Category: Media & Journalism

Did you notice?

iTunes 7.3, which was released yesterday to incorporate the iPhone, alphabetizes the library differently than its predecessors.

Punctuation marks are somehow incorporated into the order — for example, Miles Davis’s ‘Round Midnight or Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay. These used to be listed before “A” because of the apostrophe and the parenthesis. Now they show up under R and S.

And numbers now come after the letters rather than before — for example, Prince’s 1999.

I don’t care — I think I prefer this — but I thought it odd that the change was made.

——–

Some other stuff:

If you’re a shut-in you can check out the Moon Phase. (Today’s was a blue moon for most of the world. The U.S. had a blue moon last month.)

Here’s a bunch of photos of celebrities when they were kids. They’re captioned, but how many would you recognize?

For whatever reason, a video of Mika Brzezinski trying to do the right thing — and two knuckleheads.

How fast can you handle simple mathematical calculations?

Here in ‘Burque, using a pseudonym, a member of Mayor Marty’s cabinet called his radio show to flatter Marty and rail against the city council. Linda has ‘always been my alter-ego name’ CFO Gail Reese later said. Tbe Albuquerque Tribune has the story.

And Scott Adams has a take on lottery winners, prompted by the couple that won $105 million Wednesday night.

But I notice that the people who win are coincidentally the people who would be best for marketing future Powerball lotteries. You know what story you will never hear about a lottery winner? It’s this one:

“Wealthy bachelor neurosurgeon, age 30, wins $300 million in the lottery. The lucky winner, Winston Arbuckle III, says he plans to “Buy another yacht, smoke more weed, and float around the Mediterranean until I die from the clap.” Asked about his neurosurgery practice, Arbuckle quipped, “I never liked sick people.”

No, you will only hear stories about the modest couple with the hard-working husband, usually in his late fifties or early sixties. They will be “thinking about” getting a nicer house. In this latest lottery story, the husband is a long-haul trucker whose truck has recently crapped out. He plans to buy a new (used) truck and keep working.

Stupidest remark ever made, so far

This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.

Richard Cohen

Glenn Greenwald suggests Cohen’s column — “which grieves over the grave and tragic injustice brought down upon Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby — should be immediately laminated and placed into the Smithsonian History Museum as an exhibit which, standing alone, will explain so much about what happened to our country over the last six years.”

Money quote by Greenwald:

When it comes to the behavior of our highest and most powerful government officials, our Beltway media preaches, “it is often best to keep the lights off.” If that isn’t the perfect motto for our bold, intrepid, hard-nosed political press, then nothing is.

Obama did nothing wrong, they typed. And then, they kept on typing

This is the kind of self-impressed work that only appears in the New York Times. No other paper lets its reporters show the world how they love the sound of their voices. “There is no sign that Obama did anything improper.” Thirty-two paragraphs later, we’re being told how some people said it seemed—“a bit [awkward]”—at a charity function.

Daily Howler

The “bit awkward” was what some thought at a charity event where Michelle Obama appeared: “Mrs. Obama attended, though others there said it seemed a bit awkward.” (New York Times)

You tell yourself they can’t get dumber. On Sunday, the hapless Post did.

But on Sunday, the Post unleashed its big guns once again; the mighty paper was deeply troubled by an error in Gore’s kooky book. Andrew Ferguson did the honors, right there in the Outlook section—the same high-profile Sunday section which sang the praises of brilliant Fred Thompson just a few weeks ago. You always think they can’t get dumber. But they can’t wait to prove you wrong! Indeed, here’s how Ferguson started:

FERGUSON (6/10/07): You can’t really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, “The Assault on Reason.” It’s a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I’d love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

You always think they can’t get dumber. Then, they do something like that.

How pitiful has the Post become? Ferguson said he’d love to know where Gore found his Lincoln quote—but, since Gore’s untidy puddle of a book lacks footnotes, he just couldn’t figure it out. But good lord! Gore’s book has twenty pages of end-notes—including an endnote that plainly explains the source of that page 88 Lincoln quote. The quotation comes from The Lincoln Encyclopedia, a 1950 Mcmillan compilation, edited by Archer Shaw. Yes, readers, that’s where Gore “found the quote.” It says so right in his book.

Daily Howler

Gore’s book has 273 endnotes.

What Albuquerque is he talking about?

ALBUQUERQUE

At 9 a.m. on the very edge of the dusty, desolate collection of adobe homes and Vietnamese restaurants that seem to form this city, David Iglesias begins his run through the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. This is not easy terrain. The footing is terribly uneven. The altitude can be unbearable. At certain times one can hear the grumbling of mountain lions and the feasting of coyotes.

How many things can we find wrong with that paragraph from an article by Sridhar Pappu in The Washington Post — The Next Best Path? Would you believe anything that followed in that article?

Hat tip to John Fleck for the link.

And, with apologies to John and other reporters I respect, I am reminded of a quote I posted here three years ago today from Susan DuQuesnay Bankston:

As a general rule, I don’t like reporters. They go to meetings. I go to meetings. I come home and think about the meeting. They go home and write about the meeting. The next day when I read about the meeting in the newspaper, I wonder where I was yesterday when I thought I was at the meeting. This can be disconcerting.

The media and the issues

Much of the intense dissatisfaction I have with the American media arises out of the fact that these extraordinary developments — the dominant political movement advocating lawlessness and tyranny out in the open in The Wall St. Journal and Weekly Standard — receive almost no attention.

While the Bush administration expressly adopts these theories to detain American citizens without charges, engage in domestic surveillance on Americans in clear violation of the laws we enacted to limit that power, and asserts a general right to disregard laws which interfere with the President’s will, our media still barely discusses those issues.

They write about John Edwards’ haircut and John Kerry’s windsurfing and which political consultant has whispered what gossip to them about some painfully petty matter, but the extraordinary fact that our nation’s dominant political movement is openly advocating the most radical theories of tyranny — that “liberties are dangerous and law does not apply” — is barely noticed by our most prestigious and self-loving national journalists. Merely to take note of that failure is to demonstrate how profoundly dysfunctional our political press is.

Glenn Greenwald

Today Greenwald has published an even stronger take on “our broken political press.” Yesterdays column quoted above was about an essay in the Wall Street Journal and the “right’s explicit and candid rejection of ‘the rule of law’.”

I’m too old to cry and it hurts too much to laugh

NewMexiKen missed the Daily Howler yesterday but got to it this morning. It is absolutely required reading if you want to understand how the political discourse in this country has been framed.

Here, via Somerby, is Brian Williams’s actual first question to Senator Clinton:

Senator Clinton, your party’s leader in the United States Senate, Harry Reid, recently said the war in Iraq is lost. A letter to today’s USA Today calls his comments “treasonous” and says if General Patton were alive today, Patton would wipe his boots with Senator Reid. Do you agree with the position of your leader in the Senate?

As Somerby says, “Good God! Nothing too ‘loaded’ about that question!”

Or his question to Senator Obama:

Senator Obama, you have called this war in Iraq, quote, “dumb,” close quote. How do you square that position with those who have sacrificed so much? And why have you voted for appropriations for it in the past?

As Somerby points out, Obama called the war “dumb” BEFORE the war. When Obama used that term, no American soldier had died.

Go read it all!

Who you going to believe?

“Tens of thousands of Northern Californians fought their way through a chaotic commute this morning, a day after a gasoline tanker exploded and sent up a tower of flames that destroyed a heavily used freeway overpass near downtown Oakland.” —
The New York Times

“Officials had braced for terrible traffic jams and crowded ferries, trains and buses, but save for some backup on westbound Interstate 80 and Highway 101 on the Peninsula, the morning went smoothly.” — San Francisco Chronicle

Do you suppose it’s like obituaries and The Times is writing all its news stories in advance?

[Emphasis mine.]

Stuff

Guardian Unlimited has a column by Naomi Wolf that notes that from “Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And…George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.”

Slate Magazine has a column by Jack Shafer that takes a less worshipful view of David Halberstam. NewMexiKen tends to agree that Halberstam desperately needed a good editor. I began many of his books over the decades and believe I only finished one of them. Halberstam was the James Michener of non-fiction.

Which is not to detract from Halberstam’s willingness to dig deep and tell truth to power, something few if any journalists do today. See Glenn Greenwald’s tribute.

At Swampland Joe Klein translates Darth Cheney.

Best line of the day, so far

“The idea that NBC…was ‘offended’ by the use of the word ‘ho’ is beyond preposterous. Until [the Imus] incident, I would have wagered very good money that ‘ho’ would be in the title of at least one NBC-produced reality pilot within the next ten years.”

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone assessing the hypocrisy of the reaction to Imus. It’s good stuff.

“They’re all full of shit, all of them. With very few exceptions almost everyone who jumped onto the Don Imus pigpile was a shameless opportunist whose mind was made up years before this incident even happened . . .”

Sources

Yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal article by Mike Gallagher has been the topic du jour on many of the political blogs. The article claims that Senator Pete Domenici had U.S. Attorney David Iglesias fired and did so through Karl Rove and the President himself.

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired after Sen. Pete Domenici, who had been unhappy with Iglesias for some time, made a personal appeal to the White House, the Journal has learned.
. . .

At some point after the election last Nov. 6, Domenici called Bush’s senior political adviser, Karl Rove, and told him he wanted Iglesias out and asked Rove to take his request directly to the president.

Domenici and Bush subsequently had a telephone conversation about the issue.

Here’s the rub. As far as I can determine the sole indication of how Gallagher and The Journal determined what happened is this line:

“The Journal confirmed the sequence of events through a variety of sources familiar with the firing of Iglesias, including sources close to Domenici. ”

“A variety of sources . . . including sources close to Domenici.” Not one is identified, even in the most general terms.

Update 9:00AM: Here, for example, Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine) takes the article as gospel.

Update 2 9:07: NewMexiKen is just getting around to reading Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall posted this early this morning:

But the Journal’s story is a bit vague on the sourcing. The article says the paper “confirmed the sequence of events through a variety of sources familiar with the firing of Iglesias, including sources close to Domenici.” Close to Domenici looks like the key. These are facts no one else has been able to dig up so far. But proxies for Domenici wouldn’t seem to have much interest in putting this story out. So what’s up exactly? And what does it suggest about the facts alleged in the article?

Exactly

Atrios raises a key point for the media:

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are not the only black people in America, and more than that they do not have the ability to force themselves onto your news shows. There’s a pattern here:

1) Bigot eruption somewhere
2) Lots of people condemn it
3) Al Sharpton goes on every teevee program
4) The media people turn around and use Sharpton’s past as a distraction/excuse for the current bigot eruption

If Al Sharpton is an imperfect spokesperson for an issue, and you keep putting him on the teevee to be the spokesperson for that issue, then the obvious conclusion is that this is a deliberate strategy.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has a good summary of what happened to Imus (written for the British reader).

Best line of the day, so far

“Why you’re seeing all this dust thrown up about rap music is because people don’t want to concentrate on the kind of polite obscenity that white talk show hosts, particularly white conservative talk show hosts, have been trafficking in for fifteen years.”

Charles Pierce on NPR’s “It’s Only a Game,” as quoted at Daily Kos, which has more.

Cheney’s Nemesis

As commenter Richard Albury pointed out, NewMexiKen neglected to include Seymour Hersh among the birthdays Sunday. Hersh turned 70 April 8th. Matt Taibbi has an interview with Hersh in the current Rolling Stone.

America’s pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us — and that still pisses Hersh off.

Key quote: “I think Bush wants to resolve the Iranian crisis. It may not be a crisis, but he wants to resolve it.”

But it’s Saturday

The big weather-related story in New Mexico this morning is the series of tornadoes that struck the eastern part of the state last evening. This is from AP via the Santa Fe New Mexican:

A series of storms, producing at least 13 tornadoes, destroyed buildings and injured at least a dozen people, several critically, in an area along New Mexico’s border with Texas, police said.

The worst damage was reported in Logan and Clovis, communities about 80 miles apart, police said.

The tornadoes, which were reported during a 5-hour period Friday, damaged several buildings, downed power lines and sparked a fire, Clovis police Lt. James Schoeffel said.

Thirteen people from that area were hospitalized at the Plains Regional Medical Center with injuries. Five were in critical condition with head trauma, said Liz Crouch, the center’s chief operating officer.

As of 10:27 AM see if you can find anything about the storms on The Albuquerque Journal web site home page. Click to enlarge.

Albuquerque Journal

Huh?

This strange conflict in Saturday’s New York Times:

Headline: Ex-Interior Aide Is Guilty of Lying in Lobbying Case

Lead: The second-highest official at the Interior Department during President Bush’s first term, J. Steven Griles, pleaded guilty on Friday . . .

Would you call the number two person in your organization an “aide”?