Month: December 2007

We ain’t gonna play Sun City

Somewhere in my record collection is an album called “Sun City,” a project put together in 1985 by Steve Van Zandt, Miles Davis, “News Dissector” Danny Schechter and others to protest the apartheid regime in South Africa. Please click on the clip below — if you haven’t seen it before, you’ll be amazed. It might be the greatest music video ever made. It’s certainly the most socially conscious.

Sun City was a resort casino aimed at luring a wealthy white clientele. The idea was that money from high rollers would be used to prop up a crumbling, corrupt system that had exploited and oppressed the black population, whose most visible symbol, Nelson Mandela, had been imprisoned for many years. Eventually, of course, the regime fell, but not until incalculable damage had been done.

Who would be willing to profit from such evil? Sol Kerzner, for one. In today’s Boston Globe, Sean Murphy reports that Kerzner was the developer of Sun City, earning him accolades from Frank Sinatra as “the world’s best saloon keeper.” It’s not a secret. I had known about Kerzner’s South African ties. But I hadn’t made the connection to Sun City.

The main theme of Murphy’s story is not Sun City, but the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. It seems that Kerzner and Len Wolman, the principal investors in Mohegan Sun, found a loophole in a federal law that has allowed them to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars while the Indian tribe that nominally controls the casino receives relative pennies.

Getting rich by exploiting an oppressed native people? Well, that’s really old hat to Kerzner.

Kerzner and Wolman, as you may have heard, are also the lead investors in the proposed Middleborough casino. And Kerzner, as Stephanie Vosk and George Brennan remind us in today’s Cape Cod Times, “was charged in 1986 with bribing a South African official in exchange for exclusive gaming rights. The charge was dropped in 1997, but it has followed him each time he has bid on a casino license.”

The Middleborough deal was negotiated on behalf of the investors by Glenn Marshall, who chaired the tribal council of the Mashpee Wampanoags until he was forced to resign in August after his lies about his military service and a past rape conviction were brought to light. Tribal members tell the Globe that the details of the Middleborough deal remain a secret to them to this day.

And so it goes. This is what you get when you try to make common cause with casino gambling. This is what the Middleborough selectmen fail to understand. This is what Gov. Deval Patrick thinks he can avoid through extensive governmental regulation.

What legislators need to understand is that the best way to avoid such sleaze is not to head down this road in the first place. We ain’t gonna play Sun City.

Casino opponents are winning

When Middleborough’s town meeting approved the selectmen’s deal with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe last summer, there was an ominous context: Town officials were telling voters that the tribe would build a casino either with a deal or without one, and the town might as well get the best package it could.

That, indeed, is the most logical explanation for the fact that town meeting approved the deal, and then turned around and overwhelmingly voted “no” on an advisory question asking whether a casino should even be built in Middleborough.

Now Stephanie Vosk and George Brennan are reporting in the Cape Cod Times that the tribe continues to insist it has a right to build a casino in Massachusetts regardless of state law. As Vosk and Brennan note, it’s a position that state officials reject. Ultimately, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs will decide.

The Casino Facts blog goes into this in more depth. But the bottom line is that casino opponents should keep fighting. As Matt Viser writes in today’s Boston Globe, Gov. Deval Patrick is making little headway with a key legislative committee in his bid to saddle us with three casinos.

Opponents are winning. This is going nowhere. Even if the feds rule that the Mashpee can build a casino in defiance of state law, I would think opponents could keep it tied up in the courts for years to come. No one should feel intimidated by the alleged inevitability of casino gambling.

My last disclosure: Enough, already. Last month I was the guest speaker at a fundraising event in Middleborough sponsored by CasinoFacts.org. Middleborough is my hometown. My opposition to casino gambling is not a secret. I have neither taken money from nor donated money to anyone associated with this issue. From this point on, I’m traveling disclosure-free.

The return of Media Log

If today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fish wrap, what’s a five-year-old blog post worth? Not much, I’d say. Nevertheless, I’ve been able to rescue the archives of Media Log, the blog I wrote for the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to ’05, which had disappeared one or two redesigns ago. As I’m sure you know, the current author of the blog — now called Don’t Quote Me — is Phoenix media columnist Adam Reilly. If you’re not checking in on Adam every day, you should be.

Today’s media scandal

How was it that the names of players who were not in the Mitchell Report wound up being identified as steroid users earlier in the day? As Dan Shaughnessy writes in the Boston Globe, “Some of the names were pretty interesting. Where do those players go to reclaim their reputations?”

By many accounts, the false positives originated with WNBC in New York, which posted a correction late in the afternoon, after George Mitchell had finally released his report. But was WNBC alone, with others merely following the station’s lead? Or were there others who also broke this toxic non-story?

Howard Owens on community nudity

Howard Owens, GateHouse Media’s chief online guy, has weighed in on the Somerville Journal’s video/photo coverage of the Naked Quad Run at Tufts. An excerpt:

This is no time for community journalism to be squeamish — and keep in mind, we’re talking about a video that shows, essentially, nothing. What it does capture is the spirit of the moment. What it does record for posterity is a real event, in a real community, that is seemingly important to a lot of people in that community.

Isn’t that an essential part of journalism’s role, even if offends some people’s sensibilities, even some of the participants (read the comments on the story)?

Should journalists really be in the role of hiding the truth of what really goes on in a community? I feel like that is what Dan Kennedy is suggesting.

You should read the whole thing. Increasingly, local newspaper editors are going to be dealing with issues like this. And I’m certainly not in favor of “hiding the truth of what really goes on in a community.” Text-only coverage wouldn’t have been as entertaining, but it would have gotten the essential truth out.

By the way, Owens goes slightly astray in referring to the Boston Herald’s Jay Fitzgerald as a blogger, and then criticizing him for not linking to the Journal’s coverage. Fitzgerald wrote his story for the print edition and would have had nothing to do with whether any links were added for the Web.

Owens also slams a Facebook group formed to protest the Journal’s actions, writing, “Think about it — [a] group of students throw privacy concerns to the wind by running around naked in public (even posting pictures to Flickr), and then get upset when that event is covered by a media outlet. How ironic.”

In fact, the Facebook group he links to appears to be a parody. Check out the video.

Friday morning update: Jay responds to Howard: “I didn’t mind the Journal’s coverage. I also like what WickedLocal is doing on the web in general, though I could do without the hair-trigger self-righteousness at the slightest whiff of controversy.”

(Rotten) apples and oranges

Shouldn’t we make a moral distinction between Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, who’ve been accused of taking steroids in order to throw harder and hit the ball farther, and Andy Pettitte and Mo Vaughn, who alleged took human growth hormone so they’d be able to bounce back from injuries more quickly? It seems to me that the former compromised the integrity of the game, whereas the latter was merely dangerous and stupid.

Here’s a PDF of the Mitchell report. Search for Pettitte’s and Vaughn’s names and you’ll see what I mean.

Just because you can …

Universal Hub has the lowdown on the Somerville Journal’s decision to post photos and a video of the Naked Quad Run at Tufts University. The Journal is getting slammed with comments, some of them funny, some of them questioning the Journal’s ethics.

Now, don’t get excited — you won’t find any full frontal nudity, as they used to say on “Monty Python.” And allow me to lower the excitement level a little more by picking up on the ethical theme.

The Journal is part of GateHouse Media, which has unveiled an aggressive online initiative called Wicked Local. GateHouse’s online guru, Howard Owens, is a huge proponent of video. I hope he weighs in on the Tufts shenanigans.

Greg Reibman, editor of the GateHouse territory that includes the Journal, tells Jay Fitzgerald of the Boston Herald: “For students to be shocked that newspapers would show up and take photos, I don’t see how they can be so naive in this day and age.”

My reaction? Neither the video nor the photos are offensive. I don’t think anyone is recognizable except for the guy who’s wrapped himself in the Israeli flag. You can also find slightly more revealing photos of the event at Flickr. (No, I’m not going to help you, but it’s not difficult.)

Still, posting pictures of drunken students running around in their birthday suits is not the sort of thing a community newspaper ought to be doing. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.

This isn’t a big deal, but it does illustrate how technology is changing not just the content of journalism but the ethical decision-making that goes into it.