In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at Pavlov’s media and how they reacted to President Obama’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize — channeling Republican talking points before they’d even been articulated. Good dog!
Year: 2009
The Blutarsky theory of Red Sox futility
If you’re like me, you probably hadn’t thought about “Animal House” for many years, even though it is the greatest movie of all time.
So what were the odds of finding two Blutto Blutarsky references following the collapse of the 2009 Red Sox?
First, on Monday, the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy informed us, “In that moment, Papelbon was working on a string of 27 consecutive scoreless postseason innings. His career playoff ERA was John Blutarsky’s grade-point average: 0.00.”
Then, today, Gerry Callahan writes in the Boston Herald: “Guerrero flared a single to center, and just like that, the previous six months of Red Sox baseball was like Blutarsky’s seven years at Faber College: down the drain.”
Must be just a coincidence. (Thanks to Media Nation reader J.M.)
Good thing we’re a two-daily town
Libel battle won, but war remains lost
A battle has been won over a bizarre and dangerous decision by a federal appeals court earlier this year that truth may not be a defense in libel cases brought by private parties. Unfortunately, the war remains lost.
According to lawyer Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, a jury found recently that the office-supply chain Staples did not act with malice when a manager sent an e-mail to some 1,500 employees informing them he had fired a sales manager named Alan Noonan for violating the company’s travel and expense policies. (Ambrogi points to an article in the National Law Journal, but it’s subscription-only.)
As I reported earlier this year in the Guardian, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, ruled that Noonan’s libel suit against Staples could proceed even though the contents of the e-mail were true. The court relied on an old provision of Massachusetts libel law pertaining to “actual malice,” which Judge Juan Torruella wrote should be defined as “ill will” or “malevolent intent.” Torruella earned a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for his anti-First Amendment decision.
Although Staples may not spring immediately to mind when one thinks about freedom of the press, the implications for the news media are obvious.
In the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case of Times v. Sullivan, actual malice is defined as pertaining to a defamatory statement made with knowing falsity, or with “reckless disregard” for the truth. And though Times v. Sullivan applies solely to public officials, a series of subsequent decisions by the Court made it clear that a defamatory statement can never be found libelous if it is true — a principle asserted by free-speech advocates since the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger.
First Amendment lawyers such as Ambrogi and Robert Bertsche wrote that Torruella should have thrown out the Massachusetts law, on the books since 1902, as unconstitutional in light of Times v. Sullivan.
So far, though, Torruella’s toxic handiwork remains in effect — at least in Massachusetts.
Hopelessness and hope in urban America
Regular readers know I’m closely following the New Haven Independent, among the most journalistically substantial of the non-profit community news sites.
This morning I want to share with you an astonishing story from the Independent on the state of urban America — a feature by Melissa Bailey on community volunteers who cleaned up the dried blood left behind in a three-family home after a recent murder.
Not to indulge in clichés, but it’s a story that quite literally combines hopelessness and hope. And the comments actually cohere into a worthwhile conversation.
Closer to home, if you missed Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham’s Sunday piece on Maria Dickerson, a Springfield woman raising the four children left behind by her murdered friend, it’s not too late.
Good call running it on page one and giving Abraham the space she needed to tell the story properly.
Gay-activist numbers match tea-party protesters
Last month, a crowd that the Washington fire department estimated at somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 turned out to protest against President Obama. (You may recall that Michelle Malkin passed along the fiction that 2 million people had showed up, and was forced to backtrack.)
By Washington standards, it was a decent turnout, but nothing remarkable. To judge by much of the coverage, though, you would have thought we were witnessing the final collapse of the Obama administration. Fox News covered it like a sporting event, with the tea-party protesters cast as the home team, and the self-loathing mainstream media struggled to follow suit.
Yesterday, a crowd at least that big marched in Washington on behalf of gay and lesbian rights. There has been no reported official estimate, but the New York Times reports that “tens of thousands” marched. So does the Washington Post. The organizers, Equality Across America, have reportedly placed the crowd at 150,000.
Yes, the gay activists got coverage. But even now, the march barely rates a mention on the home pages of CNN.com, MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com. How much do you think we’re going to hear about it in the days and weeks ahead?
Wait till next year
The shocking truth was that I didn’t see today’s game. Weeks ago, I’d volunteered to lead a church hike through the Lynn Woods. I updated myself on the score several times on my BlackBerry, and made it back to the car just in time to hear the top of the ninth. Ugh.
Tonight, I punched up WEEI just in time to hear some bozo caller ranting that Jonathan Papelbon should be “run out of town.” Can you imagine? Fortunately, the hosts were having none of it. If the Red Sox had been able to hit during those first two games, Papelbon’s rare failure today wouldn’t have mattered so much. Pap’s performance looks a lot worse because others didn’t do their jobs.
Still, despite the holes on this team, if Papelbon had done what he almost always does, and if the Sox had won Game Four, all the pressure would have shifted to the Angels. Who knows what would have happened?
Not that they were going all the way. I agree with something the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn wrote on Twitter: “Bottom line: It’s a crushing way for the season to end, but once Beckett stopped dominating, had to figure a title wasn’t in the cards.”
Maybe the Red Sox need new fans: Just saw this, from Rob Bradford at WEEI.com. I had not realized that some fans were booing Papelbon. What a disgrace. Maybe the Sox need new fans even more than a mobile third baseman and a DH who can hit good pitching.
Through the glass darkly
Friday was deadline day for bidders seeking to make an offer to buy the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from the New York Times Co. And it appears there’s not much to report.
New York Times media reporter Richard Pérez-Peña writes that it’s not even clear whether the two contenders for the Globe, a group led by former Globe executive Stephen Taylor and California-based Platinum Equity, had submitted bids.
Each had reportedly offered to pay $35 million as well as assume pension liabilities of $59 million. Jessica Heslam had reported in the Boston Herald that the estimate of those liabilities had recently been revised upward to $115 million. Pérez-Peña quotes sources who confirm the upward revision, but suggest the error was not quite as great as that.
It’s hard to know what to believe. I can tell you that I’ve heard the actual pension liabilities may be even higher than what Heslam’s sources told her. The truth may be that such estimates are hard to nail down, and that opinions differ.
Meanwhile, Telegram & Gazette reporter Shaun Sutner breaks the news that former T&G editor Harry Whitin is involved in a group that is seeking to buy the paper separately — the first indication that the Globe and the T&G might be split up. (The Globe runs the story as well.)
The money guy is identified as Ralph Crowley, the president and CEO of Polar Beverages.
The Times Co. bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and the T&G in 2000 for $296 million.
Several months ago, a T&G source explained to me all the multifarious ways that Globe and T&G operations had been combined over the years. I was left with the distinct impression that it would be an expensive proposition to try to separate the two at this point.
But if the two papers end up with different owners, I suppose it wouldn’t be that difficult for them to reach an agreement to continue joint operations that make sense.
Red Sox by the numbers
The Boston Globe’s Adam Kilgore has the statistic I was looking for. The notion that the Red Sox can’t hit good pitching isn’t just a cliché — it’s actually true. Kilgore writes:
The Sox sputtered all season against frontline pitchers. Against the top 15 American League pitchers in ERA+, a stat that adjusts ERA for ballparks, the Red Sox hit .220 with a .266 on-base percentage and a .327 slugging percentage. The league average against those pitchers was .248, .292, and .387.
Next, one of my own favorite stats. The Sox ended the season 95-67, for a very respectable winning percentage of .586. It’s hard to believe they finished eight games out with a record like that, but that’s what happens when the Yankees sign the three best free agents on the market.
But if you eliminate the woeful Orioles, against whom the Sox were 16-2, then the Red Sox’ record for the year was 79-65, for a mediocre winning percentage of .549. Not that every team doesn’t have a cousin or two, but that’s ridiculous.
Granted, that still would have been good enough to get them into the post-season, and it’s better than Minnesota’s .534. But it is, perhaps, a more accurate measurement of their actual abilities.
The Sox still have a chance to prove us all wrong. But right now things don’t look good.
Did Acorn help Al Franken win? (II)
It’s been more than 24 hours, and Katherine Kersten has not responded to my e-mail asking how voter-registration fraud in Minnesota could have led to election fraud that helped put U.S. Sen. Al Franken over the top in his race with Norm Coleman.
At this point I have to assume she’s firing blanks.
The heart of her argument, published in the Star Tribune, is that Acorn registered 43,000 new voters in Minnesota last year; that, given Acorn’s track record, some of them must have been fraudulent; and that since Franken won by just 312 votes, only a tiny fraction of those registrations needed to be transformed into votes in order to explain Franken’s victory.
Of course, the alchemists believed that if they could transform just a tiny fraction of the lead they had in their possession into gold, they’d all be rich.
Let’s try to keep in mind what this is about. Acorn hired temporary field workers who, in many cases, were paid by the signature to sign up new voters. That created an obvious incentive for the workers to fill in as many names as possible and thus make more money.
I’m not aware of an allegation being lodged anywhere in the country that an ineligible voter showed up on election day, identified himself by one of those phony names and then cast a ballot. The right has spent months — years — looking for such evidence only to come up with nothing.
And when you understand the nature of the very real fraud that was committed, it’s impossible to see any connection. It’s like tying the health-care debate to the color of Queen Elizabeth’s hair.