They can pull media's leg until it falls off

Every bunko artist counts 

on the victim to help make the con.

The hoax as a media phenomenon has been around a long time.

Damn MSNBC for falling for an election campaign scam. But don’t guilt the cable guys into thinking such things have never been done before.
A guy came into a newsroom where I once worked. He had some highly credible story. It relied on every newspaper’s drive to break a big news story.
In other words our own newshound tendency outweighed the actual facts.
Every bunko artist counts on the victim to help make the con.
His tale relied on him and him alone. He nimbly turned aside every attempt to identify someone who could collaborate. But we could trust him, he said, and wasn’t he standing right there in front of us?
He’d even be willing to stay in town — at our expense — until we published the expose. That way we could hold him accountable.
Asking for financial backing of course was his undoing.
All I had to do was Xerox his fake driver license and fax it to “the authorities,” I told him. That convinced our confidence man to skedaddle.
Election facts and myths flew helter-skelter before the Barack Obama election punctuated it all. A blog and false identity were behind a wavelet of deception about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She supposedly didn’t know Africa is a continent, according to a claimed leak inside the John McCain presidential camp.
When so much was being said bizarrely and so much being supposed imaginatively about the VP candidate to nowhere, you can palpably feel the drive to go on air without verification.
The New York Times parsed the fraud ever so gingerly a week later. The Times wasn’t so absolutely sure the explanation of the prank wasn’t a deception too. Remember the old Mad Magazine’s spy vs. spy?
If it’s to be believed, two “obscure filmmakers,” the newspaper said, concocted the ruse with a Web site connected to a fictitious think tank.
The tricksters earlier had gulled The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
In another exercise in sophomore humor, someone printed a spoof of The New York Times announcing the end of the war in Iraq.
Ask it. You’re already thinking it: Is truth no longer sacred?
Never was. Never will be. That’s the answer to that.
The ruse we have with us always.
The age of the blog, of the hack, of the wannabe triply guarantee it.
Sometimes it’s for laughs. Sometimes it’s for ego. Sometimes it’s for money.
The continental Palin sting was supposed to help pitch a television script concept.
But I suspect there’s something in the head of some people who’d find an excuse to put one over on media types anyway.
We’re asking for it all the time. Because we value an exclusive break on a big story more than we do waiting for the driver i.d. on the swindler to show up bogus.
The only antidote to the practical joke is fact checking every item broadcast, published and digitalized.
Do I think the media will adopt the absolute cure absolutely?
Nope. That you can bank on.

A license to dance

Sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.

The First Amendment makes a lovely invitation to the journalism ball.

Ask any dancer in the professional news business.
Trouble is, that same person can be a positive busybody about anyone else’s call to be a self-styled journalist.
I’m a constitutional purist about free expression, declared retired Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie last week. He said government shouldn’t license journalists.
But it was no more than a few minutes later in his speech at the Nieman Foundation for Journalists at Harvard. Downie said Lou Dobbs shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast his CNN news program because of his notorious stand against immigration.
Time and again prominent news executives do this two-step. No one can tell them how to behave journalistically. But they would deny symbolic licenses to other practitioners.
Hypocrisy trips merrily at a faster pace in the current splintering of the information industry. Print, cable, online and broadcast standards dance to different sheet music in which a main step is finger pointing at the professional practices of other dancers on the floor.
The boogie beat of citizen journalism especially drives the foxtrot crowd of mainstream media into digital harrumph.
Look, it’s like this: Journalism is either free of interference or it isn’t.
I prefer free.
If you enforce standards of practice for the street dancers, you have to do the same in the ornate ballrooms of news too.
It happens that quite a few amateurs trip themselves up in their own private Roselands. That stumblebum effect is supposed to lower the public’s opinion of all journalists. Such bad ethics shouldn’t be allowed, sniff the slow-dancers.
Yes, well, their disdain takes for granted public opinion of journalism could get much lower.
It’s just as likely the public will award the trophy to seasoned, sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.
The marketplace of public opinion is licenser enough.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter. Not when you play the constitutional music of the law of the land.
You’ve got to open the floor to the trip-foot amateur and the rowdy intruder if they want to go dancing with the stars.

When are the Middle Ages relevant to our own times? When a journalist presents them

World Without End 

A book by Ken Follett

New American Library, 2008, 1,014 pages, $22 paperback

There’s something about the Middle Ages.
Think about our time. Think about their time. You can recognize the people, know them, feel with them.
The peopling inside the literary construction of World Without End, though, is not done with your neat beginning-middle-end storyline. The plot sprawls from England to the Battle of Crecy to Florence and back via Avignon, Chartres and Paris.
Ken Follett is a former journalist with a journalist’s mindset. Journalists should read him even as a writer of fiction.
A storyteller is a storyteller.
He’s an international writer of modern suspense thriller-dillers. Except when he isn’t.
His previous exception is the renowned Pillars of the Earth. That epic sends a wonder-of-the-age cathedral soaring skyward in countryside England during the 12th century, because a prior and his monastery peer wonderfully out from medieval gloom
Religious and most other institutions two centuries later lose the light or can’t yet find their way forward in this sequel.
But a hodgepodge of children in the World grow up around a secret and come into their own by their mature years, each in his or her own way. Well, some do fall by the wayside.
The characters remind you of the All Saints’ Day hymn brightening this time of year: “I sing a song of the saints of God…and one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green...and one was a soldier, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast…for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”
Can’t identify with the 14th century? Picture yourself in a Brueghel painting. You see a familiar populated-landscape, not a distant portrait
Fall in line with Chaucer’s pilgrims marching off to Canterbury. You’ll know the way figuratively.
Or share stories while hiding from the plague with Boccaccio’s characters in The Decameron. Even the ribaldry will seem familiar.
Expect to compare the economic threat of our time, the lack of confidence in government and the demand for creative self-reliance.
Examine the peril of infants, the challenges of childhood and the sometime brutishness of old age.
Notice both eras are super-religious and steadfastly profane at the same time. Churches ever seek reformation while the irreligious constantly stimulate a renascence in art, science and trade.
We hold in common our foreign wars, more appealing to heads of state than to us plain folk. Then and now, government can grow overbearing.
And there’s the Black Death, the great antagonist in World Without End. We have AIDS but also cancer, heart disease and diabetes –– more pronounced because of our life span and life habit.
Technology sets us apart from our ancestors, not our daily and mortal lives. Even so the engineering solutions in the cathedral town of Follett’s Knightsbridge inspire us.
At its length this is a lifestyle more than a book. So it should be.
We’re not reading about a distant time, a distant place, a distant folk. We’re experiencing ourselves through a novel.
So easily could we be medieval.

Yes! Okay. Joe's more sure now than before

Promises to Keep, On Life and Politics
A book by Joe Biden
Random House, 2007, 365 pages

“Are we going to be okay?”
A woman in Dubuque asks Joe Biden the question on all our minds.
He surely has been hearing the country’s anxiety a lot on the campaign trail. Biden is the running mate of Barack Obama on the Democratic presidential ticket leading as the nation goes to vote today.

Say what you will about the always angry, fearful, extended campaigns. They expose our next officeholders to the national mood, the mind of the nation, the emotions we all feel.
But we need a book such as Promises to peer through political feelings into personal poetry within our collective fate. Even so public a figure as Biden otherwise gets eclipsed as a real person by White House elections.
This time around we are united in apprehension but not much else.
Without economic security, we have no national security –– at home or abroad.
Without confidence, we are not America. Not really. Not as we all know and love her.
Sen. Biden’s personal and political autobiography couldn’t come at a better time. Clearly the original intent is support of his own presidential campaign. No matter. We still need to know the heart of the likely next vice president.
It’s sound.
We know this man. Oh, he’s from Delaware, not necessarily the center of our universe.
Still, he’s made of our kind of stuff –– a good student when he applies himself, not a great one. A good thinker with strong feelings, not an arrogant and cold person. A self-made middle class product of genteel poverty, not a rich man’s son.
And he earns our respect for national legislation to support cops and protect women.
He’s the guy who stops Bork-like mistakes on the Supreme Court and green lights good judge nominees.
He’s the conscience behind stopping the Balkan bloodbath. He’s the guy who stands in line with GIs for a turn at a bucket bath in Afghanistan when there’s no running water. He’s the origin of good ideas about bad futures in Iraq.
Joe Biden also is a man of tragedy. Word comes of his first wife’s death and of their daughter’s and of the fearful injuries to two sons in a car wreck while he is not yet sworn in as one of the youngest U.S. Senators ever elected.
He is the survivor of aneurisms.
Politically he is the survivor of his own mistakes, misjudgments and misstatements.
The thing about survivors is not what happens to them or what they do wrong. It’s how they press on, how they learn from their past and –– as with Joe Biden –– how they build a new family life and a fresh public life.
This book’s title is a Robert Frost line ideal for a politician. The next two lines are perfect for a nation pausing in mid-destiny as we are: “And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.”
Biden poetically reminds us we hold dear the values of compassion, honesty, integrity of thought, generosity, freedom and hope on our national journey.
So the very last words Promises to Keep addresses to us and to the woman in Dubuque is, “We’ll be okay.”

The incurious rush to save mortgages

Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions. . .Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.

What’s the point of journalism, if not to ask questions?
The Media delved into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaskan past. Her Republican presidential running mate complained about the background check. And that political tactic now seems stronger than journalistic curiosity.
The reportage wanes as the Palin phenomenon waxes stronger.
Reporters also seem to have used up their quota of inquiry on politics just when we need answers about economic issues..
They need to ask if Americans really want Uncle Sam as a landlord.
The case for Treasury takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sure seems compelling.
The Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation are a mess. Heads had to roll along with any other cliché that would clean up the government-sponsored secondary home mortgage market.
We don’t yet know for sure if the debacle in the total pubic and private securitized loan market will bring down the American economy.
So the government had to reform the two federally backed agencies that own half the mortgages in the nation.
But insuring the market is different from owning it.
We have just socialized mortgages in this country.
And the Press is asking fewer questions than about The Bridge to Nowhere that connects falsehood with Gov. Palin’s claim to reform public works.
For decades we’ve resisted socialized medicine.
Even now Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential candidate, campaigns against letting a federal bureaucrat stand between my doctor and me.
So why would I want a government clerk overseeing where I lay me down to sleep?
That’s neither a conservative nor a liberal question. It’s something sensible for The Press to ask as surrogate for ordinary, everyday folk.
Yes. Something had to be done about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. And quick.
The swift and sure government action, however, has the look of forever about it.
Why isn’t there a sunset provision built into the takeover? Then the government could fix the problem and get out of the mortgage business, returning it to private or quasi-private enterprise.
But the business pages and Wall Street programs on TV aren’t asking that question.
Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions.
Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.

Words can be a poor path to remembrance

I’m afraid I don’t know what point the military officer was trying to make.

Symbols communicate better then words.
The barrel-down M-16 topped with helmet and dangling dog tags has become the universal soldier’s memorial.
Add GI boots and a fireman’s helmet and a peace officer’s Smokey Bear hat. You’ve created the War on Terror altar saluted and prayed over and flag-decorated all over the land on Sept. 11
The display is affecting.
I went to a ceremony on a college campus where the ROTC brigade prepared the parade field. So effective were the symbols, silence would have been better than the words that were spoken.
The cadet commander read remarks badly in need of a copyeditor. I wanted to tell him it’s okay for student soldiers to use good grammar.
Then spoke the Army lieutenant colonel who is professor of military science. Nestled among the platitudes was a statement that no foreign power had occupied American soil.
He must not have known about the War of 1812 – its Battle of New Orleans. . . the burning of the White House. . .Dolley Madison.
Francis Scott Key wrote one of our enduring symbols during that war, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The anthem describes the British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor.
I’d be inclined to include Pancho Villa’s Mexican incursion in the American Southwest as an invasion. Our Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing thought so, sharpening his troops before World War I.
The colonel might have recalled the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands in our era’s World War II.
Or German U-boat forays into our territorial waters.
And Pearl Harbor wasn’t an occupation but might as well have been.
Like our 9/11 it was nation changing.
I’m afraid I don’t know what point the military officer was trying to make.
There’s no shame in being invaded or even occupied – only, perhaps, in failing to repulse.
Actions speak loudly and clearly and unambiguously.
Like symbols.

Narrative journalism can make some sense of humanity's senseless disasters

F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century
By Mark Levine
Hyperion, 2007, 307 pp., $25.95

We know storms, we Southerners. Violent weather writes large in family Bibles.
Hurricane Gustav bears down on Breaux Bridge, La. as I write these words. We wait word our son’s family is safe there.
Our storm child once lived through the worst tornado outbreak in memory. He was 18 months old on that date, April 3, 1974 – in Hillsboro, Ala. for his doting grandmother’s birthday.
Today we’re swapping text messages to stay in touch. But 34 years ago I have to wait hours to learn the safety of my child and his mother, visiting the Lawrence County farmhouse she grew up in.
I suffer separation guilt even now, stuck as I was in Washington, D.C. as a correspondent. Finally I learn Granddaddy covers my little family with mattresses and pillows and stands watch as tornadoes dance their deadly hoedown.
Before the twisted ballet finishes 17 hours later, 148 funnels click their heels in 13 states and a province of Canada. Their paths add up to 2,584 miles. The dead number 335 souls, the injured 6,000 people and the damaged property $600 million for 25,000 families.
It all starts over my own family. But the most devastated Alabama region lies just to their north, across the Tennessee River, in Limestone County.
Mark Levine describes the devastation like a novelist. Or with the quality of Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm. Or Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Narrative journalism makes sense of disaster, roughly a Greek derivation for “losing your lucky star,” Levine writes.
He pursues his story of the “superoutbreak” through the memories of survivors: In a moment your life changes. It’s that sudden…You don’t know why it happened to you and not someone else. And since it happened to you, why did you survive it? Others didn’t.
The Alabamians who fill his book are people you know. They are people you care about. They are people of the whole family of humankind, more subject to disaster than we care to think about.
The science of severe weather grounds the narrative, told through the quirky tale of a Japanese physicist, Tatsuya Fujita. As an immigrant to the young science of meteorology in America, “Mr. Tornado” creates our “Richter Scale” for storms. So “F5” means winds above 261 miles per hour on “The Fujita Scale” of intensity.
Fujita determines Limestone suffered “incredible” winds up to 318 mph.
The year 1974, Levine reminds us, produces streaking at the Oscars when The Sting wins. Evel Knievel plans a rocket ride across a mile-wide canyon in Idaho. A French daredevil crosses twin towers of the new World Trade Center on a cable.
It’s odd the author omits the context of legislation the storm system inspires. Since I covered Kentucky issues for The Courier-Journal, I stand in the Oval Office when the also star-crossed President Nixon signs the Disaster Relief Act of 1974.
Louisville took terrible hits from nature’s April 4 attack, backgrounding my story.
My own family stories of storm survival still ground me as a Southerner. As an American. As a human.