Globel Waning

Posted on August 10, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Just gotta ask if the Boston Globe is composing its front page according to the actual news, or to Globe bylines?

Case in point: Page One of yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe. No quibble here with the two David Ortiz stories – one about his Who, Me? press conference, the other about the vagaries of doping in sports.

But then there was the piece on decaying municipal offices, and the story about the new Beatles video game, and the promo for the “never-before-told-story” about the Boston Harbor cleanup that occupied one quarter of the front page.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is, the Hudson River airplane-helicopter crash, which took the lives of nine people, was relegated to page 9.

I know Boston hates New York (and, coincidentally or not, the Boston Globe hates the New York Times), but really . . . does that story placement reflect solid news judgement?

Or is it a reflection of the Globe’s wanting just Globe stories on Page One, given that the rest of Sunday’s A section featured all of three Globe bylines. Everything else was wire stuff from (mostly) the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, the last of which supplied the Hudson River crash report.

Meanwhile, the hometown Times didn’t exactly cover itself in glory by playing the crash barely above the Page One fold instead of in the top righthand column, where the day’s most important news traditionally goes.

(For the record, that space was occupied by “Climate Change Seen As Threat to U.S. Security” – in which hypothetical people die, as opposed to real ones.)

Maybe it’s just a numbers game. Here’s the Times death-toll enumeration:

It was the worst air accident in the New York City area since Nov. 12, 2001, when 265 people were killed in the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Belle Harbor, Queens, as it took off from Kennedy International Airport for the Dominican Republic.

It was also the worst air accident in the New York City area on August 8, 2009. And it deserved better treatment, both in the Times and the Globe.

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Astrotruth

Posted on August 9, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

The debate over Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul/reform/government takeover has been upgraded to “hostile,” according to this New York Times report.

The bitter divisions over an overhaul of the health care system have exploded at town-hall-style meetings over the last few days as members of Congress have been shouted down, hanged in effigy and taunted by crowds. In several cities, noisy demonstrations have led to fistfights, arrests and hospitalizations.

Sounds like all-out warfare to us, and as the feller (anyone from Aeschylus to Rudyard Kipling to 1918 California Sen. Hiram Warren Johnson) says, the first casualty of war is truth.

In this case, though, truth is also the second and third casualty. The most widely publicized information about healthcare legislation in news reports up to now ranges in reliability from little to none.

[Healthcare overhaul/reform/government takeover advertising is a whole nother issue, which the hard-working staff at Campaign Outsider is trying to wrestle into submission for a later post.]

But it’s not just the facts that are questionable in this dustup. The tactics – mostly at town hall meetings – have been downright disgraceful.

On the opposition side we’ve seen or heard about mock tombstones with a Congressman’s name on it, at least one lawmaker hanged in effigy, and a Nazi swastika subbing for the S in a U.S. Senator’s title.

Democrats say the opposition effort is not a grassroots movement, but an Astroturf movement manufactured by the healthcare-industrial complex and the GOP – which is somewhat, but not entirely, true.

Beyond that, the Obama administration is telling the Demroots to fight back, according to the Times report.

“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,” said Jim Messina, the deputy White House chief of staff.

Pronoun agreement issues aside, that sounds like Sean Connery’s Jim Malone in The Untouchables telling Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness how to bring Al Capone to justice.

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!

We’ll see if Pres. Obama remembers his Chicagoroots. Leading indicator: He’s already backstabbed pharmaceutical companies on the deal they thought they had with the White House.

All together now: That’s the Chicago way.

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Harry Patch, R.I.P.

Posted on August 8, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Nice piece by New York Times writer John F. Burns about the funeral of Harry Patch, who died at the age of 111 as the last living British soldier from World War I.

Mr. Patch survived “the fighting at Ypres [in Flanders] that was among the bloodiest in a war that took the lives of nearly 900,000 men from Britain and its colonies.”

At the funeral, Burns wrote:

A Belgian diplomat read an excerpt from Mr. Patch’s 2007 autobiography, “The Last Fighting Tommy,” in which he described an offensive during the battle at Passchendaele, the bloodiest chapter in the Ypres fighting, when he came across a fellow soldier “ripped from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel” during a British assault on German lines.

The episode reinforced in Mr. Patch, a devout Christian, the belief that there is a life after death. “When we got to him, he looked at us and said, ‘Shoot me,’ ” he recalled. “He was beyond all human help, and before we could draw a revolver he was dead. And the final word he uttered was ‘Mother!’ It wasn’t a cry of despair, it was a cry of surprise and joy.”

He added, “I’m positive that when he left this world, wherever he went, his mother was there, and from that day, I’ve always remembered that cry, and that death is not the end.”

Mr. Patch’s funeral also featured, Burns noted, traditional Anglican hymns and “a singing of Pete Seeger’s Vietnam-era antiwar ballad, ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,’ sung by a young woman from the cathedral choir.”

Oddly enough, the funeral service did not seem to include a reading of “In Flanders Fields,” the celebrated WWI poem by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, M.D., a Canadian surgeon who attended the wounded at Ypres for 17 days.

Here’s the sad, lyrical opening stanza:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard  amid the guns below.

Harry Patch survived those guns, but he was, as John Burns wrote, “past his 100th birthday before he began speaking out about the horrors he endured as a machine gunner in Flanders.”

Perhaps he recalled the final stanza of “In Flanders Fields:”

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.


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Gone Golfin’

Posted on August 7, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

To compensate for the boss’s recent vacation, the hard-working staff at Campaign Outsider got Thursday off and went a-golfing, the first time in ten years we’ve struck a ball in anger.

It was not a pretty sight.

We have long contended that the better you get at golf, the less fun you have. Exhibit A: this exchange a number of years ago with our brother Robert , who is a fabulous golfer and pretty much remembers every shot he’s ever made.

CO: So how was your business trip to the West Coast?

ROBERT: Good – I played Palm Springs.

CO: How’d you do?

ROBERT: Okay . . . I got my first hole-in-one.

CO: Wow – that’s great.

ROBERT:  Yeah. I walked onto the green and thought, ‘Thank God I don’t have to putt.’

We rest our case.

Not surprisingly, given our innate ineptitude, it’s always been fun to beat our way around a golf course, and today was no exception. Today was also the umpteenth time we’ve failed to achieve our lifelong golfing dream, which is to shoot not our age, but our IQ.

Just can’t get that low.

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Gone Fishin’: What I Missed

Posted on August 6, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

I know I’m late to the party on this – and I haven’t seen any of the commentary about it, so I’m probably Johnny Redundant – but what the hell was the New York Times thinking when it ran this piece about kidnapped-by-Iran Newsweek correspondent Maziar  Bahari?

For starters, the Times piece, headlined “Newsweek Steps Up Effort To Free Reporter in Iran,” doesn’t even identify Bahari as a writer for Newsweek until the 13th graf, which says he has “written for the magazine since 1998.”

Previous to that, Bahari is merely described as a “prominent journalist:”

In a statement, the editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, said that Mr. Bahari’s “journalistic work in Iran has always been balanced and objective.”

The Times report adds this:

Sam Tradeau, the New York representative for Reporters Without Borders, said that Newsweek initially tried to limit public comments about Mr. Bahari’s arrest, “believing this would be the most efficient way to secure his release, especially because the charges against him were completely baseless and ridiculous.”

Oddly, the Times fails to mention its similar dilemma over the capture of Times reporter David Rohde in Afghanistan – an especially egregious omission in light of the Times’ decision to withhold disclosure of that kidnapping and the paper’s largely successful lobbying effort to persuade other media outlets to do the same.

For its part, Newsweek has lately stepped up its effort to free Bahari.

The Times, on the other hand, needs to step up its disclosure.

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Gone Fishin’: What I Caught

Posted on August 6, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

The Missus and I ventured out to the Berkshires the last couple of days, and here’s what I caught:

* An eye-candy exhibit, Prendergast in Italy, at the Williams College Museum of Art. It brought together 60 of Maurice Prendergast’s charming watercolors of his sallies through Venice, Rome, Sienna, and Capri around the turn of the 20th century.

* An eye-opening exhibit, Dove/O’Keefe: Circles of Influence, at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. It brought together the work of Arthur Dove (1880-1946), “acknowledged as America’s first abstract painter,” and the work of Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986), “one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century.” As they say in the Southwest, “It’s a corker.” It runs through September 7.

* An eye-popping production of The Torch-Bearers at the Williamstown Theater Festival. I don’t know what to say about this revival of the 1922 George Kelly play, but I can tell you what the Missus said: “I’m speechless. I’m without speech.” I’ll only add that The Torch-Bearers is a thoroughly ridiculous play propped up by a ridiculously talented cast – from the bloviating Edward Herrmann to the gyronomic Katie Finneran to the flat-out hilarious Andrea Martin. It runs through August 9, which is a blessing . . . and a curse.

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Dobbs Fairy Tale

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Courtesy of Campaign Outsider’s Verizon broadband revival:

The curent Lou Dobbs donnybrook is a total hoot.

CNN’s resident xenophobe has been propping up the birthers who contend that Barack Obama was born in Kenya so is ineligible for the U.S. presidency.

Media Matters for America, a watchdog group founded by born-again liberal David Brock (late of the “a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty” Anita Hill anti-fan club), produced a TV spot calling out CNN for propping up Dobbs.

That led, Media Matters brays, to an AP story headlined, “Lou Dobbs ‘A Publicity Nightmare for CNN,'” and its report, “CNN’s Kurtz, CNN President Now At Odds Over Dobbs.”

Media Matters tried to buy  time for the Dobbs spot on Lou Dobbs’s show, but CNN spiked the ad.

No offense, but it seems like a good time for CNN to abort the birthers.

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Gone Fishin’

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

I wanted to post about the excellent dustup around CNN’s Lou Dobbs, Mr. Midwife to the birther movement that claims Barack Obama does not have a valid U.S. birth certificate, thereby making Obama ineligible to be president.

But my costly Verizon broadband connection is not cooperating, so I’ll just say this:

The hardworking staff of Campaign Outsider will be on assignment for the next few days.

Catch you (up) later.

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Why America Needs Daily Newspapers

Posted on August 3, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Check out this heart-wrenching report in Sunday’s New York Times about suicides among Iraq war veterans, which are accelerating at breakneck speed.

The number of suicides reported by the Army has risen to the highest level since record-keeping began three decades ago. Last year, there were 192 among active-duty soldiers and soldiers on inactive reserve status, twice as many as in 2003, when the war began. (Five more suspected suicides are still being investigated.) This year’s figure is likely to be even higher: from January to mid-July, 129 suicides were confirmed or suspected, more than the number of American soldiers who died in combat during the same period.

Those statistics, of course, do not offer a full picture. Suicide counts tend to be undercounts …

Here’s the thumbnail version of Sergeant Jacob Blaylock’s story after he left Iraq:

Sergeant Blaylock went back to Houston, where he tried to pick up the pieces of his life and shape them into a whole. But grief and guilt trailed him, combining with other stresses: financial troubles, disputes with his estranged wife over their young daughter, the absence of the tight group of friends who had helped him make it through 12 months of war.

On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26.

“I have failed myself,” he wrote in a note found later in his car. “I have let those around me down.”

If daily newspapers disappear or become shells of their former selves, most of these stories disappear along with them. It’s not that nobody will do this kind of in-depth investigation, it’s that there will be far fewer of them.

And we’ll be far poorer for the loss.

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Department of the Obvious

Posted on August 2, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

If the Wall Street Journal’s interview with John McCain on Saturday wasn’t the most self-serving exercise this side of the check-out lines at Shop ‘n’ Stop, it’ll do till something better comes along.

Here’s McCain on how he was shocked shocked at his press treatment in last year’s presidential campaign, as related by interviewer Stephen “Death Before Taxes” Moore:

He seems perplexed that his pals in the media turned on him in 2008 after years of worshipful press treatment. “In 2000 [when he ran against George W. Bush] I used to go chat with reporters on the back of the bus, and we would have these long, pleasant conversations . . . . I was the underdog clawing my way up. But then in 2008, I noticed that it would be kind of a gotcha session with the press—a totally more hostile attitude.”

No, a totally more high-stakes attitude. When you’re a presidential longshot, you get the kid gloves. But when you’re the actual Republican presidential candidate, the gloves have to come off, as any reasonable politician would agree.

[Update: Yes, yes, the news media completely failed to do the same to Barack Obama. But that doesn’t mean they should have gone easier on McCain or – a candidate with a more serious grievance – Hillary Clinton. It means they should’ve done their job and examined Obama’s candidacy just as closely.]

Meanwhile, on the economic front, the stock market tanked, creating another dilemma for McCain as he told Moore:

“We were three points up on September 14. The next day the market lost 700 points and $1.2 trillion in wealth vanished, and by the end of the day we were seven points down.”

That, of course, confirmed the conventional wisdom at the time: If the political topic of conversation in the runup to the election was Iraq and homeland security, advantage McCain; if it was the economy, advantage Obama.

Which brings us to Moore’s next question:

Why did [McCain] suspend his campaign, and why did he vote for the $700 billion bank bailout plan, which was wildly unpopular with voters?

Here’s McCain’s response:

“You have no idea the pressure I was under  . . . So I do the impetuous and rash thing by saying, look, I have got to go back to Washington and see how I can help. And by the way, so did Obama—but it was McCain that was the impetuous one. “

Yeah, because Obama didn’t make a big to-do about suspending his campaign and putting patriotism over politics yak yak yak the way McCain did, except the gambit was transparently political – not to mention lame – on McCain’s part, making him look, well, impetuous and rash.

The WSJ headlined the McCain interview, “Pulling No Punches.” Truth is, McCain punched himself out.

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