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.
Saturday, April 10, 2004
THE ARROGANCE OF MR. JUSTICE
SCALIA. Here is the text
of a press release by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the
Press over the goon-like
behavior that Supreme Court
justice Antonin Scalia encouraged with his bizarre policy of not
allowing himself to be videotaped or recorded. The highlight is this,
from the committee's executive director, Lucy Dalgish:
Even assuming it was
reasonable for Justice Scalia to prohibit recordings of his speech
- which it was not - the law does not allow law enforcement
officials to seize work product from journalists under these
circumstances. Perhaps one of these days, Justice Scalia will tell
us why he has so little regard for electronic media. Certainly the
only effect the tape recordings by two print reporters would have
had on coverage of his speech would have been to make the
reporting more accurate.
The press release goes on to note
that the forcible erasure of the two recordings may have been a
violation of federal law. Gee, if that ever makes it to the Supreme
Court, do you think he'll recuse himself?
The Hattiesburg American,
one of the two news organizations singled out for Scalia's judicial
assault-by-proxy, reports
on the latest developments today. The other organization, the
Associated Press, has a story
showing that Scalia continued his thuggish ways in an appearance at
William Carey College.
The college's spokeswoman said she
was "embarrassed and angry" over the position she'd been put in when
a Scalia aide ordered news photographers to stop taking his picture
even as guests snapped away.
RICE'S UNINTENTIONALLY REVEALING
TESTIMONY. I haven't said anything about Condoleezza Rice's
testimony before the 9/11 commission because it struck me that - not
unexpectedly - she said nothing revealing or even particularly
interesting. She ran out the clock for three hours, which isn't
exactly hard to do. (And can we cut the condescending crap about how
"articulate" she is? She was no more articulate than any member of
the administration would have been, with the obvious exception of
George W. Bush.)
Slate's Fred Kaplan, though,
has a piece worth pondering. He argues
that Rice's testimony, seemingly bland and innocuous, actually
revealed her to be "a bad national security adviser - passive,
sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of
the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy."
A must-read.
posted at 11:33 AM |
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Friday, April 09, 2004
SCALIA'S LATEST QUACK-UP.
Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is a disgrace. You already knew
that. But his latest, which resulted in a federal marshal
confiscating a tape from one reporter and deleting the memory from
another's digital recorder, ought to make all of us shudder at his
arrogance.
On Wednesday, Scalia spoke to a
group of high-school students in Mississippi. Apparently Scalia has a
longstanding policy against having his words recorded, and that policy never trickled down to two reporters.
The Washington Post's
Charles Lane explains
what happened next:
As Scalia was addressing
an afternoon assembly at the Presbyterian Christian High School in
Hattiesburg, Deputy U.S. Marshal Melanie Rube confronted the
journalists and told them they must erase their recordings because
they violated the justice's policy against audio- or videotaping
of his public appearances.
After Associated Press reporter
Denise Grones balked, the marshal took her digital recorder and
erased its contents - after Grones explained how the machine
worked. The marshal also asked Hattiesburg American reporter
Antoinette Konz to hand over a cassette tape and returned it,
erased, after the event.
What's particularly despicable is
that the US Marshals Service is apparently trying to hang Rube out to
dry. Lane quotes David Turner, a spokesman for the service, as saying,
"Justice Scalia did not instruct the deputy to take that action."
Farther down, though, Lane writes: "She had been instructed to
enforce Scalia's policy during preparations for his visit, Turner
added." (I'm assuming that Lane means David Turner; in between he
introduces an Ed Turner, who is a spokesman for the Supreme
Court.)
In other words, Scalia didn't want
his words recorded, Rube well understood that she was supposed to
make sure his wishes were followed, but Rube's superiors won't give
her a pass for doing what she had clearly been instructed to
do.
Scalia should personally and
publicly apologize to Denise Grones and Antoinette Konz for his
idiotic demands, which are in direct contravention of what we should
expect in a free society. And he should apologize to Melanie Rube for
putting her in an impossible situation.
WHY PEOPLE HATE THE MEDIA, PART
CCXIV. Knight Ridder reports
that CBS is trying to put together a show that would attempt to find
abducted children. The show would take "viewers along on an emotional
and life-changing ride, from the abduction to the search in all its
intensity to the reunion of child and parents."
posted at 11:21 AM |
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Thursday, April 08, 2004
BRESLIN UNDER FIRE. Let's
see, now. Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin quotes the Reverend
Louis Sheldon, who heads some right-wing nut group called the
Traditional Values Coalition, as having said hateful things about
homosexuality. So far, so good.
But it turns out that the exchange
between Breslin and Sheldon took place 12 years ago. And that Sheldon
swears it never happened. And that Breslin doesn't have any notes.
And that the one time Breslin wrote about it previously, the quotes
weren't nearly as inflammatory.
Hmmm.
Romenesko's got all the links, so
if you want to know more, just click
here.
NEW IN THIS WEEK'S
PHOENIX. The terrible images from Fallujah are
destined to become icons of the war in Iraq. But what, exactly, are
they trying to tell us? (The story's not quite up yet, but it should
be here
later this morning.)
Also, a Pulitzer
about one war illuminates another.
posted at 8:14 AM |
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Wednesday, April 07, 2004
MONITORING IRAQ. CNN's Aaron
Brown told us all last night to read the Christian Science
Monitor's coverage of the uprisings in Iraq. So I did. Very
sharp, very calm analysis, quite different from the frightening
reports on television and in most newspapers. Not that those are
wrong, but the violence overwhelms the context.
Dan Murphy reports
from Baghdad that support for the upstart Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr
is wide but shallow. This is a point I've seen made elsewhere, but
Murphy does an exceptionally good job of explaining it. Murphy
writes:
Iraq's major Shiite
political parties, like the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, are reluctant to stand up to Sadr's militants,
afraid they could lose standing for siding too closely with the
US.
They're hoping that the US will
deal with Sadr's people for them, leaving them free to criticize
the operation if public anger grows at the civilian, predominantly
Shiite casualties in Baghdad's Sadr City, the holy city of Najaf,
and the southern town of Nasariyah.
Murphy also offers a key
observation that any influential Shiite leader who succeeded in
surviving Saddam Hussein's depredations is almost by definition weak
and compromised, writing:
The moderate Shiite Grand
Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, who stayed alive by avoiding controversy
while many ayatollahs were killed by the Hussein regime, also has
avoided any major statements.
No wonder Sistani has proved so
frustrating for US and UN negotiators.
In addition to Murphy's piece, the
Monitor's Ann Scott Tyson analyzes
the difficulty of the mission now facing US troops.
Thank you, Aaron.
WHEN METAPHOR BECOMES
REALITY
There must be a
temptation, when confronted with the Dantesque scenes from
Fallujah, to surrender to something like existential despair. The
mob could have cooked and eaten its victims without making things
very much worse.
- Christopher
Hitchens, writing
in the Wall Street Journal, April 2
We are united. Saddam Hussein
committed injustices against us for 35 years. It is impossible
that we let America do the same. We will kill them with knives. We
will eat them.
- Mohammed Ali
Hussein, quoted
in today's Boston Globe
HORSING AROUND. Back in
1994, when Mitt Romney was running against Senator Ted Kennedy,
then-governor Bill Weld called Romney something like a very
impressive piece of political horse flesh (sorry, can't find the
exact quote).
Boston Herald business
columnist Cosmo Macero Jr. today demonstrates
(sub. req.) that Romney is more of a show horse than a work horse. He
reports that Romney has been blowing off "Jobs for Massachusetts," an
economic roundtable of high-powered business executives and community
leaders, which was the incubator for such job-growth initiatives as
the mid-'90s tax breaks for Raytheon and Fidelity. (Note: Media Log
is not endorsing those gifts, especially the one for
Raytheon.)
Macero writes:
Five fiscal quarters into
Republican Romney's jobless administration, the only people more
frustrated than his political rivals are the business-community
supporters who hailed his 2002 victory over Democrat Shannon
O'Brien.
"The idea of running around the
country chasing jobs ... I'm not sure that's the right strategy,"
says John Regan, a Republican, who is vice president of
legislative policy for the Associated Industries of
Massachusetts.
The Bay State has shed 60,000
jobs on Romney's watch.
Nor does Macero let Romney off the
hook for posturing on such issues as gay marriage and auto-insurance
rates rather than rolling up his sleeves and doing the hard work of
economic development.
Romney's not just losing people.
He's losing those who should be his strongest supporters.
BUSH FIGHTS OFF THE LYING
LIARS. Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, in his
Lowell Sun column, offers
a long and impressive list of Bush critics who've been denounced by
the White House as liars.
They range from former Treasury
secretary Paul O'Neill and former counter-terrorism adviser Richard
Clarke to Gwen Rigell, the principal of the Florida school where Bush
was reading to children when the 9/11 planes hit, who says the
president couldn't have seen the attacks, as he has claimed, because
there was no television set in the classroom.
Goldman writes:
Is there a point at which
President Bush has to look in a mirror and admit to himself that a
list of people this diverse, whose previous accomplishments were
so exceptional that each and every one had individually earned the
right and the honor of serving a United States president, may, in
fact, not all be liars or malcontents, or disloyal?
I think the answer is
yes.
Ooh! Goldman must be
French.
posted at 9:15 AM |
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Tuesday, April 06, 2004
THE JANEANE AND BARRY SHOW. Here's
how I get my Air America. I click on the website,
and get the audio stream running. Then I start up a little freebie
program called WireTap, which captures the stream and saves it as an
AIFF file. After about an hour, I shut it down and save the file.
Then I copy it to iTunes, convert the AIFF file to AAC, and move it
to my iPod. Finally I use an attachment called the iTrip so that I
can play the iPod through my car radio.
If you're thinking this is no way
to reach ordinary listeners - the sort that might possibly be weaned
away from right-wing talk radio - well, you're right. But if you live
in Boston, you don't have much choice.
My convoluted work-around did
enable me to catch about 45 minutes of Janeane Garofalo's Majority
Report last night. (I listened while driving to work this morning.) Her co-host was old friend Barry
Crimmins, and their guest
was Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, host of a popular left-leaning weblog
called the Daily
Kos. The Kos stepped in it
last week when he wrote this about the deaths of the four private
security workers in Fallujah:
I feel nothing over the
death of mercenaries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or
because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a
better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw
them.
Zuniga fessed up to coming across
as "an insensitive jerk," but Garofalo and Crimmins were having none
of that, insisting he had nothing to apologize for. (Barry also
worked in a plug for Al
Giordano, who'd written a
post to that effect.) I don't think we've tuned in Rush Limbaugh
today, Toto.
Garofalo has a nice sense of pacing
- better than Al Franken, based on my limited listening so far. She's
obviously very smart, and she asks good questions. I would have liked
to hear more from Crimmins, but Garofalo did most of the talking. On
the other hand, this is only the second time I've heard The
Majority Report, and I'm already getting tired of her constant
reference to "new-metal conservatives," her term for latter-day
right-wing extremists. It was cute the first time, okay the second
time, but now ...
A couple of observations. One is
that Garofalo and Crimmins have both had long careers in comedy, yet
neither made much of any attempt to be funny. I'm sure it's not easy
- this is the Bush White House we're talking about, after all. But
the whole question about Air America is whether it can balance its
righteousness with enough entertainment to attract, you know,
listeners. I don't have any suggestions except to point out
the obvious: they've got to figure this out.
My other observation is how weird
it is to listen to a talk-radio show that is this far to the left.
I've become so inured to right-wing talk that Rush could deliver an
ode to Franco, Bill O'Reilly could demand war against France, and
Sean Hannity could insist that John Kerry is a traitor, and it would
pretty much blow past me. But to hear talk-show hosts who are to the
left of my muddled liberalism is startling, though refreshing after a
while.
It just shows how our expectations
of what a radio talk show is supposed to sound like have been shaped
by the rather ugly status quo.
posted at 12:21 PM |
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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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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
