BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Monday, April 05, 2004
COMATOSE ON THE RANGE. The
New York Times today reports
that the Disney board is pondering how much authority to exercise
over Michael Eisner, who's still running the company despite losing
the title of chairman following a recent shareholders'
revolt.
May I suggest that the board take a
field trip to the local multiplex and catch Disney's latest,
Home
on the Range. I took my
daughter, Becky, to see it yesterday. Now, granted, I haven't seen
every one of them, but I think this might be the worst animated
feature Disney has ever made. It is plotless and charmless. The
animation is atrocious. Mercifully, it is only an hour and 16 minutes
long, which meant that I only looked at my watch 30 or 40
times.
The reviews
are not as bad as I would have thought, and Becky liked it. So maybe
it was just me. My guess, though, is that this is not going to be a
box-office sensation.
HERALD NOTES. Given
all the uncertainty pervading the newly sensationalized Boston
Herald these days, it's encouraging to see that there's at least
some commitment to covering important stories. Today, Thomas Caywood
weighs in with the first
of a two-parter on the
renewed heroin epidemic.
And here's a good companion
piece: a front-page
Boston Globe article by Stephen Smith on how Governor Mitt
Romney's cuts in drug-treatment programs have endangered $9 million
in federal aid.
Meanwhile, a few folks at the
Herald are reacting publicly to my piece
in this week's Phoenix on the Herald versus the
Globe, and whether the Herald can maintain relevance
against its much-larger rival.
At Jim Romenesko's media-news site,
Herald staffer and union official Tom Mashberg
lambastes
me for "attempting to
assess changes at the Herald based on about a month of Herald
experimentation" (scroll down a bit). Business reporter Jay
Fitzgerald, on his widely read "Hub Blog," endorses
Mashberg's comments. And business columnist Cosmo Macero Jr., on his
cosmomacero.com site, writes
that I've "basically declared war" on the Herald.
To which I'll offer a couple of
responses.
-- The month-long experiment to
which Mashberg refers is, from where I'm sitting, approaching a year
old. The Herald has been moving increasingly toward
sensationalism ever since former editor Ken Chandler was brought back
as a consultant last spring. The continued presence of editor Andy
Costello served as a counterbalance, a guarantor that Chandler
wouldn't get too out of hand in making the Herald look more
and more like his previous paper, the New York Post.
Costello's removal more than a month ago did not mark the beginning
of a new experiment, but the acceleration of an experiment that was
already under way.
-- Except for a few people who've
left, the Herald staff is the same one that has been producing
good work for years. I've heard, through private e-mails and
conversations, that in some circles my article has been interpreted
as an attack on the staff. That's ridiculous. If anything, my
reporting reflected the frustration of good staff members who worry
that they will no longer be taken seriously.
posted at 9:29 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
