Something there is that doesn't like secrecy in government.
Democracy. That's what.
Journalism in its moments of freedom can be the strong right arm of government by the people, for the people and of the people.
The other strong arm is a standing army under civilian control.
The result: Conflict, thy name is warrior vs. journalist.
Soldiers have a fundamental right of secrecy to protect their own lives from disclosure of troop movements, tactical strikes before they happen and critical knowledge that would give aid and comfort to an enemy.
Reporters have a fundamental need and right to transmit a broad picture of the battlefield so people will know what their citizen-soldiers are up to and up against.
The proper balance between the competing values of a warring democracy seems intact after a huge test disclosing government secrets from the interminable war in Afghanistan.
We are hearing the predictable screams about lack of patriotism by leakers of secrets.
When values of military good order and the citizen right to know collide, however, you can make a case that it's honorable to publish -- as long as no one gets hurt.
The publication of -- how many? -- 92,000 low-level classified documents from the war in Afghanistan makes me feel better about our balanced freedoms.
The same act must set teeth on edge in the Pentagon.
The price of democracy is bruxism by the generals.
The military-political complex responded to the document disclosure by WikiLeaks in the predictable, quaint way of the past.
"Nothing new...old stuff...threat to national security...could endanger soldiers."
Yeah, well, if the information is obsolete, how can it endanger anyone?
Disclosure provides the Taliban an enemies list, officials say.
Pardon?
You mean to tell me the enemy needs our help to list victims for ambush and assassination and roadside bombs all on its own?
WikiLeaks withheld 15,000 documents until it could redact names of individuals whose lives really could be endangered.
Critics also said the information didn't advance the public debate abut the war. Their point is the benefit didn't outweigh the danger of disclosing stolen secrets.
Actually, we've never had as good a look at the war and the rationale for or against prolonging it still further. That's partly because disclosure coincided with a congressional vote on continued war funding. The leaked secrets proved their worth by that timing alone.
The reporting lacked credibility, another complaint goes, because official sources didn't approve the release of information.
Yeah, well, government never was going to reveal what the leakers did. And Washington itself doesn't enjoy credibility with the people. Too many secrets!
The New York Times, which along with The Guardian in England and Der Spiegel in Germany had a head start on parsing over the secrecy archive, verified information in the trove with its own reporting for the sake of credibility.
Still, a whistle-blowing competitor labeled WikiLeaks an "information vandal."
That's a really nice phrase someone manufactured there. But "information rebel" seems more to the point.
If we're to make our way democratically in this time of information revolution, we'll need more data patriots to do their jobs.
"All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people," The Times quotes the WikiLeaks.org website.
"We believe this scrutiny requires information."
War ordinarily demands secrecy.
But Afghanistan is our longest conflict ever without solid purpose, goals or resolution.
We've waged it with both of our good, democratic arms tied behind our back: It's not the people's war they know enough to understand or to support, and their military mightily labors against treacherous allies who aid the furtive enemy on uncertain moral and geophysical terrain.
We've been climbing the Hindu Kush with a backpack full of dead weight and an ammo pouch filled with rocks.
The transparency WikiLeaks and the cooperating news media strive for should actually help the cause by opening the eyes of Americans. Their involvement then could aid the prosecution of the war or hasten withdrawal.
Resolution at last! One way or another.
Quit grinding your teeth, generals. The armed forces are better off either way.
Oh, it's irksome to government for documents to be compromised -- possibly by a PFC under suspicion. A private first class? Really!
Logic inquires who bears the greater blame -- the leaker or the officials who preside over such a readily compromised treasury of secrets.
The degree of official pique over the publication is a measure of Washington's distance from its own democratic roots.
We have a need to know, we the people do. And government has a need for our informed consent of its wars, if conflicts are to be won.
"Beware the fury of an aroused democracy," Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the Nazis in 1942. Ike presided over the secrecy of D-Day to our great joy and success in World War II. But he knew enough to cultivate media so the home front would fall in step behind the military push.
Freedom feeds on disclosure. Oddly, so does war when waged by a people aroused by information.
The equation of secrecy and disclosure balances itself out in a healthy democracy.
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Get camera. Make documentary. Be a journalist.
Documentary film is in.
Reality storytelling is all over HBO, Hulu, Netflix and Redbox.
(What wonderful names we have for our new-style movie distributors! Makes you wonder what would happen if newspapers had catchy names more with the present media age!)
Sundance and filmfests that wish they were Sundance feature documentaries alongside fictional films. The corollary is book publishing where houses are saying new taste turns to non-fiction over fiction.
Narrative non-fiction in book length is some of the best journalism around.
Documentarians who use film to produce journalism deserve the same respect.
Michael Moore, the polemicist filmmaker, doesn't always get a lot of respect because of his ambush interview technique. He gets called names by the executive class of companies and government. They consider themselves his victim more than subject. In truth they make themselves into Moore's camera fodder.
A lot of people chafe under the treatment they get from CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" too. But no denies Morley Safer and Mike Wallace are journalists.
Ken Burns may look like a history documentarian. But his topics -- civil rights, baseball, the national parks -- have an edginess that comes with a point to be made by a journalist.
One weird way to be sure if a media producer is a journalist is to look in federal court.
Joe Berlinger thinks he won a First Amendment ruling on outtakes to his film, "Crude."
Chevron wanted all his unused footage from the documentary about that company's legal fight with Ecuadoreans who allege an oilfield contaminated their water.
Berlinger will have to give up some but not all his film Chevron originally sought from his cutting-room floor. He'll have to meet the legal standard all journalists can face of surrendering material necessary to administer justice in a court of law.
The court by extension established this documentary filmmaker is an investigative journalist as surely as one employed by a newspaper or network in old media days.
Berlinger won the courtroom concession to stand in journalism's ranks by the way he partially won and partially lost the case over what journalists want to think are sacred but are not necessarily -- their notes.
The media industry likes to say it's hard to tell exactly who is a journalist in these new media days. People who believe they control or at least speak for the industry want to control who can be in it.
Like an over-controlling parent, naturally, they are losing control.
With an implied journalism license issued by central-control figures such as media execs and narrow minded journalism practitioners, perhaps not everyone deserves the benefit of the First Amendment, goes that unfortunate logic.
But every citizen does deserve the protection of freedom of expression.
This digital age makes any person with a camera and a computer into a citizen journalist with equal opportunity to be discovered on YouTube if not HBO, Hulu, Netflix and Redbox via Sundance and all the rest.
We all may become documentarians in this ComRev as I call the communication revolution.
In that case we will all be journalists with the same right of free of expression some would reserve only to themselves.
The whole concept sounds as though it would make a good documentary film.
Documentaries are in, you know.
Reality storytelling is all over HBO, Hulu, Netflix and Redbox.
(What wonderful names we have for our new-style movie distributors! Makes you wonder what would happen if newspapers had catchy names more with the present media age!)
Sundance and filmfests that wish they were Sundance feature documentaries alongside fictional films. The corollary is book publishing where houses are saying new taste turns to non-fiction over fiction.
Narrative non-fiction in book length is some of the best journalism around.
Documentarians who use film to produce journalism deserve the same respect.
Michael Moore, the polemicist filmmaker, doesn't always get a lot of respect because of his ambush interview technique. He gets called names by the executive class of companies and government. They consider themselves his victim more than subject. In truth they make themselves into Moore's camera fodder.
A lot of people chafe under the treatment they get from CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" too. But no denies Morley Safer and Mike Wallace are journalists.
Ken Burns may look like a history documentarian. But his topics -- civil rights, baseball, the national parks -- have an edginess that comes with a point to be made by a journalist.
One weird way to be sure if a media producer is a journalist is to look in federal court.
Joe Berlinger thinks he won a First Amendment ruling on outtakes to his film, "Crude."
Chevron wanted all his unused footage from the documentary about that company's legal fight with Ecuadoreans who allege an oilfield contaminated their water.
Berlinger will have to give up some but not all his film Chevron originally sought from his cutting-room floor. He'll have to meet the legal standard all journalists can face of surrendering material necessary to administer justice in a court of law.
The court by extension established this documentary filmmaker is an investigative journalist as surely as one employed by a newspaper or network in old media days.
Berlinger won the courtroom concession to stand in journalism's ranks by the way he partially won and partially lost the case over what journalists want to think are sacred but are not necessarily -- their notes.
The media industry likes to say it's hard to tell exactly who is a journalist in these new media days. People who believe they control or at least speak for the industry want to control who can be in it.
Like an over-controlling parent, naturally, they are losing control.
With an implied journalism license issued by central-control figures such as media execs and narrow minded journalism practitioners, perhaps not everyone deserves the benefit of the First Amendment, goes that unfortunate logic.
But every citizen does deserve the protection of freedom of expression.
This digital age makes any person with a camera and a computer into a citizen journalist with equal opportunity to be discovered on YouTube if not HBO, Hulu, Netflix and Redbox via Sundance and all the rest.
We all may become documentarians in this ComRev as I call the communication revolution.
In that case we will all be journalists with the same right of free of expression some would reserve only to themselves.
The whole concept sounds as though it would make a good documentary film.
Documentaries are in, you know.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Classic lit for soldiers, football players and journalists
British boys schools and American military academies assign Homer as must-reading for plebs.
Soft young minds need the bloody joint-crunching of the Trojan War to juice up the impulse to wage war for queen and country or for flag and country.
Classical literature stands as the best military field manual ever written. How violent is the species human. Always has been.
Hand-to-hand combat starts in the mind that transforms what otherwise would be the anti-romantic, organized maiming of enemies into socially acceptable pretense of civility.
War is what Carl von Clausewitz called diplomacy by other means. How politically correct-sounding.
The NFL is gladiator society that will do until we next demonize another foreign enemy and set upon him with spear or pike or bayonet.
We have to be taught to hate, says a line in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Nah.
We have to be taught to transform hatred into battle and to settle between wars for their somewhat milder alternative, American football.
All the tactics and strategy and attempts to intellectualize the game -- or the battlefield -- cover up the effort to hurt the other guy before he can hurt you.
So I'd simply give freshmen and cadets chapter one of The Blind Side by narrative journalist Michael Lewis.
Journalists should read the passage to see the less banal side of sports and to envy the style of the writer. His timing and controlled release of information condenses the violence of pay-for-view bone-breaking into 12 white-knuckle pages.
They begin: "From the snap of the ball to the snap of of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five."
And the opening is prelude only -- a back story of how the left tackle position evolved to fend off the bonecrusher Lawrence Taylor and his imitators coming after quarterbacks. By extension the account explains how Michael Oher rose from impoverished obscurity to protect the blind side of his own Achilles every Sunday.
Everyone knows the book, because they saw Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock in the soft and sweet movie.
The flick is good. But the more serious, blood-spurting book is great narrative journalism (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009, ppb., 339 pages, $13.95), the kind that explains what you didn't know enough to ask about.
Oh, the ancient Homer is stick-to-the-ribs more filling as a writer.
But for bustin' up those ribs and teaching soldiers to soldier and players to play and writers to narrate, Michael Lewis produces a modern classic in war, uh, ahem, sports journalism
Soft young minds need the bloody joint-crunching of the Trojan War to juice up the impulse to wage war for queen and country or for flag and country.
Classical literature stands as the best military field manual ever written. How violent is the species human. Always has been.
Hand-to-hand combat starts in the mind that transforms what otherwise would be the anti-romantic, organized maiming of enemies into socially acceptable pretense of civility.
War is what Carl von Clausewitz called diplomacy by other means. How politically correct-sounding.
The NFL is gladiator society that will do until we next demonize another foreign enemy and set upon him with spear or pike or bayonet.
We have to be taught to hate, says a line in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Nah.
We have to be taught to transform hatred into battle and to settle between wars for their somewhat milder alternative, American football.
All the tactics and strategy and attempts to intellectualize the game -- or the battlefield -- cover up the effort to hurt the other guy before he can hurt you.
So I'd simply give freshmen and cadets chapter one of The Blind Side by narrative journalist Michael Lewis.
Journalists should read the passage to see the less banal side of sports and to envy the style of the writer. His timing and controlled release of information condenses the violence of pay-for-view bone-breaking into 12 white-knuckle pages.
They begin: "From the snap of the ball to the snap of of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five."
And the opening is prelude only -- a back story of how the left tackle position evolved to fend off the bonecrusher Lawrence Taylor and his imitators coming after quarterbacks. By extension the account explains how Michael Oher rose from impoverished obscurity to protect the blind side of his own Achilles every Sunday.
Everyone knows the book, because they saw Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock in the soft and sweet movie.
The flick is good. But the more serious, blood-spurting book is great narrative journalism (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009, ppb., 339 pages, $13.95), the kind that explains what you didn't know enough to ask about.
Oh, the ancient Homer is stick-to-the-ribs more filling as a writer.
But for bustin' up those ribs and teaching soldiers to soldier and players to play and writers to narrate, Michael Lewis produces a modern classic in war, uh, ahem, sports journalism
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Bias behind the gusher in the Gulf is the people's call
Look out for the language. The spoken tongue ends in a sharp point.
Listen to what we call the environmental catastrophe of our time.
We might have had "The Gulf Oil Spill."
Or we could have named it "The Deepwater Horizon Spill."
I'm wistful about "The Dick Cheney Oil De-reg Spill."
Based on a recent book, there's the "Why We Hate Oil Companies Spill."
But the judge-and-jury vernacular favors "The BP Oil Spill" over alternative, generalized, non-directed names.
Why raise the issue? Because with the name goes the liability. All of it.
Other terms recede. Increasingly the company that bears the blame also bears the label like a smear of crude.
You can't merely and evenhandedly suggest BP "may" be the responsible party, because British Petroleum lends its name to reckless ir-responsibility. That pointedly is as mild as descriptions get.
So "BP Oil Spill" pronounces accusation like an indictment from a grand jury composed of the whole country.
Lawyers will coat those waters like a five-state oil slick the BP Spill has become.
Court cases aplenty will try to escape spending the last farthing on clean-up.
PR image manipulators will try to convince reporters to find an alternative to the virtual trademark with its informal corporate logo, the oil-covered pelican.
Media will profess lack of bias.
But there is a prejudice, undeniably. The public made up its mind and rendered a verdict journalism conveys in what we call this disaster: "The BP Oil Spill."
It's not merely a plain and simple accident. Not an industry mishap. Not a failure by the consortium at the wellhead. Not the fault of negligent regulators -- although ironically it's all those things too.
"The BP Oil Spill." That's what it is.
The people speak.
Listen to what we call the environmental catastrophe of our time.
We might have had "The Gulf Oil Spill."
Or we could have named it "The Deepwater Horizon Spill."
I'm wistful about "The Dick Cheney Oil De-reg Spill."
Based on a recent book, there's the "Why We Hate Oil Companies Spill."
But the judge-and-jury vernacular favors "The BP Oil Spill" over alternative, generalized, non-directed names.
Why raise the issue? Because with the name goes the liability. All of it.
Other terms recede. Increasingly the company that bears the blame also bears the label like a smear of crude.
You can't merely and evenhandedly suggest BP "may" be the responsible party, because British Petroleum lends its name to reckless ir-responsibility. That pointedly is as mild as descriptions get.
So "BP Oil Spill" pronounces accusation like an indictment from a grand jury composed of the whole country.
Lawyers will coat those waters like a five-state oil slick the BP Spill has become.
Court cases aplenty will try to escape spending the last farthing on clean-up.
PR image manipulators will try to convince reporters to find an alternative to the virtual trademark with its informal corporate logo, the oil-covered pelican.
Media will profess lack of bias.
But there is a prejudice, undeniably. The public made up its mind and rendered a verdict journalism conveys in what we call this disaster: "The BP Oil Spill."
It's not merely a plain and simple accident. Not an industry mishap. Not a failure by the consortium at the wellhead. Not the fault of negligent regulators -- although ironically it's all those things too.
"The BP Oil Spill." That's what it is.
The people speak.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
The untold story of this GD economy
The first rough-draft of history can't read the picture of our times.
You didn't have to live through the Great Depression to write a chronicle of repetition.
First there was the financial crisis as President Obama entered office. And by "crisis" I don't mean a market downturn. The system failed. Completely.
As in 1929 we were so-o-o-o close to losing the nation.
The Hoover-like Bush-Cheney administration set us up: Regulation went big bye-bye, tax policy transformed surplus into deficit with the rich getting richer and the rest getting poorer and the oil industry, the most subsidized business in America, received corporate freedom to slash and burn for profit -- greed in the name of capitalism.
Hoover lives!
The new administration strives mightily in the Spirit of FDR. But the White House is up against the same throwback forces that made the GD (Great Depression) economy worse than it had to be.
Republican Party and Libertarian ideology prevail to prevent stimulus spending.
The one time a government should spend money it doesn't have is during an economy as slow to move as a politician in an election year.
But the conservatives who want Obama and Democrats out for partisan reasons are saving our way into deeper financial disaster.
It all happened before. We never learn.
No wonder this emotional nation feels a world class downer of frustration trending to grief -- the blues, a second, essential, psychological part of an economic depression.
Element three is the reflection in nature.
The 1930s had the Dust Bowl.
We have the BP Oil Spill.
Don't you dare dismiss the Gulf crisis as a regional problem. The biblical plague of our times trashes lives, finances and well-being directly or indirectly in a threat to life as we know it from sea to shining.
The impact may be less obvious in circles farther from the epicenter. But energy policy, environmental policy, economic policy, public policy, political palaver will all reflect the humanitarian catastrophe.
Americans who don't have out-of-pocket losses nevertheless will experience a looser grip on nationhood.
Black humor, itself an oil pun, may chortle about high-test seafood but is really a cry from the heart.
That's Great Depression material.
How amazing journalism hasn't pieced the picture together.
Too busy covering press conferences, placing anchors on oily beaches and covering the trivia of a BP executive's yacht race and other PR gaffes.
Charter boat captains, coastal politicians and washaterias for pelicans get some coverage.
Yet no one covering the Fed in Washington, the markets in New York or the boom shortage in Biloxi has taken the holistic view of economic life from shore to board room to living room.
Maybe when the out-migration of Gulfies matches the Grapes of Wrath era of Okies we'll see the Dorothea Lange images and the John Steinbeck narratives and the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. reminders of the cycles of history in endless repetition.
Artists and historians again will have to compensate for journalism's failure. Another missed opportunity.
And that's too GD bad.
You didn't have to live through the Great Depression to write a chronicle of repetition.
First there was the financial crisis as President Obama entered office. And by "crisis" I don't mean a market downturn. The system failed. Completely.
As in 1929 we were so-o-o-o close to losing the nation.
The Hoover-like Bush-Cheney administration set us up: Regulation went big bye-bye, tax policy transformed surplus into deficit with the rich getting richer and the rest getting poorer and the oil industry, the most subsidized business in America, received corporate freedom to slash and burn for profit -- greed in the name of capitalism.
Hoover lives!
The new administration strives mightily in the Spirit of FDR. But the White House is up against the same throwback forces that made the GD (Great Depression) economy worse than it had to be.
Republican Party and Libertarian ideology prevail to prevent stimulus spending.
The one time a government should spend money it doesn't have is during an economy as slow to move as a politician in an election year.
But the conservatives who want Obama and Democrats out for partisan reasons are saving our way into deeper financial disaster.
It all happened before. We never learn.
No wonder this emotional nation feels a world class downer of frustration trending to grief -- the blues, a second, essential, psychological part of an economic depression.
Element three is the reflection in nature.
The 1930s had the Dust Bowl.
We have the BP Oil Spill.
Don't you dare dismiss the Gulf crisis as a regional problem. The biblical plague of our times trashes lives, finances and well-being directly or indirectly in a threat to life as we know it from sea to shining.
The impact may be less obvious in circles farther from the epicenter. But energy policy, environmental policy, economic policy, public policy, political palaver will all reflect the humanitarian catastrophe.
Americans who don't have out-of-pocket losses nevertheless will experience a looser grip on nationhood.
Black humor, itself an oil pun, may chortle about high-test seafood but is really a cry from the heart.
That's Great Depression material.
How amazing journalism hasn't pieced the picture together.
Too busy covering press conferences, placing anchors on oily beaches and covering the trivia of a BP executive's yacht race and other PR gaffes.
Charter boat captains, coastal politicians and washaterias for pelicans get some coverage.
Yet no one covering the Fed in Washington, the markets in New York or the boom shortage in Biloxi has taken the holistic view of economic life from shore to board room to living room.
Maybe when the out-migration of Gulfies matches the Grapes of Wrath era of Okies we'll see the Dorothea Lange images and the John Steinbeck narratives and the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. reminders of the cycles of history in endless repetition.
Artists and historians again will have to compensate for journalism's failure. Another missed opportunity.
And that's too GD bad.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Who stole my holiday?!?
Anyone can be an editor or producer when news breaks.
The trick is to communicate brilliantly when there is no news. As on holidays.
NBC's Today Show broadcast a brief but pretty good report Friday before the long weekend about the impending Independence Day amid a depressing economy.
Matt Lauer, a good interviewer any day, had a really eye-opening conversation with the equally good Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC economic head-turner.
Now, if only we'll see and hear lots of follow-up in depth.
More likely the Marine band and news stale-from-the-can will parade across screen and newspaper page.
Put enough features in City Desk hold files and the TV video bank, and everyone can have a nice holiday.
Judge by Matt and Maria's interview: Many Americans without work, without a mortgage payment, without good retirement prospects and with BP oil lapping at their security or with health and other bills weighing on their minds are going to have a not-so-nice Fourth of July.
So why wouldn't journalists work longer, harder to report the national misery index doesn't take a holiday.
If terrorists or tornadoes attack, every newsperson will rush in from picnic and park to cover the disaster.
Why don't media work during the slow-motion catastrophe of this holiday in the dumps?
What's with the cancellation of all those municipal fireworks shows?
How come we're actually glad the markets are closed so they can't plummet farther?
Where's the hopefulness without hype out of state and national capitals and city halls?
So many questions. So little time.
Journalism should never take a holiday.
The trick is to communicate brilliantly when there is no news. As on holidays.
NBC's Today Show broadcast a brief but pretty good report Friday before the long weekend about the impending Independence Day amid a depressing economy.
Matt Lauer, a good interviewer any day, had a really eye-opening conversation with the equally good Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC economic head-turner.
Now, if only we'll see and hear lots of follow-up in depth.
More likely the Marine band and news stale-from-the-can will parade across screen and newspaper page.
Put enough features in City Desk hold files and the TV video bank, and everyone can have a nice holiday.
Judge by Matt and Maria's interview: Many Americans without work, without a mortgage payment, without good retirement prospects and with BP oil lapping at their security or with health and other bills weighing on their minds are going to have a not-so-nice Fourth of July.
So why wouldn't journalists work longer, harder to report the national misery index doesn't take a holiday.
If terrorists or tornadoes attack, every newsperson will rush in from picnic and park to cover the disaster.
Why don't media work during the slow-motion catastrophe of this holiday in the dumps?
What's with the cancellation of all those municipal fireworks shows?
How come we're actually glad the markets are closed so they can't plummet farther?
Where's the hopefulness without hype out of state and national capitals and city halls?
So many questions. So little time.
Journalism should never take a holiday.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The streetcar that carried the general away
We journalists are Blanche DuBois, forever depending on the kindness of strangers.
People figure no public official will ever follow Gen. Stanley McChrystal's model of allowing a reporter into his candid inner circle. The general ended up fired for his barracks room candor.
Yet I believe journalistic history will repeat itself. Often. Like Blanche's signature line from A Streetcar Named Desire.
Kindness is another way of expressing openness or even naivete.
We haven't seen the end of opening up, even or especially by star-encrusted bravado.
And the public will be the better for it -- as always.
The career mistake of Gen. McChrystal turned into his ultimate service to the nation: Government and public both refocused on the war in Afghanistan, which we are losing or at least not winning.
Miss DuBois will return. We share her perpetual dependency on strangers.
The literary metaphor of Tennessee Williams's character in his 1947 play strikes my mind like a controlled nuclear event.
Blanche's nemesis was another Stanley -- the brutish Kowalski, antithesis of her dowdy, loopy world view and romanticism that drew out the beast in Stanley.
Excuse me, Gen. McChrystal, have you read the play?
The Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings, who did the live-in interview with McChrystal, might not remind anyone of a DuBois or of the southern playwright who wrote Streetcar.
Yet the reporter and the general acted out the archetypes of clash between brutishness and soft persistence that spin off beneficial journalism like a newly discovered molecule from an atom smasher named Desire.
Oh, yes. Journalism will replicate the explosion, because that's what journalism does.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Not too fond a farewell for Helen and Larry
Am I the only one in America who thinks it's perfectly okay for Larry King to sit at home instead of sitting on his set at CNN?
I have nothing against the gentleman.
But I have nothing especially for him either.
He's not a journalist. He's a habit.
And let's don't confuse the status of endurance with national icon. Larry King is no Cronkite or even a Brokaw.
He simply spent a long time in TV. He talked with a lot of people. Isn't that nice?
Nancy Reagan called him on the air to say she'd miss him. Sweet. They threw on-air kisses to each other.
At least he's going out on his own terms, although with declining popularity.
That's better for him than Helen Thomas's hasty retirement amid catcalls for something she said.
It's hard to imagine Larry King saying anything that could offend in that degree. But I almost wish he would go out in rage rather than smoochiness with any former First Lady.
Oh, I'm not saying a journalist is not a journalist unless he or she is a contrarian. That didn't work for Ms. Thomas, the fixture at the White House.
But I am saying journalism and journalists ought to reinvent themselves several times before we let them get away from us.
Fifty years in a Executive Branch briefing chair with your name on it and 50,000 broadcast interviews are exercises in longevity, not in themselves evidence of journalistic contribution.
Goodbye, Helen! Goodbye, Larry!
It was nice to know you.
Yet not so nice we can't let you slip away so the innovators can take your places.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Sketches of grandeur: Why journalists should dip into Middle Earth and other fantasy literature to come down to this earth
The Children of Húrin By J. R. R. Tolkien with illustrations by Alan Lee; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2008 pbk. edition, 313 pages, $14.95.
We have an Ent living in our meadow.
Why not?
We are of the generation who popularized J. R. R. Tolkien in this land. We read The Hobbit to our children. We gave them The Lord of the Rings trilogy when they were ready.
Why wouldn't one of the ancient race of walking, talking tree giants take up residence with us?
Fantasy is serious business. Even for journalists. Lighten up, gang. You'll be more conversant with real people.
There's the Hollywood version of fantasy. But even bigger are the motion pictures of the mind that inspire us, steady us between good and evil on our personal quests and endear otherworld creatures to us as a comfort of the imagination.
Middle-earth is far less comfortable since the passing of Tolkien and the co-opting of his creation by movie moguls and the electronic gaming set who owe their pastime to literary fantasy.
So posthumous works by the master become bestsellers. His son Christopher Tolkien edited the squibs and scraps and notes that became The Children of Húrin.
You take what you can get. Isn't endurance the message of Middle-earth?
This is a dark and bloody work without much redemption, though. It's like sitting down to Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is at least majestic in its cosmic tragedy, and discovering you picked up the grisly Titus Andronicus by earthbound error.
First you wade through genealogies and set-up. Think of all the begats in the Bible. Or the penance Tolstoy exacts before getting you to the action in War and Peace.
At last you strike storyline like a vein of gold. But the ore plays out when Morgoth, the First Dark Lord, captures Húrin to crush the hero's spirit of rebellion in the First Age.
So attention shifts to the nobleman's children, Túrin and his sister Niënor. But they live lives of unquiet desperation, dismay and disaster that lead ever downward.
Finally comes closing confrontation with Glaurung, the worm-dragon of fire sent to fulfill hellish curse.
Just another day at the office in Middle-earth. Or perhaps where you work.
Túrin is no Ranger destined for the kingly triumph of the later works. His sister is no princess royal. Not yet on scene are Bilbo Baggins or Gandalf the Grey and, of course, Treebeard the Ent living in the woods of Fangorn during the Third Age of Tolkien's more popular works.
His son and literary executor opened a view into his father's mind as it sorted out the world that would become the Hobbit's and ours by extension. It's like seeing Michelangelo's chalky sketches for the Sistine Chapel instead of the finished work.
Read it to see how the grandeur came to be.
How grand?
Ask any of us who have an Ent living in our meadow.
Middle-earth is far less comfortable since the passing of Tolkien and the co-opting of his creation by movie moguls and the electronic gaming set who owe their pastime to literary fantasy.
So posthumous works by the master become bestsellers. His son Christopher Tolkien edited the squibs and scraps and notes that became The Children of Húrin.
You take what you can get. Isn't endurance the message of Middle-earth?
This is a dark and bloody work without much redemption, though. It's like sitting down to Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is at least majestic in its cosmic tragedy, and discovering you picked up the grisly Titus Andronicus by earthbound error.
First you wade through genealogies and set-up. Think of all the begats in the Bible. Or the penance Tolstoy exacts before getting you to the action in War and Peace.
At last you strike storyline like a vein of gold. But the ore plays out when Morgoth, the First Dark Lord, captures Húrin to crush the hero's spirit of rebellion in the First Age.
So attention shifts to the nobleman's children, Túrin and his sister Niënor. But they live lives of unquiet desperation, dismay and disaster that lead ever downward.
Finally comes closing confrontation with Glaurung, the worm-dragon of fire sent to fulfill hellish curse.
Just another day at the office in Middle-earth. Or perhaps where you work.
Túrin is no Ranger destined for the kingly triumph of the later works. His sister is no princess royal. Not yet on scene are Bilbo Baggins or Gandalf the Grey and, of course, Treebeard the Ent living in the woods of Fangorn during the Third Age of Tolkien's more popular works.
His son and literary executor opened a view into his father's mind as it sorted out the world that would become the Hobbit's and ours by extension. It's like seeing Michelangelo's chalky sketches for the Sistine Chapel instead of the finished work.
Read it to see how the grandeur came to be.
How grand?
Ask any of us who have an Ent living in our meadow.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Ever on Sunday: Talk shows are not immune from the expectation of good journalism
It is simply good journalism to give viewers relevant
background about a news source before awarding
that talking head access to the national ear.
Sunday is the day of rest. But if you're gonna do journalism, you darn well can stir yourself to do it right. That means background, perspective, needed information to parse what those guest talking heads are saying on the talk shows.
First it was NBC's Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw as host. Then it was CBS's Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer. Finally it was a replay by CNN's Wolf Blitzer with "the last word in Sunday talk."
All brought U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., onto their languid, day-of-rest airtime to oppose a bailout for the Big 3 automakers in Detroit. None of the talk show hosts apparently did their homework about the ax-grinding Mr. Shelby.
Maybe the senator is right. Maybe he's wrong. It's an important national debate regardless.
So is knowing that Sen. Shelby represents the state that calls itself the "New Detroit" with a foreign accent thicker than his Southern drawl.
Shelby's home base is Tuscaloosa, Ala. –– just up the road a piece from the new Mercedes M Class plant.
Follow Interstate 20 east past Birmingham, and you come upon the Honda plant for Odyssey and its other vehicles manufactured in Lincoln, Ala.
Or turn south onto Interstate 65 to see the new Hyundai plant outside Montgomery.
Cruise those Interstate corridors for the supply firms, the sub-contractors and enhanced dealer showrooms that complete the Dixie-Detroit manufacturing base that would benefit from a decline in the economic prospects of the original car-building capital.
Alabama achieved its status by opposing union work forces with Right to Work Laws and providing generous financial bonuses to the overseas carmakers for locating inside its borders.
Is Sen. Shelby so parochial as to adopt a position just to protect, enhance and extend his own state's economy? Well, let's save that discussion for a day when we also want to decide whether the pope is a Roman Catholic.
But I'll do what the network journalists did not: I will divulge in fairness that Shelby is being consistent with his opposition to bailouts generally and voted against the original $700 billion legislation to come to the aid of Wall Street.
I am not, however, debating his consistency.
I am declaring it is simply good journalism to give viewers relevant background about a news source before awarding that talking head access to the national ear.
At stake is the franchise for the whole Sunday morning talk phenomenon.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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.
Friday, November 7, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Political platforms and weather shelters are OK but we need foreign affairs coverage too
It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.
The Press should be more like the Pentagon. Russia shows why.
World peace depends just as much on understanding international conflict as shooting the globe up.
Military planners classically prepare to wage two American wars at once with enough assets left to meet a third emergency.
It’s the attention span as much as anything. But our Information Industry can’t meet the same standard.
Well, come to think of it, neither can the admirals and generals. But they at least try in theory.
Media are concentrating on politics. ’Tis the season.
With some effort they also are monitoring the machine gun-like rat-a-tat of ferocious storms strafing from the weather-Atlantic air war.
Yet for a long time journalism has lost sight of the shooting war that never quits giving hell between Israel and the Palestinian people.
Lebanon lies abandoned between bombings.
Iraq may be a success story. But we haven’t looked at it with the critical consideration of what happens to a corner crime scene when the beat cop moves on.
Iran was the subject of much Press speculation about our possible invasion. Too little real reporting is going on now that our government hasn’t pulled that trigger.
Military Intelligence Рthat clich̩ of an oxymoron Рlacks analysts who can speak Farsi. Media lack sufficient folks who even know adequately the difference between the Persian culture of Iran vs. the Arab rest of the Middle East.
Food, fuel and water shortages portend more resource wars, especially in Africa.
North Korea seems to have backslid – as the preacher would say – on nuclear disarmament. But just try to find a coherent news story explaining independently the American role.
The news consumer is thrown on too much dependence of our own self-serving government for explanations of worldviews, especially in the gaze toward Russia.
That’s the same Administration reinventing the Cold War.
Missiles in Poland, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, patronizing attitudes toward Russian self-esteem – all got fashioned into a new containment policy.
But the bear doesn’t want to go into that cage. It even got restive, invading Georgian territory that leans toward Moscow anyway.
Now we have Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and his oddly subordinate president of Russia, looking at the real prize, The Ukraine.
The new czars can cut off gas and oil to Europe on whim as a strategic weapon. That potential is akin to terrorists or rogue states shutting down the flow of Middle Eastern oil through the Straits of Hormuz – a crippling but real potential.
President Bush has made bear trainer threats he can’t enforce, because he has our diplomatic and economic and military assets stretched too thin.
Vice President Cheney castigated Russia from a Tbilisi pulpit on an aid trip as though he were a two-bit Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, bring down that wall.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cut her academic teeth on the Cold War. She quaintly denounced the Russian moves as unacceptable in the 21st Century. Yet it’s her Administration’s leadership that fails to move out of the Reagan era into realistic foreign affairs of this time.
Without intense, systematic, independent reporting and analysis on front page and prime time, those government pronouncements stand unchallenged by the benefits of journalism.
It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.
Or it’s like depending on the National Weather service as the sole source of hurricane coverage instead of the animated maps, on-scene reports and progress updates by the energized Media.
American foreign affairs deteriorate badly and rapidly while The Media deploy their assets to other stories. The winning presidential candidate is going to have a greater problem than the drain of jobs, housing and affordable fuel.
We’re in for shock about world affairs.
And all because self-imposed cutbacks of resources and interest prevent The Media from providing the independent information democracy needs as much as it needs political platforms and weather shelters.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Our convention-al media
PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK the editor how many work in the newsroom.
Oh, about half, goes the old joke.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Justin Peters wrote a cute send-up on the 15,000 reporters at the Democratic National Convention.
Most are wearing bad suits.
A thousand are drunk, which Peters says is as it should be.
Many don’t have credentials, can’t find the credentialing office, are complaining about lack of floor passes and are smugly criticizing others in the media who have no business crowding the place up.
Those are right.
But an exception not mentioned in CJR is Asa Eslocker with his ABC-TV camera crew. Denver police arrested Asa – roughly, it sounded like – and used language not too delicate for the reporter’s ears but not likely to be heard from the DNC podium.
Cops said the network crew was blocking a hotel’s private sidewalk.
ABC said the journalists were looking into corporate lobbyists and wealthy fat cats at the convention.
Oh, what a lovely reason to get busted. Waytago, Asa.
- - -
MANY OF THE convention-going journalists are doing it for funsies, no doubt.
Bloggers had an extraordinary welcome.
But professional news organizations can spend $50,000 a reporter and up covering presidential campaigns. Convention town hotels and bars and restaurants and whatever else can be hidden on expense vouchers eat up a bunch.
So why do it, asks U.S. News & World Report.
Its Whispers column quotes Mark Potts, a media blogger at RecoveringJournalist.com, suggesting the media instead do community journalism – my phrase, not his.
Let Associated Press and the big syndicated news operations blow their dough, says Potts. And spend the money instead on covering city hall or local schools and the like.
Well, I’d spend the money on the presidential campaigns. But I suggest the “community” approach, because that implies relationship journalism.
Make the candidates’ health care platforms a local story. Explain what the two hot wars are doing to the home front. Tell the local economy story in Obama and McCain terms the hometown crowd can feel.
All we need to know about the conventions – except for the odd story an Asa Eslocker might get arrested for – can be seen on the television tube as it happens.
Relating politics to the local media audience — priceless, as the commercial says.
- - -
MARK SALTER wrote books with his and boss’s John McCain’s name on them.
Now he’s writing the senator’s acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.
His muse is Peggy Noonan, the hit speechwriter of the George H. W. Bush presidential years, according to Newsweek.
The McCain candidacy is derivative. It’s based on the ongoing war in Iraq, the tax policies of the current president Bush and the trickle down economy from as far back as Ronald Reagan’s days but as dried up for Americans as Death Valley
Two of Salter’s books with McCain – Hard Call and Faith of My Fathers – are workmanlike, readable prose. But they are not dream-inspired like the two published works of Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic opponent.
The Republican writing team will need more than the Noonan mojo and the campaign leftovers of past Republican years.
- - -
THIS IS A credentialing society.
We don’t seek education for its own sake. We earn degrees and diplomas to get our ticket punched for entering the middle class mainstream.
The odd result is bored, tired, ennui toward life instead of the genuine liberal arts and sciences joy of discovery about the universe and all that’s in it.
It’s the same with journalists who seek the political convention credential and then sit on it.
They have a nasty habit of reporting in the “here we go again” fashion slouch.
But the unfolding DNC show in Denver – and with any luck the RNC convention to follow – don’t live down to the conventional view of blah-boring.
The aroma of American renewal is in the air.
And any journalist who can’t smell those roses had just as well join the drunks spotted by the CJR observer at the convention.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Do read John McCain and Barack Obama for citizenship, for journalism, for uplift
Hard Call, The Art of Great Decisions
By John McCain with Mark Salter
Twelve, 2007, 457 pp., $15.99
Faith of My Fathers
By John McCain with Mark Salter
HarperCollins, 1999, 349 pp., $14.95
Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2004, 457 pp., $14.95
The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2006, 375 pp., $14.95
Every citizen-journalist has a duty to add our presidential candidates to his or her knowledge base.
I feel hopeful. We’ll preserve values, if we elect either man. Read their stories. You’ll agree.
Notice I didn’t say John McCain and Barack Obama share world views. The Democratic National Convention will nominate Sen. Obama this week for his principles. Then Republicans will see that bet and raise it with Sen. McCain’s ideals.
We’ll have a choice, a real choice, not the usual poker game. Their writings make it so clear.
Obama is the change candidate because his journey is founded on family generations where the future – only the future – always looks brighter. So his Dreams has substance. Dreams must, because life depends upon them. He really can understand this current national crossroads of economy and opportunity and progress after race and after class and after mean political conflict.
The Democrat is what he says, the child of always striving, sometimes failing, constant hopefulness.
The Republican is true to his forefathers too. They are Celtic warriors in every American conflict since Scottish immigration. McCain looks backward to their history for his strength.
We must ask if the warrior can govern. Hard Call does not make him out the decision maker you would expect.
The classy Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson flatly calls McCain’s campaign inept. The New York Times details his habit of adopting the last opinion he hears, of agreeing to staff decisions only to abandon them without warning and of undercutting his own spokeswoman in public.
Imagine such executive disorder in the White House and shutter.
McCain admits he’s hard pressed to explain his method. Call actually is an anthology of Horatio Alger heroes – of interest but not as forecast of a presidency.
The ghostwritten selection runs to the conventional white male usually with military or even a naval connection. The senator can’t escape the ghosts of his admiral father and grandfather and his own hellish Navy aviator life as a POW torture victim in North Vietnam.
McCain claims to live for the present. But two pages later in Faith he concedes, “My public profile is inextricably linked to my POW experiences.”
So is yearning for principled death, for projection of military power abroad, for a VFW worldview.
We have this soldier of Sparta, the Greek citystate forever associated with perpetual war footing. We have the philosophical Barack Obama, suited for Socratic dialogue.
Both suffer from absentee fathers. Both lead aimless youths. Both recover well. Both taste betrayal.
Sen. McCain fights an inept government’s misguided war. But he can’t learn from it, perpetually choosing combat as Option One, the old warrior genes kicking in.
Sen. Obama’s DNA points him forward in Hope. His Chicago pastor who suggests the concept turns on him. Eyes on the prize: The Democrat keeps, “…the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict…
“It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story.”
Two families…two storytellers…two candidates for America.
By John McCain with Mark Salter
Twelve, 2007, 457 pp., $15.99
Faith of My Fathers
By John McCain with Mark Salter
HarperCollins, 1999, 349 pp., $14.95
Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2004, 457 pp., $14.95
The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2006, 375 pp., $14.95
Every citizen-journalist has a duty to add our presidential candidates to his or her knowledge base.
I feel hopeful. We’ll preserve values, if we elect either man. Read their stories. You’ll agree.
Notice I didn’t say John McCain and Barack Obama share world views. The Democratic National Convention will nominate Sen. Obama this week for his principles. Then Republicans will see that bet and raise it with Sen. McCain’s ideals.
We’ll have a choice, a real choice, not the usual poker game. Their writings make it so clear.
Obama is the change candidate because his journey is founded on family generations where the future – only the future – always looks brighter. So his Dreams has substance. Dreams must, because life depends upon them. He really can understand this current national crossroads of economy and opportunity and progress after race and after class and after mean political conflict.
The Democrat is what he says, the child of always striving, sometimes failing, constant hopefulness.
The Republican is true to his forefathers too. They are Celtic warriors in every American conflict since Scottish immigration. McCain looks backward to their history for his strength.
We must ask if the warrior can govern. Hard Call does not make him out the decision maker you would expect.
The classy Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson flatly calls McCain’s campaign inept. The New York Times details his habit of adopting the last opinion he hears, of agreeing to staff decisions only to abandon them without warning and of undercutting his own spokeswoman in public.
Imagine such executive disorder in the White House and shutter.
McCain admits he’s hard pressed to explain his method. Call actually is an anthology of Horatio Alger heroes – of interest but not as forecast of a presidency.
The ghostwritten selection runs to the conventional white male usually with military or even a naval connection. The senator can’t escape the ghosts of his admiral father and grandfather and his own hellish Navy aviator life as a POW torture victim in North Vietnam.
McCain claims to live for the present. But two pages later in Faith he concedes, “My public profile is inextricably linked to my POW experiences.”
So is yearning for principled death, for projection of military power abroad, for a VFW worldview.
We have this soldier of Sparta, the Greek citystate forever associated with perpetual war footing. We have the philosophical Barack Obama, suited for Socratic dialogue.
Both suffer from absentee fathers. Both lead aimless youths. Both recover well. Both taste betrayal.
Sen. McCain fights an inept government’s misguided war. But he can’t learn from it, perpetually choosing combat as Option One, the old warrior genes kicking in.
Sen. Obama’s DNA points him forward in Hope. His Chicago pastor who suggests the concept turns on him. Eyes on the prize: The Democrat keeps, “…the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict…
“It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story.”
Two families…two storytellers…two candidates for America.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Pink slips for newspaper ombudsmen – Can other jobs be far behind?
Reporters hate questions about their work.
Editors do too. They just scapegoat better.
So official question-askers inside the newsroom fill an important position.
Call the position an ombudsman or a reader-representative or a public editor. Call it what you will. The role is not a newsroom popularity contest.
The job is all about journalism credibility:
Make sure the reader can believe the news.
Protect against undue victimization.
Guard against institutional neglect.
Correct the correctable.
Explain the rest.
Forty years ago the first newspaper ombudsman in the country went to work at The Courier-Journal. Now the Louisville newspaper joins a trend to eliminate the “inspector general” position for cost-cutting.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Orlando Sentinel, The Hartford Courant and The Palm Beach Post are other papers dispensing with their public editors, according to C-J Public Editor Pam Platt. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080803/COLUMNISTS10/808030383/1016/OPINION
She riled editors and reporters at The Courier-Journal for the last time and will move to editorial page writing.
Lo, how the machinery for ethics has rusted shut in the information industry. Never did run at optimum.
Norman Isaacs – Stormin’ Norman to his admirers and detractors alike – failed at creating a British-style National News Council in the 1960s and 70s. Isaacs was executive editor of The C-J, an industry leader in responsible journalism and an officer in the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
The New York Times editors especially pooh-poohed the social responsibility idea behind the council. Every paper is its own best policeman, claimed The Times.
Turned out the paper couldn’t even police its own Jayson Blair, the reporter who famously made up news and published the falsehood with a straight face. Ironically The Times created a public editor as part of the clean-up that also cost the news division its two top editors.
Ombudsmen at newspapers were Norman Isaacs’s fall-back position when the Council idea floundered. That’s why The C-J was the first in the country to have one.
Who else speaks for the news consumer?
Everyone in the production of information has a conflict of interest to cultivate, a reputation to protect or a touchy, defensive attitude to nurture.
But not the public’s representative who is removed from the process.
Too late the industry realized the need for what New Yorker media critic Ken Auletta importantly labeled as accountability and transparency – the ethical twins for explaining ourselves as journalists.
As the news industry grew in social prominence, public trust declined. That’s why Norman Isaacs and others saw the need for reform – an idea before its time, as matters turned out.
Now the newspaper arm of journalism withers. You can make a case for loss of public confidence accelerating the economic trend.
Instead of getting riled at ombudsmen, reporters and editors can get riled at their own pink slips.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Food for thought: Have another banana?
Editors who get on their high horse are apt to slip on a fruit peel and go down, steed and all.We see so many ethical stands. We hear so many grand statements of news as separate from advertising, which journalists call “the dark side.”
Then in the middle of every week we get their food sections, glaring in self-contradiction.
These labor intensive, soft journalism, tepid ventures into consumer reporting, if you can call recipes serious reportage, are a bigger staple than rice and potatoes.
The media critic may lose a job. The book page may disappear. The news bureau may shut down.
Food sections endure.
They wrap supermarket fliers and run grocery coupons. Some peddle wine and spirits or boom high-end restaurants for this nation of foodies.
Now this is the entry point for Harry Highminded, the editor, to blurt at me that eating is news too: “Ever see anyone give up food, heh-heh-heh?”
Well, yes, actually. Famine is increasing. Food riots are starting. Americans are malnourished either through obesity or poverty.
The real news of food is in genetic crops, the biofuels competition for corn and the safety of meat and produce.
News pages covered the massive South Korean protests against American beef imports. How many food editors followed up with coverage of safety in local meat markets?
Or how many check out jail, school and nursing home menus for nutrition?
Or publish health department inspections? Some do, to be sure.
But it’s the unusual food editor who sees a role in questioning advertisers who are the reason the editor has a job.
Media’s hypocrisy over the weekly homage to buying and eating is not a moral cesspool we’ll all drown in. And I’m not on my own high horse.
But it does us all good to admit our hunger for ad revenue isn’t satisfied by pretense at purity.
I agree food is a huge category of news and ripe for investigation and exposition.
Tell me where my milk comes from and why the price is zooming. Explain why Super Wal-Mart is America’s breadbasket but what that’s done to competitive choices. Report on the Food and Drug Administration for scaring us but not protecting us against salmonella in our produce.
Cover nutrition, the real story, not gluttony as typical food sections do.
But don’t try to con me into believing most newspaper food sections are any more than advertising vehicles.
That’s too big a bunch of bananas to swallow on horseback or anywhere else.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Read novels to learn narrative style
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
By David Wroblewski
HarperCollins, 2008, 566 pp., $25.95
Glimpse the world’s soul. Know death in the midst of living. See tragedy ennoble as in Hamlet.
This is Shakespeare’s plot line, after all, this narrative of Edgar Sawtelle. Oh, don’t mistake the literary art as artifice or as an American imitation or as a literary homage.
David Wroblewski, the first-time author, seizes the most famous drama in world literature for its pattern of eternal meaning. He has a myth to weave, a universal truth told in story form.
So a classic story mold reinforces what you might mistake as ordinary, even as a tale about dogs and their people.
You understand Hamlet better for seeing Edgar Sawtelle rise, discern his place in the mystery of life, avenge his father and suffer his own fall along with everyone around him even as the things that count – that really count – continue on their perpetual way.
Edgar was born in 1958 to a couple who raised and trained an idyllic breed of dogs on their northern Wisconsin farm as Edgar’s grandfather had done before. The house and a barn fitted out as kennel form a living stage. It produces the family story of companionship with each other and with nature. But the farm also is womb for an uncle’s unnatural evil.
A mythic journey of self understanding must take place before Edgar resolves the conflict.
While he’s away we lose the Ophelia character in a manner to break every dog lover’s heart.
Anna Quindlen last year wrote a sad book about pets — Good Dog. Stay. John Grogan wrote Marley & Me, soon to be a movie, based on his newspaper column about his funny, foolish, faithful pet.
Those are animal stories.
The dogs in Edgar Sawtelle’s life are different. They drive the constant, considerable action. They communicate in their canine fashion, because they were born mute like Edgar. In the womb, a seer explains, God told Edgar a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know. So the young man signs. And he acquires wisdom deep inside.
With Edgar we all learn dogs are not the beasts in this story. You wonder what God told them.
Insight and even vision — literally — aren't the brilliance of this narrative. The story, always the story, carries us a remarkable 566 pages.
The natural elements in those north woods plot the way through explanations of things we didn’t know we wanted to know. Breeding and training and even of how to play canasta and the characters buffeted by action in and out of their control and the descriptive details, yes, the wonderful details — those all make this book.
I tell journalists to read novels to learn narrative style. This is the book for them.
Yet The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is not journalism or a Shakespearean knock-off or ordinary fiction.
The thought crosses the mind of Edgar’s mother Trudy: When we accept life, we take contradiction with it.
You wonder if even Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude understood the tragic idea held in this legend, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
By David Wroblewski
HarperCollins, 2008, 566 pp., $25.95
Glimpse the world’s soul. Know death in the midst of living. See tragedy ennoble as in Hamlet.
This is Shakespeare’s plot line, after all, this narrative of Edgar Sawtelle. Oh, don’t mistake the literary art as artifice or as an American imitation or as a literary homage.
David Wroblewski, the first-time author, seizes the most famous drama in world literature for its pattern of eternal meaning. He has a myth to weave, a universal truth told in story form.
So a classic story mold reinforces what you might mistake as ordinary, even as a tale about dogs and their people.
You understand Hamlet better for seeing Edgar Sawtelle rise, discern his place in the mystery of life, avenge his father and suffer his own fall along with everyone around him even as the things that count – that really count – continue on their perpetual way.
Edgar was born in 1958 to a couple who raised and trained an idyllic breed of dogs on their northern Wisconsin farm as Edgar’s grandfather had done before. The house and a barn fitted out as kennel form a living stage. It produces the family story of companionship with each other and with nature. But the farm also is womb for an uncle’s unnatural evil.
A mythic journey of self understanding must take place before Edgar resolves the conflict.
While he’s away we lose the Ophelia character in a manner to break every dog lover’s heart.
Anna Quindlen last year wrote a sad book about pets — Good Dog. Stay. John Grogan wrote Marley & Me, soon to be a movie, based on his newspaper column about his funny, foolish, faithful pet.
Those are animal stories.
The dogs in Edgar Sawtelle’s life are different. They drive the constant, considerable action. They communicate in their canine fashion, because they were born mute like Edgar. In the womb, a seer explains, God told Edgar a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know. So the young man signs. And he acquires wisdom deep inside.
With Edgar we all learn dogs are not the beasts in this story. You wonder what God told them.
Insight and even vision — literally — aren't the brilliance of this narrative. The story, always the story, carries us a remarkable 566 pages.
The natural elements in those north woods plot the way through explanations of things we didn’t know we wanted to know. Breeding and training and even of how to play canasta and the characters buffeted by action in and out of their control and the descriptive details, yes, the wonderful details — those all make this book.
I tell journalists to read novels to learn narrative style. This is the book for them.
Yet The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is not journalism or a Shakespearean knock-off or ordinary fiction.
The thought crosses the mind of Edgar’s mother Trudy: When we accept life, we take contradiction with it.
You wonder if even Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude understood the tragic idea held in this legend, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
Monday, August 4, 2008
George Carlin: A journalist appreciated
We all laughed with George Carlin. Journalists should have taken him more seriously. He had better instincts than many.Carlin had an ear for usage. Write for the ear, we teach, not the eye. But too few do, producing a stilted tone instead of conversation.
And he thought. He thought about society. He started in radio. He ended in books.
His mastery of words and how to use them rose to the level of philosophy or at least of philology, the love of language and its meaning.
That’s because Carlin always sought the underlying sense and not just superficial correctness, the level where most users of the language stop drilling.
“Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway,” he asked.
That equals my favorite conundrum of how a vacuum bottle knows to keep hot things hot and cold things cold.
Comedians play a special role in our society. They are court jesters where the republic is monarch. They tell us what we need to hear in a way that overcomes our reluctance to listen.
Carlin will receive the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for humor posthumously to underscore his specialness.
Now there’s a pair to tickle St. Peter’s funny bone, Carlin and Twain. Add Ambrose Bierce and Will Rogers to the circle. They all represent the poetic truth: “Scratch a humorist, and you’ll find a bitter man.”
Carlin put the thought differently: “Scratch a cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”
So, Carlin said about Ronald Reagan’s defense of the Nicaraguan Contras: “If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?”
I am not alone in my respect for the ability to assess others’ use, abuse and misuse of language. The official wordsmith of The New York Times Magazine, William Safire, paid tribute after Carlin died at 71.
Safire saw a perverse value in “the seven words you can’t use on television” routine by Carlin. By devaluing the shock value of those adolescent obscenities, Safire thought, the performer had done a service to the language.
Wouldn’t you like to have a copy editor who believed in modernizing speech? Most copy editors enforce a tedious regimen.
Never write that a person died “suddenly,” they lecture, because everyone is alive one instant and dead the next.
I’ll be damned, I can imagine Carlin saying, because I spent my whole lifetime not dying, and it was pretty damn sudden when I finally did.
Too bad he can’t cite the exaggeration his predecessor Twain did about reports of his death
The life of Twain was a cover story in Time for his social criticism on race and excesses of the Gilded Age, which he named. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html
Wouldn’t you like to have a copy editor who believed in modernizing speech? Most copy editors enforce a tedious regimen.
Never write that a person died “suddenly,” they lecture, because everyone is alive one instant and dead the next.
I’ll be damned, I can imagine Carlin saying, because I spent my whole lifetime not dying, and it was pretty damn sudden when I finally did.
Too bad he can’t cite the exaggeration his predecessor Twain did about reports of his death
The life of Twain was a cover story in Time for his social criticism on race and excesses of the Gilded Age, which he named. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html
It took 98 years after his death to get the coverage.
Let’s see if a century passes before his successor George Carlin achieves the recognition of a man so funny he’s seriously important.
Let’s see if a century passes before his successor George Carlin achieves the recognition of a man so funny he’s seriously important.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Arts and Letters was a horse, no press release at all
The art of the public relations agent comes out in press releases, which generally are artless.
They can be elaborate. They can entice. They can blare, rarely trying the subtle approach.
They are why city editors have messy desks.
They are the stuff of the logo, the release date, the contact information.
No tree should have to give a life for one. No electron should have to spin a tizzy over one.
But press releases are not going away, no more than their authors in media relations departments.
Press releases can be the cry of the Sirens, who seduced the crew of Ulysses on his odyssey. Tough men, they, but prone to have their heads turned by sexy maidens. Or, press releases can be terse, useful guides to the morning line for reporters to take slight notice of and then discard.
So we need to put them into perspective.
New York Times business writer Joanne Kaufman does not. She does dignify the press release with a story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/media/30toxic.html?ex=1372478400&en=109705c354560eb5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
We find out the best words a PR writer can use to attract the attention of a journalist for exposure in the media.
A kind of a science as well as a recklessly purported art figures in Ms. Kaufman's article: The proper technique uses words most likely to be picked up by an Internet search engine these days.
We even learn a book by PR stunt planner David Seaman is due out in October, "Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz." Makes you feel dirty just thinking about it.
The biggest little secret in public relations, it turns out, is timing. Make sure the press release comes out on a slow news day, the Times article concludes.
Well, there's no true conclusion. I will supply one. The story is dutifully non-judgmental. I will be, dutifully.
A press release has one value and one only, as a tip sheet. The best ones in my experience are so labelled, "Tip Sheet." Trust it any further and you're liable to tip over. Even phone numbers and addresses are suspect, to be checked and verified while the journalist re-reports any information in the release, which is never to be quoted or treated as valid information from an original source.
Did you get that, young journalist?
Ms. Kaufman did not report the journalistic value of press releases. Allow me. There is none.
Journalism is what a reporter brings to an idea. The idea may come from a tip by a useful press agent. But the journalism is value-added.
Oh, me, oh my!
You will depart this blog post with the thought journalism is an art and public relations is a service industry whose product is mechanical, the press release.
You think correctly.
They can be elaborate. They can entice. They can blare, rarely trying the subtle approach.
They are why city editors have messy desks.
They are the stuff of the logo, the release date, the contact information.
No tree should have to give a life for one. No electron should have to spin a tizzy over one.
But press releases are not going away, no more than their authors in media relations departments.
Press releases can be the cry of the Sirens, who seduced the crew of Ulysses on his odyssey. Tough men, they, but prone to have their heads turned by sexy maidens. Or, press releases can be terse, useful guides to the morning line for reporters to take slight notice of and then discard.
So we need to put them into perspective.
New York Times business writer Joanne Kaufman does not. She does dignify the press release with a story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/media/30toxic.html?ex=1372478400&en=109705c354560eb5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
We find out the best words a PR writer can use to attract the attention of a journalist for exposure in the media.
A kind of a science as well as a recklessly purported art figures in Ms. Kaufman's article: The proper technique uses words most likely to be picked up by an Internet search engine these days.
We even learn a book by PR stunt planner David Seaman is due out in October, "Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz." Makes you feel dirty just thinking about it.
The biggest little secret in public relations, it turns out, is timing. Make sure the press release comes out on a slow news day, the Times article concludes.
Well, there's no true conclusion. I will supply one. The story is dutifully non-judgmental. I will be, dutifully.
A press release has one value and one only, as a tip sheet. The best ones in my experience are so labelled, "Tip Sheet." Trust it any further and you're liable to tip over. Even phone numbers and addresses are suspect, to be checked and verified while the journalist re-reports any information in the release, which is never to be quoted or treated as valid information from an original source.
Did you get that, young journalist?
Ms. Kaufman did not report the journalistic value of press releases. Allow me. There is none.
Journalism is what a reporter brings to an idea. The idea may come from a tip by a useful press agent. But the journalism is value-added.
Oh, me, oh my!
You will depart this blog post with the thought journalism is an art and public relations is a service industry whose product is mechanical, the press release.
You think correctly.
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