By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Month: July 2006 Page 4 of 5

Journalism versus activism

The Boston Globe today publishes a good summation of the war between the Daily Kos and The New Republic. Written by Michael Grynbaum, the article casts things in standard terms: old media versus new media. But I don’t think that quite gets at it. In essence, this is really a battle between journalists (Jason Zengerle et al. at TNR) and political activists who think they’ve become journalists — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they think they’ve replaced journalists.

Zengerle appears to have caught Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga in some fairly shady dealings with regard to his political consultant/business partner, Jerome Armstrong, blowing wet cyberkisses to Armstrong clients such as Mark Warner and writing an e-mail aimed at persuading fellow liberal bloggers not to write about Armstrong’s problems. Kos heads an advertising network that those bloggers belong to, so such a request comes with a little added zing.

Kos has denied the allegations, but hasn’t really explained anything. Instead, he’s embarked on a campaign of villification against TNR.

I know Zengerle a bit and consider him to be an honest journalist. I also find the Kos to be an unreadable amalgamation from people whose credibility I have no way of judging. That’s not to say it’s of no value. But which posts? By whom? Besides, my interest in blogging is journalistic. Blogging as another form of politics I find less interesting.

Update: I realize I was negligent in not acknowledging Zengerle’s e-mail screw-up — although, frankly, not as negligent as Grynbaum. Oof.

Our fill of Dr. Phil

Are you surprised to learn that Dr. Phil and his wife acted like a couple of obnoxious divas during their stay in Boston? So says the Track.

The toughest review Dr. Phil got, though, comes by way of Universal Hub. And there’s more here.

Eric Convey leaves Herald

Another longtime Boston Herald stalwart is leaving. Eric Convey, currently the senior executive city editor, will take the managing editor’s job at the Boston Business Journal on July 17. He’ll report to editor George Donnelly.

Reached by Media Nation, Convey responds by e-mail: “I absolutely love the Herald and the people here. No one could ask for better bosses than I’ve had. But great stuff is happening at the BBJ too, and this opportunity offers professional and personal possibilities that were too good to pass up.”

Community media discussion

Tomorrow I’ll be moderating a panel discussion at Faneuil Hall on “Community Media: Fixing What the Mainstream Broke.” Part of the Alliance for Community Media conference, it will begin at 7 p.m. and run for an hour and a half or so.

The panelists will be Kevin Howley of DePauw University, Sascha Meinrath of Free Press and Felicia Sullivan of UMass Lowell.

It should be a good discussion, so please come on down.

The “D”-word

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby takes great comfort in the fact that President Bush didn’t simply ignore the Supreme Court after it invalidated military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees last week, offering it as proof that Bush isn’t actually trying to set up a dictatorship.

Jacoby, who’s been known to call himself a libertarian, might consider how far down the road we’ve traveled for it to seem rational to defend the president on the grounds that he has simply indicated his willingness to obey a ruling by the Supreme Court.

Loosen those nooses

Those treason charges against Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seem to have burned themselves out pretty quickly. More than anything, I don’t think the New York Times-bashers could overcome this op-ed piece in last Friday’s Times by terrorism experts Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey. Under the headline “A Secret the Terrorists Already Knew,” they wrote:

Administration officials made the same kinds of complaints about news media accounts of electronic surveillance. They want the public to believe that it had not already occurred to every terrorist on the planet that his telephone was probably monitored and his international bank transfers subject to scrutiny. How gullible does the administration take the American citizenry to be?

Terrorists have for many years employed nontraditional communications and money transfers — including the ancient Middle Eastern hawala system, involving couriers and a loosely linked network of money brokers — precisely because they assume that international calls, e-mail and banking are monitored not only by the United States but by Britain, France, Israel, Russia and even many third-world countries.

While this was not news to terrorists, it may, it appears, have been news to some Americans, including some in Congress. But should the press really be called unpatriotic by the administration, and even threatened with prosecution by politicians, for disclosing things the terrorists already assumed?

The next day, Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet and Keller, the New York Times executive editor, wrote an op-ed that was published in both of their papers. (The L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal broke the story around the same time as the N.Y. Times, but haven’t paid nearly as high a political price.) It’s a well-considered, well-reasoned argument for going to press. They noted that the papers have withheld information that could genuinely damage national security, and also that government officials sometimes want sensitive information revealed when they think it will make them look good. I like this passage in particular:

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department’s efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary’s team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration’s relentlessness against the terrorist threat.

The Baquet-Keller piece was an improvement over Keller’s earlier solo effort, which made some good points but was marred by a defensive, somewhat whiny tone. My colleague Stephen Burgard, director of Northeastern’s School of Journalism and a former L.A. Timesman, argues that Keller’s first piece panders to the N.Y. Times’ base, whereas the second succeeds in reaching out to a broader constituency. Burgard writes:

Whatever these Americans may think of a particular president, they of course will want the government to succeed, and will think about press decision-making along a spectrum of what might or might not cause real harm. In such an instance, where the perceived interests of the government and a free press are in collision, the readership for the editor is no longer restricted to the regular readers and detractors. The real audience is in fact the entire nation.

So will Rep. Peter King, Sen. Jim Bunning and their ilk stop taking noose measurements long enough to think seriously about what has happened? Probably not. But if bringing espionage charges against the media was ever on the table, it’s certainly off now.

I do think the New York Times made one significant mistake: By presenting the financial-tracking story as a blockbuster, it appeared to be blowing the cover on a valuable, and, it would appear, entirely legal program.

Whatever misgivings folks might have had about the Times’ earlier exposure of the NSA’s no-warrant wiretapping program, it was hard to scream “Treason!” when the White House was so obviously breaking the law. The Times couldn’t fall back on that this time. Instead, it should have made it clear that this was not new information — rather, it was an in-depth look at how the White House was following through on a promise it had made within weeks of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Whose justice?

The New York Times reports today that Steven D. Green, the American ex-soldier charged with raping a young Iraqi woman and murdering her and her family, may either be mustered back into the Army and court-martialed or tried in a civilian court.

But hold on. I’m certainly no legal expert, but it seems to me that if American authorities decide to try Green in a civilian court, it’s got to be an Iraqi civilian court. Perhaps he could be recalled and court-martialed, but how could he be tried by the U.S. domestic justice system? The crime he is alleged to have committed took place on Iraqi soil.

Do we have an extradition treaty with the new Iraqi government?

Time for a Slate Explainer.

Now with fewer ads

I’ve decided to remove Google ads from Media Nation. Even though I get as many as 1,000 unique visitors each day, the ads aren’t paying — probably because they seem to be completely irrelevant to whatever it is I’m writing about, so no one’s clicking.

More important, I want to focus on a far more interesting advertising project being sponsored by Boston Blogs, of which Media Nation is a member, and whose ads you can see at the top of the right-hand column. Boston Blogs ads are local, and they’re screened and administered by a real person — Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub fame.

That’s more in keeping with the direction in which I want to take Media Nation, although I haven’t actually canceled my Google Adsense account. You never know.

Ann Coulter, plagiarist

But will anyone care? The Raw Story has the details. Apparently the New York Post is the first mainstream (sort of) outlet to report this. There go that liberal media again.

New details on an atrocity

The Washington Post today publishes sickening new details about the alleged rape-murder by U.S. troops of a young Iraqi girl (she’s now reported to have been just 15) and the murder of three of her family members. Ellen Knickmeyer writes:

Janabi [a neighbor] and others knowledgeable about the incident said they believed that the attackers raped Abeer in another room. Medical officials who handled the bodies also said the girl had been raped, but they did not elaborate.

Before leaving, the attackers fatally shot the four family members — two of Abeer’s brothers had been away at school — and attempted to set Abeer’s body on fire, according to Janabi, another neighbor who spoke on condition of anonymity, the mayor of Mahmudiyah and a hospital administrator with knowledge of the case….

The case is at least the fourth American military investigation announced since March of alleged atrocities by U.S. forces in Iraq.

Although I’m sure the vast majority of U.S. troops have conducted themselves professionally, what’s coming out now is doubly horrific: atrocities such as those under investigation are inevitable in war, and this is an unnecessary war.

And how skittish are the media? The Post plays this story on page 15, on a slow news day.

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