First Draft

The 'Who The Fuck Are You' Doctrine

Scout sends over the latest "oh yeah, well where did YOU go to school huh?" argument against giving stupid people columns, via The Progressive: 

Rickert’s main point was that both Ruff and Kemble engaged in “guilt by association” by pointing out some of the allies of Kaleem Caire, the chief proponent of Madison Prep. Those allies include the Koch Brothers and the rightwing American Legislative Exchange Council.

Rickert quoted Kemble as saying that the people behind Madison Prep are interested in "obtaining a secure stream of public funding to attract more private investment in what are essentially private ventures outside of the scrutiny or accountability systems of democratically elected school boards."

And he dismissed that assertion with a snide, “Well, OK…”

Well, snide is pretty much your only defense when you've gotten your ass kicked on a story. Snide is pretty much all you have left, and so snide's what you go with. Rickert, the columnist, supposedly has "got his laser-like perspective trained (mostly) on all things Madison," but as Rothschild points out, is whining about the unfairness of reporting on actual facts because ... stuff. 

He confessed, “I'm not saying either author had the facts wrong.”

And he conceded that “certainly it’s important to consider what connections or interests motivate people in power.”

If that’s the case, he should be praising Kemble and Ruff, not slamming them.

And he, as well as the readers of the Wisconsin State Journal, should be wondering why that paper itself didn’t uncover some of the connections that Ruff and Kemble so diligently unearthed.

Instead, he sneered at citizen journalism: “In an online world with easy access to reams of information, the danger isn’t a little knowledge, but little perspective on knowledge.”

If that access was so easy, why didn’t we find out about it in the State Journal?

BURN. 

And hee. 

True story: I once "broke" a story that was supposed to be an exclusive to the New York Times. We had it at the same time. I ran into the NYT reporter at a press conference and when he mentioned he'd scooped everybody, I politely pointed out that we had the story the same day he did. "Oh, well," he said, and kept right on talking about his amazing journalistic feat. Because his press pass had a cooler name on it, he didn't have to care. I used to see my stories on the evening news, read my leads on the AP wire, and hear entire paragraphs on the radio word for word. Very RARELY did I or my colleagues ever have our original reporting credited. Not so much as one of those newfangled "link" things the kids were coming out with. Nada. 

This argument gets hauled out every time some big-city reporter gets spanked by a little guy. Whether that's a reporter at a student paper, at a smaller paper, at a magazine, at a radio station, whatever. I've always worked the smaller news org in a market and almost always, the bigger competitor's response is to either dismiss your scoop as not being "that important" or steal the thing outright and "re-report it" by calling all the initial sources you identified and giving you ZERO credit. 

Now there's a third thing we're doing, which is to argue against the standing of the person who broke the story to even break a story at all. As if you have to have a fucking Cracker Jack Real Life Reporter prize to make a difference. As if you EVER had to have that. As if there haven't been small papers and independent publishers since the beginning of goddamn time. 

And it should make me angry but it really does just make me sad. Every single minute we spend talking about who's got the right to be called a journalist and who's "really" doing the "real" work in the "real" world for "real" money is a minute we're not spending talking about what nefarious shit was uncovered and what should be done about the dishonest assholes who run the world. Every minute we spend wanking on and on about how awful it is that so many people think they're journalists is a minute we're not spending thinking about how great it is that so many people want to do journalism at all.

As if that's not a goddamn gift. As if we shouldn't be celebrating and learning from one another. As if it's not like holding a big sign over your head that says I AM INSECURE AND NEEDY SOMEONE HOLD ME PLEASE, this whining about how much information there now is, in the world. 

A. 

Oh, NOW it's Fucking ON, Bitches

Real weatherman gets all huffy about groundhog treading on his rightful turf: 

We are expected to act as the groundhog's spokesperson and explain the archaic shenanigans of a bunch of old men with large top hatswho enjoy pulling a rodent out his hole, thrusting him in the air and making proclamations about whether or not winter will continue.  This will be my 26th Groundhog Day as a broadcast meteorologist so I have heard just about every joke there is regarding the day.

[snip]

We might as well ask a giraffe for stock picks, he could probably be just as accurate.

So Punxsutawney Phil is a punk when it comes to weather forecasting. 

I'm so glad the Internet is killing journalism, some days, I really am. 

A. 

Mitt Hispanic?

Is the whitest man in American public life suddenly Hispanic? No but Fox News Latino is toeing the Murdochian line and asking whether Romney is the "First Gringo-Latin President." This is, of course, poppycock, piffle and other p words that I can't think of. In his eagerness to pander (another p word)  Mitt keeps mentioning his family's "emigrating from Mexico."

Here are the basic facts as I understand them: one of Romney's ancestors went to Mexico because he was polygamous and Mexican officials were even more corrupt than the Americans so they didn't enforce their own laws against plural marriage. In 1912, young George Romney and his family fled the Mexican revolution because they feared getting their rich white heads cut off. So much for Latinness or Hispanicosity. It's all part of the Mittster's pretense that he's a man of the people.

Past inherited rich guy Presidents such as FDR and JFK made fun of their own backgrounds but, of course, their policies benefited poor people. Imagine FDR saying "I'm not concerned about the very poor." I'm grateful that Romney has still got his gaffe machine mojo working...

Finally, a word to the MSM: the term Hispanic is meaningless. The main Latino groups in the US and A have nothing in common politically. Since the MSM excels at oversimplification, I'm going to do likewise: Cuban and Central American voters lean GOP and tend to be conservative.  Mexican and Puerto Rican voters lean Democratic and tend to be liberal. Try asking a rich Cubano in Miami if he has anything in common with a Mexican grape picker in California. If you do I hope they aren't drinking a beverage, spit takes can be very messy...

Okay it's time to bid y'all adios for now, so I'll let the Texas Tornados have the last word:

 

The Ethics of Protecting the Powerful

You know, I'm really tired of journalists equating "ethics" with cowardice: 

At the time of my email, there was no heroic choice to be made: Pat was no longer a candidate for the Rhodes Scholarship. Days before, the Rhodes committee had suspended his candidacy after discovering that an anonymous woman had accused him of sexual assault. Yale officials knew about the complaint as early as September. It’s unclear if those directly responsible for endorsing Pat’s Rhodes application knew about the assault claim — or if the Yale administration decided to re-endorse Pat after being contacted by the Rhodes committee. Regardless, Pat was no longer a candidate on November 13, when he announced he would play in the Game, earning hero-worship at Yale and in the national media.

[snip]

As current Science and Technology editor Eli Markham told me, the News’ editor-in-chief, Max de la Bruyere, decided to sit on the story in mid-November. “It’s more complicated than that,” he told a leader on last year’s editorial board, who asked to remain anonymous. Multiple current and past members of the newspaper’s managing board, all deeply involved in the day-to-day work of the paper, have confirmed that the News has had the story for over two months. In fact, the Times story that broke last night featured reporting from last year’s editor-in-chief, Vivian Yee. She too approached the paper with a tip-off, but its editors chose not to follow the story. The paper even knew that the sexual assault claim had lost Pat an offer to join the Boston Consulting Group after graduation. Even then, they wrote nothing. For reasons personal, social, or political — who can ever tell on a college campus? — the News’ management chose to ignore the bombshell, protecting Pat’s reputation.

The Yale Daily News editor responds: 

Soon after Patrick Witt ’12 announced his decision to play in The Game, the News received a tip that a Yale student had filed an informal complaint alleging sexual assault against the quarterback.

The student who had filed the complaint against Witt chose to make it informal. This meant that no disciplinary measures would be taken against Witt and that the complaint would be kept confidential. All parties involved observed that route of discretion. The complainant, the alleged perpetrator and all those who heard the case honored the discreet process. In order to be fair to all those involved and the process they had adhered to, and because the nature of the complaint meant that all its details remain allegations, the News chose not to print a story.

Is it your job to be fair to the process, though? To exercise discretion? To honor the system in place? 

(And what in the blue hell is an "informal" complaint of sexual assault? Maybe a larger story is the messed-up-sounding "process" being followed here, in which someone can be accused of sexual assault but not, you know, seriously or anything. Not to mention what, if any, pressure was brought to bear on the accuser to make such a complaint "informal.")

I wouldn't bring this up just to join the pile-on on this student editor, who's already facing an impressive amount of recrimination by everyone, except that I think there's something in here that really needs addressing, something I've heard not only in the realm of student media but so-called professional journalism as well: That "ethics" demand that you hold off on a story because it's going to piss a lot of sensitive people off at some kind of critical time and it would be so much more "ethical" not to do that.

We heard this in the 2004 election over the illegal wiretapping story, that the Times held onto it until it wouldn't be quite so "inflammatory." Until it wouldn't matter, actually, all that much in the context of being able to affect the people in power, and thus no one would yell and scream and call them traitors. Except that everybody did anyway, and so there was really no point. 

There is something ethical about seeking out a response from all possible actors in a system about which you are reporting. There is nothing "ethical" about withholding information that you know to be true in order to protect the powerful. Look, I am the most conflict-averse person on the planet. I don't go looking for stories about things that are screwed up because it's fun when people call me an ugly whore and make weird phone calls to my house. And I'd never judge you if you don't like doing that either. But if you've appointed yourself to lead discourse in your community (or on your campus) and you'd just rather not, okay, because it's hard Mommy, I politely suggest that you find a job just as noble and worthwhile doing almost anything else.

Because if you are saying that you want to describe the world around you, and despite every attempt to mystify and professionalize it that 's all journalism is, then you'd better do it right and damn the torpedoes and damn who it upsets and damn respecting the process because none of that is your job. 

Now that the Times broke the story, the Yale Daily News is all over it, and every single story raises more questions than it answers: 

 The Times reported that the Rhodes Trust had learned of the accusation several days before Witt announced he would play in the Game and notified Yale that he would be ineligible for the scholarship unless University administrators re-endorsed his candidacy. According to Magazu, the Trust requested an additional letter of reference from Yale for Witt, though the scholarship was never "suspended." But when asked to specify when Witt first learned that the Trust had been informed of the complaint, Magazu, who began representing Witt on Jan. 1, said he did not know. Magazu added that Witt did not ask University administrators for an additional letter of reference because he had already decided to withdraw his candidacy.

A. 

 

Ross Douthat: Love is a Bowl of Sugar

OH GOD IT'S NOT LIKE THAT YOU CLOWNASS: 

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

I've noticed that we have no more private contractors, because we have an army. Before 1776, life was paradise for Blackwater but the minute we formed militias, they were fucked. Such a sad state for a glorious private enterprise. 

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches.

Or to Applebees. Won't the government think of the jalapeno poppers? 

This is another "reasonable conservative" tic I've noticed from acquaintances of late: "I, personally, would give more money to charity or hire more people at my office if I paid less in taxes and various fees." And yes, you, nice person that I know, probably would. Ross might actually give more to charity if he had that money laying around. Does that mean we should give EVERY rich person free money on the off chance one or two of them might kick in $25 to the local food pantry? 

How is that any less governmental social engineering? 

Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

There is distinct lack of soup kitchens and food pantries, now we have a welare office. What a fucking idiot. 

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions — hospitals, schools and charities — in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. 

A) No, it doesn't. 

B) This does not, actually, violate the consciences of anybody, and here's why: Hospitals and insurers only have to COVER contraception, and only if they employ large numbers of non-Catholic employees. Nobody who is Catholic has to take it. Therefore, we should be counting on the large numbers of Catholics who are so serious about this shit that they won't take the pill to stand up for their own morals and against the horror that is Obamacare. 

I'll give you a minute to stop laughing. 

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not.

Yes. Catholic hospitals are just in this for the decency of serving others. I'm not saying some of them weren't, in the beginning, but you can't pretend that a lot of this isn't profit-driven, and a lot of that profit isn't helped by massive tax exemptions. 

The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”

Actually, that is exactly what Catholics leaders are saying by choosing not to follow the law. You know, this is a thing I keep hearing from Catholic officials in other contexts, this constant talk about church canon law, as if that should supersede actual real-life American law. I'm pleased as punch we all have our own ways of doing things and our own rules, but when you get right down to it, if you want to be a member of a community, you have to do more than just loudly demand that the entire community "respect" your beliefs by changing its morality to suit yours. 

The larger point Ross is making is actually more offensive, though: We can either have government or charity but not both. Our government cannot pursue any common good, because that will mean that everybody will assume shit is all handled and we can go back to watching the Super Bowl. If someone else has it taken care of, then I don't need to give a shit.

I don't know if Ross has met any of his fellow humans, but we're actually not like that. I post a lot of stuff about how stupid and selfish and mean we can be, but I believe people are basically decent and that given half a chance we will help one another. Given half a chance and a bit of encouragement, we will feed the stranger and clothe the naked and take care of the grandma whose car broke down on the freeway. I know this because I've seen it happen at least as often as I've seen people be awful, and I choose to believe that love isn't a bowl of sugar. There isn't only so much. If our government takes care of many of us, we will still take care of each other, because that's what we do. It's in our bones and blood, and hundreds of years of inhuman cruelty haven't beaten it out of us, not entirely. 

Decent government that acts in our interests doesn't kill the charitable impulse. It encourages it. It offers official approval of the nagging feeling in the pits of our stomachs that says, "somebody should be helping these people." It represents, outwardly, the best of us, and the only reason Ross or anybody like him has a problem with that concept is they don't want to be forced to give a shit about anybody but themselves. 

And that's fine, really. There are nice libertarian islands being built for people like that. 

Schmuck. 

A. 

Student media at odds with educational paths

Loyalty and affiliation, once earned and given, become a large part of who we are. It is for this reason that I still wear T-shirts from my student media days, root for the Cleveland Browns through every double-digit loss season and have never once thought about “Newting” my wife.

It can also be something that blinds us a bit to the reality of our surroundings.

I thought about this when one of my previous stops along “career highway” fell into my newsfeed this week. The editor-in-chief of a blog that critiques the Mizzou J-School was told to resign from her post because she would be working at the Columbia Missourian that term.

The Missourian is a unique enterprise, by the very definition of the word. The one-of-a-kind media outlet is owned by the university, edited by faculty members and staffed by students. The paper is Columbia’s citywide a.m. daily and competes with an independent p.m. paper. (It also has obviously expanded into digital outreach over the years since I left.)

The students land on staff as writers, photographers, designers, copy editors and more when they sign up for specific classes that focus on writing, photography, design and so forth. In other words, to graduate in this program, they have to work at the paper. In order to work at the paper, they must not work at other competing media outlets, as per a conflict-of-interest policy.

This clearly bothered the founder of J-School Buzz, David “Teeg” Teeghman,  who took to JSB and lambasted the decision. Aside from calling the policy “antiquated,” he explained his views on how the policy does a disservice to student journalists:

(Kelly) Cohen would have learned a few things as JSB’s editor-in-chief that she will never learn at the Missourian. She won’t learn much there about analytics, what content generates traffic and buzz, the difference between stories an audience “wants” and “needs,” how to run a popular news blog, how to respond to critical commenters and tweeters you know personally, how to keep a site running when it gets a rush of unexpected traffic, and so on. We can talk about how all the sequences are becoming converged, or whatever, but JSBers learn a unique skill set no other Mizzou newsroom can offer.

Comments from the current Missourian editor, Tom Warhover, and current and previous members of the Missourian crew take issue with various points Teeghman makes. To his credit, Teeghman clarified his original aims, defended some of his positions and made amends when it was clear he was wrong, all things I’d expect from any good journalist.

The policy isn’t new and this isn’t its first challenge. In the pre-blog days, the conflict had always been between the Missourian and the Maneater, the student-run paper. Students hated that they had to give up their allegiance to a paper that allowed them to do great journalism and run their own show to come to what they viewed as a weaker place to be told what to do. Students I knew often planned their Missourian terms around their Maneater desires. One kid kept taking summer courses to “get the Missourian over with” so he could get back to the paper and eventually run the place.

It wasn’t the greatest way to view the education you were shelling out tons of money for, but I did understand it.

And I do understand Teeghman’s desire to keep his brainchild up and running. On occasion, I’ll check in on a few projects I started at various stops in my career to see if they’re still going or not. I still hate one J-school that took a decent idea a couple of us built, bastardized the unholy hell out of it and then declared it a “great thing” despite protestations from students each term. I was also saddened to learn one project I launched, involving high school students and press freedom, was discontinued.

Still, as Thomas Wolfe once noted, you can’t go home again.

I also understand that student media outlets often find themselves scratching and clawing for respect and dignity, desires most professional media outlets simply dismiss as “cute.” It always galled me when the pro papers got dibs on a story because sources would call them first. I’d have six kids working on breaking a story in a student newsroom somewhere, backchannelling the shit out of something, begging for interviews and pursuing the piece with the vigor of starved pit bulls. Once it became clear the sources couldn’t stop us from publishing the thing, they’d call up the pro paper and just give them the whole story, which they’d publish before we could. It was infuriating.

It was also infuriating that these “important” outlets never wanted to give the student media their due. They’d take info from the student stories and offer no credit to the paper as a source. They’d be snotty to the kids at press conferences. They’d pretend that student media didn’t really exist.

My first job interview at a pro paper involved sitting down with the city editor and going through my clips. He was polite enough before asking which of the six stories I submitted that I liked the best.

“That one,” I said, pointing at a piece about a house party being busted and $80,000 in fines being levied against the hosts.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I beat you guys on it.”

He gave me this whimsical look and explained that his paper had bigger concerns than this and how this kind of thing wasn’t a big deal. In other words, “We didn’t lose to you. We weren’t even playing the game. It wasn’t worth our effort.”

Nice.

Still, the guy hired me and a few months later, the paper did an “in-depth look” at how cops were busting house parties and handing out monstrous fines. I’m sure in his mind, he still wasn’t behind the story. He was working on something much bigger and more important that we little student people couldn’t understand.

Despite all of this, I get the reason for the policy.

The paper has to look out for its own interests, but also the interests of the students. Even without a direct link to JSB, I’m imagining life in the Missourian newsroom for Kelly Cohen will be a bit awkward. It always was for the Maneater “lifers” who were sentenced to the term at the CoMo. When the Maneater broke a story and left the Missourian in the dust, these kids got the stink-eye. The prevailing thought: “You probably knew about this and didn’t tell us.”

Or, worse yet, when things happened around the Missourian that led to news, if the Maneater covered it, look out.

One year, a kid who was a reporter for the Missourian was busted for theft of some pricy artwork after he and several friends broke into a historic home on campus. As the Missourian was trying to figure out how to write this, word got around that a Maneater reporter was working on this story. One editor was really ticked off and was wondering aloud which of the Maneater kids in the newsroom had tipped our hand.

None had. Shockingly, the Maneater folks knew enough to... (gasp!) check the police blotter and (swoon!) interview people.

And this is with a policy that prohibits working for two places at once. Without the policy, I’m sure the paranoia would have been worse.

We all have to make choices in our lives as to where our loyalties lie and how we let them play out. Sure, it sucks for Teeghman that he’s being shorted a staffer and yet, anyone who knows anything about the school and its policies could see this coming. No, this policy isn’t antiquated or stodgy or whatever descriptor seems easiest to fling when you’re losing a fight like this one. Companies all over the place have rules about what you can and can’t do as a member of their organizations. When it was time to take that pro media job, I had to quit my gig as the city editor at the student newspaper. I was as pissed about this as Teegham is about the Cohen situation. I kept thinking, “This is horseshit. These people just don’t get who we are and what we do.” Eventually, I was the one who figured it out.

I also figured I didn’t want to become the real version of this fictional guy.

If it’s any consolation to Teeghman, I peek in on my other old jobs from time to time, but I’m not horribly invested. When the schools I graduated from call and ask for money, I politely decline.

However, when my student newspaper does its annual alumni fundraising drive, my check goes out in the mail the very next day.

Loyalty, once given, remains long beyond the strictures of policies and the reach of time.

Codetalkers

This: 

The only people who find Alinsky's writings radical are the Haves, because it suggests that the Have Nots have the power to equalize the system a little more. That's a scary concept for the one percent for which the GOP is entirely dedicated. But unlike former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman in the clip above, I do think this resonates with those Republican voters notorious for voting against their own interests. Because not one of them will bother to get informed on Alinsky. Not one of them will bother to do any critical thinking but simply categorize Alinsky as one of those nefarious bad things from which to be frightened or suspicious of the liberal agenda.

I don't actually think any of them will even HEAR Alinsky and be curious. I'd like to see polling done on Alinsky the way it's done on political candidates for name recognition measurement, and find out, among the Republicans who just vote Republican because their hairdresser gives them the political news, how many of them even know who the hell he is. 

And this: 

Listening to this, I’m struck by one thing:  if Newt is the candidate, he’s going to drive the discussion into all the nooks and crannies of noise and diversion that have occupied Fox News viewers since Obama’s victory.  In other words, Newt is the candidate of the 2009 media cycle, where the Tea Party dominated media coverage.  

Which goes back to something I've been talking about basically since 2008: NOBODY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THIS CRAP BUT OTHER CRAZY PEOPLE. Alinsky-an community organizaing tactics and socialist death panels and all this other Glenn Beck nonsense is just noise to your average Republican. This is too advanced for them. The War on Christmas, communist re-education camps, fascist light-bulb replacement and other Tea Party articles of faith sound just as crazy to mildly racist "independent" voters as they do to us. 

Those nice white middle-class people are listening for code language, of course, but it's "school choice" and "teachers' unions" and "entitlement programs" and "parental responsibility" and "moral values" and "I don't want to have to explain this to my children." The old young bucks bying T-bone steaks thing, and why women need to have all these choices anyway. Maybe some vague intimations about how organic food is homosexual and no one should force you to eat it. A comment here or there about how Michelle Obama doesn't know her place. Unless they're the 27 percent parked in front of Fox all day, you ask any ten Republicans who Saul Alinsky is and they'll probably ask if he's an actor or an American Idol contestant.

(I didn't know who he was until Republicans started boring on about him. Because there is a limited amount of space in my head for stuff that is not, at the moment, actively on fire.) 

That's not to say that 27 percent of Americans who are bugfuck crazy is an insignificant number, but it's really not worth getting worked up about. The other 30 percent who are looking at the numbers and on average voting for the guy they think will punish black people, gay people and chicks for wanting their legal rights worry me far more. 

A. 

Story Fatigue

The public wants better news than it's getting: 

Even during weeks when the economy was the top story, interest surpassed coverage. For example, the week of Dec. 8, 41 percent of people said they were following the economy very closely; it was 13 percent of coverage that week. From Dec. 15-18, 36 percent said they were following it closely; it was 10 percent of coverage.

But hey, let's talk more about abortion, gay marriage, Newt's wives, Obama's birth certificate, who "won" a debate, what video is "sweeping like wildfire across the Internet" and for fuck's sake, the motherfucking weather: 

Keep stats like the above handy for when somebody is boring on in a column about how the all-powerful news media is simultaneously powerless to resist the desires of the masses for cheese and stupidity. 

A. 

Today In "How Is This Dickweed Employed?"

Where David Brooks should be.

Where David Brooks is.

Okay, Okay. I shouldn't read David Brooks. I shouldn't give two shits about what that neo-Victorian finger-wagger is on about today. But this shit right here just left me gobsmacked. Read on!

[T]here is a misbegotten ideology haunting the land, the ideology of sunshinism. This is the belief that everything should be made public.

--snip--

Sunshinism is a destructive ideology. Forcing people to financially undress in public is just one of those incursions that repels decent people from running for office.

That's right. You have just witnessed a man who has a cushy sinecure at the country's premier newspaper just say that too much public information is a bad thing. Take a minute to let that sink in. And imagine if, say, the Commandant of the Marine Corps embraced pacifism, or the Pope suddenly decided that this whole "God" stuff is all bunkum and issued an encyclical stating that Holy Mother Church was to become the world's foremost atheist organization. While my two scenarios are, essentially, punchlines, that's what Brooks just did. David Brooks, ladies and gentlemen: walking punchline. 

You should hit that link and read the whole thing. I don't know if Brooks actually believes the bullshit he's spewing or if it's all a show, but in the end, it doesn't matter. To be fair, Gail Collins does point out how stupid this idea is, but that's akin to calling water wet at this point.

David Brooks: Go find another job, please. You're one of the one percent; actually, even better, you're a mouthpiece for them, so you'll land okay. No breadlines for the likes of you, O Titan of the written word. But journalism? You're doing the vast majority of us no favors with this, and it can't make you feel good to have millions of people mutter "Christ, what an asshole" every time they see your picture.

But it shouldn't be on Brooks to recognize what a schmuck he is. I mean, this enormous, gaping asshole has every right to his opinion. But I can't imagine why a goddamned business that is (in theory, at least) committed to shining light into dark corners sees fit to cut him a check for this utter, utter crap.

Well played, dying industry. Well played.

Let's Build a Time Machine

And get some hippie to just blow David Brooks already. 

A. 

ps. JUST ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, you fucking weedwhacker, you whine in your MAJOR NEWSPAPER COLUMN about how newspapers are liberal and won't allow conservative viewpoints equal treatment and I SWEAR, I will release a horde of sexually ravenous hamsters into your car AT A TIME AND PLACE OF MY CHOOSING. 

The Things We Worry About

I said this in comments over at Balloon Juice but I wanted to expand on it here: The Obama White House, like the Clinton White House before it, has to spend enormous amounts of time worrying about utterly trivial bullshit because our political press is just such absolute crap: 

Mrs. Obama’s difficulties illuminate some of the president’s central challenges in the White House, including how the Obamas’ freshness to political life, a selling point in 2008, became a liability in office. Her worries about his staff point to a chief executive with little management experience who clung to an inner circle less united than it appeared. (Mr. Emanuel’s relationship with the president grew so strained that the chief of staff secretly offered to resign in early 2010; Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, had a tense relationship with Mrs. Obama and with Valerie Jarrett, another adviser). She shared the president’s ambivalence about political chores and the back-patting and schmoozing that can help get things done in Washington.

OH HEAVENS. She doesn't like back-patting and schmoozing and chores! Whatever shall we do? Doesn't she KNOW that you have to give a handy to the right people in order to get anything done around here? How dare she have the outrageous expectation that we are all adults and nobody should be asking anybody for a pet in order to fucking do their jobs? 

The first couple declined to be interviewed.

You don't fucking say. 

“We all have watched what happens when people get caricatured,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview, explaining why he policed such personal matters. With a mistake like John Edwards’s $400 haircut in 2007, “there’s no way to correct that.”

Yes. There's just no coming back from that. Start two wars and blow up lots of people and fail to do anything of any significance besides drive the country into crippling debt over it, though, and you're a Strong Leader who Loves Freedom. I swear to God, I will personally write a check to cover the president's next haircut if we can all just for fucking once in our lives worry about something that MATTERS. 

Other aides said there was a reason Mr. Gibbs became the main enforcer of the rules of political life: because Mr. Obama, all too aware that his wife never wanted that life, would not.

HE WAS TOO BUSY KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN and ending DADT and the war in Iraq and OH YEAH THE ECONOMY WAS MELTING DOWN. Pardon him for not giving a fuck what Michelle wore to a party. 

She had little appetite or expertise for policy detail, and she knew the history of first ladies —like Nancy Reagan and Mrs. Clinton — who had been deemed meddlers, unelected figures who wielded unearned power.

"Who had been deemed ..." The passive voice again. Who deemed them meddlers, Jodi? Could it have been their political enemies aided by the compliant and bitchy White House press corps? No, they just magically were "deemed" meddlers and then it was all over. Funny how that just happens. 

Early on Sept. 16, Robert Gibbs was scanning the news when a story stopped him short: according to a new French book, Michelle Obama had told Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French first lady, that living in the White House was “hell.” It was a potential disaster — the equivalent of the $400 haircut, Mr. Gibbs feared, coming just weeks before election day and on the heels of a vacation in Spain that had drawn accusations of lavish spending.

Mr. Gibbs asked her aides to find out if she had said anything even close (no, the answer came back), and then fought the story back for hours, having the book translated and convincing the Élysée Palace to issue a denial. By noon the potential crisis had been averted.

WELL THANK GOD FOR THAT. At least no one died. 

I do not even know what to DO when things like this are the equivalent of the fucking Alamo. 

A. 

Blogger Ethics Panel

"We found it on The YouTube" turns out to be not perhaps the world's best attribution. 

I've said for a long time that bloggers have been, by and large, better about this stuff than the "professional" journalists who spend all their time bemoaning how ethically challenged we are. That's in part because links are our stock in trade, and credit is often the only reward a blogger gets for reporting. When it's all you earn, you care about every penny. 

A. 

Merciful God

I would cut off my right arm, I really would: 

Well, there is a big bag of money out there, and it is indeed going to the Wrong People, and those would be the people in whose company Willard Romney has spent his entire, cosseted, entitled existence. He has embarked on a divisive campaign of misdirection, hoping against hope that nobody notices that he mortgaged himself to his ambition on an adjustable rate, and that he's underwater on his soul.

A. 

We're Sorry You're Bigots

Oh, GOD, just stop it. It's getting embarrassing. Just stop pretending you're interested in reporting on anything, and let the Internet take over. Honestly, tell me it could possibly get worse. 

A. 

The Internet

It's killing journalism so much. 

A. 

It's Not That They're Lying, It's That Nobody Cares

I think Krugman's only partly right here, actually: 

Back in 2000, George W. Bush made a discovery of enormous consequence: you could base a whole political campaign on claims that were flatly untrue, like the claim that your big tax cuts for the wealthy went to the middle class, or the claim that diverting Social Security funds into private accounts would strengthen the system’s finances, and reporting would never point this out. That’s when I formulated my doctrine that if Bush said the earth was flat, headlines would read Views Differ on Shape of Planet.

The genius of George W. Bush was that he figured out that public opinion doesn't matter at all. It's not about lying or not lying, it's not about the complacent media, it's about your political opponents being so utterly cowed by imaginary bullshit that you no longer actually have to have public approval to get anything done at all.

Let's not just lay blame at the feet of our busted political press, which likes to call black and white just two opposing views of equal value. Let's lay blame at the feet of those who should be on the side of white but who seem vaguely ashamed of it all and find the entire process of choosing a color distasteful, and sit in their rooms wrapped in blankets hoping the phone doesn't ring because then they'd have to defend the side of white and they'd really rather not because gross. 

So it doesn't matter what the press calls lies and truths. It doesn't matter that the press calls two sides equal when they are not, because if there aren't two sides, you don't actually have to worry about any opposition at all. And once you are in office, it is very difficult to get you out in less than your allotted time there (Wisconsin may be the one place where America does not presently suck in this way), so who the fuck cares what people with Ds after their names are blithering on about? If every newspaper in this country was using WE ARE AT WAR typefaces to tell everyone with eyesight that Bush was lying us into war, do you really think, I mean do you, that people would have listened? 

I don't know. I know it mattered terribly, at the time, to fight back in some way, in any way, because what you do is up to you, but I lack Krugman's confidence in the power of our political media. I just don't know if anyone's mind changes that way anymore. 

A. 

David Brooks: I Am An Asshole, and Therefore Secretly So Are You

David Brooks cannot bear how superior everyone sticking up for victims of child sexual abuse is these days: 

First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption. Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.

First up: Advocating for action to stop sexual abuse as it occurs, and then strenuous laws aimed at preventing it from ever happening again, comes across as morally superior BECAUSE IT IS. If it's now out-of-bounds smug to say we should as a society better protect the powerless from those who prey upon them, smug sounds pretty good to me.  

Second: It's entirely possible to say that someone in such-and-such position should have done something, while also acknowledging that in that same position, you don't know what you would have done. 

But even if you can't say precisely what you would have done, you should at least know what should be done. And every time you say it out loud, you move us all a little farther away from the place where we riot in favor of an institution that enabled sexual abuse. The entire point of talking about the people who didn't see, or saw and didn't act, or acted but not strongly enough, is to reinforce the idea that passivity in the face of evil is not okay. 

So of course along comes David Brooks to talk about how that's just a normal human reaction, so, you know, whatevs. It's interesting that he assumes that all outrage on the part of "a zillion commentators" (obviously not this very good one that makes the same point without the smarm and judgment) comes from a place of vanity. What else could possibly motivate such outrage? 

Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: “How could they have let this happen?”

The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.

Brooks prefaces this, his oh-so-brave contrarian stance, with a few grafs that blither on about how we used to acknowledge our sinfulness but now kids have self-esteem so we can't do that anymore. Or something. 

As to David's other examples: The problem in the wake of our torturing innocent people in secret prisons was not insufficient self-examination. It was that we were torturing innocent people in secret prisons and needed to not ever be doing that. David Brooks, now so concerned that we turned away from our inner angels, spent much of the past decade studiously not mentioning the innocent man shipped off to Syria to be tortured. 

I assume he didn't say anything at the time because he didn't want to appear superior. 

A. 

Stealing Our Jobs

Amateurs are ruining CNN! 

Chris Ariens at TV Newser reports that "at least 50 positions are being eliminated [including] as many as 12 staffers in the Washington, DC bureau alone, four of whom are longtime photojournalists." These numbers pale in comparison to the mass layoffs of 2008, when CNN sacked its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, but it does throw a wrench into the resilient hope that citizen journalists aren't stealing jobs from professional journalists.

Yes. They're stealing the jobs. All on their own. Those dastardly citizen journalists! It can't be that CNN's rapacious profit-mongering has made them decide that it was cheaper to scam the inexperienced than continue to scam those who've done this as a job. It can't be our masters' fault! It must be those evil citizens! 

I'm not arguing that anybody who can hold a camera can do the job of a photojournalist, by the way. But when we continue to frame the media conversation as SHUN THE INTERLOPERS, we not only diminish the potential contributions of those who didn't have access to the traditional media training of the last 30 years, we pit parts of the 99 percent against each other and let the 1 percent off the hook. Twas ever thus, of course, but at least here I'd like us to talk smarter than that. 

A. 

How, Exactly, Would We Know This?

Far be it from me to disagree with the asskickingest writer on the political Interwebs these days (seriously, 12 times a day he writes something that makes me want to tear off my own head and eat it because what is the POINT, if I can't do it like that?) but I think this is a little unfair to the idiots of America:

And let's assume that Kasich gets kicked around, the way it looks like he might, and the way he thoroughly deserves to be, god knows. What happens next? Is there really an actual movement building here, a parallel mobilization among the largely white middle class that would parallel the one taking place in the Occupy camps around the country? Or will the people on the lawn go back to sneering about the drum-beating hippies sleeping in the parks? Will they all leave the state capitol in Columbus and go back to listening to the hundreds of sub-Limbaughs on their local radio stations, telling them that teachers have it too good because they have summers off, or that firefighters are gaming the disability system, and that "government" is merely a way for all of Them to steal Our money, and that voting is just a waste of time? Do they all go back to worrying about The Deficit, which is merely convenient shorthand for all the things they don't want to pay for? Do they all go home and prepare themselves, through ignorance and apathy, to vote for the next John Kasich who comes along?

There are other elections going on today, too. It looks as though the Democrats may lose the state senate in Virginia, which will hand the entire state government over to the Republicans. I am going to be very impatient, then, with Virginians who get angry in a year or so that their public services have withered and that a decent middle-class lifestyle is receding from view. In Mississippi, they are voting on a fantastical proposition whereby a zygote is declared to be a "person" protected by law. If it passes, I am going to be very impatient with any Mississippians who get angry in a year or so that they must remain childless, because every in vitro fertilization clinic in the state has fled to places where they don't see Jesus in the trunks of gum trees.

Here's the deal: Everybody should know by now what the results of these elections will mean.

How? How would they know this? I'm not saying people are devoid of responsibility for seeking out truth and knowledge, but it is more acceptable these days to have an opinion on the Kardashians' marriages than it is to have an opinion on politics that goes any deeper than "fuck 'em all, Charlie, they all suck." This, right now, is a sampling of stories on CNN's home page:

A bunch of random shit about Silvio Berlusconi's "gaffes," which is apparently what we call being a disgusting pig these days

Some throwaway stories about Greece and "austerity," as if there is a universal understanding of what austerity is

This Obama-Sarkozy open-mic thing, as if it is news that in the UN lunchroom nobody wants to sit with Netanyahu ever

The Duggars having another kid

Some freakjob buying John Lennon's tooth

Giant asteroid to pass close to Earth Tuesday

Dog makes pals with police horse

Where, in all that, is Ohio? Where is Mississippi? Again, if you live in those states you absolutely have the responsibility to inform yourself on local issues because asking national news to do it for you is a long wait for a train don't come, but attacking people for not developing a national narrative that Republicans are backwards-ass necks seems a little ... I don't know, misplaced? There are people of my acquaintance who consider themselves very well-informed, who were comparing, the other day, Sarah Palin to Jesse Goddamn Jackson, as if Sarah Palin had spent her entire life fighting for the betterment of others and then fucked some stuff up along the way. I mean, there are people I know who are not morons, who think Brian Williams is authoritative and that Bob Schieffer is some kind of role model.

We are so utterly broken here, is my point. Out here where the message gets delivered, not just produced, we are so completely fucking busted. We are informed by people who have little information about politics they profess to find trivial or repulsive or both, and this meager diet of buzzwords is served in between 10 minutes of weather, three minutes of anchor banter and a bunch of commercials for Cialis, and then we cut to a story about a viral video of a baby giggling that, if you have Facebook or an elderly relative with e-mail, you've already seen 57 times. That's what you get for free. That's your bottom line, foundation media.

And the thing that makes developing an alternative narrative to the national media so goddamn critical is the same thing that makes it so hard: AMERICA IS REALLY FUCKED. The amount of time it takes to pay bills and argue with insurance assholes and four different online specialty pharmacies on the phone, for example, eats into a lot of reading and discussion time. If you're lucky enough to still be employed, on your commute home you mostly think about how much gas costs and how you're going to afford the increase in your mortgage payment because the bank that held your loan went tits-up and now nobody even knows who owns your house anymore. Your kids are sick, and the doctor can see you only during the hours you have to be at work or else, and the washing machine is making a noise, and your spouse saw a roach in the kitchen, and it never fucking ends.

My point isn't to let power-humping fetus-fetishizing union-busting dickheads off the hook here. My point is that I have a lot more contempt for the people selling this stuff than the ones buying it.

A.

Like a Fungus

Sinclair Broadcasting, best known for being absolute fucksticks at a time when fuckstickery was still an art and not a routine, continues to grow, like something out of a horror movie:

Sinclair Broadcast Group continues its buying spree with the purchase of Freedom’s eight television stations. Price Colman reports that Sinclair will own more than 60 stations, the most of any company, though that doesn’t mean it reaches more people than other companies with stations in larger markets. Freedom’s stations reach 2.63 percent of U.S. households, according to a news release announcing the deal. Regulators must approve the purchase because it would give Sinclair duopolies in two markets, including West Palm Beach-Fort Pierce, Florida.

A.

Kids Today Like Their Print

If it's THEIR print, that is:

Students have returned to college campuses armed with laptops, smart phones and countless other electronic gadgets. Yet most still turn to a print newspaper for their campus news.

The printed versions of college newspapers continue to thrive, with students grabbing copies as they go from one class to another. It’s not unusual to see students reading about the latest campus news while eating a quick lunch or taking a break on the lawn.

It’s far less likely that the wired generation, raised with iPods and smart phones, is checking out the news on the newspaper’s website.

I can't tell you how many college journalism events I go to, where they discuss "the future of journalism." The only time student media even comes up is for someone to deplore it as unserious and students' love of it as insignificant. It only counts as reading a paper if you read the Times, kids!

Some of this is the usual amateur versus professional argument with which blogtopia is familiar. Some of it is that a lot of our pundit critters aren't researchers, and just say things based on the last poll to cross their desks. But they ignore the reasons student papers succeed, and the reasons they do succeed could be valuable lessons to media companies that have responded to the loss of customers by making their products worse.

“College newspapers are niche publications,” said Lloyd Goodman, director of student publications at the university. “Students like to pick it up, read it over lunch. It’s still a community newspaper.”

That may help explain why, in general, local commercial newspapers have had trouble gaining a foothold with students. Several of the college newspaper advisors I spoke with described repeated — and unsuccessful — efforts by commercial newspapers in their areas to sell more on campus.

“I don’t see students hovering over the Los Angeles Times here,” said Mona Cravens, director of student publications at the University of Southern California. “The faculty, staff and students have come to rely on the Daily Trojan for what’s going on on campus.”

The campus is their town, and the campus paper covers their town. It's easy to get, it's useful and convenient to them, and it's distributed where they see it all the time. What's in it varies widely from campus to campus, and the skill with which it's produced varies as well, but it's their paper. That sense of ownership and loyalty requires some hard work and money to build, but once built it's hard to lose. Media companies today destroyed it on purpose in relentless pursuit of profit, forgetting where those profits come from in the first place:

Stephen Heleker, student body president at Boise State University, told me in an e-mail that students spend so much time on computers doing school work that “they value the respite offered” by the print version of the college newspaper. “It definitely becomes part of the routine at college.”

A newspaper, part of your daily routine. Imagine.

x-posted at FireDogLake

A.

'Misdemeanor Illegal Lodging'

Riot cops were apparently needed to combat the evil sin of camping:

Interim Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said at a news conference later in the morning that hundreds of officers and sheriff's deputies from more than 12 agencies moved in on about 170 protesters.

He said police fired beanbag rounds and tear gas, but no one was injured. Television news footage showed protesters being taken away in plastic cuffs without incident, although an officer did fire a non-lethal projectile from a shotgun at a protester who lobbed a bottle, authorities told the San Francisco Chronicle.

One of those arrested, Aiyahnna Johnson, 30, of Oakland, had been living at the camp with her 2-year-old daughter. "We want the best for you guys, that's all," she was quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle telling two officers who were leading her away.

And via my pal Scott on Facebook, here's a story that illustrates what the point is of all those crazy hippies banging drums in the street:

Occupy Wall Street has already achieved a stunning victory – a victory that is easy to overlook, but impossible to overstate. In just one month, the protesters have shifted the national dialogue from a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street: the lack of jobs -- and especially jobs with decent benefits -- spiraling inequality, cash-strapped American families' debt-loads, and the pernicious influence of money in politics that led us to this point.

To borrow the loosely defined terms that define the Occupy movement, these ordinary citizens have shifted the conversation away from what the “1 percent” -- the corporate right and its dedicated media, network of think-tanks and PR shops -- want to talk about and, notably, paid good money to get us to talk about.

The latest of Time magazine is Joke Line's fucking idiocy about how left and right are evil, of course, and that the only way to get yourself heard politically is to disavow actually giving a shit in any way, and mouth platitudes that express not true moderation but a desperate attempt to ensure balance by insulting fucking everybody. I'd link to it, but it's behind a paywall, and also contains zero polling data to actually back up the assertion that everybody likes people and politicians who eschew movements. In truth, only Joke likes these, because they allow him to point out his own superiority over those gross people who believe in stuff.

So people like that have the money and the power, the airwaves and the soundbites, and hippies have tents and signs, but when all you've got is a hammer you might as well nail some shit down. What's the point of protesting? To change the conversation. When and if the protests end, the work that has always been done will continue being done, so that we get better as a country, but right now we need to talk about something else besides the deficit and how hard rich people have it when everyone hates them.

A.

Everybody Work Harder!

Management to the drones:

Unfortunately, in spite of these and many other great accomplishments, our financial performance is not where we need it to be. Through the first nine months of 2011, our revenues are off plan by 3%, largely driven by the national advertising category which is off almost 30% year-over-year. Operating cash flow is behind plan by 24%.

In the face of continuing challenges to our industry, we need to continue to work together. We need to sustain our print businesses while we find new digital sources of revenue. We need to innovate and optimize our resources. And I know we can. After just three months in my new role, I’m continually inspired by our employees. You have a passion for winning and do so much for our company and our community.

Yes. If only there was some kind of money available:

Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Tribune Co. won court approval to pay as much as $42.5 million in incentive bonuses to 640 managers of the bankrupt newspaper publisher.

But hey, you all need to work harder, because your passion is inspiring (and cheap!), and I know we can innovate and optimize and synergize our way to winning!

A.

Imagining the Fox News Reaction

If city governments had done this to the Tea Party.

A.

HEALTH BEAT!

If only the Internet would stop destroying journalism:

David Bauder reports that ABC’s “soft news” includes a greater emphasis on health, medicine and family stories — content that is a match for the “World News” audience, which is 60 percent female.

“World News” Executive Producer Michael Corn tells Bauder “the broadcast reflects Sawyer’s sense of curiosity and adventure … It does more on health matters, for example, because health has a real impact on people’s lives.”

As for that news that women supposedly want, apparently when they say "women" they really mean "rich mommies with no health problems at all," because this is a sampling of headlines from ABC News's Health section:

Sweethearts Tend to Hit the Sweets

Brain Imaging Sheds Light on Math Anxiety

Halloween Perils for Pets

South Park’s Mr. Hankey as Rectal Cancer Mascot

Should parents monitor college kids' Facebook pages for signs of alcohol abuse?

'Maybe-Baby' Mindset Can Put Mom and Baby in Harms Way

About half the stories are about not fucking up your kids, MOM. Dad, of course, having nothing to do with the parenting, much less actually worrying about the kids' health. That's for the chicks to think about.

Other stories feature menopause, breast cancer and pap smears, just to reinforce the idea that the only things women have to worry about becoming sick from are their reproductive organs. All you ladies with lung cancer and heart disease? Better wait for a rich and/or famous woman to make those "women's health" issues. All you girls out there debilitated by asthma, MS, leukemia? Those stories won't let us show a mammogram on TV, so whatever, deal with it on your own.

A.

ps. That last is a particularly repulsive story about how if you're not totally concentrating on getting pregnant and making your body a sacred vessel, you might pickle your infant by pouring a splash of red into your spaghetti sauce. Stop drinking five years before you plan to get pregnant, you whores!

Suffering is Always Virtuous When It's Someone Else's Suffering

David Brooks, kids:

After an explosion of debt over the past few decades, Americans are now reacting strongly against the debt culture. According to the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll, three-quarters of Americans said they’d be better off if they carried no debt whatsoever. Not long ago, most people saw debt as a useful tool for consumption and enjoyment. Now they see it as a seduction and an obstacle.

By choice or necessity, eight million Americans have stopped using bank-issued credit cards, according to The National Journal. The average credit card balance has fallen 10 percent this year from 2010. Banks, households and businesses are all reducing their debt levels.

And this is proof that America is great again! Because we're all scared blind that the ground is going to drop out from under us tomorrow, we're not spending on anything we don't have to, and that proves we have rededicated ourselves to acting like a Norman Rockwell painting! 

No word, in this entire column, about whether David Brooks is spending less. About whether he is rededicating himself to the American value of burying all his wealth in a coffee can in the yard, or squirrelling money in various drawers throughout the house lest putting it all in one place tempt him to spend it on, you know, groceries, or maybe something frivolous like a book. This turning inward, to the great American value of realizing how fucked you are, that's for the little folks.

Which is SO GROSS. I was saying this last night to my mom in a conversation about something else, that nobody ever talks about their pain being beneficial or necessary or good until that pain is over. Nobody, mid-field amputation, is like, "I'm really glad you're cutting off my leg without anesthesia because this, right now, is leading me to a deeper understanding of my life and the universe's plan for me." Years later, you can talk about how this was just a bump in the road that led you to your spectacular good fortune at present, but while it's happening that doesn't mean shit.

Pierce does his usual fantastic job of vivisecting this nonsense:

Anyone who meekly suggested that, maybe, he'd like to put in 20 years at his job and collect a pension at the end of it that he could live on, was dismissed as a whiny relic of a past age, or as a state employee. And, in any case, part of the miracle of Wall Street was devising new and complicated financial instruments by which private pension plans could be pillaged for private profit. If David Brooks was concerned about this prior to 2008, when the people who go to dinner with him and who pay his honoraria nearly blew up the world, he kept devilishly quiet about it.

The generational hating is, as per usual, rage-inducing, because no matter what is going on (Brooks's lead references the 1960s, the only decade American political columnists remember in any way) it proves that the Young Folk are Finally Listening to Their Elders. When what's actually happening is that young people, trying to figure out what the fuck to do, looked at the righteous screwing their parents got from the world and said, you know what? Let's not do that anymore.

A.

Summing Up Chicago

Driftglass:

Whatever is happening on the 5th floor of City Hall and whatever gloss a drive-by steno like Friedman wants to put on it, the fact is that below decks thing are a mess.

Rahm's budget is shot because Daley hocked everything he could lay his hands to prop himself up for his final three years in office. This he did with the full support of the Chicago Machine wnd with the City Council acting as his willing accomplice.

Rahm's line workers are shot because for the last several years those who weren't clout-protected were driven like rented mules to make good on one special Mayoral imitative after another, while random layoffs dropped like bombs all around them.

THIS. Go read the whole thing, and drop your spare change in the fundraiser bucket while you're over there, so we can keep reading more sense amid all the Friedmanisms.

A.

People Don't Want Stupid, Trivial News

Shocking:

But gradually, the interest from readers began to eclipse the interest from other journalists and a subtle shift began to take place in our newsroom priorities. A good example was our coverage of the UK government's health reforms, which many readers felt didn't do justice to the worrying revolution facing one of Britain's national treasures. We initially responded by ramping up our live coverage of the two-day NHS debate in the House of Lords - attracting over 1,000 comments. But we also asked our health reporter to do a bit of digging and list today an upcoming story on how cuts have already begun to hit services.

I'm tired of watching newspapers and news organization justify their downward spirals into triviality and TMZ-style celebrity crap by saying that's what readers want, when they often have no more data than a "most e-mailed" stat from their cluttered, ugly web sites.

A.

Go Fuck Yourself, Bill Keller, You Solipsistic Jackass

I wish I had something more civil and acceptable to say, but honestly, when I talk about why newspapers are currently sucking donkey sack, this is basically the sort of thing I mean:

Bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street? Fed up (Fed Up!) with the presidential Race to the Bottom? Depressed by the warning signs of the next Depression?

I bring relief. Like Nurse Jackie scavenging in the medicine chest for stray painkillers, I have assembled some capsules of hope from places you probably haven’t noticed lately, because the dominant news is so disheartening you can’t bear to proceed beyond the front page.

Hee hee, protesting is silly and boring and none of those people matter and nobody's opinion is really important compared to My View of Big World Events, which will not affect my paycheck no matter how wrong it is. Also, reality is depressing. Depressing is bad. Depressing is something I should combat in my columns! Get happy, everybody, Europe's about to fuck over its middle class almost as bad as we do right here!

Also, a reference to a Showtime program makes me relevant. Hipness! Young people!

I especially love how his implicit suggestion to readers is that if the news is bothering them, they should seek out good news or feel free, with the editor's express permission, to tune out and claim some kind of burnout caused by reading the fucking paper. As if that's just like patrolling Fallujah or something. As if that is an excuse you even GET, when the earth is caving in. You're tired of reading bad news?

Imagine living it, you rich horsefuckers.

You know what an alternate way to go would be? To politely suggest to readers that if they find unregulated capitalism stifling, to get off their asses and change it. To nudge readers toward action in regards to a Republican presidential field that is a mix of mildly stupid and full-on evil, such that perhaps they would demand different candidates. To point out that a coming second Depression is entirely a creature animated by political will, and that no matter how much money corporations pour into elections if everybody voted instead of about half of us, those corporate bagmunchers wouldn't be able to control SHIT.

All that stuff requires passion for one's community, a drive to improve the lives of readers and the ability to not give a fuck about the ragaholic conservative message groups that will be screaming bloody blue murder about the liberal New York Times. I don't see Bill Keller, of all people, having the stones to actually make any of that stick. Besides, what the fuck difference does it make to him? He's not missing a meal no matter how many protesters get maced outside his building.

If you want to know why newspapers are dying, don't look at the Internet. Don't look at conservative versus liberal bias. Look at the endlessly reinforced message that nothing MATTERS anymore, that nothing should matter, and that mattering is passé and probably Communist. You keep telling people not to give a shit, eventually they're going to listen to you.

A.

If Only There Was Still Money In Newspapers

Damn you, Internet!

Dubow could collect $37 million

The board said Dubow, 56, had resigned "due to disability," a circumstance that paves the way for him to collect as much as $37.1 million in retirement and disability benefits, company documents show. The benefits are worth considerably more than what he would get, $22.5 million, if he left in a traditional retirement.

[snip]

The company's stock was worth $72 a share when Dubow became CEO. But it plunged alongside other newspaper stocks, trading as low as $1.85 in March 2009 amid fears the company was headed for bankruptcy. It closed today at $10.45, down a penny.

Well, we should definitely reward his sterling leadership.

Also, I would totally accept a "traditional retirement" of $22 million. Just throwing that out there.

A.

They Cannot Muzzle The Light

You know that famous picture from the Westboro Baptists protests and counter-protests? This one?

I feel like standing next to Capitol Hill with that sign right now. Or the DNC headquarters. Something.

Thousands of people are in the fucking streets. Thousands. In New York, Boston, Cali, Philly. Thousands.

Yet Washington Democrats cower in the corner for fear of joining them.

I can see why. What if one of the hippies has a rude shirt?

And doesn't it make Obama look bad to point out that the earth is caving in on his watch?

What if somebody at the rallies compared Republicans to Satan? What would Chris Matthews say?

What if somebody at the rallies once sold his food stamps on Facebook?

Won't that give Republicans and the pundits who hold Washington hostage cause to say mean things about us? Won't that give them cause to talk about how we're all about the smelly kids and faggots and welfare cheats and others who are anathema to America? Surely they wouldn't be doing that anyway so I'd best stay over here, and pretend those protesters don't speak for me.

Surely I'd better not note that these are my people, my constituents, the middle class workers for which my party is supposed to have fought, once upon a time, in a land far, far away. Surely I'd better not concede that even if they are just "college kids," they're goddamn citizens of this country whose concerns deserve a voice and whose voice is a vote. Surely I'd better not worry that where there are ten of them today there will be sixty tomorrow, because when in history has that ever happened?

Surely it's safer to stay indoors, keep my powder dry, and hold off having this fight until things get just a little bit worse. Surely, when the right moment comes along, someone will let me know.

In case it's escaped anyone's notice, the Occupy All That Shit protests aren't going away. They're growing. They're going from city to city. They're getting louder. They're gaining friends and allies. They're becoming more. And I don't know how much more, how many more people it's going to take before somebody supposedly on the side of the middle class takes fucking notice and gets his ass down to the microphone. 

Isn't there a single strategist in Washington yelling that there are thousands of votes out there to be won by actually acting like a Democrat? I know that hasn't exactly been in high favor the last 10 years, but do thousands of people in the street express anything BUT a deep hunger for a world that isn't going to screw them over? And isn't that a political opportunity of which someone should avail himself?

Yes, the Tea Party was funded, and marketed nonstop by Fux News. You know what else it was? Supported by every major Republican candidate, who looked at the racist signs and the ignorant-ass 'necks in attendance and said sure, some of them are gaping assholes but all of 'em are gonna vote and they might as well vote for me. That's part of how that movement gained legitimacy. If tea partiers held a march against Obama's wars, they wouldn't lack for grand marshals.

Our leaders, even among those who do nothing but comment, just snipe about hippies and kids, as if they have any economic or demographic data on these crowds at all. That's if they notice; most are too busy figuring out how much to cut from Social Security. I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them. Yes, everybody's tired, but eventually your exhaustion is just self-indulgence, and it doesn't matter what's on the back of the trustafarian's shirt at this point.

You go to the revolution with the revolutionaries you have.

I'll be at Occupy Chicago tomorrow with food and coffee for the demonstrators. Where will our leaders be?

A.

The Internet Gives Dexter a Run for His Money

Journalism. Why won't anyone pay for it? If only you kids with your iPods weren't so selfish.

Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Tribune Co. won court approval to pay as much as $42.5 million in incentive bonuses to 640 managers of the bankrupt newspaper publisher.

The recipients, who include television-station managers and newspaper executives, will split a bonus pool that will be based on Tribune’s operating cash flow at the end of the year. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin J. Carey approved the bonuses today in Wilmington, Delaware.

The bonuses are “critically important to maintain proper incentives for the management team,” Tribune said in a court filing dated Aug. 30.

Tribune expects to end the year with $517 million in cash, Brian J. Gold, a company attorney, said in court. That means executives would split from $26.4 million to $32.4 million, according to the plan. They would split $42.5 million should Tribune reach $700 million in operating cash flow.

Jesus tits, BUCKY could run a newspaper with that amount of money, and he has no thumbs.

A.

 

Waiting for the Miracle

Oliver would like those kids today to be good so Daddy won't hit them:

If you dress up like a dope-smoking hobo, expect to be treated like one and not be taken seriously. Get a haircut. Wear a nice shirt. Carry a sign with a message that makes some kind of sense to an average American.

It might work.

Dan continues the discussion over at Corrente, citing an observation from Allison Kilkenny on the media coverage:

For every batshit crazy quote Bellafante presents, I can match it with a calm, articulate response from another attendee. I guarantee that. However, that's not the point. I'm not a believer in the "perfect objectivity" goal for journalists because it's impossible to ever obtain. Human beings inherently possess prejudices and biases that blind them to aspects of reality. Bellafante is less likely to see the Matthews. I'm less likely to see the black bloc.

Yet we risk much when we traipse into this false equivalency territory. The two approaches I've described above aren't given level platforms in our society. Bellafante reaches a far, far larger readership, and the ones who dismiss protesters always do because their corporate overlords love depicting protesters as flower-waving, stoned-out-of-their-gourds hippies. If you think those are the only people on your side, why get off the couch at all?

Well, that's the point, really: To find a reason not to get off the couch. If they're all just hippies in hoodies, there's no reason for you to think about what they're saying. If they're all just filthy teenagers, you can go back to your dinner and not worry about that nagging feeling in your gut that says get on a goddamn bus and go join them. If you can find a reason why this protest, these protesters, are unsuitable, then there's really nothing you need to get worked up about.

Better bide your time, keep your powder dry, and wait for a protest when everybody's wearing a color that doesn't clash with your hair. Better wait for the perfect cause, with the perfect leader, for the perfect reasons. That's sure to come along any minute now.

Every second spent worrying about the clothing and behavior of the protesters is a second spent not talking about why they're out there in the first place. We saw this during the Wisconsin protests, too: the constant fear that one single shitsmack would spit at a cop and then it would all be over. We debated if protesters had "jumped the shark." Monitoring the behavior of people who were standing up to power so easily took precedence over monitoring the behavior of people in power, as if their actions had equivalent consequences. It's easier to kick down than to punch up, and with our new journalism that equates amoral disinterest with objectivity and passion with bias, the powerless find their mohawks as much of an affront to America as mortgage fraud.

My view on this is pretty simple: The meanest thing a protester could possibly do would be nicer than the nicest thing Dick Cheney has ever done, so until that son of a bitch is in chains in a basement somewhere, you'll pardon me if I can't get too excited about somebody yelling anarchic slogans.

Because here's the thing: It is never okay to treat anybody like this:

Among the video clips on the Occupy Wall Street website is one that shows a police officer macing a group of young women penned in by orange netting.

Another video has circulated of a police officer throwing a protester to the ground, though it is not clear why. The video shows the man standing in what seems to be a non-threatening manner before the incident.

No matter what he's wearing, or what she's saying.

x-posted to Firedoglake.

A.

Washington Post Thinking This Internet Thing is Here to Stay

Telling reporters to link to sources. The blogosphere called, it says welcome to 1998.

A.

A Must-Read Story About Poverty Making the Rounds

Read the whole thing and then come back. I'll wait.

There's a couple of things going on in here beyond just the "wow, are people fucking fucked" response you're supposed to have. The first is this:

Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund called the surging child poverty rate "a national disgrace." Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., cited evidence that poverty shortens life spans, calling it "a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people."

Overall, though, the figures seemed to be greeted with resignation, and political leaders in Washington pressed ahead with efforts to cut federal spending. The Pew Research Center said its recent polling shows that a majority of Americans — for the first time in 15 years of being surveyed on the question — oppose more government spending to help the poor.

Why, though? Why do they feel this way? Why do they hate and fear the poor? What's changed in the last 15 years? One thing consistently drives me goddamn bonkers about our press is this passive-voice nonsense where we pretend people just decide to have views based on nothing. We all know full well that the reason people oppose more government spending is that there is a constant stream of human dildos on their televisions telling them that the reason people are poor is that we're doing too much to help the poor and we should stop it.

Some of this is elementary psych, of course. One way of coping with the devastating fear of something awful happening to you is hating everyone it does happen to, hating their weaknesses and failures, hating their examples of what can happen if you slip, even just a little. Obviously that's one way you can react. But until 15 years ago we didn't have a full-time media machine invested in telling people that that sick feeling in the pits of their stomachs meant you should throw rocks at the homeless folks causing it until they went away.

And until 15 years ago we kind of, sort of, almost maybe sometimes had politics that allowed for a voice saying what the fuck is wrong with you, you selfish goddamn assholes. Give that poor kid an apple and some bus fare, you jerk. We didn't always pretend it was admirable to sneer at panhandlers. We might have done it, but we wouldn't have openly applauded people for doing so.

The second thing I want to point out is this:

About 75 miles away, in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, dozens of families lined up patiently outside the Willow Creek Care Center as truckloads of food for the poor were unloaded.

Among those waiting was Kris Fallon of nearby Palatine, mother of a teen and an infant, who hitched a ride with a friend.

She recounted how she and her husband — once earning nearly $100,000 a year between the two of them— lost their jobs, forcing them to move from their rented home into an apartment and give up their car.

"We fight a lot because of the situation," she said. "We wonder where we are going to come up with money to pay rent, where we are going to get food, formula for the baby."

She began to cry.

Hoffman Estates is a wealthy community. I bought some furniture off Craigslist from a dude there whose wife was redoing their kitchen, and when I walked in I wondered why on earth because the place was like a palace, and this wasn't even the fanciest home on the block. So the other part of this story is that from Willow Creek (the area's mega-church, by the by) you can throw a rock and hit the REASON everyone is so goddamn poor: Because a few other people are so goddamn rich.

That's really what this story isn't about, and should be. It's about the abjectness of some but not the excess of others, and you can't pretend the two aren't related or you miss the real story. I want to give the AP props for doing this, putting a face to the poor and lost, and certainly it's better than anybody else has done. It's very easy for news organizations to give up on stories like this because hey, we know about poor people, and we know they don't read the paper so fuck 'em.

But stories like this are too easily dismissed on the grounds that each individual should have made different choices. Here's just a sample of the comments before I had to stop reading them and go hit my head on something hard for a while:

That husband looks like a real loser. Yeah, I'm sure he has his resume updated and is ready to hit the streets. If something like that walked into my office I'd have security escort him out. No wonder they're out of work. It also looks like they didn't let money stop them from having yet another child. I'm sure our tax dollars that are robbed from us everyday are paying for that kid's diapers, food and care. The welfare office, WIC and free medical sees to that. I don't think I feel that sorry for that couple.

Of course people like this miss the point, but it's easy to. The point isn't this guy, or that guy or all the guys in the story. The point is that cumulatively we are horrifically screwed, and until stories like this also address the why, make the connection between those who are poor and the policies that make and keep them so, we're going to keep seeing pitiable examples that the intended audience steadfastly refuses to pity.

A.

Mitch Albom Sucks

It's not even that this stuff is bad. It's that it's bad in a way that is designed to offend or excite exactly no one. This isn't supposed to change your life, Albom might as well say out loud. Don't think about it, don't get pissed off, don't e-mail me, and for God's sake don't change one single thing you already thought when you got up in the morning.

Nancy Nall has it covered:

It so happens that all the columnists were called upon to contribute something, and no one, even the good ones, hit anything out of the park. But Mitch pegged the needle on the Smarm-o-Meter, once again, by observing that yes, yes, we have changed, and yet, life and love does, and always will, go on.

Because we weren’t sure about that before. You know, there was an attack on American soil, and maybe all life would have stopped, and taken the love with it.

This guy is paid $250,000 a year by the Freep, I’m told. For that sum, he is apparently not required to make a phone call to one of the dozens of smart people, many of them clergy, who would pick up for him, who might have offered a new perspective or original observation about this tragedy. He’s not required to say something that hasn’t been said a thousand times. He just phones this shit in, and collects the check.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this nonsense were confined to Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day and other more fitting holidays. But this was a profound national tragedy, and this is what he comes up with. I ask you.

I mean, plenty of people wrote stuff about 9/11 that made me want to claw my own eyes out, but at least that was a REACTION. I think we're scared of riling anybody up, in traditional media, anymore. I think we're worried about raising people's blood pressures.

As I say all the time about Chris Matthews and other assorted pundit critters, what possible difference does it make to Albom whether it's good copy or not? He's Mitch Albom(tm), the brand. He has buckets of money and absolutely no risk of being fired. There's no real reason he should stretch for it anymore. He's not trying to make the show. He's set for life. It's not burnout, or writer's block, or a shiraz problem, or any one of a hundred other scenarios in which you as a writer do shitty work and put it out there knowing it sucks and feeling like you just barely made your paycheck this week. It's being some kind of Emotional Authority, and feeling like whatever you say has some inherent value, beyond what you actually said.

I get it, you know, not killing yourself on every play. I'm lazy as all hell. I want to just come up with one good thing, make a lot of money and then retire to my Caribbean island. What I don't get is continuing to write when you've so obviously said "fuck it" to the fundamental point. You are supposed to be yelling as loud as you can with whatever voice you possess about the things that are important to you, the things you think should be important to the world.

When you run out of things, or decide your true calling is feeding seals at the Shedd Aquarium, then you are done, and that's okay. Go be done. But don't continue to bore on about nothing for hours because you as a Brand(tm) have to say something on this Important Day. That's a waste of ink. Save your breath for when something really matters to you. If you can even find something with a searchlight and a posse anymore.

A.

PAY FOR IT, BITCHES!

The Daily Herald, the north/northwest Chicago suburban paper and home of stories for office park employees who are frightened of the city, is going to start charging money to read online because all of you suck:

“Why is it necessary to charge for digital access?” Ray asked in a staff memo. “We invest significantly in reporters and editors and an infrastructure that provides tailored coverage of local news, suburban business developments, politics and entertainment as well as sports from the pro levels to preps. We believe that what we do has value to our readers and to the community. A new payment structure will enable us to continue to provide the kind of quality local news and the journalism expected from the Daily Herald.”

I'm about done with the newspaper as institution waxing poetic about the nobility of journalism and how important it is to support it with cash. The people writing these things are the same ones who for years kept journalists at poverty wages and told us it was romantic and we should do the job for the love of it. Funny how important local journalism becomes when executive salaries start hanging in the balance.

The Daily Hairball (full disclosure: my competitor when I worked out in Elgin, my paper when I lived in Schaumburg and some disabled children were selling subscriptions and Mr. A is a sucker), while not owned by a huge conglomerate and run in a generally more responsible fashion than other Chicago papers I could name, is up against a half dozen free competitors, and it's hard not to see this going down in not-even-spectacular flames.

Dan Sinker, who if I haven't mentioned it recently provides some of the best media commentary in the city via his Twitter feed, pointed out:

Daily Herald digital sub cost: $240/year. Even if you're a print subscriber, you have to kick in $1 more a week.

So there's that. They're doing it, but making it more expensive than a print subscription. Which only works if you're providing more than just the print content, or if the content is truly unique and indispensible. Everybody brings up the Financial Times, but the FT is not the local high school sports scores and stories about charity auctions. Sinker again:

Between the Daily Herald's digital subscriptions and the Tribune's tablet fiasco, maybe the Sun Times' strategy is just "wait 'em out"?

If it is, it'll be the smartest thing they could do. Half of what I do in monitoring this shit is bookmarking it and then just waiting to say I Told You So.

A.

You Are Not Obligated To Interview Everyone Who Sends You a Press Release

A more important question than "why did Christine O'Donnell walk out of this CNN interview" is "why was she being interviewed in the first place?"

Agenda-setting!

A.

Torture Story Fail

I've been talking a lot about the tendency to equate journalistic objectivity with bloodlessness, and this story, about the torture of innocent people by Chicago police and the cost to the city of defending the mayor, is a prime example: 

A police torture saga that has cast a long shadow over Chicago City Hall for nearly three decades is resurfacing – and it is reviving criticism that the new administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel is too tied to former Mayor Richard M. Daley and the excesses of his tenure.

See, you can call it a long shadow, but I seem to remember Chicago Reader reporter and author John Conroy being pretty much the only one who gave a shit about any of this in substantive fashion for years and years, before he was laid off from the paper and our traditional media betters were opining that the whole thing was boring anyway. It's not like people have been indordinately giving a shit and this is tiresome by now.

The whole stewpot of police torture cases is simmering anew because a federal judge recently ruled that Daley can be deposed as a defendant in a civil suit brought by Michael Tillman, who was exonerated and released from prison in 2010 after serving 23 years. Mr. Tillman’s case is one of more than 100 involving suspects who allege police torture under Jon Burge, a disgraced former Chicago police commander who is now serving time in federal prison.

The Burge saga has long been a sore spot for the black community, which believes the city has not showed sufficient accountability to the mistreated suspects, all of whom are black.

Right. It wouldn't be a problem for white people, because we're all certain the city has everyone's best interests at heart, and also nothing that happens to black people affects us at all. It's only the black community that has any cause to be upset. The rest of you? Go on about your day. Have you heard it's hot this summer and the Cubs suck?

Also. Sore spot? Is that what we're calling glaring injustice now? This is pretty much the same thing as saying it's a total bummer when your house burns down with everyone you love inside.

The whole story is about the outrage of having to pay for Daley's defenses in various lawsuits, because the city's in a budget crisis, and somewhere in there is a feeling that the civil suits (as they always are when brought by the powerless against the great) are just picking on poor broke Chicago. We can't afford this, natch. When really, what we can't afford is cops torturing people and a mayor who refused to do anything about it, as at least one local alderman understands: 

“Continuing to defend the indefensible is not smart,” says Chicago Alderman Joe Moore. “I’m not suggesting we settle these cases without being mindful of the city’s fiscal health and sign a blank check. But, clearly, these people who were victims of Burge’s torture need to be compensated. To delay that justice for years is not a good thing.”

The price tag for the city is the least outrageous thing about this whole mess.

A.

On Michele Bachmann and the Deathly Hallows

I'm gonna say this once: My biggest problem with the Bachmann Newsweek cover is that she's on it at all.

Did they deliberately choose a photo that made her look bonkers? Of course. What do you think they do, sit around and throw darts at page proofs until somebody scores a bulls-eye and that's the one they use? Of course they used a photo that made her look like a lunatic, and of course they did it for the LULZ and the clicks and attention. They did it hoping she'd make a big fucking stupid deal out of it for her mouthbreathy followers and oh, hey, look at that, suddenly somebody gives a flying fuck what Newsweek is doing again.

Would they treat a male presidential candidate like that? No, but the real sexism here is that the only female presidential candidates, the only female politicians, who get this kind of treatment are the ones they want to single out as nuts or movie stars.

There are lots and lots of hardworking, smart, interesting women in politics today. They're just not celebrities, not on the scale of Bachmann or Hillary (everybody's other favorite punching bag), and so not as worthy of attention.

It's not that they only treat female politicians with scorn. It's that they ignore the fucking club of the most of them until one opens her mouth and says shit so mind-blowingly stupid that Republicans in Iowa want her to be their president.

A.

Let's Do Anything Other Than Our Jobs!

American newspaper companies have decided that the real problem with their business is not that they're no longer covering things people care about, or covering them well, or spending their money and stewarding their resources responsible, but that there's just no new toy shiny enough to get people to read!

Via leinie:

Tribune aims to offer the tablet for free, or at a highly subsidized price, to people who agree to sign up for extended subscriptions to one of its papers and possibly a wireless-data plan with a partner cellular carrier, said five people briefed on the project.

 

The report states that this is the pet project of Eddy Hartenstein, Tribune’s chief executive, and they are working with manufacturing partners which may include Samsung.

As my Twitter crush Dan Sinker put it last night, noting that there were NO locally written Wisconsin recall stories on the Trib's web site until well into the election returns, despite the fact that you can chuck a rock from here and hit Kenosha, "Don't spend money developing a dead-end hardware device when you can't even get reporters 60 miles north."

Honestly. Is there anybody who doubts how this will go? A launch, some good sales numbers the first day or so, and then ... news comes out about the bugs, or the service sucks, or the thing can't be repaired or altered or played with or hacked or anything else geeks like to do with their toys, and also it's expensive, and nobody cares all that much, and then there will be like a six-month black hole followed by a bunch of bitchy stories about how kids today just don't want to pay for news.

It is getting so that it's a fucking drinking game, watching these people screw this up. And hey, it would be a lot of fun, getting drunk and mocking people, if we didn't actually need media fundamentally awake and aware and on top of stuff these days. It would be a really great game, if it wasn't a war. 

A.

Feel More Like London

Reading this tonight, via Kos, I was reminded of something Megan wrote some time back, about what happens to people when you continually tell them they're nothing: They start to believe you.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

Giving people who need assistance a stake in society doesn't just help individuals. It tethers people in, so that even if they don't have what you have, they see the value in what all of us have, and feel a part of things. This isn't charity. There is an actual benefit to me in creating a world that benefits you: It makes you less likely to SET ALL MY SHIT ON FIRE. God Almighty, what happens when you wall people up in their own little worlds and only venture there when something's broken? You give them incentive to break things.

A.

 

Who Needs Sources When You Have Angry Radio Dipshits?

How do you report an event? Maybe you could just open up your news broadcast to whatever knob can dial a phone and report, unverified, everything he says:

But of all the local media outlets, TMJ4 had the most interesting—and rash—approach to the story: printing nothing but testimonies from Newsradio 620 WTMJ callers. Here’s one of the more levelheaded:

“It was 100% racial,” claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran from St. Francis who says young people beat on his car.

“I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn't do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody's windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it.”

First of all, I don't know who was cruise director on the HMS Amateur Hour that night, but what the hell does his status as a veteran have to do with this? Does this make his "testimony" more trustworthy? Or do we just think serving in the military gives you a special edge when it comes to identifying black people?

Second of all, for those of you unfamiliar, NewsRadio 620 hosts fantastic broadcasts of Brewer games, and then a stream of "news" broadcasting that runs the gamut from smugly self-satisfied suburban fear-mongering to outright racist wingnuttery. Their callers are exactly who you think they are, even adjusted for the normal psycho shut-in percentage of talk radio listeners. 

So if I'm the cruise director here, I'm asking what in the blue fuck is so hard for the reporter to go out and interview some eyewitnesses to this apparently very violent event him- or herself, rather than sitting and listening to the radio and reporting on what various people who claim to be eyewitnesses have said after the fact. That way, there could be a story with actual sources, numbers, police report information, and other such quaint relics of a bygone era of journalism.

TODAY'S TMJ4 video shows West Allis police handcuffing at least one person, but they won't say how many people they took into custody.

Some witnesses described attacks on the State Fair Grounds as well.

Milwaukee Police said that their officers were sent to State Fair Park for "complaints of battery, fighting and property damage due to a large, unruly crowd."

A police sergeant told TODAY'S TMJ4's Melissa McCrady that the number of calls describing injuries are still coming in, so they could not give an accurate number of people who were injured.

That sergeant explained that some injuries were serious, and local hospitals were attending to the injured.

As of early Friday morning, Milwaukee Police said they had no one in custody.

Unanswered questions: WHY wouldn't West Allis police say how many people they arrested? And why was no one in custody Friday morning, if this was such a catastrophic event? Did everybody just sober up and go home? That doesn't sound like something you do after a OMG RACE WAR.

The Journal Sentinel cites "at least" 24 people being arrested.

This is the sort of story you start to recognize after a while. Like the Trench Coat Mafia bullshit, the Marilyn Manson crap that came out after Columbine. Like Jessica Lynch, like half the shit we thought we knew about most major disasters. Things move fast. I am not questioning that something happened here. I am questioning that running with the loudest nutjobs you can find who are claiming it was basically the Titanic out there might be a thing best done on day two, when everyone has sobered up.

Or you can just get some really quality conversation going before the ink's even dry on the police reports:

Alds. Bob Donovan and Joe Dudzik issued a joint statement in reaction to the violence: "Let's face it, it also has much to do with a deteriorating African American culture in our city. Are large groups of Hispanics or Hmong going out in large mobs and viciously attacking whites? No."

A.

Blogger Ethics Panel, Chicago CBS 2 Edition

If only the Internet hadn't ruined all journalism ethics ever.

A Chicago television station is being blasted by civil rights leaders and news media professionals for airing edited video of a 4-year-old boy that took his statements out of context, violating the basics of journalism ethics.

The Maynard Institute published a story on July 21 detailing how Chicago CBS station WBBM ran a story about the June 29 shooting of two teenagers in the Park Manor neighborhood.

A freelance photographer interviewed the youngster about whether the shooting frightened him. The station aired the portion of the interview in which the boy responded by saying he was not afraid and wanted his own gun.

However, it failed to air the portion of the child’s quote in which he said he wanted a gun because he planned to be a police officer.

Via Beachwood. Go read and then come back.

You know, let's for a moment pretend the quote WASN'T taken out of context, and the little boy did seriously believe the best way to protect himself was to get all armed up with an AK or whatever these privileged anchors assume he was talking about. Let's say that genuinely was his outlook, rather than a wish to be a police officer.

That's an indication of something deeply fucked up, not just with this kid but with the world around him. That's troubling, and depressing, not the least bit because it would be so understandable. So IF this kid really was talking about becoming a gang enforcer or something, is this really the response you'd want to give on the air?

The following is a transcript of what the station aired June 30th.

Boy: “I’m not scared of nothing.”

Reporter: “When you get older are you going to stay away from all these guns?”

Boy: “No.”

Reporter: “No? What are you going to do when you get older?”

Boy: “I’m going to have me a gun!”

Anchor Steve Bartelstein ended the story saying, “that was scary indeed.” Co-anchor Susan Carlson exclaimed, “hearing that little boy there, wow!”

Bolding mine. Yeah, it's scary. Scary that all you can come up with in the way of social commentary and editorial is "scary" and "wow!" This isn't a goddamn cartoon. You don't just get to watch this on your TV and flinch into your popcorn. Jesus.

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Did the AP Get Religion?

Were they visited by three ghosts or something?

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Thanks, Chris Matthews' Racist Uncle

You helped get us into this, you fuckers:

It's a simple fact that media empires are very costly to acquire, and, for that reason, there is a much greater danger that they become biased toward the interests of those people who can afford to purchase them.  Could it be any other way?  Our nation's economic survival is not a question of left vs. right. Media content that uses partisanship and social issues to make it look that way must be exposed for what it is: soap opera. The Debt-Ceiling Hostage Crisis is a professional wrestling marathon with a little more clothing, and a little less sincerity.

And tomorrow when all this is done, Republicans and Teawads will still rail against the Liberal Media, and Romenesko will still be full of exasperated defenses of the principles of journalism as if people cannot BELIEVE that these semi-pro victims and power-humpers don't respond to actual evidence before their actual eyes. We gave them everything, bent over backwards to do what they wanted, reported on this fake crisis as if it was a real crisis just like they told us to do in their press releases, so why do they hate us?

BECAUSE THEY DO. Because it's fun. Because it gives them a reason to get up in the morning. Because all their friends do. Because despite all this cutting, and all this anger, and all this capitulation, despite getting everything they want, THEY'LL WAKE UP TOMORROW STILL NOT KING AND WILL NEED SOMEONE TO BLAME FOR IT AND YOU'RE THERE. Just because, okay, because it's what they do, and after all this time I no longer blame them for doing it, I blame you for getting rolled.

And that goes double for Congressonial Democrats and our alleged Democratic president, who didn't have the stones to say okay, just shut it all down then, if that's what you want. The piece above talks about how Obama had no choice but to embrace this "ambush," which, um, fuck no. He had plenty of choices. They weren't popular and they weren't very good and probably some of them would end up doing some serious damage, but he had choices. Pretending we had no choice when we had nothing but is what got us into this mess as a country, and it cuts Obama and Reid slack for not having the balls to use whatever procedural tricks they had to use to get done what needed to get done.

(Apropos of that, I am kicking the next person who talks to me about civility in politics right in the dick.)

What is the endgame here? What did we save? We're now going nowhere slowly instead of fast, with cuts to Medicare, with mandates for more cuts to more programs people need, with agreement on the general principle that we can do anything to anybody so long as it isn't raising their taxes because THAT is the greatest evil we can think of. It's nothing less than a capitulation, the latest of many by Democrats, to the Republican economic strategy, and it's going to fix absolutely nothing.

I know, okay, financial system disaster if this hadn't happened, but we're already going to hell in a handcart. It's a little late to worry about grease on the rails.

Via kwhittman on Twitter.

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How Adorable

A NYT Magazine profile of James O'Keefe.

When the inevitable criticism hits, look for the defense that it was a cautionary tale, not a lionization, ignoring the fact that it's the prominence granted by such a story that's uncalled for. Let's make a list, shall we, of people who HAVEN'T been considered worthy of of such treatment.

Also this is rage-inducing:

“Undercover journalism goes back to at least the 1820s in this country,” says Brooke Kroeger, the director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, who has written a book on the subject, to be published next year. “And the use of hidden cameras to do it came into prominence after World War II.” Muckrakers, of course, are advocates, loved or despised according to the targets they choose. “For years, advocacy groups such as those for a better government have partnered with journalistic organizations,” Kroeger says. “Last year the Humane Society released an undercover video of the inhumane treatment of pigs in Virginia that got picked up by media around the country and won applause from animal lovers. Many of those same people vociferously went after O’Keefe for his exposé of NPR. It’s basically a question of what you care about and what side you are on.”

No, it's basically a question of whether the videos are edited deceptively and turn out to be total bullshit. But that wouldn't justify a scholarly position or a book deal, I suppose.

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Rupert Murdoch: Backdoor Man

I haven't had so much fun following a political scandal since Watergate. Holy crap, I just dated myself. The thing I *love* about the phone hacking scandal is that a major asshole is getting at least a partial comeuppance. Rupe won't be going on the dole any time soon but his hold over British politicians has been smashed to smithereens. What follows is my semi-informed analysis on this very entertaining scandal. I'm feeling summer ennui so I've dispensed with extensive hyperlinking but the best coverage can be found (where else?) at the Guardian's web site.

Rupe has been apologizing a lot this week but his"humble" act has been a crock of crocodile tears. It was made clear when he declined to take responsibility for anything done by the oily hacks at NOTW. Yeah, it's a big fucking company but it would make his apologies sound more sincere if he'd say "the buck stops here." Yo, Rupe it's the self made man thing to do: suck it up and move on, mate.

Murdoch the elder's synthetic humility is reminiscent of Uriah Heep: the Dickens character, not the band named for him. He's all unctuous right now but when the time comes to stick the shiv in, the old pirate will be back in character: he's Bill Sikes with big bucks. But as bad as Rupe is, he's at least an interesting character: James Murdoch comes off as an android with an MBA.

The action shifted on Tuesday to the House of Commons with a statement from the Posh Boy followed by 136, count 'em 136, questions from MPs. I watched it on live stream and he did reasonably well but his skin lacked its usual pink-ish color: it was gray and parchment like. His answers were smooth but evasive. He kinda, sorta admitted that hiring Murdoch henchman Andy Coulson was a bad idea but it was what Watergate creep, John Ehrlichmann, once described as a "modified limited hangout."

The story that's emerging is that in order to suck up adequately to Rupe, Cameron was advised to hire Andy Coulson as his communications director by Rebekah Brooks. It seems that tough old Ozzie Rupert disliked David Cameron and his Etonian school tie. On a personal level, Rupe preferred gruff and cantakerous Gordon Brown so the Posh Boy let Rupe have his way with him. I doubt that it was necessary: the UK Murdoch press' politics have been characterized by opportunism, they were likely to switch to the Tories in any event. Cameron's arse kissing has him eating shit right now. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Labour party leader Ed Miliband has had the best two weeks of his tenure. There's was a lot of criticism of young Miliband's early days as leader but he appears to have hit his stride. If nothing else, Labour was wise to skip a generation and go with a leader who has had minimal dealings with the Murdoch press. Like the GOP during Watergate, the Tories have been working the "everybody does it" angle but it's not working as well as expected.

The other leader who appears a bit unsteady at this point is Cameron's Deputy PM, the Liberal Democrats' leader Nick Clegg. The Tories' junior partners have taken a hammering from their own supporters over severe government spending cuts that the Lib Dems pledged to mitigate but largely have not. This would be an opportune moment for Clegg to pull the plug on the coalition and force Cameron to govern with a parliamentary minority. It would be the politically wise thing for the Lib Dems to quit the govenment BUT it looks unlikely unless much more shit hits the fan. Why? Clegg is a classic goo goo who puts process above politics and even policy. I expect him to eventually say: "We promised to stay the course for 5 years and we will honor our word." The coalition is looking more and more like a suicide pact for the Lib Dems but Clegg is unlikely to seize this chance to remove the straight razor from his party's throat. Stiff upper lip and all that shit...

Time to circle round to the post title: Murdoch's revelation that not only has he been a frequent vistor to 10 Downing Street but that he always enters via the back door. It seems to be an apt metaphor: Rupe and his minions have been administering a right buggering to Britain's political class, which of course rhymes with you know what...

I'm sure other shoes will drop in this scandal including here in the US & A. I'll, however, leave that for another day and let Willie Dixon via Jim Morrison have the last word:

 

Associated Press to Start Doing What They Sue Bloggers for Doing

Crediting other news organizations for their reporting? Admitting that they didn't just invent everything they send out over the wires? LINKING TO STUFF???!

SHUT UP.

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Suck It, WI Teawads

The first of the Democratic senators up for recall is retained, soundly.

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