
future? Where would he have gotten that idea?
Obligatory weasel words: by itself,
this proves nothing. But there are some pretty serious questions that
need answering.
posted at 10:05 AM |
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Friday, July 18, 2003
Drip, drip, drip. No matter
how much cover Tony Blair tries to give George W. Bush, the news for
the White House keeps getting worse.
Today the Washington Post's
Walter
Pincus and Dana Priest
report that the State Department received those forged Niger uranium
documents three months before the State of the Union address -- and
four months before the documents were finally turned over to UN
weapons inspectors. Write Pincus and Priest:
State Department officials
could not say yesterday why they did not turn over the documents
when the inspectors asked for them in December.
Both the Post and the New
York Times' James
Risen and David Sanger
offer details on how National Security Council staffer Robert Joseph
pushed to include the phony Niger connection in the State of the
Union even though CIA director George Tenet had personally acted to
keep it out of Bush's October 7 speech.
Meanwhile, former secretary of
defense Caspar
Weinberger comes riding to
Bush's defense with a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece (free
registration required) that attempts to resurrect the Niger story.
Earth to Cap: perhaps there is something to it, as Blair
insists. The issue is the White House's cavalier treatment of a
forgery. But, then, lest we forget, Weinberger received a
presidential pardon from Bush's father.
Loyalty counts.
The sneering subhead on
Weinberger's piece: "How many electoral votes does Niger have,
anyway?" Well, gosh, I guess that would be zero. Can't argue with
that.
posted at 7:52 AM |
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Thursday, July 17, 2003
Despite everything, goodwill in
Baghdad. Late blogging this morning -- my home Internet
connection was down. I heard the results of a
fascinating poll (PDF file)
on the BBC while driving to work. Despite everything, a survey of
adults in Baghdad shows that precisely half supports the US-British
invasion and most definitely does not want Saddam Hussein back in
power.
According to the poll, by the
British polling company YouGov, 50 percent "think that America and
Britain's war against Saddam's regime was right" and 27 percent think
it was "wrong." Those expressing no opinion totaled 23 percent --
which seems weird until you remember that they were probably
terrified to answer.
The support comes even though large
pluralities believe the primary reasons for the war were oil and
Israel.
By a margin of 29 percent to nine
percent, respondents say they would rather live under US rule than
under Saddam -- even though they also say that their lives were
better a year ago than they are today (47 percent to 32 percent).
Optimism prevails: by 52 percent to 11 percent, they believe their
lives will be better five years from now than they were under
Saddam.
And by 75 percent to 14 percent,
Baghdad residents say that Iraq is a more dangerous place today than
it was before the invasion.
What this shows is that even if you
believe we blundered into Iraq under false pretenses (and if you
believe that, you would be correct), there is still more than a
decent chance of salvaging this -- if we get about the business of
restoring the country's shattered infrastructure and continue to turn
power over to Iraqis.
Sometimes it's difficult to take
the Fitzgeraldian view and hold two contradictory ideas at the same
time. But we need to find a way to investigate the prevarications of
the Bush administration while at the same time realizing that a
significant number of Iraqis do see us as liberators, and are
depending on our willingness to follow through.
posted at 11:13 AM |
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New in this week's
Phoenix. The surprise issue of the 2004 presidential
campaign may turn out to be same-sex
marriage.
Plus, newly anointed New York
Times executive editor Bill
Keller turned down another
career path several years ago: the chance to edit the Boston
Globe.
posted at 11:13 AM |
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Wednesday, July 16, 2003
A bulletin from Planet W.
Salon blogger Joe
Conason has picked up on a
truly weird statement that Our Only President made in a story
reported by Dana
Milbank and Dana Priest of
the Washington Post.
George W. Bush said that he decided
to go to war with Iraq after having given Saddam Hussein "a chance to
allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."
Do I need to point out that Hans
Blix, Mohamed ElBareidi, and company were in Iraq, diligently
looking for weapons, and left only when the threat of a US invasion
came imminent?
Asks Conason: "What possessed the
president to make an assertion that everyone on the planet knows to
be untrue? And who is going to take the responsibility for this
one?"
posted at 3:01 PM |
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Searching for those WMDs.
The New Republic is back with another vital contribution
to the debate over the so-called imminent threat posed by Saddam
Hussein.
Last month, the magazine ran a
report by John
Judis and Spencer Ackerman
demonstrating how the White House and the Defense Department leaned
on the intelligence community to cook the books in favor of a US-led
invasion.
This week, it carries a dispatch by
Los Angeles Times reporter Bob
Drogin (subscription
required) that asks: what ever happened to those WMDs? Drogin's
well-researched guess is that Saddam's weapons program ceased in the
mid 1990s under pressure from UN inspectors and economic
sanctions.
Now, this gets a little
complicated. There's no question that Saddam lied repeatedly when
inspections started up again late last year. Even Hans Blix said it
appeared Saddam was holding out. Why didn't Saddam just come clean
and save himself?
The most likely explanation,
according to Drogin, is that even though Saddam was telling the truth
when he asserted that Iraq didn't have WMDs, he wanted to make it
look like he was lying in order not to appear weak.
Certainly US officials could have
been fooled by this stance. But combined with the earlier story,
showing that the administration was more concerned with building a
case than with finding the truth, Drogin's article is damning
indeed.
And remember, the New
Republic was prowar, vigorously so.
posted at 7:58 AM |
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On bended knee. I've got one
bone to pick with Robert
Kuttner's column in today's
Boston Globe: he can't be sure that George W. Bush knew the
Niger-uranium evidence was fake.
Other than that, Kuttner offers a
first-rate indictment of the White House's lying ways, and of the
supine media that let the Bushies get away with it.
posted at 7:58 AM |
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Not the corrections column.
Check out what InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds does when he's
caught
making a mistake. I'm
surprised.
posted at 7:58 AM |
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Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Not on Keller's agenda. You
wouldn't expect a blogger as savvy as InstaPundit
Glenn Reynolds to make a rookie mistake, but he does today. After
blasting a column by the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof,
he
asks, "I wonder if Bill
Keller will exercise some adult supervision."
I wonder how Reynolds made it this
far without knowing that the editorial and op-ed pages are under the
control of editorial-page editor Gail Collins -- who, in turn,
reports directly to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
After all, the opinion pages'
isolation from the news operation is one of the reasons that Howell
Raines was treated with such suspicion when he was promoted from
editorial-page editor to executive editor.
posted at 10:16 AM |
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Baron's stock soars.
Boston Globe editor Marty Baron is staying put, he tells
his own paper's Mark
Jurkowitz and the Boston
Herald's Greg
Gatlin. Baron's statement
should put an end to speculation that he'll be brought to New York to
serve as managing editor under newly
named executive editor Bill Keller.
But Baron's stock is clearly at an
all-time high. He and Los Angeles Times managing editor Dean
Baquet were the only two outsiders who were seriously mentioned as
possible successors to Howell Raines, who resigned in the aftermath
of the Jayson Blair scandal. (Not that they were true outsiders,
having both worked as editors at the NY Times.)
Both Jurkowitz and Gatlin quote
Baron as saying all the right things about Keller. But the reverse is
also true. In 2001, shortly after Baron had been named editor of the
Globe, Keller
told me that he had become
a Baron fan during Baron's stint in New York.
Saying he had recommended Baron
"enthusiastically" both to Globe publisher Richard Gilman and
Times Company chairman Arthur Sulizberger Jr., Keller commented:
"He's an editor of terrific judgment and integrity. I'm partial to
editors who tell you what they think without nursing some political
agenda, and Marty did that while he was here."
Yesterday's announcement marks
quite a reversal of fortune for Keller, who was passed over in favor
of Raines two years ago. To be sure, Keller had carved out a great
job for himself, writing both a column for the op-ed page and long
pieces for the Times Magazine. But there's no doubt he wanted
the top job.
He could have dealt himself out of
the running several years ago when, during his stint as Times
managing editor under Joseph Lelyveld, he was asked whether he would
ever consider taking the editor's position at the Globe. He
said no. Months later, when Globe editor Matt Storin retired,
the spot went to Baron instead.
Now, not only is Keller right where
he wants to be, but Baron is in an ideal position: editing the
Globe, publicly identified as a hot property, and with someone
with whom he has a good relationship running the
Times.
posted at 9:58 AM |
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Those WMDs, discovered at
last. This may not last long, so hurry up and do it now. Thanks
to JM.
- Go
to Google.
- Enter the phrase "weapons of
mass destruction" (use quotation marks).
- Click on "I'm Feeling Lucky."
You'll get what looks like an error
page. Read carefully.
posted at 9:58 AM |
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Monday, July 14, 2003
Dylan's Japanese connection.
News that Bob Dylan had lifted extensively from a Japanese book on
his 2001 "Love and Theft" CD sent me running for Bob Spitzer's
Dylan: A Biography (1989). Sure enough, just as I had
remembered, I found Spitzer's account of an interview with Rob
Stoner, who played bass on Dylan's 1975 Desire album and in
the Rolling Thunder Revue. Stoner's recollection of a conversation he
once had with Dylan in New York City is worth quoting at some
length:
At three o'clock in the
morning, in a city once referred to as "the most dangerous place
on earth," Bob Dylan and Rob Stoner went on a walking tour that
lasted until the sun came up. "We just wandered around until
dawn," Stoner recalls. "Bob staring off into space with his hands
in his pockets, walking with a bounce in his step. Taking it all
in. Later I learned that this was something he did in every major
city in the country. No one recognizes him and it allows him to
feel completely free and relaxed."
As usual, Bob was preoccupied
with plans for the tour, but mostly they talked about obscure rock
'n roll songs. Stoner was a connoisseur of old rockabilly
standards. He owns a priceless collection of R&B 78s,
including the entire Sun Records catalogue and hundreds of
southern "race" records, and as the two men walked they tried to
stump each other with a list of their favorite titles and
corresponding singles. Bob was no slouch when it came to
rockabilly. "He knew almost everything I threw at him," Stoner
remembers. "Not just the titles but the entire lyric, too. He'd go
into a verse like he was singing it only a couple hours before.
The extent of his knowledge was mind-boggling."
Very cautiously, Stoner broached
a subject that had been nagging him for some time. "Ever hear a
tune called 'Bertha Lou'?" he asked Bob.
Bob nodded confidently. "Sure.
Johnny Burnette and his trio. 19 ... 57."
"Fifty-six," Stoner corrected
him, "but that's pretty good, man." They walked another hundred
feet or so in silence. "The reason I asked is that it's really
similar to one of your songs." In fact, it was almost a
note-for-note duplication of "Rita Mae," from the Desire
sessions. The melodies were exactly the same, and Bob's scansion
followed Burnette's pattern to a rhyme.
"Oh, yeah?" Bob remarked, but it
was a closing statement if Stoner had ever heard one.
"He never even asked which song
of his I was referring to," Stoner says nonplussed. "He didn't
care, and at that moment I realized that the line between
plagiarism and adaption was so blurred that it wasn't even an
issue for him."
A quick search of BobDylan.com
turns up a song from 1975 called "Rita
May," written by Dylan and
Jacques Levy, that has apparently never been released. But Stoner's
recollection neatly ties in with a piece in Saturday's New York
Times by Jon
Pareles on the Japanese
connection, who notes that Dylan has always operated as someone who
blends together lyrics and music from a variety of sources. Writes
Pereles:
The absolutely original
artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature,
living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or
traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist,
Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He's
reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending
they don't exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and
extension, emulation and mockery -- that's how individual
artists and the arts themselves evolve. It's a process that is
neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan's album title "Love and
Theft," which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy
by Eric Lott.
The extent to which Dylan, er,
lovingly stole lines from a little-known Japanese book, Junichi
Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza, is nevertheless a surprise.
The details were reported last Tuesday in the Wall Street
Journal by Jonathan
Eig and Sebastian Moffett.
Even Dylanologist Christopher Ricks of Boston University, who never
has a bad word to say about Zimmy, comes off in the Journal piece as a tad disappointed.
A big deal? Not really. Dylan has
always been pretty transparent about the way he works, even if -- on
this particular occasion -- he borrowed from a source so obscure that
it's a wonder it was ever discovered. Still, Dylan plays it both ways
to an uncomfortable extent: he pieces together bits of found culture,
sticks his copyright on it, and collects the royalties.
At the very least, as Pareles notes
in the Times, Dylan should be generous the next time a rap
musician asks permission to sample one of his songs.
posted at 8:27 AM |
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Uh, sorry about that. On the
second thought, the New York Times tell us, TVT Records'
Steven Gottlieb is not litigious and has not lost
control of his company. And thus we have another day, another
"Editor's
Note," and another
massive
corrective story.
posted at 8:26 AM |
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Dept. of shameless
self-promotion. I have reconfigured DanKennedy.net
to promote my book on the culture of dwarfism, Little People:
Learning to See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes, which will
be published by Rodale in October. Please have a look.
posted at 8:26 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
