BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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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, October 10, 2003
The end of Narco News.
Today is a sad day for independent media. The Narco
News Bulletin, produced
by my former Phoenix colleague Al Giordano, will
soon be no more.
For the past three and a half
years, Narco News has offered an idiosyncratic, comprehensive
look at the misguided US "war on drugs," told from a Latin American
perspective. It's an issue that's not on all that many radars --
indeed, it's not on mine as much as it should be. But I always knew
that Al and his "authentic journalists" were out there telling the
truth.
Giordano writes:
It's been quite a ride. In
these 1,275 days that shook América, we've witnessed,
reported, translated, and participated in the growth of a visible
drug legalization movement in Latin America where there previously
was none. We've blown the whistle on attempted coups d'etat in
Venezuela. We've walked side by side with, and reported from the
fronts of, the growing social and indigenous movements that, from
Argentina, to Bolivia, to Brazil, to Ecuador, to México, to
Perú, to Venezuela, and elsewhere, have reawakened
Simón Bolívar's dream of a Latin America united
against impositions from above.
In December 2001, Giordano and
Narco News won a precedent-setting First Amendment case when a
New York judge threw out a libel suit brought by the head of Banamex,
a powerful Mexican bank. Here is a piece I wrote on Giordano's
victory; and here's an
earlier
piece that discusses the
lawsuit in detail.
Giordano will continue to write his
weblog, Big,
Left, Outside, "Al
Giordano's countercoup for authentic journalism, democracy and a free
press."
Narco News will be missed,
but I suspect Giordano will continue to be heard from, soon and
often.
posted at 11:28 AM |
comment or permalink
Thursday, October 09, 2003
More on Der Gropenfuhrer.
Blogger Elisabeth Riba reports that I put up the wrong link to my
Phoenix piece on Arnold Schwarzenegger and the LA
Times. Here's
the right one.
And here is Riba's
take on why the tabloids
went easy on Schwarzenegger during the recall campaign. It's not
personal -- it's business!
posted at 11:13 AM |
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That's Mister Ed to you,
pal. The Globe Spotlight Team today has one of those long
packages on an obscure topic that you wouldn't think you'd much care
about: financial
abuses at private foundations.
This one, though, is pretty
sprightly, mainly because the paper has found some rather colorful
characters with their hands in the till.
My favorite is Edward Lake, whose
story is told in a sidebar
by Francie Latour. A retired $20,000-a-year government clerk, Lake,
through a chance encounter some six decades ago, lucked into serving
on the Florik Charitable Trust, paying himself -- at most recent
count -- $230,000 a year to look at the mail.
Latour's kicker:
"A lot of people thought I
couldn't do this, see? I don't appear to be slick enough," Lake
said. "But I fooled them. I fooled them all. When they say Mr.
Lake, that means Mr. Lake. Nobody calls me Ed."
Urine trouble. Both the
Globe
and the Herald
give front-page treatment to yesterday's regional drug summit at
Faneuil Hall.
The Herald's Thomas Caywood
runs hard with the most disturbing angle: White House drug czar John
Walter's outrageous proposal for random school drug
testing.
As the ACLU's Nancy Murray says,
"It's just putting the emphasis in the wrong place. We don't need our
schools to be more like prisons."
New in this week's
Phoenix. The Wilson
affair is potentially an
enormous scandal that could endanger lives and national security.
Will the media keep the heat on -- or just pass it off as a typical
Washington kerfuffle?
California
voters show the LA
Times that they don't care about Governor-elect (imagine that!)
Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping and humiliation of women.
And the Phoenix
editorial calls on WEEI
Radio to declare that Dennis & Callahan has completed its
long-running engagement.
posted at 9:08 AM |
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Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Peter Meade, class act.
Apparently it took an old pro from a different, better era of talk
radio finally to knock some sense into the management at WEEI Radio
(AM 850).
Both the Globe
and the Herald
report today that the station suspended John Dennis and Gerry
Callahan for two weeks without pay on the same day that Peter Meade,
the executive vice-president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of
Massachusetts, was yanking $27,000 worth of advertising off the
air.
If you've just tuned in, this all
arose last week, when the morning-drive-time hosts yukked it up over
Little Joe, the gorilla who escaped from the Franklin Park
Zoo.
Observing that Joe had hung out for
a while at a bus stop, Dennis referred to him as "a Metco gorilla";
Callahan chimed in that he was "heading out to Lexington."
Though both papers mention Meade's
action, neither points out that Meade was a talk-show host at WBZ
Radio (AM 1030) during the 1980s. (He continues to do political
analysis for the station from time to time.)
A moderate liberal, Meade hosted a
show that directly preceded conservative David Brudnoy's. More often
than not, they would kick issues around together during the
crossover. It was a model of enlightened, civil talk radio of the
sort that's almost impossible to find these days.
As for Dennis and Callahan, two
weeks sounds about right -- provided the station is serious about
changing its gay-bashing, misogynistic, and (in at least this one
instance) racist tone.
Then again, we're living in an era
when the likes of Michael Savage trash gays and lesbians on the air,
and when even a reasonably intelligent host like Jay Severin refers
to illegal Latino immigrants as "wetbacks" and Muslims as
"towelheads."
No doubt that Dennis and Callahan
crossed way, way over the line. But the line itself needs some
heavy-duty recalibrating.
posted at 11:12 AM |
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Monday, October 06, 2003
It's not what's in his heart,
it's what comes tumbling out of his mouth. The Globe's
Adrian
Walker has a smart column
this morning on suspended WEEI Radio (AM 850) host John
Dennis.
Dennis wants us to know that he's
not a racist. Well, I've never met the guy, and have no idea whether
he's a racist. But what he said was racist, and that's the
issue.
Cohost Gerry Callahan is on the air
today, despite the revelation on WGBH-TV's Greater Boston on
Friday that Callahan was in on the so-called joke.
Meanwhile, 'EEI hasn't changed the
Dennis
& Callahan website
since this all began. The motto: "Home of Repeat Offenders."
Nice.
Many zeroes. I've always
enjoyed Michael
Wolff's media column in
New York magazine.
But I doubt I'll ever be able to
read it again without remembering that Wolff is making
$450,000
a year.
Call and response.
Globe ombudsman Christine
Chinlund has a meaty
analysis of whether the paper gave former State Senate president Tom
Birmingham a fair chance of responding to charges that he'd
blown
his budget -- thus putting
his successor, Bob Travaglini, in an awkward position.
Chinlund rarely lets her colleagues
have it, but in this case her conclusion is clear: what Birmingham
had to say would have cast the story in a different light; and though
he had been difficult about making himself available, in the end,
reporter Raphael Lewis didn't try hard enough.
posted at 9:32 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
