A racially tinged food fight

Romenesko has got a few links up on a simmering controversy over the devastation in New Orleans. When hungry people grab food from abandoned grocery stores, are they responding rationally to unusual circumstances? Or are they looting?

Incredibly, this Boing Boing item suggests that the difference in at least one case may depend on whether the person is white or black: a white couple is described as "finding" food, whereas a black man had apparently grabbed his goodie bag by "looting" a store. As you will see, the two pictures are remarkably alike.

Yes, we're talking about two different news agencies, and as the item itself notes, we have no way of knowing whether there were circumstances that might justify such labeling. But it's hard to disagree with Romenesko letter-writer Christina Pazzanese, who says, "Perhaps these photos will stimulate a media 'gut check' as we race to tell the stories of the thousands who lost their lives and livelihoods."

Last night I was watching CNN when I saw some folks - I don't remember their race - described as "looters." They were walking out of an abandoned grocery store with what appeared to be food and other essentials. (And yes, I realize there is real looting going on, too, but that's not what I'm talking about.) What's happening in New Orleans is horrible, and is likely to get worse. Editors need to stop and think about how they describe people who find themselves in a desperate situation.

Mustard with that?

ThinkSecret.com, one of the Apple rumor sites being sued by Steve Jobs, has some fun with the New York Times' story today on Apple's supposedly imminent announcement of an iPod-capable cell phone. To wit:

THINKSECRET: The phone, the Times said, will allow users to "listen to the songs, presumably through headphones," as opposed to listening to them through salami sandwiches, as originally presumed.

By the way, I've rediscovered Aaron Swartz's New York Times Link Generator, which allows bloggers to create Times links that won't expire. For some reason I had misplaced it. So if you don't read this post for a couple of weeks, the link to the Times story should still work.

Greetings from Northeastern

I'll be attending orientation events for new faculty members at Northeastern this week. In fact, I'm on campus right now, posting this from a public computer. So expect little blogging this week.

Comment spam solved?

I just turned on a Blogger feature called "word verification." Now, if you want to leave a comment, you will be prompted to enter a sequence of characters - which, presumably, you will not be able to do if you're a spammer buzzing through people's blogs automatically. You will still be able to log in anonymously. So let's hope it works.

Bob on Bob

If you haven't seen it yet, here's the trailer for Martin Scorsese's Dylan biopic, "No Direction Home." The bad news: it's all about the '60s (again!), and the quotes you hear floating over the video sound like the usual clichés. ("There is an American collective unconscious, and Bobby somehow tapped into it." Ugh.) The good news: Dylan seems fully awake in the interview snippets, and the concert footage of "Like a Rolling Stone" is a killer.

Don't try watching this without broadband.

"Death in the Garden"

"I can't believe I saw him die right in front of me" begins Boston Herald photographer John Wilcox's story today about taking pictures of a man shooting up in the Boston Public Garden and then watching him keel over. It's a stunning story - accompanied by an even more stunning online picture gallery. This is must-see journalism.

Given that this is the Herald, the inevitable comparisons will be made to last October, when the paper ran a graphic, color photo of Victoria Snelgrove's bloody body outside Fenway Park. As I predicted, Herald publisher Pat Purcell later apologized.

Wilcox's report, though, is nothing like that. The front-page photo, though dramatic, isn't graphic. And though I don't have today's print edition and thus can't see how it was played inside, every photo in the online gallery is newsworthy without being exploitative.

This was a self-inflicted public death, and it's not a bad idea to show people as directly as possible what drugs can do. As Wilcox writes, "The men I photographed in the park yesterday didn't look like back-alley junkies. They were clean and dressed like working people. One of them was wearing a roofing company shirt." In other words, this could happen to someone you know.

After Matter: (Thanks for the phrase, Jay Rosen.) Adam Gaffin has a roundup of commentary on Universal Hub.

Steve Outing responds

His thoughtful response to my critique is in the comments section, here. No disrespect to the other Steve, whose comments are also worth reading.

Shifting the time-space continuum

Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute has a piece in Editor & Publisher on how technology is being used to open up the editorial page. Every one of the ideas he mentions is worthwhile, from the Seattle Post & Intelligencer's "virtual editorial board," to blogs by editorial writers, to offloading worthwhile material onto the limitless space of the Web.

Still, I find the mentality expressed in this excerpt problematic:

OUTING: Editorial pages can open up to more voices by giving them space on the Web. If four people submit Op-Ed pieces on, say, a controversial local land-use plan, then all four can run. A logical approach in a print/online publishing environment is to choose the best for print publication and then refer to additional public Op-Ed essays online. Or, the print Op-Ed page can serve more as a table of contents to what's published online, with abstracts of each of the four articles and Web addresses for the full articles.

It's the same space issue with letters to the editor, of course. The online editorial page frees letter writers up from the old tyranny of editorial-page editors. For instance, at the Post-Intelligencer, the policy is that an individual can only have a letter published once every three months in the print edition. Yet for the letters areas of P-I Web site - and the same goes for submissions to the Virtual Editorial Board - a prolific letter writer can be published every day.

What this means is that in time, the editorial page of a printed newspaper becomes a highlights page for a much richer presentation of viewpoints and opinion on its respective online area. Interesting, thoughtful and lengthy conversations on important issues can be boiled down and summarized in print - a "Cliff's Notes," if you will, of the full issue discussion online. Online = depth. Print = a quick read.

What is the idea of a daily newspaper? To me, the idea is to present a coherent compilation of the news. In putting together that coherent picture, the editor's most important job is deciding what to leave out. You want to help the reader who can only give you 15 minutes to navigate through a complicated news-scape, while at the same time providing depth to those who can spend an hour.

But even a newspaper's most devoted readers need to know that there's an end - that, at some point, intelligent editors have decided that enough is enough, and that any more would represent a diminishing rate of return. What Outing favors, by contrast, could easily turn into a situation in which the print newspaper declines in importance while the Web edition morphs into a bottomless pit.

The Web provides limitless space. But that doesn't absolve editors of the responsibility to respect their readers' very limited time.

Schechter unhacked

He's back, but he doesn't know what happened. Stay tuned.

No, it's not a car from the Balkans

You can't tell from the transcript, but during last night's lengthy report on CNN's "NewsNight with Aaron Brown" about Pat Robertson's latest outrage - a televised call to assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez - the headline at the bottom of the screen read, "Hugo Who?"

Well, if the public doesn't know who Chávez is, who's responsible for that? Could it be, you know, the media?

This Wikipedia article on Chávez seems fair and balanced. If CNN's not going to tell its viewers who Chávez is, perhaps it can suggest they read it rather than mocking them for their ignorance - ignorance for which CNN is partly to blame.

Just ask Bob Costas.

Denigrating the Atlantic's past

From the moment that he bought the Atlantic Monthly in 1999, David Bradley has perpetrated the notion that the venerable magazine had been getting by on little more than its reputation. Bradley does it again today in the New York Observer, explaining to my former Boston Phoenix colleague Tom Scocca how he and his first editor, the late Michael Kelly, saved the Atlantic.

SCOCCA: "This is the problem Michael and I used to fret about: What's its purpose?" said Mr. Bradley. After "what Michael Kelly used to call a great 19th century," Mr. Bradley said, The Atlantic through the decades had fallen behind a speeding-up news cycle. "It retreated in ambition," Mr. Bradley said. "And it retreated from the news."

Thus does Bradley continue to add insult to the terrible injury he inflicted earlier this year, when he announced that he was moving the century-and-a-half-old Boston landmark to Washington, merging operations with the National Journal, which he also owns. (Too bad Oliver Wendell Holmes didn't name the magazine the Bostonian rather than the Atlantic.)

There's no question that Kelly and his successor in job if not in title, Cullen Murphy (whose tenure at the Atlantic predated Bradley's arrival by 15 years, and who's leaving at the end of this year), did some good work. Thanks to Bradley's deep pockets, they were able to bulk up the magazine with more newsworthy, timely articles and more big-name writers. But despite a slew of National Magazine Awards (choose "Atlantic Monthly" at "Magazine Title") under both men, the magazine certainly hasn't been perfect. I'm not a fan of the redesign Kelly oversaw, finding it more old-fashioned than the still-fresh design he threw out. Articles are longer and more bloated than ever; a piece I might take a gander on at 5,000 words turns into "sorry, no time" at 15,000 or 20,000 words. And then there is the traditionally liberal Atlantic's increasingly neoconservative bent, a trend that can certainly be attributed to Kelly, and - according to Scocca's article - perhaps to Bradley as well, given his youthful support for the Vietnam War.

As I think back over the years, the Atlantic articles I remember the most tend to be those published under Kelly's predecessor, William Whitworth: Ellen Ruppel Shell's horrifying report on mad-cow disease, published in 1998. William Calvin's warning that even slight global warming could lead to a tipping point that would plunge Europe into another ice age, also published in 1998. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's "Dan Quayle Was Right," from 1994, which helped transform the debate over the benefits of two-parent families. The Atlantic won nine National Magazine Awards during Whitworth's tenure, including the big one, for general excellence, in 1993.

And if Whitworth's Atlantic was not quite as on top of the news as Kelly's and Murphy's, it made up for that by being more consistently surprising. Certainly I never would have read a feature on the crisis in seminaries had it not arrived in my mailbox in 1990 ("The Hands That Would Shape Our Souls," by Paul Wilkes).

Other than Bradley's unforgivable decision to move the Atlantic out of Boston, his tenure has been a positive one. But can we please dispense with the fiction that the magazine had become irrelevant before Bradley swooped in to save it? It's a different magazine from the one he bought from Mort Zuckerman - better in some ways, not so good in others. For Bradley to suggest otherwise is insulting to those of us who are longtime readers.

Dissector dissected

Danny Schechter's weblog of progressive news from around the world has been hacked. If you go there now, you'll see a message from the "Minus-Power Virus Coding Team." Follow the link to irvirus.com at the bottom of the page, and you get something that looks to be in Arabic, with music.

A "whois" search reveals that the domain name "irvirus.com" is registered in Tehran, Iran. (So maybe the text is actually in Farsi rather than Arabic.) The contact is listed as arash {dot} hosseinian {at} gmail {dot} com. Frankly, I wouldn't put much stock in this. Interesting if true, as they say - although the fact that the host is also based in Iran suggests that maybe this is for real.

Nothing about this yet on MediaChannel.org, the website that Schechter edits.

What Moog wrought

Whether you like synthesizers or not (I don't, much), you should check out the "audio slide show" on Robert Moog that's been posted at the New York Times website. (Click on "The Music of Robert Moog.") Moog, who invented the synthesizer, died on Sunday.

What I like most about the Times' multimedia exhibit, narrated by music critic Allan Kozinn, are the generous sound clips from the Moog synthesizer's early days: a longish snippet from Emerson, Lake & Palmer's loathsome "Lucky Man" (on which the synth is used mainly for stupid sound effects), a bit from Wendy Carlos's "Switched-On Bach" (the wonderfully creepy soundtrack to "A Clockwork Orange") and the Beatles' characteristically melodic and restrained use of the instrument on "Abbey Road."

Amazon.com has some terrific clips from "Switched-On Bach" here. The CD is ranked #154 in sales this hour, no doubt a reaction to Moog's death.

Correction: Media Nation is reliably informed that the soundtrack to "A Clockwork Orange" was actually a sequel to "Switched-On Bach," heavily flavored by Beethoven.

Wired wilderness

It was right around noon on Tuesday, Aug. 9. We had just reached Clarendon Lookout after an exhausting vertical scramble through the heat and humidity. Sweat was pouring off me; my heart was pounding. And there, perched on the rock before me, was a young couple who had arrived shortly before us, looking like they had just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalogue.

She was chatting away on a cellphone. After she hung up, she apologized and introduced herself and her husband as "Bug and Ms. Priss." Way back last spring, they had left their home in Memphis in order to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, some 2,000 miles. As you can see from this, "thru-hikers," as they are called, have become something akin to marathoners - that is, it's a Herculean feat, but a lot more people do it than used to be the case. More than 500 a year, in fact. (The thru-hiking experience was documented to hilarious effect several years ago in Bill Bryson's excellent book "A Walk in the Woods.")

Unlike most of the thru-hikers we met, Bug and Ms. Priss seemed almost normal. After three and a half days on the trail, our band of three adults and four boys looked pretty bedraggled, but Bug and Priss seemed as though they had done little more than stroll up a hill for a picnic. It turned out that - other than being in far better physical shape than we were - they had stopped by a relative's house within the past day or so and had gotten cleaned up. Priss told me that they hoped to reach the end of the trail, at Mt. Katahdin in Maine, by mid-September or so, and then relocate to the Carolinas.

Before they moved on, they urged us to look up their trail journal online. If I'd had the presence of mind, I'd have asked them a few questions about how - and why - they would do such a thing. I'd have taken their picture, too. But I did manage to swipe a photo from their site, which I'm sure they won't mind. I e-mailed them some questions a few days ago, but they haven't responded; in fact, as you'll see, they haven't updated their journal for a bit.

You will see that Bug and Priss are, in fact, Bryan and Bethany Love. Their journal notes that they're thru-hiking this year to mark their fourth wedding anniversary. Bryan's first entry, from last August, begins with this:

BRYAN: Currently, I'm a 31 year old pharmacist at a very large hospital in Memphis. I started in my current position fresh from my residency with the intention of only staying a few years, then moving back to SC. Seven years later and I'm still in Memphis. Before continuing on with my professional career, I want to take some time off. What better way to take some time off than to take a little "walk in the woods." I know most of my colleagues & friends couldn't understand my desires to spend 4-6 months walking to Maine. Luckily for me, my wife understands completely and is looking forward to the trek also.

You'll also find photos and even some notes on their gear.

What I find fascinating about this is the need to take part in media of some form even when going through such an elemental, off-the-beaten-track experience as thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Of technological necessity, this is obviously a new development. I've been backpacking since 1968, and the first time I ever brought a cellphone into the mountains was in 2001. Now it's common, and you see people chatting away wherever there's a cell signal.

Since Bug and Priss didn't respond to my e-mail, I can't tell you exactly how they're able to blog from the AT. But their e-mail address suggests that they're using a tiny Pocketmail computer, which taps into the cellular network. Photos, I imagine, are taken on their cellphone. And thus are the Loves able to engage in some DIY media even while hiking from Georgia to Maine.

Our goal, on the other hand, was simply to hike from Bromley Mountain to Mt. Killington in five days - a 50-mile backpacking trip in southern Vermont encompassing the final stretch of the Appalachian Trail in Vermont before it turns east toward New Hampshire, with Vermont's own Long Trail continuing north to the Canadian border.

On Saturday, Aug. 6, I headed up with three other adults and four 14-year-old boys - all of us from my son's Boy Scout troop. The trip had been a year in the planning, and for me, at least, it was pure nostalgia: I had gone on two such trips when I was in scouts, and a third as a 21-year-old helping out my old troop. Of course, at 49, I knew the hiking was likely to be more difficult this time around.

Day One was warm but not particularly humid. That, combined with the fact that we were fresh, made for a relatively easy day's hike, even though it was supposed to be our toughest day on the trail. We spent our first night at the Griffith Lake Tenting Area and our second - following a very easy day of hiking - at Little Rock Pond, a beautiful, deep lake in which some members of our party went swimming. (Not me, though I wished I'd brought swimming trunks.) Little Rock Pond was presided over by Rick, a student at Unity College in Maine who's majoring in adventure education.

By Day Three, Monday, the weather had turned humid again. And after a fairly easy morning, we had a brutal hike in the afternoon, staggering up an unheralded peak called Bear Mountain. At this point, our backpacks were weighing us down, and there wasn't much we could do about it: a good deal of the weight was water, and it would have been dangerous for us to carry any less than the two to three liters we were each lugging.

It was also on Day Three that we met "Doc," another thru-hiker and by far the most colorful character we encountered. A Floridian by way of Woonsocket, R.I., Doc was hiking the entire AT for the second summer in a row. It was unclear what he did for a living, though he mentioned something about working in a veterinary hospital. Doc was middle-aged or older, and he smoked a lot of cigarettes - not exactly conducive to effective hiking. In fact he tended to keep pace with us, whereas most of the other hikers blew past us with depressing vigor. Talkative, profane and filled with wild stories, he told us about growing up amid the gang wars of New Haven and New York City, and of hiking over Mt. Washington at night, bombed on vodka. He was an interesting and engaging guy, although a little Doc tended to go a long way.

We camped for the third night at the Minerva Hinchey Shelter, the only night I decided to stay inside rather than set up my tent. (The shelters along this stretch of the AT are three-sided structures with a roof, but open in the front.) Around 9:30 p.m., someone whom I took to be a thru-hiker made his way into camp and parked his malodorous head about six inches from my nose. The next night, at the Governor Clement Shelter, I was back in my tent.

By far our most difficult stretch was from 3 p.m. on Monday, when we started up Bear Mountain, until 1 p.m. on Tuesday, when we reached the peak of Beacon Hill, a bit beyond Clarendon Lookout. (Beacon Hill refers not to Boston, but to the fact that there's an airplane beacon on the summit.) These were three extremely difficult uphills, all the harder because they are minor summits that don't get much attention. In other words, it's a lot easier to bust your hump when you know ahead of time that you have a tough hike ahead of you.

As we did on Wednesday, Aug. 10, our last day on the trail. That's when we climbed Mt. Killington, at 4,235 feet the second-highest peak in Vermont. The AT actually skirts around the summit, but we scrambled to the top along a steep, rocky side trail. We had several hours of hiking in front of us, but it was all downhill from Killington. The feeling of accomplishment was palpable.

My apologies for not posting any photos of our hiking party. The four boys, obviously, are all minors, and I don't have permission to post their pictures. But it was quite a feat for them and an even greater feat for the adults. Only one of us (not me!) was in good physical shape, and none of us enjoys the resilience of youth at this point in our lives.

What I keep thinking about, though, is how much the experience has changed over the past 30 years. It used to be that when you took part in a backpacking trip, you were cutting yourself off from the world - there simply wasn't any way you would hear about anything, from national catastrophe to personal tragedy, until you emerged from the woods. Now, it's a given that you're going to stay in touch.

Maybe not to the same degree as Bug and Miss Priss. But, in fact, all of us were calling our families, and one of the adults even left in mid-trip after he learned that his wife was sick. I checked my voice mail and returned a work-related call. It's a wired nation, and that applies to the woods and mountains just as much as it does to cities and towns. Is it better? I'm not sure. But it's different.

The Fox effect

There isn't one, according to a new study that gets an airing in today's New York Times.

The NEA's non-boycott boycott

National Education Association president Reg Weaver has a letter in today's Boston Globe that is disingenuous at best. Following the contretemps over the op-ed published in the Globe earlier this week criticizing the NEA's campaign against Wal-Mart - an op-ed that turned out to have been indirectly subsidized by Wal-Mart (click here and here) - Weaver writes:

WEAVER: Michael Reitz is not the first to characterize the National Education Association as supporting a boycott of Wal-Mart ("Why target Wal-Mart?" op ed, Aug 16). This is just not true. The NEA, which represents 2.7 million educators, voted to support the "Wake Up Wal-Mart" campaign to educate its members about the retailing giant's antiworker practices and how its profits are used for anti-public education activities. The effort is about educating, not boycotting: Consumers are simply reminded that when they shop, they have choices about where to spend their money.

Not a boycott? Here is some information on the anti-Wal-Mart campaign that I found on the NEA's website. Yes, the wording is circumspect, and supports Weaver's claim that the campaign is not a boycott. Except that the very first sentence begins, "The NEA Executive Committee approved the Association's participation in 'Wake-Up Wal-Mart,' a major national effort organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) ..." And the NEA provides a link to the "Wake-Up Wal-Mart" website.

Follow the link, and the very first thing you will find is a graphic that reads, "Send Wal-Mart 'Back to School' this summer. Pledge to buy your school supplies somewhere else."

Drill down a little more deeply, and you can sign an online pledge. It begins: "Because Wal-Mart is failing America, I ... pledge to send Wal-Mart 'Back to School' this summer by buying my 'Back to School' supplies somewhere other than Wal-Mart."

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "boycott" as follows: "To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion."

By any reasonable definition, the NEA, by taking part in a campaign that asks people not to buy school supplies at Wal-Mart, is participating in a boycott. For NEA president Weaver to deny that is to deny reality.

Following the money

In light of yesterday's Boston Globe screw-up, you should read this excellent article (PDF) by Morton Mintz from the current issue of Nieman Reports. Titled "Why Won't Journalists Follow the Money?", the article laments media laxity when it comes to identifying industry-funded special-interest groups as - well, as industry-funded special-interest groups.

You'll note that the Globe's Beth Daley gets a silver star.

In other developments, the online version of Michael Reitz's column now begins with this:

Clarification: A column that appeared yesterday by Michael Reitz of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation that criticized the National Education Association's boycott of Wal-Mart should have noted that the foundation has received grants from the Walton Family Foundation. Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart.

And the Globe today runs a letter (scroll down a bit) critical of Reitz's column that was written by North Andover resident Bill Callahan, who is described as "a high school teacher and a member of the Brookline Educators' Union, an affiliate of the National Education Association."

Ah, full disclosure - it's a beautiful thing.

Ugh! Comment spam

I'm starting to get hit with spam in the "comments" sections. No, I'm not talking about nasty posts - I mean, get-rich-quick crap is getting uploaded to this site. I remove it when I find it, but I don't want to spend all my time doing that. Unfortunately, I may have to require people to register with Blogger.com before they can comment. Sorry about that.

Not-so-full disclosure

The Boston Globe op-ed page today carries a column that criticizes the National Education Association's endorsement of a union campaign to boycott Wal-Mart. The piece was written by Michael Reitz, whom the Globe identifies as "the director of the Labor Policy Center for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a nonpartisan, public policy research organization based in Olympia, Wash."

Among other things, Reitz charges, "The NEA even criticizes the Walton family, the founders of Wal-Mart, for contributing to 'anti-public education efforts like private school voucher initiatives and anti-public educations PACs.'"

Unfortunately, you will not be surprised to learn that the Globe - and not for the first time - has failed to perform due diligence with respect to an outside op-ed contributor. In five minutes of Googling, I was able to learn that the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) is anything but "a nonpartisan, public policy research organization." And it turns out to be no surprise that the foundation is particularly exercised about Wal-Mart.

Here is a 2002 article posted on the website Media Transparency, which tracks "the money behind conservative media." Although I wish the data were a little more up to date, I think it's sufficient to prove EFF's hyperpartisan nature. Here are three major donors to the EFF that should help to establish Reitz's bona fides:

1. The Walton Family Foundation, which is the charitable arm of - yes - the Wal-Mart fortune left behind by the late founder, Sam Walton. According to Media Transparency, the foundation gave Evergreen $300,000 between 1998 and 2000, and has also given millions to other groups that support EFF's conservative education agenda, such as tuition vouchers. No wonder Reitz expressed such shock and horror that the NEA "even criticizes the Walton family."

2. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, controlled by the notorious right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife. The Scaife Foundation, Media Transparency discovered, gave Evergreen $150,000 from 1998 to 2000.

3. Boston business figure William Edgerly. In light of Tom Palmer's eye-opening piece about the Pioneer Institute's woes - published in the Globe Ideas section this past Sunday - the following excerpt from Media Transparency's report is pretty interesting:

MEDIA TRANSPARENCY: Foundation for Partnerships Trust, funded and run by William Edgerly, CEO emeritus of State Street Bank and Trust of Boston. The foundation gave Evergreen a total of $70,000 in 1998 and 1999; at the time of the grant, Edgerly was chairman of Advantage Schools, a for-profit school operator run by former Pioneer Institute executive director Steve Wilson that clashed with the Massachusetts Education Association over operation of schools in the state. Edgerly is on the board of the Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts member of the State Policy Network.

Weitz's success in placing his anti-NEA screed in the Globe was something of a coup for Evergreen: it currently leads the "What's New" page on the organization's website. And so the Globe has provided Evergreen with some undeserved credibility.

From time to time, the Globe's policy of accepting paid advocacy ads for the op-ed page comes under fire, even though such distinguished papers as its corporate big brother, the New York Times, do the same thing. On July 21, for instance, the Boston Herald tweaked the Globe for its efforts to market that valuable real estate.

But at least with an ad, you know what you're getting. Running Reitz's Evergreen piece was far more insidious, because the reader was given no warning about the agenda behind the op-ed. Needless to say, full disclosure should have been provided. But I suspect that the Globe editors would rather have killed the piece than admit it was funded with money from the likes of Wal-Mart and Scaife.

"The Scream" in real time

The Boston Globe Magazine today publishes a letter that takes issue with Charlie Pierce's characterization of Howard Dean's infamous scream. The letter-writer, Carol S. Williams, of Clarendon Hills, Illinois, complains that Pierce falsely described the scream as "real." She continues:

WILLIAMS: A newsroom tape editor invented The Scream - clip, crop, snip to remove the context of his rally until he looked like a madman - and then it was broadcast over multiple days, hundreds of times. No candidate could survive that, and it worked as planned. So the media, not the voters, selected the Democratic nominee. And here you are perpetuating this myth.

Williams's view is common among Dean supporters, many of whom continue to believe that Dean's presidential campaign was done in by the media. But is she right?

First, let's consider what Pierce actually wrote. In his Dean profile of July 24, Pierce had this to say:

PIERCE: For someone who had driven a lonely road with him from Iowa City to Ottumwa, it was like watching a creation myth in real time. A presidential contest, working through its own curious internal dynamics, was designing a Howard Dean of its very own, one that was beyond the control of the actual Howard Dean. The Scream wasn't even instantly iconic. Accounts in the next day's newspapers - including the Globe and The Washington Post - described Dean's most famous sound bite as merely a candidate trying put a brave face on a surprisingly dismal showing, and fighting to make himself heard over a raucous crowd.

It took a couple of days of relentless repetition for Dean to become defined by the moment. Now, The Scream stands with Edmund Muskie's "melting snowflakes" in 1972 and George Romney's 1968 "brainwashing" on the subject of Vietnam in the annals of campaign self-destruction. Suddenly, Howard Dean's mix of issues was no longer "eclectic." It was eccentric and risky. His brutal candor was no longer "appealing." It was mean. He wasn't energized. He was unhinged. A doppelganger Howard Dean stalked the actual one for the rest of the campaign.

Judging from this, I'd say Pierce's assessment is identical to Williams's. It's more likely that Williams was reacting to the beginning of the subhead - "With one spontaneous scream, Howard Dean went from Democratic front-runner to political laughingstock" - which Pierce, of course, almost certainly didn't write.

Now to the matter of whether Dean's scream really was a media creation that destroyed his candidacy. All I can tell you is that Mrs. Media Nation and I were watching coverage of the Iowa caucuses that night, and saw Dean deliver his march-through-the-states rant in real time. And I can report that we both had the same reaction: Oh, my. He'd just had his rear end handed to him, finishing third in a state that he had allegedly led for months. John Kerry and John Edwards were surging, with the battle to take place on Kerry's turf, in New Hampshire, the following week. And Dean was bellowing like a nutcase in front of a national television audience.

Did the media make too much of the scream over the following week? Of course, and that overcoverage may well have hastened Kerry's rise and Dean's collapse in New Hampshire. But on that night in Iowa, Dean came across as a sore and angry loser. That wasn't a myth. That was reality.

How 20th century is this?

The New York Times reports that Google is being forced to downsize its plans for digitizing as many books as it can get its hands on because of copyright concerns - even though the service would offer no more than a snippet of text from works whose copyrights were still in effect.

Sadly, former Colorado congresswoman Pat Schroeder plays the well-compensated lobbyist-Luddite.

Bay State McCain

Former Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, co-host of the Bloomberg Radio program "Simply Put" (WBBR Radio in New York, AM 1130; the rebroadcast can be heard locally from 8 to 10 p.m.), passes along two striking poll results from Taegan Goddard's Political Wire.

The first shows John McCain with a huge lead among New Hampshire Republicans some two and a half years before that state's first-in-the-nation primary. No surprise there: New Hampshire gave McCain a huge win over George W. Bush in 2000, demonstrating that the Granite State's libertarian-flavored GOP is seriously out of step with the national Republican Party. (Too bad.)

More striking, though, is the second poll, of likely voters in the 2008 Massachusetts Republican primary. At the moment, McCain has a lead of 46 percent to 22 percent over our home-state governor, Mitt Romney.

What does this mean? Not much this far in advance. But in Massachusetts, at least, Romney's supporters can't seriously argue that McCain has higher name recognition than their man does. It's clear that Romney still hasn't made enough of an impression on his adopted state to garner much support, even among his fellow Republicans.

What Peter Jennings meant

I'm hardly the first person of my generation (I'm 49) to make the observation that I almost never watch the three major networks' nightly newscasts. Lifestyles have changed dramatically over the past 20 to 30 years. It's far more convenient to tune in National Public Radio while I'm commuting than to sit down and try to watch a 6:30 p.m. headline service. If there's big news, I'll watch CNN's "NewsNight with Aaron Brown" at 10 p.m.

Still, Peter Jennings's death matters, just as Tom Brokaw's retirement mattered and - yes - just as Dan Rather's "did he jump or was he pushed?" departure mattered. My sightings of all three tended to take place during big news events, election nights and the like. Jennings and Brokaw were very good at what they did, and I'd give Jennings the edge for a somewhat more intelligent approach. Even Rather, an unsettling presence, stood for real news values. Yet the Jennings/Brokaw/Rather troika embodied not the golden age of television news but its decline.

Network news audiences are half the size they used to be. Unlike the true giants of an earlier era, like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, the Big Three of recent decades represented an early attempt by network news executives to put telegenic faces in front of the camera. Jennings flopped as a twentysomething, pretty-boy anchor, then turned himself into a real journalist. Brokaw was a veteran of "Today," hardly a paradigm of hard-news excellence. Rather, though hardly unskilled, was best at calling attention to himself, as when he memorably snarked at Richard Nixon during a televised news conference.

What you did sense with all three of them, though, was that they had standards, and that, ultimately, they would not be a part of the more perfidious schemes their profit-obsessed corporate bosses might come up with. (Not to be overly nostalgic; they all stood by while foreign coverage was gutted, didn't they?) Brian Williams and whoever ultimately replaces Jennings and Rather (Charlie Gibson seems to be the early favorite for Jennings's chair) may become equally skilled journalists. But will they have the clout to resist further news cutbacks?

With NBC News in the best position of the post-troika era, having made an astoundingly smooth transition to Williams, it will be interesting to see whether the other two networks decide to move away from the nightly news model and come up with other ways to appeal to a shrinking audience. Obviously Jennings will be missed; and he'll be missed even more if Disney decides this is the perfect opportunity to lighten up.

Hills to climb

This will be my last post for a while. Tomorrow, I leave for a five-day, 50-mile backpacking trip with my son's Boy Scout troop along the Appalachian Trail in Vermont. My goal: sheer survival.

Cutting Gordon's knot

Dick Gordon is going out with a bang. Gordon, the host of "The Connection," on WBUR Radio (90.9), was canned recently amid reports that station management believed ratings were "flat." Yesterday, he fought back in the pages of the Boston Phoenix, telling Mark Jurkowitz, "I'm left wondering what possibly could have motivated them." Today, Gordon has an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe. Among other things, Gordon writes:

GORDON: I'm still bewildered as to why the program was canceled. At a time when WBUR is clearly anxious about maintaining financial support from the public, they have taken down what they called their flagship program. "The Connection" was carried on more stations across the country than any other news show produced at WBUR.

They've talked about "flat ratings," but "The Connection" has consistently had one of the top measures of listener loyalty at WBUR and some of the best such ratings among all NPR talk shows. Just over a year ago the station was boasting that ratings for "The Connection" were up 22 percent.

So what happened? As someone who followed WBUR for years, I think I can provide some perspective. After longtime general manager Jane Christo left the station last fall amid charges of mismanagement (and worse), the fear I heard voiced most often - even among Christo's detractors - was that Boston University, which holds the station's license, would start slashing the budget to get the operation's massive debt under control.

Dick Gordon did an excellent job of hosting "The Connection." His ability to broadcast from war-torn Iraq brought a dimension to 'BUR that it hadn't had with its other program hosts. He was also a gentleman, and I thoroughly enjoyed my one appearance on his show. But, as he acknowledges to Jurkowitz, he came in under a cloud, replacing the wildly popular Christopher Lydon, who was fired in early 2001 after he and his executive producer, Mary McGrath, demanded an ownership share of the program.

Following Christo's departure, a WBUR source who would occasionally update me on internal discussions at the station told me that though management was believed not to want to start cutting too deeply, if things got bad enough, Gordon might go. This source assumed that managers saw Tom Ashbrook, the host of "On Point" - which will move to the 10 a.m. slot now occupied by "The Connection" - as a greater asset than Gordon.

In fact, that's exactly what happened. And though Gordon and Ashbrook each bring considerable strengths to the microphone, Ashbrook comes across as having a more lively personality. If WBUR really couldn't afford to keep both of them (and let's not forget that the station's signature hosts earn well into the six figures), then interim general manager Peter Fiedler probably made the right decision. (In another cost-cutting move, the station ended its relationship with award-winning documentarian Michael Goldfarb, who's based in London.)

But what of the high ratings to which Gordon refers? Here's where the economics of public radio enter in. Public radio these days is almost entirely privatized; a station such as 'BUR exists primarily on listener contributions and advertising - that is, corporate underwriting. But though public stations have to be responsive to their audiences, they are responsive in a different way from commercial stations. Obviously 'BUR is betting that it can nix "The Connection" without any falloff in contributions or underwriting, because people and companies give to the station as a whole rather than to any particular show.

If Fiedler and company are right, then 'BUR will save itself a whole lot of money. A side benefit, as Jurkowitz notes, is that Ashbrook won't have to compete with Lydon, whose new show, "Open Source," emanates from WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) Monday through Thursday from 7 to 8 p.m.

What happened to Gordon was lousy. He will definitely be missed. But there's no mystery to what happened. Jane Christo built a station that was more expensive than the community was willing to support, especially after the dot-com bust and the Lydon fiasco. Retrenchment was inevitable. As a frequent listener, I just hope this is the last of it.

The 300-year-old liberal media

Among the prevailing civic religions currently animating American political life, perhaps none is as long-lived as that of unfettered capitalism. A bit long in the tooth compared to its heyday during the Reagan years, the notion that government is the enemy of both individual liberty and economic freedom nevertheless remains a firmly established part of our mythology.

So it was with some surprise and pleasure that I read Paul Starr's "The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications," his 2004 book on why American media have, for better or worse, come to dominate the world. Because Starr - a Princeton University scholar who is co-editor of the American Prospect - argues persuasively that the US culture industry is such a success story not because of unfettered capitalism, but because of traditional liberalism.

By traditional liberalism, I mean not the laissez-faire liberalism of the 19th century, nor the pseudo-socialism with which liberalism is too often confused today. Rather, I'm talking about the political philosophy that prevailed for much of the 20th century, and especially between the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson - that is, the belief in a mixed economy of capitalism and regulation, enhanced with some intelligent government policies about how best to improve society.

The phrase that Starr uses over and over again is "constitutive choices" - decisions made at an early point that have had far-reaching consequences over time. For instance, Starr explains the rise of the American newspaper industry, and its eventual dominance over the British, Canadian and European press, as the result of a number of conscious and semi-conscious decisions. To wit:

- In other Western societies, government has taxed the press. By contrast, from the time of the rebellion against the Stamp Act of 1765, the US government has not only not taxed the press, but it has also provided various tax incentives.

- A cheap, professional and reliable US Post Office, with special rates for newspapers, led to an inexpensive, extensive distribution network.

- Universal education, for the masses as well as for the elite, created an involved citizenry eager for the news provided by the early media.

- Government-subsidized roads and canals created additional distribution channels.

Starr offers example after example to bolster his thesis. For instance, magazines, which became the principal organ for investigative reporting in the last quarter of the 19th century, only took off after postal policies were changed to make the business more lucrative. In the early 20th century, the Supreme Court for the first time started putting some teeth into the free-speech guarantees of the First Amendment, thus establishing the Constitution as a countervailing force at a time of rising business and governmental giantism. In the 1920s, then-secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover's policies paved the way for a privately owned, publicly regulated radio industry, a regime that was later extended to television.

Starr seems troubled by this last development. Although he notes that the US had at least managed to avoid the government monopoly that prevailed in Europe, broadcast regulations - promulgated on the theory that the airwaves are a finite, privately owned resource - have prevented radio and television stations from enjoying the same First Amendment protections as their print counterparts. At the same time, the early bias toward commercial broadcasting (Starr notes that government regulations actually referred to nonprofit stations run by universities, religious groups and the like as "propaganda" stations) prevented the creation of modern public radio until the late 1960s.

In his summing-up, Starr writes:

STARR: The market, even when its products are distasteful, is a continual stimulus to innovation outside the market and in reaction to it. In a dynamic sense, markets in liberal societies enrich the public sphere far more than they impoverish it. If, however, all were left to the market - if government had not promoted communications networks, the press, education, and innovation while attempting to check tendencies toward excessive concentrations of power - the public sphere would be poor indeed. Our public life is a hybrid of capitalism and democracy, and we are better off for it, as long as the democratic side is able to keep the balance.

If that isn't a good working definition of traditional liberalism, I don't know what is.

Here, by the way, is an insightful review of "The Creation of the Media" written by James Fallows for the New York Times Book Review.

One obvious question raised by Starr's book is this: What constitutive choices do we face today that might have long-range effects on the media that will be used by our children and beyond? Certainly the deregulatory stance taken by the FCC in recent years is worth examining, although that's mainly about managing the death of Old Media.

My candidate for a constitutive choice we've got to get right is making sure that the broadband Internet - and its faster and more robust successors - remain wide open. Powerful business interests would love nothing better than to privatize these networks, banning rivals from using or charging them exorbitant rates, and favoring their own content over those of independents.

The organization that's doing the most to ensure an open Internet is the Center for Digital Democracy, headed by the indefatigable Jeff Chester. Paul Starr has shown how crucial it was in the past to get it right. It's just as important that we get it right in the future.

Exclusive Gates

I'm slogging through Paul Starr's "The Creation of the Media," and was reading the other night about how, during the early days of telephones, competing networks were incompatible with one another. You couldn't call your friend on the other side of town if she was using one type of phone and you were using another. Well, here we are a good decade into the Internet revolution, and Bill Gates is still operating under the ancient paradigm.

Go to most sites that offer multimedia - NYTimes.com or iFilm.com, for instance - and you're given choices: RealPlayer or Windows Media (yes, there's a Mac version), sometimes with a QuickTime option thrown in, too. It is rare that it matters what browser you're using. Thus, even though Starr's telephone analogy is alive and well, you can work around it.

Go to MSNBC.com, though, and it's a different story. Even though Microsoft is perpetually rumored to be looking to get out of its partnership with NBC, the Bill's-way-or-the-highway ethos still holds. Oh, the site renders fine on the Mac version of Firefox. But when you try to play a video clip, you are informed that you must be using the most recent version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Windows, along with Windows Media Player. Even the Mac versions of IE and Windows Media Player won't do.

Here is the Word from Bill:

MSN Video incorporates the latest Internet technology to bring videos to your computer. To use this technology, MSN Video requires the following software:

- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later
- Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 or later
- Macromedia Flash Player 7 or later

I own some shares of Microsoft stock, but I'm not sure why. When I bought them, my theory was that Apple had better technology but Microsoft had a superior business strategy. As it turns out, I'm being punished financially for my cynicism, which I suppose serves me right. At least I have no regrets about my choice of technology.

By the way, it's not as though Microsoft makes no money from the Apple crowd. The Mac version of MS Office is a huge bestseller. So come on, Bill. Show us a little love.

David Shaw

Latecomers to the work of Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw, who died yesterday, may know him for little more than an ill-considered screed against bloggers that he wrote this past spring.

Among media critics, though, Shaw was a legend - the only one of us, to the best of my knowledge, ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. That's sort of like a second baseman winning the home-run title.

Shaw was not as celebrated as he should have been because he worked well outside the East Coast media orbit. Today's LA Times obituary sets the record straight. So does this appreciation, by National Journal's William Powers.

Rushing toward Romney

Today's New York Times further cements Governor Mitt Romney's status as 2005's "It" boy in the 2008 Republican presidential sweepstakes. In a front-page piece headlined "Massachusetts Governor Tries to Accentuate the Conservative," Pam Belluck essentially describes Romney's strategy as positioning himself approximately a half-inch to the left of George W. Bush.

The Times article is just the latest evidence that Romney is having considerable success in the media pre-primary that will determine who's serious and who isn't. The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a long, effusively positive profile of the governor by former New York Observer media columnist Sridhar Pappu. In June, National Review put Romney on its cover, with writer John Miller exploring whether the governor was conservative enough for Republican primary voters. (The article - available online by subscription only - created a minor sensation because of a quote from Romney political adviser Michael Murphy, who referred to his client as "a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly." Well, at least Romney is no longer faking it.) Just weeks before that, the Weekly Standard published a cover story by Terry Eastland that explored whether Romney's Mormon religion would be a help or a hindrance were he to run for president.

Of the three magazine articles, Eastland's is the most useful, because it explores in some depth the relationship between Mormonism and evangelical Christianity. Eastland dares to say out loud that Mormonism deviates so significantly from traditional Christianity that many observers do not consider Mormons to be Christians - potentially a real drawback among the conservative religious voters who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process. Indeed, Eastland begins by observing that, as recently as 1999, a poll showed that 17 percent of Americans would not vote for a Mormon for president. (Of course, Romney's Mormonism carries with it certain advantages, too, as this Adam Reilly piece in the Boston Phoenix demonstrates.)

By contrast, Miller's National Review piece is a once-over-lightly, and Pappu's borders on hagiography - although it does have the virtue of letting the reader see Romney the way he sees himself, always a useful service and one the media rarely perform.

The Romney rush is unusual for two reasons: it's at least a year too early, and these media lovefests usually involve Democrats rather than Republicans. Inevitably, some months before everyone gets serious, the press falls in love with a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, straight-talking Democrat with little or no chance of winning - Mo Udall, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, even Howard Dean before his weird, mid-2003 rise miscast him as some sort of a left-wing rabble-rouser. The only Republican I can think of who got this sort of treatment was John McCain in late 1999 and early 2000. (Media Nation's 2008 Democratic candidate for the early media massage: Iowa governor Tom Vilsack. Just watch.)

Far from straight talk, Romney's public pronouncements tend toward bland marketing-speak. Indeed, Romney suggests to Pappu that his substance-free rhetoric is a direct result of what happened to his father, George, whose 1968 presidential campaign went into freefall after he described himself as having undergone a "brainwashing" administered by American military officials during a visit to Vietnam. "It did tell me you have to be very, very careful in your choice of words," Mitt Romney told Pappu. "The careful selection of words is something I'm more attuned to because Dad fell into that quagmire."

The early rush of media attention Romney has received is the result of several factors. For one thing, the 2008 presidential campaign is wide open - as wide open as it's been in many decades. For another, most of the attention on the Democratic side is going to the celebrity pseudo-candidacy of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may or may not run. Then, too, Romney, as a social conservative in liberal Massachusetts and as a Mormon, is exotic, something the media always like. Finally, the Republican field at this point is so fractured that Romney seems plausible.

Romney had better enjoy all the attention while he can. Should he find himself to be a legitimate frontrunner in, say, mid-2007, he'll be getting far more attention than he is today. Chances are, though, that it won't be the kind that he'll frame and put on the wall.

Judging Posner

Slate's Jack Shafer has the takedown I wanted to write about Richard Posner, whose nearly 5,000-word typing exercise on the state of the media appears in the current New York Times Book Review.

Since Shafer beat me to it, let me instead whine a bit about the Sam Tanenhaus-edited NYTBR. I had thought it was settling down into something resembling its old self - that is, the slightly boring but indispensable guide to Books I'll Never Read That I Need to Know Something About. I mean, according to this, there have only been three Christopher Hitchens bylines in the Review all year. That's something to be grateful for, and it's more than can be said of, um, Slate.

Posner's poorly researched, clumsily written opus suggests that Tanenhaus still hasn't quite figured out that his job is to provide a service, not to create a sensation - let alone an embarrassing one like this.

Media being media

Mark Jurkowitz has an entertaining item on the past week's contretemps over Manny being Manny. But something doesn't set right with me over this. As Mark observes, Ramírez's annual freakout "is tiresome and relatively inconsequential."

Which is why part of me feels as though the local sports media were complicit in a fairly transparent attempt by ownership to run the oddball slugger out of town. Fortunately, the owners themselves pulled back when they realized they'd have had to give up too much.