Month: July 2006 Page 2 of 5

BostonHerald.com has been tweaked. It’s not a full redesign, and navigating it can still be a bit bewildering. But it’s — well, better.

The emphasis is on the Herald’s Web-only and Web-enhanced features. There’s a “Today’s Most Popular” box on the right and prominent space given to the paper’s bloggers.

The section-front guides that you encounter as you scroll down are an improvement, although they appear not to have been fully implemented yet — right now, “News & Opinion” consists of obits.

Not bad, but I’d still like to see a full redesign. Here is one of the best. (Well, they’re both tabloids, aren’t they?)

Sunday marked White House chief of staff Josh Bolten’s first appearance on “Meet the Press.” I suspect he won’t be back soon — and that when he does return, he’ll have a strategy other than stonewalling Tim Russert by repeating the same non-answer over and over again.

Russert is no Ted Koppel, but he is dogged, and he can get pretty riled up when someone simply refuses to answer his questions. He seemed especially put out by Bolten, who dodged him on Lebanon, Iraq and — most notably — whether President Bush believes that embryonic-stem-cell research involves “murder,” as White House spokesman Tony Snow claimed last week before Bush vetoed a federal funding measure.

Do read the whole interview, but here is an illuminating excerpt. (Note: All ellipses except the final one come straight from the MSNBC transcript.)

MR. RUSSERT: Then if the president believes it is human life, how can he allow private stem cell research to go forward, go forward, if, in fact, that is murder?

MR. BOLTEN: It’s a very, it’s a very difficult balance. I mean, the president recognizes that there are millions of Americans who don’t recognize that as a human life, and that the promise of that research for the saving of life is so important that they, that they want that to go forward. What the president has said is that as far as the federal policy is concerned, no federal funds, your tax dollars and my tax dollars, will go towards promoting the destruction of that human embryo.

MR. RUSSERT: But you’re using federal funds for existing lines, which were of embryos. So were those embryos that the federal government is experimenting on obtained by homicidal means?

MR. BOLTEN: Those, those embryos, those stem cell lines, were already — those embryos were already destroyed, and, and that’s where the president — the president’s policies draw the line. That is that our tax dollars, from the point that the president made his policy statement forward, our tax dollars are not going to go to further incent the destruction of those fertilized embryos. Let me, let me…

MR. RUSSERT: The logic, Mr. Bolten, as people are listening to this, the president is saying no, we can’t use embryos that are going to be discarded by in vitro clinics because, according to a spokesman, that’s murder. But we can use embryos that were existing before I became president, that’s OK. And if you have a private company and you want to use those embryos, that’s OK. Back to the central question: does the president agree with his spokesman, Tony Snow, that the research on the embryo in, in fact, to use that embryo is murder?

MR. BOLTEN: The president thinks that that embryo, that fertilized embryo, is a human life that deserves protection…

MR. RUSSERT: But does he accept or reject the use of the word “murder”?

MR. BOLTEN: I haven’t spoken to him about the use, the use of particular terminology…

Granted, no one answers a question if he doesn’t want to. But Bolten’s inability to dodge and shift gracefully, along with his obvious lack of preparation, are unusual for someone who has attained such power and influence.

His post-“MTP” conversation with Karl Rove couldn’t have been pleasant.

Hatlo wants to know what I think about the contretemps at the Santa Barbara News-Press, where the owner is nuking the line between church (the newsroom) and state (the business office).

I’m not sure what deeper meaning this has, but there are some observers who are using it to argue that maybe local ownership isn’t such a good thing after all. I couldn’t disagree more — local owners are invested in their communities, and though moving away from corporate chain ownership is hardly a cure-all for what ails the newspaper business, it could prove to be a valuable part of the mix.

Jay Rosen has an excellent post on a mindless critique of local ownership that appeared in Fortune magazine.

The Friends of Media Nation are all over the place, as I struggle to get back up to speed after a week in electronic oblivion:

• There are few journalists whose work I respect more than that of Seth Gitell, a former Phoenix colleague who recently wrapped up a stint as Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s spokesman. Writing in the New York Sun, Gitell reports on what one can only hope will be the beginning of a backlash against Episcopal Bishop Thomas Shaw’s knee-jerk Israel-bashing.
• My editor at CommonWealth Magazine, Bob Keough, offers an analysis in today’s Boston Globe on several decades’ worth of political wrangling over the Big Dig. Keough: “[A] series of governors found themselves with little direct authority over the mammoth project as costs escalated and problems surfaced. Instead, they tried to mold it, from afar, by board and chair appointments that repeatedly came back to haunt their successors.”
• As the Globe acknowledged in its Friday report, news of Julie and Hillary Goodridge’s separation was broken by Bay Windows two days earlier. Written by the paper’s editor, Susan Ryan-Vollmar, a former Phoenix news editor, the article shows that, in the end, this pioneering lesbian couple’s two-decade-long relationship turned out to be just like most people’s: fragile.
• With veteran media critic Mark Jurkowitz having departed for Washington, Phoenix political columnist Adam Reilly steps up with a sharp analysis of how the Globe and the Herald covered the opening days of the Big Dig disaster.
• In the scratching-my-own-back category, Boston Magazine’s John Gonzalez quotes me in his profile of the Herald’s gossip columnists, Laura Raposa and Gayle Fee. Gonzalez also manages to place Media Nation in a love triangle with Chet Curtis and Ted Kennedy. Go figure.

And, oh yeah: Comments are back. So fire away.

Media Nation goes on hiatus this week, as I prepare to help supervise 21 Boy Scouts at summer camp. I am suspending comments until I get back. If you try to post, it won’t go through.

Boston Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald today begins: “Insanity, according to one insightful definition, is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.“

And then, for the second time this week, he finds a way to relate the Big Dig tragedy to those marriage-mocking, gay-coddling pols on Beacon Hill:

Legislators jumping into the fray to make sure their constituents are well-represented are insulting our intelligence, too, if they’re the same ones who just conspired to muzzle those constituents on the volatile issue of homosexual matrimony.

It’s enough to make you despair, if this is where you make your home. But truth be told, we’re only reaping what we’ve sown in Massachusetts, and it’s a bitter, fatal harvest.

You could probably hire a couple of reporters to supplement the Herald’s understaffed newsroom with what Fitzgerald is making. Can’t publisher Pat Purcell talk him into retiring?

Jon Keller: “Keep politics out of the Big Dig? What a farce. Politics long ago turned it into highway robbery. And now politics, Massachusetts-style, has killed a woman.” Watch it here.

Epoxy — holding up three-ton concrete panels — that’s “brittle and cracked.” Metal supports that “were not fully weather-protected or fabricated to contract standards.” A city that could be gridlocked for weeks — and that’s being optimistic, given the likely number of people who will refuse to use the Big Dig even after it’s reopened.

The Boston Herald runs an interview with Melina Del Valle’s daughter Raquel Ibarra Mora, conducted by the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación: “Nobody from Boston has spoken to me. The only person who has contacted us is the Costa Rican Consul in New York, Alejandra Solano.”

Former Big Dig spokesman Dan McNichol tells the Los Angeles Times: “It is just disgusting, because those tunnels are an extension of our government. You think of the subway tunnels in London — people took refuge there from the bombing during World War II.”

For years now, we’ve heard what an engineering triumph the Big Dig is. We are supposed to marvel at its complexity, and hail the skill of those who put it together.

Now, that may all be warranted. But, for some reason, I can’t help but think about the Callahan and Sumner tunnels, and all those century-old tunnels used by the subway system. They’ve worked from the day they opened, and I can’t think of a structural disaster that’s ever befallen any of them.

So why is the Big Dig so different?

This graphic in today’s Boston Globe is absolutely terrifying. Look at it. Absolutely nothing is holding those three-ton ceiling panels in place except glue. Somehow it doesn’t make me feel better that this type of system may be in use all across the country.

Nor does it help to learn that the only purpose in installing the panels may have been aesthetic, to hide ugly ceiling fans; or that much lighter panels could have been used, but were rejected because it would have been harder to keep them from vibrating. And don’t forget: There are at least 60 more of these bolts that are flawed.

The Boston Herald today is taking credit for its Tuesday online exclusive, which reported that Monday night’s fatal accident was due to an adhesive failure. The Herald is also a good example of how a tabloid can focus and reflect public outrage at a moment like this. While the Globe goes with a strong, newsy front, the Herald goes with pure emotion.

The page is dominated by a big splash reading “BIG DIG DISGRACE” and a photo of Milena and Angel Del Valle. The subheads: “Officials stonewall on Hub tunnel tragedy”; “Mitt grandstands, then returns to vacation”; “We get silent treatment from Bechtel.”

Granted, these are mini-editorials, not news headlines. But given the Herald’s mission as the city’s feisty, number-two daily, I think they’re absolutely justified.

Universal Hub has been gathering up blog commentary here.

But not as bad as it’s going to get.

From Boston.com: “Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly said at an afternoon press conference that anchor bolts similar to those involved in the partial collapse of the Interstate 90 connector tunnel failed field studies as far back as 1999.”

From BostonHerald.com: “Big Dig officials have discovered more than 60 compromised ceiling panels in the I-90 tunnel where a woman was killed Monday, raising the specter of widespread defects in all corners of a tunnel where investigators are methodically gathering evidence in a criminal probe.”