The hardworking staff has held off lo these three weeks, but now it has to be said:
We hate the new Sunday Review section of the New York Times.
It’s a maddening hodgepodge of New Analysis, Opinion, Whatever, and Is Dowd Writing Today.
The old Week in Review may have been Fogeytown, but it was our Fogeytown.
Now it’s just Looneyville.
Full Disclosure: The hardworking staff hates all change. We’ll likely calm down in a month or two.
In his Saturday op-ed column, New York Times chinstroker Joe Nocera punched into the News Corp(se) beatdown:
The Journal Becomes Fox-ified
It’s official. The Wall Street Journal has been Fox-ified.
It took Rupert Murdoch only three and a half years to get there, starting with the moment he acquired the paper from the dysfunctional Bancroft family in December 2007, a purchase that was completed after he vowed to protect The Journal’s editorial integrity and agreed to a (toothless) board that was supposed to make sure he kept that promise.
Fat chance of that . . .
Nocera proceeds to call the roll of the Journal’s transgressions:
• political articles growing “more and more slanted to the Republican party line”
• “using the word ‘Democrat’ as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing”
• “editors [inserting] the phrase ‘assault on business’ in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama”
And all of it culminating in the Journal’s coverage of the News of the World scandal.
As a business story, the News of the World scandal isn’t just about phone hacking and police bribery. It is about Murdoch’s media empire, the News Corporation, being at risk — along with his family’s once unshakable hold on it. The old Wall Street Journal would have been leading the pack in pursuit of that story.
Now? At first, The Journal ignored the scandal, even though, as the Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff pointed out in Adweek, it was front-page news all across Britain. Then, when the scandal was no longer avoidable, The Journal did just enough to avoid being accused of looking the other way. Blogging for Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, the media critic, described The Journal’s coverage as “obviously hamstrung, and far, far below the paper’s true capacity.”
But, Nocera says, the Journal’s coverage “went all the way to craven” in this puffball interview with Murdoch “that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department.”
The Wall Street Steno, in other words.
Before issuing his own mea culpa for ever writing that “the chances of Mr. Murdoch wrecking The Journal are lower than you’d think,” Nocera channels some of the paper’s journalistic stalwarts:
The dwindling handful of great journalists who remain at the paper — Mark Maremont, Alan Murray and Alix Freedman among them — must be hanging their heads in shame.
Except . . . from a Saturday Times news story on the Murdoch Meltdown:
Employees at The Journal had mixed reactions to [publisher Les] Hinton’s departure. Alan Murray, a deputy managing editor, wrote on Twitter: “Les Hinton was a great leader, and did much to support the advancement of WSJ in print and digital platforms. He will be much missed.”
Wait – is that the same Alan Murray who’s hanging his head in shame?
Maybe it’s time for another Joe Nocera media culpa.
Splendid reader Ed Mason points out some new elements in the Great GQ Dress-Down of Boston, the magazine’s 40 Worst-Dressed Cities in America feature. (The hardworking staff’s earlier post here.)
Today’s Boston Herald reports on the uproar created by this sentence in the magazine’s review crowning Boston the Number One fashion victim: “due to so much local in-breeding, Boston suffers from a kind of Style Down Syndrome, where a little extra ends up ruining everything.”
Reaction was predictable:
“I’m horrified,” said Dafna Krouk-Gordon, president and founder of TILL Inc., a Massachusetts nonprofit that provides community programs for people with disabilities. “This is vile. It sets us back as having to work so hard to eliminate the stereotypes that people with any kind of disabilities have had to live with for hundreds of years.”
“They are doing societal damage by using those kinds of examples. It is especially hurtful for someone with Down syndrome who would not be in a position to advocate for themselves,” Krouk-Gordon said.
Except its not there anymore. GQ quietly (if not quickly) removed it.
One more thing – and this comes from the hardworking staff, not Ed: Look at the pictures in this Herald sidebar. Now look at yourself. Now look at the pictures. Now look at yourself.
What ranking would you give Boston?
Metrosexual bible GQ just published its list of the 40 Worst-Dressed Cities in America, at at the very bottom – ranking behind Cleveland, Buffalo, the Jersey Shore, Wasilla for heaven’s sake, and good God Burlington, VT – is . . . Boston!
Graphic:
Text:
Boston is like America’s Bad-Taste Storm Sewer: all the worst fashion ideas from across the country flow there, stagnate, and putrefy. To be fair, it’s hard to be a fashion capital when half of your population is made up of undergraduate hoodie monsters, including those unfortunate coeds who don’t realize that leggings-as-pants were supposed to be paired with tops large enough to conceal their cameltoes. Yet when they graduate, they can wear their Uggs and still fit in at the country’s largest frat party on Lansdowne behind Fenway, where they can take breaks between body shots to admire just how long boot-cut jeans can stay in style in one place. And any classy lady from Beantown is bound to be impressed by formal sportswear. “But Boston is the epicenter of prep style!,” you say? That’s true, but due to so much local in-breeding, Boston suffers from a kind of Style Down Syndrome, where a little extra ends up ruining everything: Khakis!—with pleats. Boat shoes!—with socks. Knit ties!—actually, no one in Boston seems to have ever seen one of these. For the more proletarian-minded, there are the modest little burgs of Cambridge and Somerville, where everyone dresses like the proprietor of his or her very own meth lab. If you wonder how a people can live like this, well, it’s Jurassic Park for fashion troglodytes: life finds a way.
Wicked ouch.
Sure, the Wall Street Journal disagrees with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-My Cold Dead Hands) on everything from Acela to Zygotes, but did the paper really have to use this photo in Friday’s piece about the deficit battle on Capitol Hill?
C’mon, Journal. Aren’t you better than that?
The hardworking staff previously noted Politico’s unearthing of an unaired TV spot produced by Ted Kennedy’s 1994 reelection campaign vs. Mitt Romney.
We could not, however, locate video of the ad on Politico.
Friday’s Boston Globe helpfully provided it.
Except it didn’t, at least as far as the hardworking staff could determine.
So we turned to YouTube, which had a clip from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews program that actually showed the spot:
At long last – video.
From our Book Review Review desk:
Thursday’s Wall Street Journal featured a mostly-boffo review of Stealing Rembrandts, co-authored by Anthony Amore, head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Tom Mashberg, former Boston Herald reporter who’s been on the Great Gardner Art Heist like Brown on Williamson from the very start.
Anthony Amore and Tom Mashberg have a textured feel for Rembrandt’s work. They have interviewed a lot of people. Most important, they have particular insight into at least one of the most well-known thefts: Mr. Amore is head of security, since 2005, at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, from which three Rembrandts and 10 other paintings were stolen in 1990. The criminals wore police uniforms and tied up the guards before vanishing with the art. Mr. Mashberg, a writer for the Boston Herald, has covered the still-unsolved heist for 14 years.
One unusual aspect of “Stealing Rembrandts” is that, in addition to talking to museum personnel, the authors interview art thieves. Among the more vividly rendered is Florian “Al” Monday. An orange-haired, tracksuit-wearing, bejeweled ex-convict toting an “unpublished typewritten memoir reeking of cigarette smoke,” Monday was the brain behind the “St. Bartholomew” job, in which one of his lackeys shot a museum guard with a .22 and Monday was sentenced to 9-to-20 years in prison. He is a discerning felon. “No one touches Van Gogh,” he sniffs to the authors, rating the painters he most admires. “Except maybe Renoir.”
Renoir? Renoir?? Florian “Al” Monday is an idiot.
So is Ben Mezrich, according to Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of his new book Sex on the Moon. Here’s her initial description of the author:
Ben Mezrich, the baloney artist whose highly speculative, Peeping Tom version of the Facebook story (“The Accidental Billionaires”) became, through no apparent fault of Mr. Mezrich’s, the basis for a brilliant, razor-edged movie (“The Social Network”).
It just gets worse from there. “Cookie cutter” Mezrich “is becoming most popular just as he runs out of new ideas.”
Nowadays Mr. Mezrich displays the confidence of someone on a roll. He no longer pretends to be telling true stories. He fakes and pads so excitably that his own tricks are better than his characters’. What is “an angry whirl of gargantuan white flakes”? Mezrich snow. What is “thick and dark and ominous, like the intertwining ropes of an immense fishing net cast across the sky, swallowing up every inch of visible air, obscuring everything, even the muted glow of the nearly full moon”? A Mezrich cloudy night. What is “Hollywood’s next big thing?” Mr. Mezrich himself, according to this own Web site.
Ouch.
Ex on the Moon is more like it.
And by “ghost,” of course, the hardworking staff means former Ted Kennedy advisers. The haunting part is an unaired TV spot from Kennedy’s 1994 reelection campaign that depicted challenger Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist who helped consulting firm Bain & Co. and investment company Bain Capital purchase and dismantle a variety of American businesses.
From Politico’s Playbook:
When Romney challenged Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1994, it was his connection to those two companies that played a significant role in sinking his campaign, as Democrats tied him to plant closings and worker firings. In 2012, … Bain Capital’s involvement in mass layoffs is likely to haunt Romney in a campaign focused on jobs. … The never-aired ‘bailout’ ad, shared with POLITICO by one of Kennedy’s advisers, remains an unexploded grenade from that race, underscoring Romney’s vulnerability in the first presidential election fought since the 2008 financial meltdown. … The commercial – produced for the DSCC by Doak, Shrum, Harris, Carrier, Devine – highlights Romney’s role in turning around Bain & Co. at a moment of financial distress. … [A] Boston Globe report from 1994 confirms that Bain saw several million dollars in loans forgiven by the FDIC, which had taken over Bain’s failed creditor, the Bank of New England.
The Politico piece – The Bain of Mitt’s Campaign – doesn’t actually show the “never-aired ‘bailout’ ad,” but the hardsearching staff is on the case.
Meanwhile, lots of good 1994 Kennedy-Romney slop here.
Libertarian loon Ron Paul (R-Gold Standard) is all-in on his presidential run, having announced he’ll surrender his Texas congressional seat in a futile attempt to nab the GOP presidential nod (that last part not actually his).
BUT . . . he did pull in more moolah than AnybodyButRomney wannabe Tim Pawlenty last quarter, so attention must be paid.
From ABC’s The Note:
RON PAUL RELEASES FIRST CAMPAIGN AD. “Congressman Ron Paul has released his first television campaign ad of the 2012 campaign season,” ABC’s Jason Volack reports. “Modeled after a cinematic movie trailer, the one-minute ad dramatically reviews past debt ceiling compromises in the 1980’s and 1990’s and starkly warns that although tax cuts were promised as part of those deals to increase the debt ceiling — those cuts never materialized. As a result — the ad says — we are left with $14 trillion in debt, millions unemployed, and the dollar in decline.
The ad:
The spot starts today in Iowa and New Hampshire, to the tune of six figures.
Sing on, Ron. You’re much more entertaining than, say, Rick Santorum.
From our Late to the Party desk:
A couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog ran this item (via the Missus):
What’s the Best Newspaper Column of All Time?
The National Society of Newspaper Columnists has weighed in on the question of what it considers the finest example of its craft. And the short answer? No, Virginia.
In an online poll, the society’s members voted Ernie Pyle’s “The Death of Captain Waskow ” the best column ever published in an American newspaper, placing the 1944 story ahead of Francis Pharcellus Church’s classic 1897 editorial-page proclamation, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.”
(That Ernie Pyle piece, which the hardworking staff read years ago, is absolutely heart-stopping.)
The 15 finalists included the usual Hall of Famers – Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin, H.L. Mencken, Murray Kempton, Red Smith – as well as other familiar names: Walter Lippmann, Westbrook Pegler, Molly Ivins, Dave Barry (!).
And then there were the little-knowns: Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Miami Herald, the Washington Post’s Marjorie Williams, Chris Rose of the New Orleans Times Picayune, the Los Angeles Times’ Steve Lopez.
But nobody from Boston.
No George Frazier. No Bob Ryan. No James Carroll (no relation). No Leigh Montville.
No.
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