Jews, Obama, and #OWS

If you think that Obama is anti-Israel...

And if you think that American Jews care only about the president's stance toward Israel...

Or...

If you think that Occupy Wall Street is rife with anti-Semitism...

Read this.

Why Do I Write?

Heather asks, and answers, as does Christine.

So here's my answer: To understand the world around me, and to understand myself.

That's the "deep" answer.

My first, semi-wise-ass answer was "Because I can." And because it's how I make my living (in my other life, that is).

But the very next question I find myself asking is, why haven't I been writing more -- by which I mean, why haven't I been writing more here?

God knows I have had more than a few things crossing my mind to write about... Questions to ask, conundrums to puzzle out... But I haven't been making time for it of late. That other life has been pretty demanding of late, which, when it's the source of my livelihood, probably beats the alternative.

I've been pondering, however, the question of merging my writing identity here with my public writer's identity... erasing the seams between the two.

As yet, no definitive answer. So I'll just keep writing, to see if I might eventually figure it out...

Choosing Paths

Congratulations to Christine on her new job...

Reading her post (as well as Matt Kinsi's comment) got me to thinking...

I'm in my 50s, and to be honest, always tended to measure jobs by how close I thought they could get me to the goal of 'changing the world.'

So I chose journalism, first in the newspaper business and then, when I opted for self-employment 16 years ago, went to the less-lucrative side of freelance journalism rather than more lucrative means of employing my craft (such as marketing, advertising, PR and related areas).

But in retrospect, I'm not sure that always made the most sense. I wonder sometimes if I would have been better off doing something that paid better and at the same time left me more free to pursue interests in activism.

No way of knowing for sure, and I'm not lying awake at night questioning the route I took. But the one thing I realize now that I didn't then is that the choices are nowhere near as black-and-white as I saw them 15 and 30 years ago...

A Meditation on Politics, Part 3: Idealistic Pragmatist? Or Pragmatic Idealist?

From the late 1970s onward, in my days of working for daily newspapers, I took the ethical admonition to stay out of political activism very seriously. So I would follow political campaigns on my own time, and I would vote my hopes (and my fears), but I stayed away from any deeper involvement.

In graduate school in 1982, students were assigned to one of several teams producing a newspaper or other news product covering the November '82 elections. Since we were in New York, the lead story was the govenor's race to succeed Hugh Carey. In that extraordinarily tight race, Democrat Mario Cuomo defeated Lew Lehrman, a Reaganite Republican who, if memory serves, funded much of his campaign with his own money. I think there was little doubt that many of us in the grad school privately preferred Cuomo, but I also would argue that, for the most part, the stories we produced for our journalism "laboratory" were fair and largely unbiased. (I do recall one of our number, however, speaking disparagingly of "all the cheering from the pressbox" -- a probably accurate if a bit hyperbolic assessment. And I don't even know that that guy was anti-Cuomo -- it's as likely that he, who like me had already worked in the business, just felt his professional ethic of objectivity tainted.)

In elections that followed, my choices at the ballot box reflected an evolving and not particularly organized or disciplined political outlook. In 1984, living and working in New York State, I was intrigued by Gary Hart's desire to modernize the Democrats' image, but in the primary wound up choosing Jesse Jackson, knowing full well that the vote was symbolic. That fall I voted for Mondale, hoping against hope that he might actually win. Four years later I voted for Jackson in the primary again, admiring his effort to add struggling blue collar workers -- whose travails I was covering in my daily newspaper assignments -- to his Rainbow Coalition. Yet when I pulled the lever for the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis that fall, I was not merely choosing some lesser of two evils or acting out of loyalty to the Democratic Party -- the practical, pragmatic, and technocratic ethos of his campaign appealed to me as well. It honestly struck an idealistic chord in me.

In 1992, after considering Tom Harkin, who had the strongest pro-labor message, I voted for Jerry Brown in the primary -- skeptical of his flat tax, but appreciating his outsider argument and his zeroing in on big money. I thought Brown had done a credible job, too, of speaking to workers and voters being displaced by the economy. It remains fascinating to me that his appeal fell flat with many blue-collar voters while capturing the interest of those of us with higher incomes and with college or professional degrees.[Here's an interesting summary, from two years ago, of Wisconsin's pivotal role in past Democratic primaries.]

Very soon after Brown narrowly lost the primary to Bill Clinton, I happened to travel to Peoria, Illinois, to cover the Caterpillar strike. While I was there that week, Clinton came in, met both with company and union officials to urge them to settle, then shook hands along a picket line and held a news conference at an airport hangar. Sometime before I'd heard on the radio some of a fairly lengthy talk Clinton had given at some sort of policy-wonkish forum and been impressed by his rhetorical skills. But I hadn't been especially impressed by him in the early rounds of the primary campaigns and was embarrassed by the emerging Gennifer Flowers scandal. All that changed in Peoria, where in just a few superficial hours -- and with no one-on-one exposure to him, just the news conference as well as a few brief opportunities to observe him close-up as he spoke with individual voters -- I had found him to be mesmerizing. The day after his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, I called up a former Democratic legislator in my community and privately asked how I might get a job with the campaign. He gave me some contacts, I faxed a resume, but I heard nothing and decided not to pursue it further. As the polls that fall showed a likely Clinton-Gore win, I started keeping track of the predictions in a file, mostly with the suspicion or fear that the Democrats might pull defeat from the jaws of victory and there might be a story to write in the aftermath about the inaccuracy of polls.

In fact, of course, the polls were largely accurate. And pretty much from then on, I've been inclined to believe them, whether I wanted to or not.

I found the Clinton presidency maddening. I admired his rhetorical skills and his gift for outwitting his ideological foes. I was frustrated by -- yet, paradoxically, I fundemantally empathized with -- his tendancy to compromise with conservatives over policies such as the admission of gays and lesbians to the military. I distrusted his free-trade economic philosophy but recoiled from the anti-foreign (in this case, meaning anti-Mexican and anti-Asian) language of some of free trade's harsher blue-collar critics. And I admired his choices for the National Labor Relations Board, for Labor Secretary (Robert Reich), and his appointment of a commission to examine labor law and policy -- a commission whose ultimate recommendations for easing the ability of unions to organize were a dead letter after the GOP takeover of Congress in the 1994 mid-terms. And don't even get me started on the Lewinsky/Starr episode.

Midway through the Clinton years I went from being a full-time newspaper employee to a full-time freelancer. Because I still wrote stuff that touched on politics at least some of the time, I continued to restrict myself from political activism. But I also continued to vote from a peculiar place of idealistic pragmatism.

When Bill Bradley sought the Democratic nomination in 2000, I found myself really excited -- and voted for him in the Wisconsin primary even though he'd already dropped out. (I had no interest in the Nader Green Party run, despite having several acquaintances who thought it was time for a real third party. I wasn't happy with the Florida outcome,of course, but I was also not as reflexively inclined to blame Nader for that as others were.)

You might think, based on the history I've already taken far too many electrons to lay out, that in 2004 I would have supported Howard Dean. Yet for reasons I'm not even sure of, he didn't really grab me. In the fall of 2003, I was far more interested in Wesley Clark, seeing him as a candidate who could more skilfully navigate the treacherous waters of an opposition presidential campaign in wartime. We all know how that worked out. But Dean? Nah. Dennis Kucinich? With sincere apologies to my dear sister, who was a Kucinich supporter that year, not a chance.

DairyStateMom and I were dating by this time, and a niece of hers (whom I'd met at Christmas 2003) was a campaign staffer in Iowa for John Kerry. But when the Wisconsin primary rolled around, John Edwards was still a contender, and I liked his economic message. As it turned out, both Edwards and Dean lost to Kerry in this state.

That fall, heartsick over the Bush presidency, I for the first time put a presidential campaign sign in my yard, for Kerry. In the days leading up to the election and election day itself, I forgot my polling lessons from 1992 and convinced myself -- along with millions of Kerry voters across the country -- that he really might win. In the personal depression that followed the outcome, I was all but immobile for days. But that, too, passed, and soon after the election I was on my way to Washington to profile an up-and-coming young member of Congress from my state.

And that is where I'll pick up the story next time.

PS: On February 26, 2011, I went through and edited the titles of this series slightly.

Thinking Out Loud: Noodling a Story Idea

This is something I've never done before on this blog.

The last few days especially, and for much longer than that generally, I've been following discussions about the anti-racism movement, and disputes over its inclination to ignore or dismiss the subject of class, over on Will's blog. (Here's the most recent such discussion.)

It's a topic that intrigues me journalistically. A big reason for that is my own personal biography. On the surface I'm a suburban white man, and that's mostly how I live my life. But I grew up on the college campus (literally -- we lived in campus housing) of a historically black college that was adjacent to a rural, black village. I have immediate relatives of African descent.

A decade of covering labor and workplace issues for a metropolitan newspaper (and, more sporadically, since that time as a freelancer) has given me insights as well into issues of class and the economy's impact at the street level.

Add to that my sometimes annoying tendency to be pathologically even-handed, a holdover from my newspaper reporting "get both sides of the story" days.

Anyway...as I said, I find myself interested in writing something on this topic, but of course, first, I have to know just a whole lot more than I do right now. And then the question is, for whom? I've got two primarily regional publications I write for, and there's one in particular, based in my state's capital city, for which I think something could be fashioned. And then, what? what's the hook? What's the lede? What's the angle? Especially, the local angle?

Feel free to chime in in the comments. The usual commenting rules apply...

Live-blogging the Wire (finished)

I don't write much about my work here, and don't plan to regularly. So this is an exception. It's an experiment, an exercise.

Mostly I'm a freelance writer and editor, but I also fill in, irregularly, for a small community daily newspaper on the copy desk. That means reading and editing stories, writing headlines, and laying them out on pages for publication.

Usually I'm responsible for local news pages. Stories are assigned to certain pages, so all I have to do is read them closely for accuracy, grammar, spelling and so on, and then write the heads and place the stories, designing the page myself. Typically the stories do not need to be cut, and in fact if they need to be cut a lot they either don't run or run somewhere else where they can fit.

But sometimes I'm the wire editor. That means much more work: I have to look over everything from AP in the last 12-24 hours, consider the wire pages actually available to me (anywhere from 1 or 2 to 4 or 5), choose what to run and how long to run it, and where to place it. Most wire stories get mercilessly hacked into a shadow of their former selves in this process.

This assignment is like trying to drink from a fire hydrant -- a much more demanding assignment than the local pages are.

So tonight, just for the heck of it, I thought I'd live-blog the wire editing process. This may end up being a total failure, and if it is I don't guarantee that this post won't just wind up completely down the memory hole. But what the heck. I'm giving it a try.

3:28 PM

First task: take a look at the wire advisory for National/International, Wisconsin and Illinois, as well as McClatchy/Tribune wire. From that I'll construct a "budget" --meaning a list of possible stories to use -- for the 4 pm news meeting. I'll recommend certain ones for Page 1. Often, no wire stories end up on Page 1 of this paper, which strives to focus on local news first and foremost.

3:53 PM

Budget constructed. I'm recommending a few more stories than usual. Could easily expect none will get chosen for Page 1 -- depends on how much local there is.

Here's what I'm highlighting as Page 1 potential:

~Analysis of the Wall St. frenzy last week
~AP looks at Obama response to oil spill and knocks down the Katrina comparisons
~Examination of factors in upcoming Supreme Court pick
~Study finds suburbs are seeing more poor, minority and elderly as educated, younger whites move to cities.
~Feature on a mom of a severely injured Iraq vet

From MCT:

~Oil spill reminds us era of 'easy oil' is over
~Finance overhaul bill won't fix credit agencies
~Another story on the change in metro demographics
~As the Pill turns 50, family planning too costly for many (that's a different kind of Mother's day angle!)

There are a lot more good stories, but none that I think will even pass muster for P. 1 here, so I'm not going to bother with them at the news meeting.

I have a total of 4 pages to fill. In all likelihood, one will be a "Region" page with Wisconsin and Illinois news. I'll probably make one mostly/all World and one mostly/all Nation. The best will go on the first page of the 4, where there's the most display space.

That lead page (which is actually inside the section where it resides) also has two sets of briefs -- a column down the left and 4 across the top.

I tend to try to sort stories very quickly as to whether I'll brief them or treat them bigger.

One of the things I alaways do is list all stories that I might run and immediately try to sort into pages. Since that's a paper list, I'll do it here.***SEE UPDATE BELOW The one-or-two-word identifiers for each story is all I use, and that's all I have time for here. For those playing along at home, you'll just have to figure it out.


4:07 PM

Meeting hasn't started yet. When it does, I'll break this off.

For now...

Page B6-Region: room for 3 stories, or else 2 and a list of briefs

~Ill. budget -- lede? (right now it's just a short, but AP promises 'will be updated.' better have a backup in case they lie.)

There's nothing else of substance on the Wisconsin/Illinois wires. But a lot of shorts that can help build a briefs column. So 2 stories -- one of them very short, also -- and briefs it is.

Since I don't have the full Ill. budget story yet, I'll build the briefs column.

4:38 PM

Meeting over. Sure enough, no wire to Page 1.

But there's a change in plans. B6 won't be region; not enough interest in the Ill. budget story to run it long. Instead it will be a brief elsewhere in the section -- either lead page or the nation page.

Reason: There's a lot of big analysis pieces and we have space to run them at some greater length.

I'm going to put the demographics survey story on B6.

5:38 PM

I've found, read, edited, headlined and placed the story, with an AP graphic going with it. Had to cut about 1/3 of it (rough guess; could have been as much as 1/2). Needed to make sure a graf about recommendations (this was an account of a Brookings report coming out Sunday) got in, so I had to tighten here and there as well as cut whole sections. Oh, and I also had to put in some subheads (those are big here).

And that page is done.

When I went hunting for the story I also grabbed all the high priority stories in the domestic wire at the time. Next: check to see if there are more there.

5:43 PM

My domestic list is updated. Next, check for World stories

5:47 PM

Reading the International wire, more drug-cartel violence in Mexico. These tend to come in the form of briefs ("3 beheaded...") that may get expended ((those for consumption mostly in the Southwest, I suppose).

6:01 PM
***UPDATE TO 3:53 PM entry: It's not practical for me to list EVERY story I'm considering. Instead I'll just list the ones that are at least candidates for display spots on the relevant pages.

Next up: Pick the stories for the lead wire page. What's the best of the best here?

Standard page design calls for a story with a sizeable photo in the center of the page. So I want to pick that, and the lede story.

Page lede candidates:
~Taliban threaten new offensive
~Pakistan-Times Square
~Look ahead to Karzai trip
~Oil Spill update

Eliminate Taliban, Karzai. So it's Oil vs. Times Square

6:17 PM

Meh on the Times Square story. Leading with Oil. There's art with it (that's newspaper speak for photos.) But it won't be the lead art on the page. Still check the art to see if I want to use it.

Some amazing pix of oil in water, but this is a black and white page, so they won't come through well. Best pictures to go with this story are of a protest today in NOLA against off shore drilling or of people cleaning beaches.

6:33 PM

I'm liking the choice I made as I read the main AP news story on latest in the oil leak. There are a bunch of other stories; probably can't use them all. I'll try to use one, so I'll have to make up my mind which.

Ooh. There's a graphic with this story. Check to see if I want to use it.

6:37 PM

Nah. It's a forecast of where the oil will be Monday. Reasonable, but speculative, especially given my limited space.

6:50 PM

The oil story and a photo are placed. Now to decide if I'll run another story with it, or put that on another page with a "refer" line.

Let's see what else I want to get on this page.

Candidates for main art story:

~Iceland volcano update
~Feature about mom of a severely injured Iraqi soldier. I'd have to cut it a lot.
~Staten Island ferry accident.

Scratch volcano. Just pix of people waiting for planes.

Decision: Move mom into the next page (which can use the picture in color instead of B&W). The story won't have to cut as much, too.

Put the ferry crash picture on the first page with just a newsy cutline.

7:02 PM

Second thoughts. Ferry pix aren't that great. Anything better, photo wise?

7:05 PM

Answer: Not really. Solution: Use two pictures in a "package." One of injured person, one close-up of the ferry damage.

Gotta move now.

7:29 PM

Built and placed the ferry package. Works out. I basically have room for one story to its right, under the oil spill story. I think I'm going to use one of the other oil stories there. Then there's room for a story across the bottom. Not sure yet what will go there.

Turning to the next page now, where I'm putting the Iraq soldier's mom story.

7:30 PM

I just looked again at what I recommended for page 1 before. Some of those might not even make it in the paper at all now.

7:56 PM

Working on the military mom story. I've got to fit a headline for it into one column. It's a struggle. The story is an amazing, moving one. It's well told. I don't want to punch the wrong, maudlin buttons in writing the headline. And I need short words.

8:27 PM

The story is edited and fit into the spot I've placed it. Next up is picking another story to fill the other hole on the page.

There's a story about the Taliban in Afghanistan, planning to take advantage of Karzai's absence visiting the US. I'll use that -- relates to the general topic of US war in mideast.

One thing about this particular job: It really forces me to make quick decisions, gut decisions, and not look back on them.

8:51 PM

OK, that page is finished, proofed and ready for the printer.
Next: Decide the rest of the lead page, so that I know what's left for the last page. The last page will still be a World news page, I'm pretty sure.

That World page is 3 columns wide. So I'll make one column briefs and then have two columns for longer stories (as in 300 words). I think there will be room for 2 or 3.

9 PM

I'm looking over the possible sidebars I might use for the Oil story, and I'm inclined to go with the one that knocks down the comparisons between Obama and the oil leak and Bush and Katrina. It's a tough call. Whatever I run will have to be cut to like 15% of its original length. One's an AP investigation on the failures of such valves in the past. The other from McClatchy (i'm guessing Miami Herald, but I don't know for sure) on the less than aggressive safety measures of these deep drilling cos. If we were a coastal community they would be more relevant to readers. I think, though, the this isn't Obama's Katrina story has more national significance.

9:15 PM

I hate cutting the sidebar that much, but I don't see other options. Meanwhile, I've done a closer edit on the main story to fit the space. There are new versions. I'll check them now to see if they change it significantly. Then I'll nail down my choice for the other story on this page, and move to the World page.

9:32 PM

Rethinking my decision. The piece is a narrative -- it really can't be cut as much as I'd have to. I'll take a quick look at the other options, and then if I don't think they'll work, drop the idea of a sidebar entirely.

9:36 PM

I got it. There's a Mc/T story on 'the end of easy oil.' That should work.

9:44 PM

OK third story.
~PLO agrees to mideast talks?
~Gates-Pentagon war on waste?
~Unfixed internet glitch?
~Market frenzy analysis?

#1 can go on World. #2 can be a brief. #3 interesting but is it urgent now?

I'll go w/ the Market frenzy.

9:58 PM

Yikes, I have blood on my hands... :-)

OK, big stories on lead page are done. Now the world page. That has to go quickly. I basically have an hour left for everything. Entire world page (2 stories plus briefs) plus the two sets of briefs on lead page.

World lead story candidates:

~PLO/Israel? LA Times story says "both sides express doubts". So maybe not taht one. Or relegate it to second rank.
~British elections folo? Things are still in flux. Make that a brief I think.
~Volcano flight delays. Go w/ that for the top, PLO for the other one. Then some briefs.

10:20 PM

OK, briefs for World still to come. But the page 1 editor needs lottery numbers. That's my job.

10:30 PM

Last stretch. World Page briefs

1) British elections
2) Russian mine explosion

room for one more?

Cancel that. Mine explosion leads. And the Brit elections story is a thumbsucker. Not crucial no and not cuttable to a brief,

so...

1) Mine explosion
2) Bishop fired
3) Pakistan missile test.

Ok, putting it together and proofing.

10:46 PM

Need to pick 4 top briefs (I'll explain this later)

~Transplant recipient
~Marijuana Moms
~Pirates
~Hickel dies

For the other briefs:

~Kent State
~War on Waste
~Seattle police beating
~Times Square follow up

Might be room for one more. I'll stop there for now.

11:22 PM

There was no room for a 5th side brief.

About the top briefs: these are four very short stories arrayed across the top of the lead nation/world page. I generally try to put "grabbers" there -- and like everything else, just go by the Potter Stewart theory: "I know it when I see it."

And so, it's done. Often when I do this job, I like to look at both the nearby metro paper and the paper in the next town over (about the same size as the one I work for) to see how my news judgment does or doesn't compare. Of course, both of them are set up differently and tend to make more room for the wire stories that I'm usually having to cram into a very lmited space.

Anyhow, I hope it's been interesting.

(Edited to add): Several stories didn't make it in at all: The Illnois budget, the Supreme Court, the 'Obama's Katrina' knockdown. Others not in the way I expected. But again, it was a matter of following my instincts in the moment.

And now, again, good night.

Stewart skewers ChatRoulette reporters

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Tech-Talch - Chatroulette
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

What I like most about this is that Couric, Olbermann, Williams and Sawyer all were willing to help Stewart poke fun at their own profession.

Essential References, No. 1

Some 15 years ago I made a pitch to cover religion for a major metropolitan newspaper where I worked at the time. In the end, because of major changes there, I withdrew my interest and left the publication to start a new life as a freelance writer -- a life in which I've only written one story about religion so far (I'm actually working on a second one, but that's another matter).

Still, the topic of religion and how it's covered in the media remains of keen interest to me.

In that vein, if I were a religion writer now, I would consider The Wild Hunt essential reading on my beat. This post today exemplifies why.

In the spirit of yesterday's post on writing a blog post...

...here's a TV report on how to do a TV report:

Is this a phony story? (Updated)

Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids tweeted this, which is how I found it:

"Advert for 'reliable workers' banned as discrimination..."

(Lenore has had an eagle eye out for British nannyism, especially for policies such as one that makes a silly assumption that all men are pedophiles.)

So I read the story from the Telegraph on the "banned" job advertisement. If I were the city editor who was handed that story, I'd be kicking it back to the reporter:

1) Spokespeople for something called "The Campaign Against Political Correctness" and for the job placement agency involved are never named. Now, maybe that's some weird British journalism convention. I think it's just sloppy reporting.

2) I get no sense that the job agency was pressed for more information about broader policies on job ads.

3) The story is completely fuzzy on exactly how the ad ran. First, the headline says it was "banned." Then the story says that the placement agency employee who "claimed that the job centre could be sued by unreliable people if they placed the advert ... told Ms Mamo it will remain on their website."

4) So was it banned or wasn't it? And if it did run, was the offending language included or not? Basic facts that simply should be there...aren't.

5) More to the point, the job agency spokesperson (again -- no name!?) -- seems to deny the whole thing happened (although she declines to discuss the specific incident): “Reliability is important to employers, as it is for Jobcentre Plus -- and we welcome ads seeking reliable applicants.”

I went looking at the job website to see if I could find the listing in question. I didn't. But I did find one that included "reliability" as a desired quality.

Something just doesn't smell right here. It makes me wonder if it's another case of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story...

Update
I just checked back on the story. I'm wishing I'd printed it out as I linked to it this morning, because it looks to me like some of it has changed. Some of the phrasing I saw and highlighted above now appears to be missing.

For the heck of it, I also Googled the words discrimination against unreliable and saw, predictably, that the story has lit up the intertubes. I have yet to find any skepticism toward it.

One element that appears to have not been clear before may be that the ad was allowed on the Web but not on a job board at the agency for walk-in clients. But the inconsistencies I noted earlier still exist.

Update No. 2
Oh frabjous day! I did find a skeptic -- after I added the word hoax to the string above.

Update No. 3
And another one!

The Harry Reid comment

I suppose I'm old enough to know better, but I am still gobsmacked by the phony story about Harry Reid's Kinsley gaffe.

I'm relieved, however, to know that I am not alone.

Update: Here's an interesting take on the coverage of the whole matter.

Further update: Will S. sums it up.

Surf spray

A handful of not-particularly-related items that have crossed my computer screen today.

I've just discovered an interesting Christian blog, slacktivist, which has this clear-eyed post on religious freedom that's well worth reading.

I got there via the equally interesting Pagan blog, The Wild Hunt, which has been diligently following an ongoing story -- particularly the media sensationalism thereof -- about the uncovering of dead animal remains at a home in Philadelphia that may or may not be related to the practice of Santeria.

On other matters...

...Is it just me, or is the story of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a/k/a Humam Khalil Mohammed, the CIA double-agent-turned-suicide-bomber, beginning to sound more and more like a John LeCarre novel?

...Once in a while I happen upon Daily Variety, the show-biz paper. This story is a case study in the publication's highly idiosyncratic use of language (coined words, odd syntax, jargon). Reading it is entertainment itself.

...And finally, thanks to an ad in the margins of Facebook, I now know that a new movie is coming out that features God, St. Michael, and Jesus being born again at the Apocalypse. I'm mildly curious how the Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christians view this cultural event, but not enough to go looking right now...

Afterthought: And I'm very unlikely to see it myself.

Season's Greetings...

Yes, it is Christmas. And at my church this evening, we will also make (belated) note of the Summer Winter Solstice (3 days late) and of Hanukkah, which ended a week ago.

But it's another special day as well: the 102nd birthday of the late I.F. Stone.

From his Wikipedia entry:

In the 1930s and 40s Stone had been a mainstream journalist, appearing on Meet the Press (then a radio show); in 1950 he found himself blacklisted and unable to get work. In 1953, inspired by the example of the muckraking journalist George Seldes and his political weekly, In Fact, Stone decided to start his own independent newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly. Over the next few years, Stone's newsletter campaigned against McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the United States.

In 1964, using evidence drawn from a close reading and analysis of published accounts, Stone was the only American journalist to challenge President Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. During the 1960s, Stone continued to criticize the Vietnam War. At its peak in the 1960s, the Weekly had a circulation of about 70,000, yet it was regarded as very influential.

Hundreds of articles originally published in the Weekly were later republished in The I.F. Stone's Weekly Reader (1973), and in three volumes of a six-volume compendium of Stone's writings called A Noncomformist History of Our Times (1989).

Happy Birthday, Mr. Stone...

Regarding that story about the atheist some were trying to bar from office...

A letter writer to Andrew Sullivan calls it a manufactured controversy.

Media craziness: A case study (updated)

I heard about this story yesterday and at first blush was inclined to take it at face value.

An 8-year-old Massachusetts boy was sent home from school and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation after he was asked to make a Christmas drawing and sketched what appeared to be a stick figure of Jesus on a cross, the child's father said Tuesday.

I thought about blogging about it or more likely sending it to Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids because, although it wasn't directly about child safety overkill, it seemed to be about hysterical school district administrators, a frequent sub-theme of her work. So this morning I was looking for more information and came upon this...

School officials in Taunton, Mass., say the local newspaper -- which first reported the news -- and other outlets got the story all wrong.

...and this:

But school officials say that the account in yesterday’s Taunton Daily Gazette was rife with errors and that the father’s description of what happened is untrue.

Now both of these change the story significantly. Of course, perhaps the school district is shading the truth to protect a bad policy decision. Yet many of the comments on the NPR blog item Boston Globe story AP story simply miss the point and assume the original narrative ("Kid suspended for picture of Christ crucified!") is still the correct one.

To be sure, the boy's father is standing by his story, and it's clear that the newspaper that originally reported it isn't backing off from its understanding of events.

Yet, curiously, the Boston Globe story this morning reports:

After reading the account in the local paper, Mayor Charles Crowley of Taunton asked Hackett to apologize to the boy’s parents. But in a telephone interview late yesterday, he said he stands by the superintendent.

“Dr. Hackett has far more of the facts than I do, and now I understand that the report was not accurate,’’ he said. “Based on her account, I stand behind my superintendent. She is in possession of the facts.’’

Meanwhile, the Taunton paper posted at just after midnight (probably about the same time as the Globe story went to press) its own account in which the mayor is still demanding an apology.

With everyone on the defensive, it seems unlikely that anyone will back off of his or her position now, regardless of what "really" did or didn't happen.

And this happens all the time in the news. All the time. Think about "Balloon Boy" -- the original narrative of that was "kid is likely in terrible jeopardy," and all the TV networks were riveted to it, remember? Not surprisingly a commenter at the Taunton Gazetteweb site--skeptical about the original Jesus-picture story--makes a direct comparison to that case. Then there was the big Time magazine story about the teen moms (also in New England) who supposedly had a pact to all get pregnant--a story that appears to have evaporated as well. Or not. (Probably the most evenhanded summary is here. But Google the words: Time magazine story on "pregnancy pact" and you'll quickly see how the story became fodder for all kinds of ideologically based reaction.)

No one's hands are clean here. Not the news organization that run with sensational stories and decide their jobs are done when key figures don't comment. (In the Taunton case, the stonewalling was due, almost certainly, to the fact school officials are bound by state confidentiality laws.) Not the officials themselves, who unfortunately have to remember the real world they operate in includes media like these ones. (Comments at the Taunton paper web site suggest the publication has some credibility problems with readers; could that have influenced the superintendent to stonewall, too? If so, another bad call.) And news consumers need to look in the mirror, too.

Somewhere down the road, perhaps there will be a follow-up case study.

Or maybe just a TV movie.

Update

I don't promise to keep updating this story, but today's edition of the Gazette indicates the story probably won't die soon.

The paper also has this report on a school board meeting at which the issue arose.

What's noteworthy to me is this: In the text of the story, it says the superintendent

"also refuted “another false [media] report” that Taunton Mayor Charles Crowley wanted Hackett to apologize to the community and the family over the incident. “This is not the case,” she said... A call to Crowley was not immediately returned Wednesday night."

I spent a few minutes just now trying to see if I could find a written version of the superintendent's statement so we could find out what word (if any) was replaced with the bracketed word "media". One possibility is that it's simply an insertion, felt necessary by the newspaper to explain "report". But the paper is silent on the fact that it alone seems to have generated the story of the supposed mayoral demand for an apology.

Clearing the Smog

I've written before about the need for a journalism that succinctly makes sense of the world in a way that is broadly accessible and offers real insight, something too often missing in current forms of the craft, whether arcane, inside-baseball political and policy coverage [either in the mainstream press or on intelligent but highly technical and narrowly focused blogs], the superficiality of celebrity coverage, or the polarized lands of the blogosphere, cable TV or talk radio.

Here's one example of what I'd like to see.

Data Smog

Data Smog is the name of a 12-year-old book (I haven't read it, yet) about the rapid proliferation of information on the Internet making it increasingly impossible to tell fact from fiction.

It is by now an old and widely perceived problem, but recent events -- getting to the bottom of the real story about the meaning of the hacked Climate Change e-mails; accurately understanding what to make of Sarah Palin, her book, and the facts and myths of her political life; separating, likewise, the myths, facts, hopes and fears behind the current health insurance reform legislation -- just underscore its nature.

It's not uncommon to hear media critics, especially bloggers, complain about the way the media "filter" the news, yet with so much of blogging devoted to opinions and interpretations of isolated news nuggets through a particular ideological lens, the degree of "filtering" is even greater in the blogosphere. Again, not an especially original notion.

And I'll add that I know that the media do display all kinds of bias, subtle and not so, where ideology, class, and other factors of point-of-view are concerned.

Still...

New-media triumphalists dismiss the diminution of leading journals and passing of once-revered journalists as a good thing, urging us all to read more widely and "make up our own minds" about the news of the day. Increasingly, though, I find such prescriptions facile and naive.

Who's got the time?

I suspect that among the media models yet to emerge will be one that is highly digested, comprehensive but succinct, well researched enough to persuade readers it knows what it's talking about, and thus brave enough to tell us right out what is important, what isn't, and what's absolutely irrelevant drivel. But, of course, anyone who disagrees with its conclusions will just write it off as biased, cranky, or both.

And whether it will gain enough readers to provide the necessary revenue to sustain it is an open question.

PS: I was gonna do all kinds of snazzy, awesome links up in that second graf to make this whole post look that much more hip and Internetty, but I'm just too damn busy.

On hate crimes, comic strips, and offending the reader

For most of my life, I probably was a reflexive supporter of the notion of prosecuting certain acts as "hate crimes" and of extending the umbrella of hate crime legislation to protect more and more marginalized groups.

Over the years, I've come to conclude that the attempt to define and prosecute hate crimes is misguided. I says this somewhat reluctantly, because I do believe the desire to recognize and prosecute hate crimes comes from a basically honorable motivation.

The blogger Andrew Sullivan first got me thinking about this differently (the link is to a representative comment by him on the subject), and just recently Paul Oakley's take on the issue was for me compelling enough to clarify my own thinking once and for all.

Now comes word that, in response to pickets, the paper Newsday is apologizing for, and wishing it hadn't published, a cartoon mocking the notion of hate crimes.

The timing, I'll admit, was unfortunate. Just a week before the cartoon ran was the one-year anniversary of the death of an Ecuadorean immigrant at the hands of teenagers who stabbed him to death. And the paper's coverage of immigration issues became a lightning rod for protesters. I'm unable to judge the paper on that specific subject, but I do know that Newsday has a long and basically good reputation for serious community and investigative journalism, although its ownership has changed recently.

But the fact is, the cartoon in question (an episode of Mallard Fillmore) makes a point, although perhaps not as deftly as one would want. And I say this as a non-fan of Mallard Fillmore who was quite happy when one of our local papers dropped the strip a few years ago.

The strip (description courtesy of Richard Prince, quoting a Newsday report on the controversy)

depicted a larger dinosaur chasing a small one. The bigger one says, 'I'm not chasing you because you're a pachycephalosaurus. . . . I'm chasing you because you're delicious.' The smaller dinosaur responds, 'Oh, thank goodness. I was worried that this might be a hate crime.'

Dead is dead. Beaten is beaten. Maimed is maimed. Raped is raped. Doesn't it make sense to punish people based on the consequences of their actions, rather than the thoughts in their heads? If a mugger kills me for my wallet, or kills my friend because he's gay, does the reason for the killing really warrant a different kind of sentence?

Now I'm not against labeling an act, where appropriate, as a hate crime--but I see that basically as a sociological exercise. I just have trouble seeing how that's relevant from the strict standpoint of criminal justice.

One other thing disturbs me about the Newsday episode.

"We expect the cartoons we publish, many of which are nationally syndicated, to amuse, stir and entertain, but never to offend," a spokewoman for the newspaper said in a statement.

Hmmm... Regardless of my own opinion on hate crimes -- is never to offend really the standard that the paper expects to reach? That seems to set the bar so high that all that would pass is pablum.

Not dead yet?

A student (not mine) writes why reading ink on paper is better than reading a screen. Now if we can just get them to pay for the experience.

Should stupidity disqualify an advice columnist?

That's the question DairyStateMom asks regarding the campaign by some bloggers to get DoubleX advice columnist Lucinda Rosenfeld fired from her job for telling a letter writer... oh it's too long for me to summarize, just read it yourself.

Says DSM:

Should an advice columnist (or any opinion columnist) be removed for giving, well, bad advice? I don't think there's any question at all that the columnist gave a moronic response to the letter writer (taking Broadsheet's summary as accurate). Is that really the issue though? Do we fire columnists for stupidity?

Well, I guess some people think we should...