Year: 2009

For Jay Severin, every day is Groundhog Day

For weeks now, if you visit the Web site of WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) you’ll find this:

WTKK and Greater Media value an open and vigorous dialogue, but we also adhere to basic principles of civility, common decency and respect for all cultures. We believe Jay’s suspension is the best way to uphold both of these corporate policies. WTKK Management met with Jay Severin and his agent today. He will remain on suspension until further notice.

Like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” every day for Severin is the same day: he gets up, realizes he’s been suspended and sits down for a meeting with management and his agent.

You really get the feeling that station officials are in no hurry to resolve this. And Joe Kahn’s story in the Boston Globe on Monday (I was among those quoted) did nothing to dispel that notion.

All appellate judges are activists

At TPMDC, Eric Kleefeld posts a statement from U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., saying that he’s concerned Judge Sonia Sotomayor might allow her “personal race, gender, or political preferences” to exert an “undue influence” over her decisions as a Supreme Court justice.

You’re going to hear a lot of this in the days and weeks ahead. Conservative critics seem to be oblivious to the fact that white men have both a race and a gender. I highly recommend Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker profile of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has emerged as a conservative activist judge whose world view is very much informed by his race and gender.

To listen to conservative critics of “activist” judges, you’d think that appellate judges would always reach the same conclusion as long as they are competent and free of bias. But we all know that’s not the case, and that judges are heavily influenced by their personal beliefs.

Sotomayor, for instance, is already under fire for her role in a New Haven affirmative-action case that has been appealed to the Supreme Court. But as Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree pointed out on CNN last night, “the Supreme Court will probably decide the case 5-4. Now, she’s going to be wrong. Maybe she is. But four justices on this court right now will agree with her.”

In other words, she’s a liberal, and she’s well within the mainstream of liberal jurisprudence.

It was interesting that President Obama announced the Sotomayor pick on the same day the California Supreme Court upheld a voter-approved constitutional amendment that outlaws same-sex marriage. The vote was 6-1. Earlier, the court had created a right of gay marriage by a margin of 4-3.

The California rulings show just how important the courts are in American life — and how judges, reading the same laws, come to entirely different conclusions. If that’s activism, then all appellate judges are activists.

Obama won the election, which means that we’re going to get liberal activist judges rather than conservative activist judges. That’s the way things are supposed to work.

Another public pension outrage (II)

As Amused notes, Timothy Bassett and his wife, Linda Bassett, have both been caught up in their own public-pension controversies. Bassett chairs the Essex Regional Retirement Board, which is responsible for a decision to lower the retirement age from 65 to 60 for police and fire dispatchers in four North Shore towns.

Sean Murphy reports in the Boston Globe today on Linda Bassett’s ongoing effort to hold on to $20,000 in pension payments that she received for serving on — though rarely attending meetings of — the board of library trustees in Lynn.

And here is an earlier Murphy story on Timothy Bassett, beneficiary of a taxpayer-funded gift from former House speaker Tom Finneran that allows him to collect his $41,000-a-year public pension while getting paid $123,000 by the retirement board.

The Salem News, following up Chris Cassidy’s story, runs an editorial today noting that the board not only has a $123,000 executive director (Bassett) but also a chief operating officer, Lilli Gilligan. The editorial observes that “why this tiny agency needs both an executive director and COO is another question for taxpayers to ponder.”

I so can’t wait for the state sales tax to rise by 25 percent. How about you?

Update: Mrs. Media Nation passes along this link. It turns out that Linda Bassett is a serious foodie and the author of “From Apple Pie to Pad Thai: Neighborhood Cooking North of Boston,” not to mention a columnist for two GateHouse papers — North Shore Sunday and Current River Sunday. (Mrs. B’s bio may be out of date — Current River Sunday does not appear on GateHouse’s list of newspapers.)

She is also “on the culinary faculty at North Shore Community College.” Pension alert!

Update II: I’m told that Current River Sunday is now the Newburyport Current.

Another public pension outrage

In the midst of the worst fiscal crisis we’ve seen in many years, an obscure North Shore agency has voted to lower the retirement age for police and fire dispatchers from 65 to 60. The Salem News’ Chris Cassidy reports:

Thanks to a subtle change in job title, some North Shore emergency dispatchers will be able to retire five years early under new rules approved by the Essex Regional Retirement Board.

By reclassifying police and fire dispatchers as “signal operators,” the board recently allowed the group to retire with maximum benefits at age 60.

The change affects Boxford, Hamilton, Ipswich, Topsfield and Wenham. Naturally, defenders of this outrage say the move was made in order to rectify an injustice. Naturally, the extra cost to taxpayers is said to be negligible. Naturally, we are told that dispatchers work under an incredible amount of stress.

Guess what? I’m feeling pretty stressed right now. In what rational universe are new benefits approved in the midst of a budget meltdown — a meltdown that taxpayers are going to have to fund? The arrogance of this money grab boggles the mind.

Here are the board members.

Let the games begin

President Obama will reportedly nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Although none of the candidates on his short list has a reputation for being a liberal fire-breather, Sotomayor is probably the most provocative given her ruling in a high-profile affirmative action case in New Haven.

A ruling Sotomayor made in 1995 ended the eight-month-long major-league baseball strike. So she sounds like a fine choice to me.

Last thoughts (probably) on Maureen Dowd

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt today largely absolves columnist Maureen Dowd, writing, “I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right.”

Over the past week, I’ve thought a lot about plagiarism in the context of teaching journalism students. So it’s relevant to point out that, at Northeastern, we define plagiarism as “intentionally representing the words, ideas, or data of another as one’s own … without providing proper citation.” Based on what we now know, I sort of agree and sort of disagree that Dowd did not plagiarize. And I definitely agree that what she did wasn’t right.

When the news broke that Dowd had copied more than 40 words from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo without quotation marks and without attribution, my first thought was that bloggers would pore over everything Dowd had written to see if they could find other examples. Well, it’s been a week, and the Marshall incident still stands alone. I don’t think it’s plausible that Dowd would suddenly start plagiarizing at the age of 57. So not only is this a first-time offense, but it speaks, I think, to a lack of malice aforethought on her part.

Earlier in the week, I and other commentators wrote that we had a hard time believing Dowd could be telling the truth when she said she had somehow managed to insert Marshall’s words, almost verbatim, based on a casual conversation she’d had with a friend. She has now clarified that, telling Hoyt she’d exchanged e-mails with a friend — still unnamed — and then copied and pasted his or her thoughts from the e-mail into her column.

That is a pretty lame way to write a column, and as Hoyt says, readers have a right to expect that a columnist, as opposed to a news reporter, will use her own words except when quoting others. Dowd’s editor, Andrew Rosenthal, disagrees.

Now, this may surprise readers who’ve never worked in a newsroom, but Rosenthal’s take is pretty much in sync with the way journalists work. As an editor, I have written whole paragraphs into opinion pieces by people with well-known bylines. As a writer, I’ve had editors do the same with me. But it’s one thing to acknowledge that journalism is a collaborative process; it’s another to have friends help you write your column, and then turn it in to your editors without telling them.

If intentional theft is at the heart of plagiarism, then Dowd didn’t plagiarize Marshall. But she did plagiarize her friend, even if she did it with that friend’s acquiescence. And though she may never have lifted someone’s published words before last week, it could well be that she frequently cobbles together e-mails from friends in the course of writing — assembling? — her column.

At Media Matters, Eric Boehlert calls on the Times to produce the e-mail. At Scripting News, Dave Winer offers a similar view. My own take at this point is that Dowd not only owes us a fuller explanation, but she also owes her readers an apology. A brief suspension wouldn’t be out of order, either. It’s not a matter of wrecking her career; it’s a matter of basic accountability.

By far the most logical explanation would be that Dowd copied and pasted the Marshall passage herself with the intention of crediting him, and then forgot to do so. We could all understand that. Because she has given us something so much less straightforward, and because we still don’t know everything, I wonder if something else is going on.

At the Nytpicker, Amy Alkon asks something I’ve been wondering myself. Is it possible that an assistant did most of the work, including grabbing the Marshall quote without attribution, and that Dowd is now covering for both the assistant and herself? Normally I don’t like engaging in such speculation. But given the lack of transparency on the part of Dowd and her editors, I see no reason why we can’t offer some educated guesses.

Unfortunately, Dowd had the day off today. She should be writing her next column for Wednesday’s paper. I’ll extend to her the same invitation she received from Slate’s Jack Shafer last week: She should use her column to tell us what happened, how it happened and what she’s learned from the experience.

The standards to which she is held ought to be at least as high as those expected of any college sophomore.

Photo of Maureen Dowd (cc) by Matthew and Peter Slutsky and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Dylan’s first-rate second-rate album

I’ve listened to Bob Dylan’s latest CD, “Together Through Life,” a number of times now, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The assessment that rings truest to me is this: at the age of 67, Dylan has, for the first time in his long career, succeeded in making a terrific second-rate album.

What I mean is that nearly every album Dylan’s ever made has been a masterpiece or close to it; an attempted masterpiece that falls short in some important way; or an utter embarrassment. The stakes are always high, and usually too high. On “Together Through Life,” by contrast, it sounds like he went into the studio to have fun and managed to convey that sense of fun to us listeners. Not that it’s going to be everyone’s idea of a good time — some of the lyrics are pretty dark. What matters is that nothing here is weighed down by any deep sense of portentous meaningfulness.

Dylan accomplished that mainly by collaborating with Grateful Dead lyricist Rob Hunter on all but one song. There’s nothing like offloading the lyrical load to remove the weight of critics’ poring over Dylan’s words to try to figure out what he’s trying to say. (Not to mention tracking down his sources for evidence of what might be called over-enthusiastic borrowing.)

Everyone’s been obsessing over the Bruce Davidson cover shot. I’ve chosen instead to include the back cover, by Josef Koudelka, because it looks exactly like “Together Through Life” sounds — like a rough Tex-Mex band whose lead instrument, incongruously enough, is an accordian. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an old-fashioned blues with an accordian as prominent as it is on “My Wife’s Home Town,” a creepy, ancient-sounding song that — despite the Willie Dixon credit — could be a lost Howlin’ Wolf track.

Straight-ahead, uptempo songs like “If You Ever Go to Houston,” “Jolene” and “Shake Shake Mama” give Dylan some good new live material. The slow ones? Well, let’s just say there’s no “Nettie Moore” or “Red River Shore” here. The slow songs, especially the Hunter-less “This Dream of You,” mainly serve as mood music.

And can we please stop obsessing over Dylan’s voice? Yes, it’s shot, and it has been for quite some time. But vocal qualities aside, the man is one of the great singers in the history of rock and roll, with unmatched phrasing and urgency. His singing is one of the main pleasures of listening to his new album.

I don’t know how much I’ll be listening to “Together Through Life” six months from now. The album doesn’t rank with his comeback trilogy of the past decade (“Time Out of Mind,” “Love and Theft” and “Modern Times”), but it’s not intended to.

It’s got a beat and you can dance to it. I’d give it three and a half stars out of five.

A crowdsourced documentary

No one spoke the word “crowdsourcing.” But that was the theme of a presentation Thursday evening by “Frontline” producer Rachel Dretzin, whose next documentary, “Digital Nation,” will be a collaborative effort between her team and visitors to the “Digital Nation” Web site. “Digital Nation” is an attempt to explain how our dependence on — and obsession with — the Internet is changing our culture for better and for worse.

Dretzin is putting all of her footage and interviews online. There’s a blog tracking progress of the documentary. A series of interactive chats is under way. And folks are encouraged to submit their own video and audio commentaries about the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of online existence. There’s even a recommended “Digital Nation” hashtag (#dig_nat) for Twitter users.

“There is absolutely no way to be an expert. This is all of our story,” said Dretzin in an appearance at WGBH-TV (Channel 2), where “Frontline” is based. (Disclosure: I am a paid contributor to another WGBH program, “Beat the Press.”)

The idea, she added, is that rather than making the film in isolation and then getting reaction from the audience, the reaction would come first, followed by the documentary, which will come out sometime in 2010. “It’s an experiment for all of us,” she said.

Dretzin’s last “Frontline” film was 2008’s “Growing Up Online.” As was the case with that film, the author Douglas Rushkoff will be the on-camera correspondent in “Digital Nation.”

Collaborative journalism that combines the efforts of professionals and amateurs — sometimes called “crowdsourcing” — is one of the more promising developments to arise from Internet-based news ventures. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, a leading new-media thinker, refers to such amateurs as “the people formerly known as the audience.”

The challenge for Dretzin is to integrate what the former audience has to say into her film, rather than merely featuring it as an online adjunct.

David Brooks almost gets it right

David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times is smart and useful in its treatment of the similarities between the national-security policies of President Obama and those of George W. Bush after 2003 (though I think a more reasonable date to pick would be 2005), and of the differences between the Bush team and Dick Cheney during the waning years of the Bush White House.

But Brooks misses entirely why Obama has been more successful in selling those policies. It’s not just that Obama is more skillful at it, and understands public leadership better than Bush ever did. More than anything, it’s that when Bush finally moved away from the abject failures of the Bush-Cheney years, they were his failures.

Bush may have begun doing the right thing — or, at least, he may have begun doing the wrong thing less often — but he no longer had any credibility. Thus, by the time Condoleezza Rice had begun moving foreign policy in a less-insane direction, Bush had already irretrievably cast himself as a malleable tool.

Nor are the choices Obama is making today — on Guantánamo, on torture photos, on military tribunals — the sorts of things that will gain any real support on their own merits. Rather, most reasonable people see them as the least-bad decisions he could make given the “mess” that he inherited from Bush, as he put it yesterday.

Again, not an argument Bush could have made.