Month: August 2008

Beyond convention wisdom

Jack Shafer of Slate and Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine are both arguing that the media ought to stop covering the national political conventions.

Their reasons are obvious. The nominees have been chosen entirely through the primaries since the 1970s, so there is literally no news coming out of them except for the acceptance speeches of the vice presidential and presidential candidates. I understand the point. But I would make two counterarguments.

First, what better place is there for the three cable news networks to be? The prime-time line-ups of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC consist mainly of talk shows with a heavy political bent. The conventions give them a chance to do what they do, only at a higher level and with a larger audience. Nothing wrong with that.

Second, the conventions are filled with interesting stories, though very few of them take place inside the hall. Yes, I’d agree that having 15,000 reporters on hand to cover the same thing is nuts, but that’s not what they ought to be doing. Maybe 10,000 of them ought to go home (perhaps I don’t disagree with Shafer and Jarvis after all), but the other 5,000 ought to get outside and look for stories.

In 2000, I was at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, on assignment for the Boston Phoenix, when similar complaints arose about the news-free nature of the event. I wrote about what the media should have been covering rather than whining about the dullness of the proceedings. I’d say the same thing today.

Callahan says he had throat cancer

WEEI Radio (AM 850) morning-show co-host Gerry Callahan today confirms longstanding rumors that his months-long absence in 2007 was due to serious illness. In his Boston Herald column, Callahan writes that he was being treated for throat cancer.

Bruce Allen notes that Callahan timed his announcement to coincide with the annual WEEI-NESN telethon for the Jimmy Fund. Good move — it will raise interest and could well result in more money for the Jimmy Fund.

Media Nation is no fan of “Dennis & Callahan,” with its snide putdowns of everyone to the left of Dick Cheney. But I wish Callahan well.

Gloucester story remains incomplete

I find it interesting that Time magazine’s Web site today carries only an Associated Press story on the resignation of Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan, who blasted Mayor Carolyn Kirk for having “slandered” him. Time hasn’t run an update since June 26, when one of the magazine’s reporters, Kathleen Kingsbury, wrote an item that carried the possibly misleading headline “Gloucester Principal Stands by Story.”

Sullivan, you may recall, was the primary source for Kingsbury’s startling claim that a group of female students at Gloucester High School had made a “pact” to get pregnant and raise their babies together — a story that included such lurid details as girls’ high-fiving each other when they learned they were expecting, and one student being impregnated by a 24-year-old homeless man. Sullivan said in Kingsbury’s June 26 piece that he didn’t recall having used the word “pact,” but that he stood by what he’d told Time.

But as I wrote in June, Sullivan declined to take the additional step of endorsing Kingsbury’s reporting. To this day, we have not heard from a single Gloucester High School student who says she was part of any such agreement with other students, regardless of whether you call it a “pact.” Essentially we know nothing more than we did way back on March 7, when the Gloucester Times reported that officials were worried that some girls were getting pregnant deliberately. That is sufficiently serious to warrant community-wide concern; but it was the notion of a “pact” that made this a national story, and that remains unverified.

From the beginning, Kingsbury has strongly suggested in her reporting and in interviews that she knows who at least some of the pact members are, and that they have declined to go public. I hope she’s working on a follow-up.

Still, it has struck me as exceedingly odd that here, in Oprah Nation, not one of these young women would step forward. Let’s not forget, too, that one pregnant 17-year-old Gloucester High student appeared on national television and denied there was any such pact. Rather, she said some of the students became close after they got pregnant, a claim that comports with some inside knowledge I had picked up around the same time.

Time magazine shouldn’t just be given a pass on this.

Hillary Clinton’s very bad campaign

Everybody’s talking about the Atlantic’s piece on how Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign fell apart, so I’ll keep my comments to a minimum.

What mainly struck me was this: In the most important professional undertaking of her life, Clinton surrounded herself with a staff full of miserable, backbiting leeches. And even to the degree that they had any talent, she showed little inclination or ability to manage them.

Given that she ran as the candidate of experience, it’s telling that she wasn’t even close to being ready for prime time.

Photo (cc) by the World Economic Forum and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Necessary but insufficient

Gov. Deval Patrick deserves credit for vetoing an unaffordable pension increase for retired teachers and state workers. The Outraged Liberal calls it “one of the more courageous political acts I’ve seen around here in a long time.”

But the larger issue is that people in the private sector, with rare exceptions, don’t receive pension benefits, and haven’t for some time. There are few things people resent more than paying taxes for employee benefits that go well beyond what are available to them.

It seems pretty obvious that Massachusetts needs to move gradually (but not too gradually) toward an employee-contribution system for current and future state and municipal workers — a 403(b), which is the government/nonprofit equivalent of a 401(k).

First as tragedy … then as more tragedy

I’m reading Fred Kaplan by way of Josh Marshall on the Bush administration’s encouraging Georgia to stick its finger in Russia’s eye in recent years, only to find itself powerless to help now that Vladimir Putin has decided he’s had enough. (Not that that’s stopped the bellicose rhetoric emanating from the White House and the McCain campaign.)

It reminds me of President Bush’s father, who encouraged the Shiites in the southern part of Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein in 1991, only to stand by as they were slaughtered.

What’s happening now is a tragedy, but at least Russia isn’t Iraq. And Putin isn’t Saddam. This isn’t our fight, and it’s a shame we led the Georgians to think we would do more than we could. It’s a mistake we’ve made over and over again. (Hungary in 1956, anyone?)

Template quirk

A reader pointed out an odd quirk with the new design — if you narrow the window too much, the right-hand column slides off and disappears to the bottom. My correspondent said the problem appeared to be with Firefox for Windows 2.0.0.16, and he didn’t mention the window width. But I’ve been able to reproduce the problem with the Mac version of Firefox and Safari.

Ideally, the window would hold steady as you narrow it, as it does with the site I recently put together for our church using WordPress.com. If you narrow the window there, you’ll see that the page holds steady.

I don’t know what to do about this; it must be inherent in the template, and not amenable to a quick CSS tweak. All the more reason to think that, someday, Media Nation will move to WordPress.com.

It’s been an interesting day — Blogger’s been more up than down, and both my Gmail and Northeastern e-mail accounts have been acting up. So there you have it.

Fixed. Again, thanks to Steve. By the time we’re done, he ought to be able to sell a modified version of this template.

Sorry, Charlie — no free speech for you

Charles Evans Hughes forgot something when he wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Near v. Minnesota decision in 1931.

The chief justice listed national security, obscenity and the imminent threat of violence as essentially the only three reasons that the courts could ever step in and order someone not to exercise his right to free speech. What he left out: information that could result in the MBTA’s losing some fare money. What a bonehead, eh?

Boston Globe reporter John Guilfoil (a former student of mine, by the way) wrote yesterday that U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock had granted the T’s request for an injunction preventing three MIT students from presenting their findings on security defects in the Charlie Card, the T’s electronic ticketing system. They had been scheduled to speak at the DEFCON 16 conference in Las Vegas.

For good measure, the T is suing MIT, too, for the grave offense of not teaching its students how to be good, Charlie Card-paying citizens.

In today’s Boston Herald, O’Ryan Johnson reports that one of the students is saying the trio offered to show MBTA officials their findings so they could fix their flawed system. Instead, the T decided to sue them.

For those of you with long memories, you may recall that Judge Woodlock is a piece of work. During the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Woodlock ruled that a cage set up by officials for the use of protesters was “an offense to the spirit of the First Amendment” — but then declined to do anything about it. He’s not big on newspaper boxes, either.

In 2005, Woodlock was the proud winner of a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for his outrages against free speech. It looks like he’s well on his way to a second statuette.

This story had gone nationwide — heck, worldwide — even before the Globe and the Herald got hold of it, as Universal Hub showed on Saturday. This will not end well for Woodlock. In the meantime, though, he’s created an unnecessary hassle for everyone concerned, and emboldened the T, which — wouldn’t you know — won a Muzzle in 2006.

Photo (cc) by David Bruce and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.