BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Friday, May 30, 2003
WBUR needs to let in Fresh
Air. According to this
story on TownOnline.com
(via Romenesko),
WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) spokeswoman Mary Stohn says the station will
bring back Fresh Air "very soon."
Fine. How about this
Monday?
Look, I don't get to listen to
Fresh Air much these days, mainly because even when 'BUR
was running it, it was on at 1 p.m. -- not exactly prime
listening time.
But it's one of the best shows on
NPR, and host Terry Gross is just about the best interviewer in the
business. I can still remember her classic interview some years back
with Nancy Reagan, who nearly walked out on her. And how about Gene
Simmons of KISS, neatly emasculated by Gross about 10 minutes into
his moronic sex-god shtick?
Maybe WBUR could justify taking the
show off the air during the war in Iraq. But even though it remains
an important story, it's no longer the sort of white-hot breaking
event that must be followed every minute of the day. Few people are
going to mind a little less BBC now.
So bring back Terry
Gross!
posted at 3:25 PM |
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Philly scouts deal blow to
discrimination. The best thing the Boy Scouts of America could do
is drop its ludricrous and offensive policy of discriminating against
gays and atheists. But that's not going to happen, given the huge
number of Mormon and Catholic churches that sponsor scout
troops.
The second best thing is for the
BSA to devolve -- to decentralize, to lessen the power of the
right-wing executives in Irving, Texas (where did those people come
from, anyway?), and to allow local people to make local
decisions.
That's why it's heartening to see
that scout executives in Philadelphia have decided to take on the
hatemongers -- during a national conference in Philly, no less.
Here's
the latest from the
Philadelphia Inquirer, and here's a
supportive editorial from
the Philadelphia Daily News.
As this
earlier Inquirer story notes,
Boston's Minuteman Council adopted what amounted to a
don't-ask/don't-tell policy in 2001. But Philly's Cradle of Liberty
Council, the third-largest in the nation, appears to go Minuteman one
better, flat-out rejecting discrimination against gay men and
boys.
No such luck for the atheists,
unfortunately. But a step in the right direction is better than no
step at all.
posted at 7:44 AM |
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The Bill and Dick Show.
Doesn't it give you just a warm, fuzzy feeling that Microsoft and AOL
Time Warner are going into business together? This Washington
Post analysis by David
Vise is particularly good
on how Microsoft may emerge as the principal engine by which AOL Time
Warner distributes its massive quantities of content.
The Wall Street Journal goes
hard on the angle that this may be the
end of Netscape, the
software company that AOL acquired a few years ago for $10 billion to
compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator was
essentially the original Web browser -- an immediate descendent of
Mosaic -- but has long since fallen behind Explorer, helped along by
that massive distribution network known as Windows.
Of course, it was Microsoft's
attempts to crush Netscape that made it the subject of an endless,
celebrated antitrust case. But the buzz has long since departed
Netscape. Indeed, the code was given away a long time ago. These
days, the principal innovations to Navigator are made by the
open-source techies at Mozilla
-- which is definitely worth checking out.
posted at 7:43 AM |
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Thursday, May 29, 2003
Outrage of the day I. No
doubt we'll hear from conservatives in the next day or two as to how
the
New York Times' David
Firestone got it wrong this
morning. No doubt it will have something to do with how little low-income working families pay in taxes in the first place.
But can we nevertheless pause for a
moment of outrage over this hidden gem in George W. Bush's wildly
irresponsible tax cut? Because the fact remains that virtually the
only Americans who won't be getting a $400 rebate are poor people who
work.
posted at 7:58 AM |
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Outrage of the day II. The
Catholic bishops of Massachusetts are urging parishioners to lobby
against same-sex marriage. (Globe coverage here;
Herald coverage here.)
Apparently it is time to redefine
"chutzpah."
posted at 7:57 AM |
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Mulvoy for the defense. One
of Mike Barnicle's enablers, retired Globe managing editor for
news Tom
Mulvoy, is still on the
job, writing to the New York Times today that the poor guy got
screwed.
Lest the historical revisionism
begin to take, read this
and this.
posted at 7:57 AM |
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New in this week's
Phoenix. "Republic
of Fear," separating the
reality of terrorism, disease, and economic distress from the virtual
world of media hype and political gamesmanship. Plus, WBUR Radio
brings home a
luminous voice from Iraq.
posted at 7:56 AM |
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Wednesday, May 28, 2003
An ode to Rupe. Media Log
would be very surprised if Rupert Murdoch repurchased the Boston
Herald as soon as the FCC's cross-ownership rules are dropped
next week. As
I wrote last Friday,
Herald owner (and former Murdoch lieutenant) Pat Purcell may
be going through a rough patch, but there are no signs that the
wheels are coming off just yet.
But five years from now? Three?
One? Well, who knows? And even if Purcell finds a way to maintain his
independence, that doesn't mean deregulation won't present
opportunities to do some kind of joint venture with his old boss, who
owns Boston's WFXT-TV (Channel 25).
So it's predictable, I guess, that
today's Herald offers a
full-throated paean to Rupe
-- a fight song presented in the form of an editorial, complete with
attacks on the "loony left," Ted Kennedy, and the Boston
Globe.
Meanwhile, the
Washington Post's Frank Ahrens
reports that progressive
media groups continue to battle against what had been a foregone
conclusion -- that the FCC would drop its rule against someone's
owning newspapers and television stations in the same market, and
also let companies own TV stations that reach 45 percent of the
national audience, up from the current 35 percent.
Particularly aggressive is
MoveOn.org,
which has reportedly gathered 170,000 signatures in opposition to the
deregulatory scheme.
This fight may not be over
yet.
posted at 8:36 AM |
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Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Cathy Young responds. "With
all due respect, I don't believe the
two situations are
comparable at all. Surely it is not uncommon for public figures who
have been 'savaged' in an article to challenge the accuracy of the
report. The dispute, as I understand, was Glass's word against
Jacobson's. Moreover, Howard Kurtz quotes Michael Kelly as saying:
'Jacobson accused Glass and the New Republic of shilling for
Procter & Gamble.... It seemed to me then, and seems to me now,
an utterly irresponsible and baseless charge. He did not have any
right to accuse the magazine of something that serious without any
evidence.... This was completely separate from whether Glass was a
fiction writer.'
"Blair, on the other hand, was the
subject of internal complaints within the New York Times
itself."
posted at 9:52 AM |
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More on the Times
meltdown. Washington Post gossip columnist
Lloyd
Grove reported this last
Wednesday. But even though Romenesko
flogged it, the departure of New York Times photographer
Edward Keating -- accused of violating journalistic ethics for
staging a photo of a gun-toting boy near Buffalo last fall -- didn't
get much attention.
Given the meltdown now under way at
the Times, Keating's alleged misdeeds should be considered
alongside those of former Times reporter Jayson Blair and
suspended Pulitzer winner Rick
Bragg, who tells the
Post today that he will quit. (Bragg, by the way, tells Howard
Kurtz that Times editors knew precisely how heavily he relied
on interns and stringers, and that he's now being made into an object
lesson. What about it, Howell Raines?)
The Keating affair dates back to
last September 20, when the Times ran a front-page photo of a
young boy aiming a toy gun, terrorist-style, in the Buffalo suburb of
Lackawanna, New York, where federal authorities were investigating an
alleged Al Qaeda sleeper cell.
According to this
piece in the Columbia
Journalism Review, several other photographers at the scene were
convinced that Keating had set it up, and persuaded their editors not
to run it when it came in over the wires. As the CJR reports,
the Times eventually ran an "Editors' Note" stating "that the
boy's gesture had not been spontaneous," and that the paper "regrets
this violation of its policy on journalistic integrity."
Keating -- who denied any
wrongdoing then, and who denies it still in an e-mail exchange with
Grove -- was suspended, and eventually left the paper. And it was
Keating who took the portrait of a cigarette-smoking Blair that
landed on the cover of Newsweek.
posted at 8:48 AM |
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Stephen Glass and second
chances. The normally reliable Globe columnist
Cathy
Young made a whopper
yesterday, and she did it in service of a dubious argument: that
former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was given more
chances to screw up than a white reporter would have because he is
black.
Her example: Stephen Glass, who
left the New Republic in 1998 after it was revealed that he
had extensively fabricated people, organizations, universes,
you-name-it in his feature stories over the previous few years. Young
writes:
No one says that Blair
lied and plagiarized because he is black, only that an obsession
with diversity may have helped him get away with it. Glass was
promptly investigated and fired after the first alarm signals;
Blair got promoted despite an editor's memo urging his
dismissal.
Wrong. In August 1998, the
Washington Post's Howard Kurtz offered up this tidbit about
how one of Glass's editors, the late Michael Kelly, reacted when
Glass's integrity was challenged:
Stephen Glass, the New
Republic staffer fired for serial fabrications, once wrote a
piece savaging Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the
Public Interest. Jacobson was depicted as a fastidious eater,
zealot and hype artist in attacking such products as Olestra, the
fake fat made by Procter & Gamble.
Now Vanity Fair reports
that Michael Kelly, the New Republic's editor at the time
of the now-retracted piece, fired off a letter after Jacobson
complained: "Mr. Jacobson, you lied, and you lied because lying
supported your thesis, and you attempted to cover up your lie....
I await your apology to Stephen Glass and this magazine."
"Never in my life have I gotten
a letter with the kind of vitriol Kelly was spewing out," Jacobson
said. "He was defending an indefensible position, as was
subsequently shown to be the case with the unmasking of Stephen
Glass. "
Kelly says he was responding to
an "outrageous" news release from Jacobson's group accusing the
New Republic of mimicking other newspaper articles in "a
larger, industry-backed smear campaign to undermine CSPI's
credibility."
The Glass article in question
appeared in TNR in December 1996. He was allowed to keep
falsifying for more than a year after that.
posted at 8:47 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
