Dead Blogging Taylor Branch at Harvard

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

So the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider trooped over to the International House of Politics in Cambridge to catch the Shorenstein Center‘s annual Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics, along with the David Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism.

The latter – and better – first. The award went this year to the redoubtable Nat Hentoff, who’s always full of doubt. Hentoff wasn’t able to attend the gala event, so he appeared by satellite – directly above the the head of Shorenstein head Alex Jones as he introduced the 84-year-old Hentoff, who looked for all the world like a bed-headed Big Brother.

Hentoff spoke briefly about his career and his love of politics and jazz and the First Amendment. As a grace note, he asked the crowd to buck the current White House as – not a quote here, but close – Barack Obama continues the Bush-Cheney assault on the constitution and sometimes goes beyond them.

(Insert gasp from audience here.)

Enter Taylor Branch, bestselling Pulitzer-Prize-winning author whose new book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, “is based on 79 conversations between Branch and Clinton, in the White House, between 1993 and 2001.”

The topic of Branch’s lecture was “Disjointed History: Modern Politics and the Media,” and it was indeed the most disjointed Teddy White Lecture I’ve heard (which is a lot).

It was also off-point. Branch’s real subject turned out to be – wait for it – Bill Clinton, and his subtext was twofold:

1) Bill Clinton done been wronged.

2) It was the New York Times that done him.

I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that Branch has gone native after 79 sit-downs with Clinton. That’s rich since Branch now excoriates the Times for going native in its Wen Ho Lee coverage and becoming a federal government sock puppet.

To their credit, both Alex Jones and Sorenstein founding father Marvin Kalb pressed Branch on why he excluded Monica Lewinsky from his Clinton Chronicles of Woe.

Regardless, Branch laid most of the blame for “degrading our sense of the presidency” at the news media’s door.

Wrong door, Mr. Branch. Wrong door.

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Dead Blogging Tina Brown’s MFA, Er, Talk

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Well the Missus and I trundled down to the Museum of Fine Arts Wednesday evening to catch its Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Celebrity Lecture featuring Daily Beast diva Tina Brown.

Of course it should’ve been called the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Celebrity Commercial because Brown was there mostly to deliver a pitch for her new website, which she subsequently did in a straightforward and shameless fashion.

MFA honcho Malcolm Rogers provided the fulsome introduction, replete with statements such as “that spark of genius that is Tina Brown’s” and “it is my great privilege to introduce and your great privilege to hear Tina Brown.”

Reel it in, Malcolm. Reely.

The audience was then privileged to hear the following:

• Tina Brown (TB) describe her editing career as “Three Weddings and a Funeral”

• During her first turn as editor – at British fixture The Tattler – TB rocketed to prominence together with Princess Diana

• Next stop Vanity Fair, where TB says she invented Dominick Dunne and reinvented journalism’s approach to high society, rising to the Reagan-era celebrity

• By the way, TB’s Vanity Fair cover of a very pregnant Demi Moore? “The image of the ’90s.”

• Onward and upward to the New Yorker, “a magazine that was dying on its feet.” TB restored the venerable magazine to its 1920s Harold Ross roots, introducing photography (air kiss Richard Avedon), introducing a new illustration sensibility (air kiss Art Spielgelman), and introducing John Updike to Anthony Lane (air kisses all around).

• So much for the Three Weddings. Now, the Funeral: Talk magazine, which was supposed to be a combination of European news magazines and highbrow publications. Blame it on Harvey Weinstein, blame it on 9/11. TB: “It wasn’t the right fit for me.” Talk went silent.

• But not TB. She smartly proceeded to write a book about Princess Di, wondering all along “how she turned up in that tunnel in Paris with that totally feckless loser Dodi Fayad.” Laughter and applause.

• Next stop: the Internet. TB says The Daily Beast wants to be “a pilot fish through the media insanity . . . someone you trust making choices to inform and entertain you.” It resembles the “European high/low mashup in newspapers” with the  plastic, elastic, vibrant – “so impatient, like I am” – medium of the Internet.

• Actually, it’s the Misuss and I who are getting impatient.

Q&A:

• High-end luxury ads are coming to the Daily Beast. (So is paid content.)

• Rupert Murdoch’s decision to block Google from linking to his news outlets is “not a good idea,” since “our intellectual rhythms have changed with Google.”

• TB doesn’t believe in journalism schools.

• Most print publications will die out before too long.

• That’s okay, because public/private enterprises like the BBC will support journalism.

Not to mention, there will always be someone to support Tina Brown.

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Newsy With a Chance of Meatballs

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Gotta reproduce this AP story (via the Boston Herald) in its entirety:

LAS VEGAS – Joey Chestnut maintained his dominance in the sport of competitive eating – and expanded his palate – by winning the first-ever Martorano’s Masters Meatball Eating Championship.

Chestnut gobbled 50 meatballs in 10 minutes at the Rio All Suite Hotel & Casino Sunday. His 6.25-pound rapid nosh was a new world record and earned him the first-place prize of $1,500.

Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti came in second place, just one lonely meatball behind Chestnut. Sonya Thomas, the notorious “Black Widow” weighing in at 105 pounds, ate 42 meatballs to finish third.

The event was an official Major League Eating-sanctioned competition.

Meatball maestro Chestnut’s speed-feed repertoire also includes hot dog, pizza and chicken wing chomping.

“Deep Dish”? The notorious “Black Widow”?

Sign me up.

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Conservative PunditWorld, Hasan Edition

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Nice compare/contrast on Tuesday between the hard-right chattering classes and the moderate-conservative chinstrokerati.

Representing the former: Wasp-penned Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz.

Representing the latter: Every-liberal’s-favorite-conservative David Brooks, New York Times op-ed columnist.

Both Brooks and Rabinowitz decried the mainstream media’s depiction of  Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan – who murdered 13 and wounded 29 others at Fort Hood in Texas last Thursday –  as a “victim.” And both decried the factory-installed “Allahu akbar” war cry of Muslim terrorists.

Brooks:

They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” and then start murdering.

Rabinowitz:

To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred . . .

Rabinowitz and Brooks also opine in (sort of) tandem about the news coverage of the massacre.

Brooks:

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality.

Rabinowitz:

The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace.

The motive du jour in the mainstream media, according to Brooks and Rabinowitz?

Fear of Deployment.

Brooks:

We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

Rabinowitz:

The thesis then: Maj. Hasan’s mental stress, provoked by the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could.

But it’s in their conclusions about the mainstream media that Brooks and Rabinowitz diverge.

Brooks:

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Rabinowitz:

It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.

In this matter, Brooks and Rabinowitz are the Cicero and Demosthenes of 21st century punditry.

When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke,’ but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, ‘Let us march.’

The people are gonna march on this.

 

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Wrestling with Dr. Samuel Johnson

Posted on November 10, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

How sweet was it that Sunday’s New York Times Book Review featured side-by-side reviews of a biography of the great critic-lexicographer-biographer Samuel Johnson and an autobiography of wrestler-celebrity-nobody Hulk Hogan?

So it was that Johnson’s “Falstaffian vitalism” paralleled Hogan’s “herculean body-slamming of André the Giant at Wrestlemania III.”

And Johnson’s “spiritual complexity and intellectual splendor” rivaled Hogan’s “raspy, bombastic voice and finger-pointing, chest-beating flair.”

And finally, this conclusion: “Johnson’s personality was worthy of Shakespearean representation,” while “[Hogan’s] compulsive confessing feels more like an effort to pre-empt the Us Weeklys and TMZs of the world.”

Johnson-Hogan Texas Death Match coming soon to a pay-per-view venue near you.

 

 

 

 

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The Globe 100

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

So the Boston Globe published its advertiser-friendly Globe 100 Top Places to Work glossy magazine on Sunday, and the list was very instructive.

Especially since there were no media organizations on it, with the notable exception of cable and communications giant Comcast, which ranked #1.

[Campaign Outsider Reality Check (pat. pending):  Employees might love Comcast, but its customers are not as enthusiastic. See comcastmustdie.com for details.]

Among the Globe 100, though, there were no other media outlets. And certainly no Boston-area news organizations. No newspapers, no TV stations, no radio stations, no magazines, no nothin’.

Your obit goes here.

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PShaws

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Well the Missus and I stopped by the new Shaws/Star Market in Chestnut Hill and here is our initial impression:

It’s where Rube Goldberg would shop for groceries if he were still alive.

For starters, the actual merchandise is on the second floor, which means you – and your shopping cart – take (separate but equal) escalators to begin your supermarket adventure. And it just gets more complicated from there.

The self-checkout seems to require from one to three Star employees to complete, and the Upstairs/Downstairs thing is a pain in the neck leaving, too.

No stars.

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It’s Good to Live in a Two-Newspaper Town

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Poor Boston Red Sox owner and newlywed John Henry: His hedge fund, John W. Henry & Co., is reportedly down from $2.5 billion to a mere $188 million.

That’s the B-to-M Jackpot® every hedge fund fears.

Consequently Henry has slashed a quarter of the staff from his Florida-based casino- a move both the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe reported Saturday.

Here’s the thing: The Herald stuck the story into The Ticker business briefs (although it’s gone now from the website version and doesn’t come up in the Herald’s search engine).

The Globe, meanwhile, featured it on the first page of its Business section (albeit below the fold on what was Page 5 Metro).

Even so, what does it say when the local broadsheet partly owned by Henry spotlights the story, while the feisty local tabloid locked in a death match with its archrival buries the story?

Says the newspaper business is the gift that keeps on giving.

 

 

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Fort Punt Channel

Posted on November 7, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

So the Missus and I went down to the South End for First Friday Open Studios and ran into Lisa Greenfield, a terrific artist who works out of Fort Point Channel.

And she – [Note to City Hall: Lisa is blameless in this; it was a slip of the keyboard, and late] –  I immediately went off on Boston Mayor-for-Forever Tom Menino because of:

1) His dismissible-out-of-hand comments on last Friday’s WBUR Radio Boston edition, during which Menino claimed that Fort Point Channel is a haven for artists, which it no longer is

2) Local news reports (Boston Herald story here) that a 25-story high-rise is in the works for the Fort Point area:

The project at 319 A Street Rear by Archon Group and Goldman Properties would be the neighborhood’s tallest building, at 240 feet, and include 232 apartments.

Question: Is this the Mayor Menino Bostonians will get during his fifth term – a guy who says one thing and does another?

Answer: Why would Hizzoner change one-trick-ponies in midstream?

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Re-Re-Checkin’ NECN

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the third time the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider has written about regional cable news outfit NECN and its slow-motion dismantling of the traditional firewall between advertising and editorial content.

Maybe third time’s the charm.

The issue is this:

Every Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. NECN cablecasts a magazine-style program called Style Boston. Except it’s not a program. It’s an infomercial. That’s because NECN doesn’t produce Style Boston;  instead, the producers of Style Boston buy time to run what are essentially marketing segments on NECN.

That puts Style Boston in the category of “paid programming.”

So far, so normal.

Until NECN puts Style Boston segments in the Arts & Entertainment section of its website, which signals to viewers that the clips are editorial content.

Which they’re not.

Twice before (here and here) the hardworking staff has said that NECN is too good a news organization to throw its reputation away for short money from a third-rate production like Style Boston.

Twice before NECN has, in essence, said “So what?”

Now, though, there’s trouble in Style Boston-istan, as both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald reported on Thursday.

Tonya Chen Mezrich (a charter member of the local chapter of Air Kiss Nation and the wife of author Ben Mezrich, who fabricates dialogue for a living) was, Style Boston producer Terri Stanley told the Globe, “not strong enough to carry the most important segment of the show” – that is, the “Fashion Forward” weekly feature.

The Herald, for its part, said  Tonya Mezrich’s “wooden on-screen performance wasn’t making the grade.” (You be the judge here .)

But what’s really not making the grade is NECN’s sense of what’s journalistically appropriate and what’s not.

By which we mean Style Boston.

UPDATE: The hardworking staff failed to make explicit that Air-Kiss Queen Tonya Mezrich counter-claims she was dumped by Style Boston because she’s pregnant. But even that doesn’t explain why Mezrich’s so bad in the infomercial.

 

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