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.
Friday, June 20, 2003
Commissioner Connolly? Media
Log feels obligated to say something about yesterday's
congressional testimony by UMass president Bill Bulger, in which the
witness appeared to have studied method acting with an Alzheimer's
patient. But what?
Globe columnist Brian
McGrory's assessment this morning is overly
sympathetic to Bulger, but
he gets this much right: "It promised high drama. It delivered the
excitement of a raisin scone, but with none of the nutritional
value."
Of necessity, that was pretty much
true of the voluminous media coverage as well.
The Herald got things off to
a rocking good start yesterday with an investigative report that
Bulger's homicidal brother, mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, has
apparently been using a
Caribbean hideout while
attracting little interest from the FBI. Several
congressmen brought it up
during yesterday's questioning. But even Bill Bulger's most
vociferous detractors wouldn't accuse him of having anything to do
with that.
The Herald may have stumbled
onto another opportunity yesterday as well: Howie Carr Bobble-Head
Action Figures. I especially enjoyed watching him roll his eyes in
the instant replay on WFXT-TV (Channel 25) last night.
But absent anything truly arresting
(bad pun intended), the prize will go to the first reporter who can
get former Boston mayor Ray Flynn to talk about Bulger's hazily
admitted effort to get his buddy John Connolly, the corrupt ex-FBI
agent, named as Boston's police commissioner.
Bulger was diffident about the
matter, acting as though he didn't even know who the mayor was at the
time. But Herald columnist Peter
Gelzinis (subscription
required) says this morning:
Though Flynn did not
respond to phone calls yesterday, in a conversation several years
ago he spoke of the "intense pressure from the State House" to
appoint John Connolly police commissioner. Consider the horror of
that for a moment. Life in Boston would have resembled a scene out
of "Blade Runner," or worse, Baghdad under Saddam. Boston's cops
would've been Whitey's cops.
Flynn, of course, did the right
thing and appointed Mickey Roache as his commissioner. Roache's
tenure was troubled, to put it mildly. But he was honest. Certainly
he wouldn't have looked the other way as prized informants tortured
and killed their enemies.
posted at 8:47 AM |
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Thursday, June 19, 2003
Updating the scorecard.
Check out this
letter to the Globe
from state Democratic Party chairman Phil Johnston. Johnston takes
issue with a June 16 op-ed piece by Kennedy School lecturer Mickey
Edwards, a former Republican congressman and former Herald
columnist. (Edwards's column is no longer freely available
online.)
Edwards, making fun of the recent
Democratic state convention for adopting an ideological "scorecard"
for elected officials, wrote:
That's where Phil Johnston
and the Democrats come in. Johnston, the state's Democratic Party
chairman, presided a week ago over a state convention at which
approximately 1,000 party activists voted to produce a "scorecard"
rating members of the Legislature on their fealty to the state
party platform.
Johnston:
On several occasions I
have stated my opposition to the "legislative scorecard" adopted
by delegates at the June 7 convention.
And here's what Johnston told
Globe columnist Scot Lehigh on June 11: "It is a rather
bizarre idea, one that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to
implement. And I don't think it is helpful to Democratic candidates."
Advantage: Phil. Edwards uses
implication rather than direct assertion, but the tenor of his column
suggests that Johnston was all but demanding that the delegates
support the scorecard idea.
Ah, but then Johnston gets carried
away, writing:
A secondary point also
requires correction: There were 3,000 delegates at the convention,
not 1,000, as Edwards reported.
But that's not even remotely what
Edwards said. Here's what Raphael Lewis reported in the Globe
on June 10:
At Saturday's convention,
Johnston allowed the report card vote to take place, even though
fewer than half of the 2,265 delegates who attended the convention
at Lowell's Paul E. Tsongas Arena remained. The reason, Johnston
said, was that it did not mention any one lawmaker by name.
Now, I can't explain the
discrepancy between Johnston's figure of 3000 delegates and Lewis's
2,265. Johnston may have been including alternates. But if, as Lewis
reported, "fewer than half of the 2,265 delegates" were on hand for
the scorecard vote, then Edwards had it almost exactly right when he
asserted that "approximately 1,000 party activists voted to produce a
'scorecard' rating."
Almost, I say, because nearly
every single delegate still present would have had to vote "aye"
for Edwards's statement to be wholly accurate.
Can't anyone get this
straight?
posted at 8:54 AM |
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New in this week's
Phoenix. The Herald, beset by sliding circulation,
goes
back to its tabloid roots,
even as publisher Pat Purcell ponders whether to buy more media
properties -- or, ultimately, to sell.
Also, an innovative idea for
breaking the file-sharing copyright
impasse.
posted at 8:54 AM |
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Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Redefining the e-newspaper.
David Gelernter is identified as a "professor of computer science at
Yale," so maybe I'm just too dense to understand what he's talking
about.
But in his cover essay for the
current Weekly Standard, he argues that the "Next
Great American Newspaper"
will be conservative (we'll see about that), published on the Web
(he's probably right), and implemented in a far more appealing and
useful way than today's electronic papers. He writes:
[T]oday's
web-papers are wedge-ins, stop-gaps, crack fillers, with all the
character of putty in a plastic spritz-tube; people read them not
for pleasure and illumination but to extract a necessary fact or
kill time when they are stuck at their desks. Their builders don't
seem to have grasped what makes the newsprint newspaper one of
design history's greatest achievements.
I'm not going to disagree.
Otherwise, why would we have four daily papers delivered to our house
every day? But, as far as I can tell, e-papers are implemented about
as well as today's hardware (limited portability, good-but-not-great
displays, faster-but-not-fast-enough access) will allow
for.
So what does Gelernter have in mind
as an alternative?
Imagine a parade of jumbo
index cards standing like set-up dominoes. On your computer
display, the parade of index cards stretches into the simulated
depths of your screen, from the middle-bottom (where the
front-most card stands, looking big) to the farthest-away card in
the upper left corner (looking small). Now, something happens:
Tony Blair makes a speech. A new card materializes in front (a
report on the speech) and everyone else takes a step back--and the
farthest-away card falls off the screen and (temporarily)
disappears. So the parade is in constant motion. New stories keep
popping up in front, and the parade streams backwards to the
rear.
There's more to it, of course, but
that's where it begins: with cascading virtual index cards. This is a
big improvement? I'm unimpressed.
posted at 9:09 AM |
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So who's "bizarre," anyway?
Perhaps a new record of sorts this morning. The Herald's
"Inside
Track" and the
Globe's "Names"
column both poke fun at Teresa Heinz Kerry for making "bizarre"
statements on the occasion of a speech she gave at the Fairmont Copy
Plaza.
Examples: none!
The Globe resorts to a
previous Heinz statement, which it paraphrases as "her needing
another Botox treatment" to back up its "bizarre" assertion. But the
only direct quote it can come up with from Monday's talk is "her
admonition to 'work to make this world a whole place.'" So now it appears that if she can get through a speech without saying anything "bizarre," that in itself is news. How bizarre.
The Track goes it several times
better, offering no direct quotes, but asserting that she gave
"a bizarre, rambling speech ... about hormones and the big, bad
pharmaceutical companies' conspiracy against women!" Here's the money
graf:
"It was endless, pointless
and confusing," said one politically connected chick. "And it was
far, far too technical as a dinner speech. I mean, the Latin names
of drugs? There was an exodus out the door before dessert."
At a reported length of 35 minutes,
Heinz might justifiably be accused of trying her listeners' patience.
But "bizarre"? Media Log is still waiting for even one bit of
evidence.
posted at 9:09 AM |
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Death, coal, and Romney. The
Herald editorial page today offers grudging
praise of Governor Mitt
Romney's successful efforts to jawbone the coal-burning Salem
electric power plant into cleaning up its act.
How grudging? Well, at one point it
simply ignores reality. Referring to an appearance Romney made in
front of the plant last February, the editorial states:
Romney ... got a little
carried away at the event, declaring "that plant kills people," a
charge he has never substantiated.
Well, here's
a press release put out by the Harvard School of Public
Health back when it issued
the results of a study it had conducted on the health effects of the
Salem plant and the Brayton Point plant, in Somerset.
The subhead: "Attributes 159
Premature Deaths Per Year in Region."
posted at 9:09 AM |
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Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Kerry or not, here they come.
It's John Kerry Week in the media. The most significant example
is the
Boston Globe's seven-part biographical
series, written (so far) by
Michael Kranish.
Now in its third day, the series
accomplishes its institutional mission: being comprehensive enough
that no enterprising news org is likely to come in from the outside
and dig up any startling revelations about Kerry's past, thus
embarrassing the gumshoes at 135 Morrissey Boulevard.
At about 5000 words per
installment, it adds up to a small book, which it probably will
become once the series has run its course.
Slate's William Saletan is
stunned to discover that Kerry can be loose
and funny. "If he keeps
this up," Saletan writes, "he might actually become
president."
In the New Republic's online
"TNR
Primary" (open to
non-subscribers), my former Phoenix colleague Michael Crowley
-- who wrote an entertainingly (and perhaps excessively) tough
profile of Kerry last year -- gives him a "General Likeability" grade
of "A" on the campaign stump. Crowley also notes that the
Globe series reinforces Kerry's "special
moral authority" in going
up against the Hero of the Texas Air National Guard, George W.
Bush.
Time magazine columnist Joe
Klein follows up the favorable piece he did on Kerry in the New
Yorker last year by praising his health-care proposal. Calling it
"the
first significant new idea of this political
season," Klein says that
only Kerry's plan is responsible enough to restrict benefits to those
who need it the most.
Finally, another former Phoenician,
Al Giordano, on his new weblog Big,
Left, Outside, believes
that Kerry -- for whom he once worked, and whom he covered as the
Phoenix's political reporter in the mid-'90s -- can win ...
but only
if he gets in fighting trim.
Giordano writes:
Here's the key: To wake
Kerry up, you have to piss him off. You have to put his back up
against the wall and slam into him with everything you've got to
awaken his mutant powers. And then the real John Kerry stands up:
he's golden in those moments: American politics' version of the
Incredible Hulk. The American political highway is littered with
the higher political aspirations of former giants (Jim Shannon, Ed
Markey, Ray Shamie, Bill Weld, and a dozen or so others you
probably haven't heard of) slain by Kerry when he was
awake.
posted at 8:41 AM |
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Monday, June 16, 2003
Microsoft breaks alliance with
Apple. Last January, I
wrote about Apple's announcement
that it would take on Microsoft in the software arena. Now
the
first casualty: Microsoft
will no longer develop Internet Explorer for the
Macintosh.
Microsoft seems to be playing this
very low-key, saying simply that Apple's Safari is all that Mac users
need, and that, in any case, Web browsers have become an integrated
part of the operating system. That was Bill Gates's argument during
all those years of the antitrust case, and he must find it satisfying
now to be able to say it about someone else -- even though the truth
of that proposition was always dubious at best.
But this is actually huge news,
Microsoft's first step away from Apple since Gates and Steve Jobs
embraced in the late 1990s. Microsoft claims that it's not going to
walk away from the really important products, such as the Mac version
of Microsoft Office, but who knows? If the next version of AppleWorks
is as compatible with Office as has been rumored, then all bets may
be off.
I've switched to Safari for nearly
all of my Web browsing, mainly because it's incredibly fast -- much
faster than Explorer or Mozilla. But it's still in beta, you don't
get page numbering or headers when you print (note: if I'm wrong,
send directions!), and there are a few sites that it doesn't work
with at all -- such as Blogger.com,
the engine that drives Media Log. For that, I use Mozilla.
I love my new iBook, and I would
hate to think that it will be my last Mac. But Microsoft's latest
could be the beginning of the end for Apple.
posted at 11:02 AM |
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The hunt for common sense over
Iraq's WMDs. The hunt for weapons of mass destruction continues
in precisely the same manner that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is
still dead. Meanwhile, three must-reads:
1. Writing in the Ideas section of
yesterday's Boston Globe, Thomas
Powers observes that the
Bush administration's cynical use of dubious intelligence will harm
the US for many years into the future. By refusing to back the US and
Britain, the world community took a calculated risk: think of what
George W. Bush and Tony Blair would be saying today if we had found
chemical plants and nascent nuclear facilities inside Iraq. Instead,
France, Russia, et al. have all the more reason not to believe us the
next time. Maybe even the American people will wake up, although
that's probably asking way too much.
2. Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein
really did have enormous amounts of WMDs, including nerve gas, and he
really did refuse to account for them after UN weapons inspections
resumed last fall. New York Times columnist Bill
Keller can't bring himself
to admit he was wrong in backing the war. But he is absolutely right
when he observes: "It was not a Bush administration fabrication that
Iraq had, and failed to account for, massive quantities of anthrax
and VX nerve gas and other biological and chemical weapons. Saddam
was under an international obligation to say where the poisons went,
but did not."
3. So why aren't more of the
Democratic presidential candidates speaking out? Because, as
Ryan
Lizza (subscription
required) notes in the New Republic, most of them are
complicit, having expended a good deal of energy in the run-up to the
war denouncing Saddam's WMD capabilities. The silent candidates
include John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, and Dick Gephardt.
Even Howard Dean, who was vociferously antiwar, is being cautious for
the moment -- perhaps, Lizza writes, out of concern that WMDs may
still be found. (Bob Graham is blasting the White House, but I think
we can agree that he doesn't matter -- at least not yet.)
posted at 9:56 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
