BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
STREAMING O'FRANKEN. I've
been listening to a bit of The O'Franken Factor on Air America
Radio, which doesn't have an outlet in Boston but which is streaming
live here.
I can't judge it from 45 minutes of intermittent listening,
obviously, but while I had it on Michael Moore dropped by, and then
Al Gore called in to say hello.
Gore got off a funny, asking,
"How's the drug-free thing working out?" Moore made a crack about
OxyContin, and Al Franken chimed in, "We've been drug-free now for
two hours and 40 minutes." Maybe they're taking the wrong
drugs, because it seemed pretty low-energy. You'd think they'd be
bouncing off the walls on Day One.
Franken and Gore couldn't get Moore
to apologize for supporting Ralph Nader in 2000, but Moore did say
he's backing John Kerry this time around.
Air America has got to pick up a
Boston outlet before the conventions. You'd think this would be one
the best markets for liberal radio in the country. But with just
about every station with a decent signal locked down by a
conglomerate, that may not be easy.
Anyway ... the streaming works just
fine, and it's also on Channel 167 on XM Satellite Radio. As for the
rest of the country, stay tuned.
MONKEYS MAUL KERRY. Kerry
knew it was coming, but he hasn't been particularly effective in
warding off the flying
monkeys of the Bush-Cheney
campaign.
That's the conclusion of the
Washington Post's Dan Balz, who reports
today that "attacks on John
F. Kerry by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, backed by
millions of dollars in negative ads, have wiped out the narrow lead
Kerry enjoyed at the beginning of the month and damaged his public
image."
MORE IRAQI HORROR. The
images out of the Iraqi town of Fallujah today are horrifying and
sickening - the burned bodies (and body parts) of four Americans
being dragged through the streets, beaten with sticks, and hung up
for public display.
The New York Times, which
covers the story here,
has also posted an AP video
that you need an extraordinarily strong stomach to watch. If you read
this
AP story at Yahoo News,
you'll also find a slideshow that is nothing short of
appalling.
It will be interesting to see what
the media ethicists say about showing these images. Two years ago,
the Phoenix touched off a controversy when it published on its
Web site a link to a propaganda video made by the Islamist terrorists
who kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The
video ends with an image of Pearl's severed head being held aloft.
The paper also published two small images from the video, one of them
post-decapitation. Click
for what I wrote about it at the time.
The Phoenix got some
support, but also received a lot of criticism. Publishing gruesome
images is always controversial, and should never be done without a
great deal of thought. The question is, are the pictures from
Fallujah somehow newsworthy in a way that the Pearl images were not?
And, if so, what is the standard?
And just in case you were wondering: I think they were both newsworthy. We shouldn't be forced to watch such images, but neither should we hide from them.
posted at 3:44 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
