MEDIA
LOG BY DAN KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To post a
comment that may be used in a future installment of Media Log, or
to request e-mail delivery, contact dkennedy[a]phx.com.
Friday, October 25, 2002
Let 100 papers bloom II. No
sooner had I posted an item
yesterday praising Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell for
letting his community-newspaper editors endorse the Green Party's
Jill Stein than I heard from two fellow pundits criticizing me for
such naivete. Didn't I realize that Purcell was doing everything
he could to undermine Democrat Shannon O'Brien? Since Republican
Mitt Romney is presumably anathema in Boston's most liberal suburbs,
Purcell obviously directed a few strategically placed Stein
endorsements as a backhanded way of helping Romney.
A perfect conspiracy theory -- but
wrong. Greg Reibman, the editor-in-chief of Purcell's Community
Newspaper Company Metro Unit, tells me that the Brookline Tab
has already endorsed O'Brien. (Again, no evidence on the Brookline
section of CNC's Town
Online website. Nor has the
O'Brien-Gabrieli campaign noted it on its website,
which is just stupid.) Reibman adds that the three papers that have
already endorsed Stein -- the Cambridge Chronicle, the
Newton Tab, and the Needham Tab -- chose to do so
before last night's debate, since that is likely to be Stein's last
extended television appearance. Most of the rest of CNC's 100 papers,
he says, will publish their endorsements next week.
Another CNC source tells me he
expects that of the 19 papers Purcell owns in the northwest suburbs,
five or six will probably wind up endorsing O'Brien. "This time
around," he e-mails, "CNC has been given TOTAL editorial freedom to
endorse or even not to endorse if editors choose, although some
editors have worked together on endorsements to save on time while
others localize their endorsements."
There are times, it seems, when it's
possible to be too cynical.
posted at 9:57 AM |
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Degrees of nuttiness.
Not that anyone was watching -- after all, Chief Moose was live, just
a click away -- but last night's gubernatorial debate left me
worried. Will independent Barbara Johnson's idiotic performance be
used to discredit the idea of opening future debates to candidates
other than Democrats and Republicans? I'm afraid it will. She
interrupted. She constantly ran over her time limit. She said that
Libertarian Carla Howell "is ready for a 30-day mental observation,"
which brings to mind nothing so much as pots and kettles. She
continually tried the patience of moderator Chet Curtis, the most
patient of men.
The fact is that four people had
earned the right to be up there. Democrat Shannon O'Brien, Republican
Mitt Romney, the Green Party's Jill Stein, and Howell are all the
nominees of recognized political parties, all of which earned that
recognition by winning at least three percent of the vote in the last
statewide election. You can argue that Howell's ideas are nutty all
you want (hey, I won't disagree), but she got 12 percent when she ran
against Ted Kennedy in 2000. Go ahead and say that Stein is out of
touch. Critics (me included) said the same thing about her party's
presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, two years ago, but that didn't
stop six percent of the Massachusetts electorate from backing him.
Stein and Howell represent legitimate political movements comprising
real people. Johnson has proven nothing other than her ability to get
10,000 signatures.
This morning, though, the pundits are
lumping Stein, Howell, and Johnson together, as though they all
represent something equally frivolous and trivial. The Globe's
Scot
Lehigh dismissed Stein for
her rhymes (whoops, guess he'll dismiss that phrase, too),
such as "a boom for whom?" and "payoffs for layoffs." Okay, but here
are just a few of the idiotic clichés that the consensus
"winner," Romney, mouthed last night: "squealing like a stuck pig";
"a leopard doesn't change its spots" (those two documented by the
Globe's Joan
Vennochi, among others); and
"You can't ride the low road throughout the whole campaign and then
say, 'I want to jump on the high horse.' We're not going to change
the rules in the middle of the game" (the Herald's
David
Guarino and Steve Marantz).
Compared to those banalities, Rhymin' Stein comes off as positively
eloquent.
Putting all five up there is better
than restricting it to Romney and O'Brien. But I've said it before
and I'll say it again: it would have been a real act of guts and
judgment to include the four major-party candidates and exclude
Johnson. It's not that an independent should never be
included; but poll numbers and the presence or lack of a political
organization ought to come into play at some point. The major-party
candidates, by contrast, represent organizations have already proven
themselves in the only poll that matters, the one that takes place on
Election Day.
Oh, who won? Like I said, the pundit
consensus this morning appears to favor Romney. The Herald's
Joe
Battenfeld is particularly
over-the-top with his pro-Romney spin. Personally, I thought Stein
won. She was better prepared and more focused than she was during the
first debate. The only time she seemed nervous was during her closing
statement. And she got off the best line of the night, as
the
Globe noted on its
editorial page. In a rebuke to O'Brien and Romney, who talk mainly
about their management and business experience, Stein said that
what's needed is someone to run the state "not like a business but
like a democracy."
posted at 9:34 AM |
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Thursday, October 24, 2002
Let 100 papers bloom! The
Newton
Tab has endorsed Green
Party gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein -- a pretty amazing
statement of support for someone who is almost certainly not going to
win the election. The Stein
campaign reports that the
Cambridge Chronicle has also endorsed Stein, though I could
find no evidence of it on the unfathomable Town
Online website, which hosts
some 100 Community Newspaper Company papers, including the Tab
and the Chronicle.
The conventional wisdom has it that
Democrat Shannon O'Brien is the best bet for liberals -- that she's a
progressive-leaning centrist who knows how to get things done, and is
the only candidate who can stop Republican Mitt Romney. But she is,
the Tab editorial observes, an unlikely reformer at a time
when reform is paramount. The editorial continues:
[O]ther than making
a bold statement about supporting gay marriages (which according
to some reports upset her handlers), Democrat O'Brien has done
little to distinguish herself since the primaries or to suggest
that she'll be the reformer Massachusetts needs. And the fact that
House Speaker Thomas Finneran has been an O'Brien cheerleader
should raise concerns among Newton voters who've been crippled by
his heavy-handed rule on Beacon Hill.
That's a pretty tough statement. I
suspect O'Brien would rise above her insider connections and be a
much better governor than her detractors think. Yes, O'Brien is
extraordinarily cautious and has allies who make me queasy. But she's
smart, she seems to have good instincts, and she did an outstanding
job of cleaning up the corruption in the treasurer's office left
behind by her Republican predecessor, Joe Malone. Still, O'Brien has
failed to articulate exactly what kind of a leader she would be, and
Stein has done surprisingly well at appealing to disaffected liberals
and progressives. The candidates get another chance tonight, in the
televised debate at 7 p.m.
The Stein endorsements are as much a
media as a political story. Both weeklies are part of Community
Newspaper Company, the 100-paper chain that Boston Herald
publisher Pat Purcell bought from Fidelity a couple of years ago,
allegedly for the backbreaking price of about $150 million. Does
anyone doubt that the conservative Herald will endorse Romney
when the time comes? Obviously Purcell means it when he says that CNC
editors will be allowed to decide what's right for their papers and
their community. Good for him.
Under Fidelity's ownership, CNC
wavered back and forth between letting local editors make their own
endorsement decisions and dictating those decisions from headquarters
-- although the company never, to my recollection, allowed individual
weekly papers to do their own endorsements for statewide positions
such as governor.
posted at 9:35 AM |
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Recycling watch. On Monday
I
gave the Globe some credit
(see what I mean about those permalinks?) for its report showing that
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Shannon O'Brien had pushed a loan
program for water-treatment plants that could have benefited clients
of her lobbyist husband, Emmet Hayes. It turns out that the
Herald reported essentially the same story in November 2000.
Click
here for my piece on media
composting in today's Phoenix.
posted at 9:34 AM |
link
Media Log version 2.0. Dan's
Iron Rule of Technology posits that anything you try to do with a
computer will take 10 times longer and be 10 times more difficult
than you'd anticipated, no matter how simple it looked like going in.
So it is with Media Log. No sooner had I got this up and running last
week -- itself no mean feat, involving as it did firewalls, ftp
passwords, and trial runs with several pieces of software, not all of
which worked properly -- than I heard from Jay Fitzgerald, the former
editor of the Boston Business Journal who writes
Hub
Blog. Hey, he wrote
(I'm paraphrasing here). Where are your permalinks? No one will
link to you without permalinks! My response: What the hell is a
permalink?
As I quickly learned, a properly run
weblog includes permalinks for each individual item so that other
bloggers can link to you without having to worry that your item will
have slid off the page before their readers can find it. They are
also damn near impossible to produce with specialized blogging
software. So, starting yesterday, I began producing Media Log with
Blogger,
a set of Web-based tools that automate much of the process. Media Log
now includes automatically generated archives and permalinks, the
latter signified by the little "link" thingie after each posting
time. I also reposted the last week's items yesterday, with their
original dates and times marked in gray.
posted at 9:34 AM |
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Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Saddam's last stand?
(Originally
posted 10/23/02 at 10:10 a.m.)
The most important development in the world right now is the
nascent unrest in Iraq following Saddam Hussein's release of tens
of thousands of prisoners on Sunday. The move appears to have
backfired, as it has sparked a protest movement -- tame and
fearful, to be sure -- by families whose loved ones still cannot
be accounted for. Slate has a
comprehensive round-up of
the coverage.
The Wall Street Journal
editorial page on Tuesday opined that Saddam may be
the
next Nicolae Ceausescu,
the Romanian dictator "thought to be the least vulnerable of all
Eastern Europe's Communists right up until the time he and his
wife were shot on Christmas Day by their own people." That would
certainly be the best possible outcome, good for the Iraqi people,
good for Iraq's Middle East neighbors, and good for the world as a
whole, since it would nullify the Bush administration's threats to
launch a war.
If Saddam does fall, it
will be interesting to see how quickly the White House takes
credit by claiming that American military pressure created the
environment that made his overthrow possible. No doubt that would
be true, but -- barring evidence to the contrary -- it would have
to be seen as an unintended (though happy) consequence. Today,
George W. Bush's credibility takes another hit as the Wall
Street Journal reports on page one that there is scant
evidence for his claim that Saddam has been helping Al Qaeda.
(Here's
the link, though you have
to be a paid subscriber to access it.) Reporter David Cloud leaves
no doubt that Saddam's Iraq has been involved in a remarkably
inept brand of terrorism over the years, but he writes of the
alleged Al Qaeda connection:
Mr. Hussein, in fact,
appears to be the type of secular Arab leader -- like the Saudi
royal family and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak -- whom Mr.
bin Laden and his Islamic followers would most like to see
overthrown, with strict Islamic law imposed on Iraq's
relatively nonobserving population.
If Bush's saber-rattling
ultimately leads to Saddam's downfall, then he'll have the right
to take credit for an unalloyed good. The administration's recent
conciliatory statements about the UN are a positive development,
too. But that won't change the fact that he brought the world to
the brink of war for reasons that were never adequately
explained.
posted at 1:52 PM |
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Aesthetics and health.
(Originally
posted 10/23/02 at 10:10 a.m.)
The Globe's Anthony Flint, who's done yeoman work covering
suburban sprawl, manages to write a piece today on
the
aesthetics of cellphone towers
without making one mention of the possibility that they may also
represent a health hazard. To be sure, much uncertainty surrounds
the issue, as I learned when I
wrote about it more than
three years ago. But the controversy at least warranted a mention,
didn't it? For more information, check out the website of the
EMR
Network.
posted at 1:51 PM |
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The problem with Shannon and
Mitt. (Originally
posted 10/22/02 at 10 a.m.)
Are the media making a mockery of the gubernatorial race with a
series of boneheaded gotcha stories? Or are Mitt Romney and
Shannon O'Brien so inherently boring that there's nothing else to
write about?
Today the Globe weighs in
with a front-page piece that suggests O'Brien may have pushed a
loan program for local water-treatment plants that
could
have benefited Hayes's clients.
It's a mildly interesting wrinkle, but you've got to connect a lot
of dots to get from here to there. In the Herald,
Romney
tries lamely to tie that paper's two-part series on pension abuses
(click here
and here)
while fending off charges -- "charges" might be a better way of
putting it -- that Bain, the venture-capital firm that he ran,
borrowed
money from sleazy
junk-bond company Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s. (The
Podunk Journal has learned that Fred Smith, a candidate for
the board of selectmen, got his home mortgage from a bank whose
president was later indicted on tax-fraud charges!)
Yes, there are real differences
between Democrat O'Brien and Republican Romney, and I'm not going
to fall into the Jill Stein trap of arguing that we should all
vote for the Green Party because it really doesn't matter -- as
she asserted once again on NECN last night (click here,
scroll down, and pray that the Real Media gods are with you). But
the candidates themselves are doing little to highlight those
differences.
O'Brien, fearful of being cast as
a tax-and-spend liberal, comes off as though she's running for
chief accountant rather than governor. Romney's biggest problem is
that people might decide he's too conservative on social issues.
His solution -- run a bland-on-bland campaign in which he tries to
come across as everything to everyone -- has not worked, given his
failure to catch fire at any point during the summer or fall, a
failure that is analyzed
this week by the
Phoenix's Seth Gitell. Blogger John Ellis, the former
Globe columnist, shook
his head yesterday over
what he sees as Romney's likely defeat, calling it an "only in
Massachusetts" development. But Ellis apparently sees attributes
in Romney that Romney himself has not shown on the campaign trail.
He can't debate, his TV ads are insipid, and his policy
pronouncements are so simplistic that he has managed to earn the
wrath of a Nobel
Prize laureate in economics,
according to the Globe's Steve Bailey.
The media deserve some blame for
trivializing this race, but it's hard to make the coverage
significantly better than the candidates.
posted at 1:51 PM |
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David Rockefeller in miniature.
(Originally
posted 10/21/02 at 10 a.m.)
It would take me 30 seconds -- tops -- to tell you everything I
know about David Rockefeller. So it's possible that
David
Brooks's review of Rockefeller's
Memoirs, in this
week's New York Times Book Review, is off in some crucial
way that I missed. But I doubt it. Brooks is simply too smart to
let that happen. So I offer it up today as a near-perfect example
of economy (Brooks's essay is just 1500 words), style, moral
argument, and understanding in summarizing the life of a man whose
name everyone knows and yet who remains almost a complete mystery
to the general public.
1. Style. After laying out
Rockefeller's early years, Brooks describes him at his height, as
a key player in international affairs, mostly because he was the
Man Who Was Always There. There's a subtle brilliance to Brooks's
assessment of Rockefeller, in which he simultaneously professes
admiration and gentle mockery. Many writers would kill (Not me! I
abhor violence) to be able to craft a passage such as
this:
Over time Rockefeller
transformed himself into the leading corporate statesman of his
day. Wherever there were panel discussions, evenly spaced
bottles of mineral water and worthy discourses on the need for
increased international dialogue, Rockefeller was there. He was
there at the creation of the Trilateral Commission, the
Bilderberg Society, the Pesenti Group. He served as chairman of
the Council on Foreign Relations. His ability to endure tedium
must be unmatched in all human history.
2. Moral argument. In Brooks's
view, Rockefeller is a good man who's managed to do a lot of bad,
cutting deals with some of the world's worst tyrants -- the Shah
of Iran, Mao Zedong, the Soviet leadership -- while their victims
were dying in the streets or rotting in prison. Rockefeller sees
himself as a progressive realist, but his realism in too many
cases overtook his idealism. "While the forces of democracy
squared off with the forces of authoritarianism, Rockefeller was
perpetually in the room with whoever happened to be in power,"
Brooks writes.
3. Understanding. What ever
happened to the Protestant Establishment that Rockefeller
epitomized? How could it hold such sway until the 1960s and '70s
and then virtually disappear without a trace? Brooks attributes it
directly to the Rockefellers' own progressive instincts, their
embrace of the new. Rockefeller's children rejected the idea of a
Protestant Establishment -- one child, Brooks notes, even
bankrolled the Real Paper, an alternative newspaper that
competed with the Boston Phoenix for a time in the 1970s.
The Establishment didn't collapse. It just faded away.
posted at 1:50 PM |
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Apple to Hub: Drop dead.
(Originally
posted 10/18/02 at 10 a.m.)
So, is Apple's refusal to follow the Macworld trade show from New
York to the Menino Memorial Mausoleum (a/k/a the Boston Convention
Center) the last word? Or is it just a negotiating ploy? Given the
hype by city officials and the local media over Macworld's return
after a five-year absence, yesterday's news that Apple won't be
coming qualifies as a disaster bordering on a catastrophe. And
judging from Hiawatha
Bray's piece in today's
Globe, there's not much chance of Apple honcho Steve Jobs's
changing his mind. But is that really the case? The
Herald's Scott
Van Voorhis reports today
that Macworld organizer Charlie Greco will resume talks with Apple
next week, after "a three-day 'cooling-off' period." Who's to say
the mercurial Jobs won't change his mind? As one
perceptive poster on the
geek-news site SlashDot.org
put it:
It's not like Apple is
doing so well that they can afford to play the role of
protester. Don't they think that if they stay away from the
east coast trade show because "IGN [the Macworld
organizer] is no longer investing in New York", there might
be a significant number of people on the east coast who decide
not to invest in Apple? Especially after Boston lobbied hard to
bring the trade show back, this is definitely a slap in the
face. Apple deciding to take their ball and go home just
doesn't make any sense.
MacRumors.com
today points to a
report on ThinkSecret.com
that offers an answer to the first question I had, namely:
Why didn't Macworld officials get this all settled with Apple
ahead of time? Answer: They did, only to have Apple sandbag them
yesterday. The piece quotes "sources not a part of either IDG or
Apple but close to the negotiations with convention organizing
groups in New York and Boston" as saying that "IDG had received a
vote of confidence from Apple to move the show to Boston some two
weeks ago and that the about-face by Apple was 'a shock to
everyone,' a source said." ThinkSecret.com's prediction: Apple
will use whatever leverage it can to squeeze a better financial
deal out of Macworld in return for its agreeing to come to Boston
-- or, failing that, will start its own trade show with the help
of another company. (Not much of a prediction, given that it
pretty much covers all the bases.)
posted at 1:50 PM |
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Romney and gays.
(Originally
posted 10/18/02 at 10 a.m.)
Globe columnist Brian
McGrory today neatly
demonstrates the silliness of criticizing Republican gubernatorial
candidate Mitt Romney for giving money to his alma mater, Brigham
Young University, despite its anti-gay policies. As McGrory notes,
BYU is a Mormon institution that reflects the doctrines of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Romney, of
course, is an active member. Why, McGrory asks, isn't Democrat
Shannon O'Brien's Catholicism raised as an issue for its own many
departures from liberal orthodoxy?
In any case, my Phoenix
colleague Seth
Gitell wrote an online
piece yesterday reminding people that the BYU story the
Globe broke as "news"
this week was something he'd written about in great detail last
April. Still, the overarching point is that Romney is not a
leader on gay and lesbian rights -- not even close. Whereas
O'Brien supports Vermont-style civil unions and now says she would
sign a same-sex-marriage bill if it crossed her desk, Romney's
advocacy goes no further than domestic-partnership benefits --
important, to be sure, but so '80s.
posted at 1:49 PM |
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"H" is for Howell -- and
hemp. (Originally
posted 10/18/02 at 10 a.m.)
The Globe followed up yesterday's front-pager on the Green
Party's Jill Stein with one today on Libertarian
Carla Howell. And whereas
Stein comes across as a likable ultraliberal who could peel votes
away from O'Brien, Howell -- despite reporter Sarah Schwietzer's
humanizing touches -- seems unlikely to do much damage to Romney,
despite her potentially popular anti-tax stand. After all, even
those conservatives who are not fired up about Romney are not
likely to desert him for someone who campaigns at hemp
rallies.
posted at 1:49 PM |
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Sullivan disses Romenesko.
(Originally
posted 10/17/02 at 12:08 p.m.)
Andrew
Sullivan has had to take
back a bizarre insinuation that Jim
Romenesko's Media News is
an outpost of liberal bias. Yesterday, Sullivan posted a link to a
piece in the Rocky Mountain News on the alleged
liberal bias of the New
York Times and its executive editor, Howell Raines. Sullivan
added this gratuitous slap: "Don't expect Romenesko to link." But
Romenesko did link, forcing Sullivan to post this addendum:
"It turns out Jim Romenesko actually linked to a piece criticizing
the newly leftward spin of the New York Times. I
under-estimated him. Let me know the next time he does, will you?"
Well, okay, Andrew. What's got me scratching my head, though, is
Sullivan's apparent belief that Romenesko ever shows any
ideological bias of any kind. What's made Romenesko such a
must-read among media insiders is the perception that he has no
agenda other than dishing the dirt as expeditiously as possible.
What has he done to make Sullivan think otherwise?
posted at 1:49 PM |
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Buchanan's dot-com failure.
(Originally
posted 10/17/02 at 8:35 a.m.)
Taki Theodoracopulos, the co-editor of Pat Buchanan's new
American Conservative magazine and the money behind the
operation, turns out to be a cheap bastard. The magazine's on the
Web at the unwieldy address of www.amconmag.com.
If you type in the much-easier-to-remember www.americanconservative.com
-- as I did, hoping to avoid Googling it -- you're greeted with a
pop-up window informing you that the domain name can be had for
just $6,000. (Hey, Victor Navasky: Can the Nation scrape up
the dough? Could be part of an entertaining fundraising campaign.)
Aside from that, only some of AC's content is actually
available on its website. The only piece I want to read -- an
antiwar screed by Nicholas von Hoffman -- isn't. Damn.
posted at 1:48 PM |
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Stein way.
(Originally
posted 10/17/02 at 8:35 a.m.)
Democratic guberatorial candidate Shannon O'Brien lost two to
three points this morning, even on a day that brought the utterly
unsurprising news that her Republican rival, Mitt Romney, had
given money to his alma mater, Brigham Young University, despite
its virulent
antigay policies. The bad
news for O'Brien was the Boston Globe's long, flattering
front-page profile of the Green Party's Jill
Stein, written up straight
by Brian MacQuarrie. I've
interviewed Stein and heard her
speak. She's impressive, a
lot more so than she showed in her halting performance at last
week's debate. She also represents a powerful temptation to
left-leaning voters put off by O'Brien's centrist mush. By the
way, Stein's website is jillwill.org;
but for a good laugh, try jillstein.org
instead.
posted at 1:48 PM |
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O'Brien's righteous flip-flop.
(Originally
posted 10/16/02 at 9:24 a.m.)
Shannon O'Brien couldn't have handled her sort-of endorsement of
same-sex marriage much worse. In response to a question at a rally
organized by gay and lesbian supporters, she said that if she's
elected governor she'd sign a marriage bill if it crossed her
desk. Then she said she'd really prefer to stick to her support
for Vermont-style civil unions. Then she said to hell with it,
yeah, she supports same-sex marriage, it's nothing new, so will
you please get off her back? Sheesh. No wonder that the
Globe's Rick
Klein goes to some lengths
this morning to refute her campaign's claim that she hasn't
changed her position (She has! She has!), and the Herald
story, by Elizabeth
Beardsley and Karen Crummy,
carries the headline O'BRIEN FLIP-FLOPS IN FAVOR OF GAY MARRIAGE
LEGISLATION (She does! She does!).
Whatever. Inartful though her
handling of it may have been, O'Brien's new-found support for
same-sex marriage is a huge step along the road to full equality
for lesbians and gay men. During the Democratic primary campaign,
Robert Reich was the only gubernatorial hopeful to voice support
for same-sex marriage. No one has attributed his
worse-than-expected showing to that stand, but neither did Reich
manage to give the cause much of a boost. That makes O'Brien's
announcement all the more important.
posted at 1:48 PM |
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Friedman to McNamara: Read
this! (Originally
posted 10/16/02 at 9:24 a.m.)
New York Times columnist Tom
Friedman this morning
offers a brilliant and cogent argument as to why the divestiture
campaign against Israel is anti-Semitic -- and he does it without
letting the Sharon government off the hook, either. His wind-up:
"Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile.
But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction
-- out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East --
is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest." I hope
Globe columnist Eileen McNamara, who recently called
Harvard president Larry Summers an "intellectual
fraud" for making the same
point, has Friedman on her reading list for today.
posted at 1:47 PM |
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The estimable Mr. Conason.
(Originally
posted 10/16/02 at 9:24 a.m.)
Salon.com's Joe Conason, whose "Journal" is without question the
finest blog in the known universe, makes a mention of me (scroll
down to "Dan
Kennedy is back") that has
left me flabbergasted. Thank you, Joe, and the check is in the
mail.
posted at 1:47 PM |
link
Saddam in black, white, and
gray. (Originally
posted 10/15/02 at 9:55 a.m.) The
New York Times and the Boston Globe both run
front-page stories today on the attitudes that ordinary Iraqis
hold toward their maximum leader, Saddam Hussein, and, by
implication, toward the United States. Together, they show the
difficulty of gauging the public mood in a totalitarian society
where speaking out against the regime is likely to get you
tortured and killed. The stories appear on the eve of a national
election in which Saddam is expected to get more than 99 percent
of the vote. Or else!
The Times piece,
by
John Burns, reports that
the surface enthusiasm Iraqis show for Saddam often masks much
nastier feelings. Though most Iraqis will offer ritual
pro-government rhetoric -- often in terms "strikingly similar" to
official "diatribes" -- Burns also found that ordinary citizens
rarely criticize George W. Bush or Tony Blair unless prompted, and
seem to hold a generally favorable view of the US and
Britain.
In the Globe,
Anthony
Shadid reports that Saddam
has boosted his popularity in recent months by increasing food
rations and government salaries, and by bestowing special favors
on those who hold jobs of critical importance to his regime.
"Without a doubt," Shadid writes, "fear keeps the government in
power. But so do guns, money, and, in particular, food. The
success of Baghdad's overtures is a key reason that, despite
intense US pressure, the government remains secure and perhaps
even stronger than in past years, according to diplomats who have
been closely following Hussein's administration."
The Times and Globe
reports do nothing to dispel the fantasies of such pro-war
ideologues as Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney that a war aimed at
"regime change" will lead to the quick fall of Saddam (likely) and
the establishment of a new peaceful, democratic order in the Arab
world (what are they smoking?). For that, I recommend James
Fallows's thoughtful and frightening cover story in the current
Atlantic Monthly on the likely outcomes of a US invasion.
The title is "The
Fifty-First State?", and
the question mark is only to indicate that that is the best
possible outcome. The worst? You don't want to know -- but you
should.
posted at 1:46 PM |
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Missing numbers.
(Originally
posted 10/15/02 at 9:55 a.m.) Ashleigh
Banfield, the youngish, attractive, bespectacled MSNBC
anchor/reporter, has always held more fascination for media
critics than the public. Yet now that her 10 p.m. show On
Location has been canceled, it's the one missing detail that
makes all the difference.
Variety
reports that Banfield's
ratings have fallen from more than 400,000 per night to just
218,000 -- way, way behind the Fox News Channel's On the Record
with Greta van Susteren (866,000) and CNN's NewsNight with
Aaron Brown (704,000). Yet Banfield has also had another major
competitor from within her own network: The News with Brian
Williams, on sister station CNBC, which moved over from MSNBC
on July 15, the same night that On Location made its debut.
I don't know what kind of numbers Brian has been doing -- for all
I know, they suck -- but The News is by far the
highest-quality newscast that either of NBC's cable outlets
offers.
It seems only logical to suppose
that Williams -- the designated successor to Tom Brokaw -- is
cutting into Banfield's ratings. Yet a quick search of Lexis-Nexis
reveals not a single story on Williams's audience share since
The News moved exclusively to CNBC.
MSNBC, which at this point is
utterly lost and irrelevant, is bringing back its wonderfully
tabloidy MSNBC Investigates in the 10 p.m. time slot. If
you don't want to watch Brian, Aaron, and Greta chew over the
day's news, you can switch over for such treats as The Inside
Story on the World of Tattooing! and Amazing Videos from Store
Security Cameras! (I'm not making these up.)
posted at 1:46 PM |
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Hello in there.
(Originally
posted 10/15/02 at 9:55 a.m.) Today
marks the debut of "Media Log" on bostonphoenix.com. For those of
you who have been reading my "Notes & Observations" column on
dankennedy.net, thank you for coming over. For those who are
reading this for the first time, welcome.
posted at 1:45 PM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Boston Phoenix senior writer Dan Kennedy is writing Media Log
while on leave. He is working on a book, tentatively titled
Little People: A Father Reflects on His Daughter's Dwarfism -- and
What It Means to Be Different, to be published by Rodale in the
fall of 2003. His archives and links to published works can be
found at www.dankennedy.net.
