By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I know I should be all fired up about the Celtics and the Bruins tonight, so my apologies. (I will never be fired up about the Bruins.) Instead, I’m wondering if today will prove to be a turning point for David Ortiz, who went 0 for 7, left 12 runners on base (including the bases loaded — twice), and struck out three times. If he’d had even a mediocre day, the Red Sox would have won.
Radio announcers Joe Castiglione and Dave O’Brien are virtual extensions of the team. So I thought it was interesting that O’Brien, especially, was pointing out that Angels pitchers weren’t even bothering to nibble at the corners when Ortiz was up, and was suggesting that there may be changes coming soon.
Ortiz was a great player and is a class act. It’s sad that it’s come to this, but he’s hardly the first player whose skills have eroded rapidly. As it is, it’s hard to picture him adjusting and settling in as, say, a .260-25-80 guy. It looks like the show’s over for Big Papi.
I’m hearing a few reports from out in the field that the GateHouse Media cuts, which I mentioned here earlier in the week, are now starting to come down. I don’t have any details, and I have other matters to attend to for the next few hours. But I’m hoping that a clearer picture will emerge later on.
11:06 p.m. update. Still hearing scattered reports of layoffs here and there. Nothing comprehensive. One thing I’ve heard from several sources is that GateHouse is moving to paid obituaries, and that some typesetters who had formerly handled obits are losing their jobs.
Actually, I despise the term “paid obituaries.” An obituary is a news story, as important as anything in the paper. If it’s paid, it’s no longer a news story; it’s an advertisement.
Ruth Spencer of the European Journalism Centre, a sharp young journalist whom I met at the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan, last month, has an update on efforts by the Kazakh government to censor the Internet.
Citing a Radio Free Europe report, Spencer writes that several leading Web sites in Kazakhstan shut down for one hour on Wednesday to protest the proposed law, which I wrote about here, here and here.
At Global Voices Online, Askhat Yerkimbay has a round-up of what the Kazakh blogosphere is saying about the proposed new law, which has passed the lower house of Parliament. Yerkimbay concludes:
In brief, the Kazakh language bloggers’ main disagreement is that this draft law would make it possible to ban a blog for any reason, while bloggers would have no rights.
There is some hope that President Nursultan Nazarbayev will veto the proposal, according to Adil Nurmakov, Central Asia editor for Global Voices, whom I interviewed in Almaty. For one thing, Kazakhstan is scheduled to assume the presidency of the Organiation for Security and Cooperation and Europe (OSCE), which is a very big deal.
It could be that Nazarbayev will decide that signing a restrictive anti-speech bill into law would harm his country’s image at precisely the moment that he is trying reach out to the world.
Probably not, writes LA Observed business columnist Mark Lacter, who watched the entertainment mogul spin the media before deciding he didn’t really want to buy Los Angeles Times after all.
“No one manipulates the press like David Geffen,” says Lacter.
Newsweek’s Johnnie L. Roberts reports that David Geffen would turn the New York Times into a non-profit institution if he should succeed in buying the paper. But someone — Roberts, Geffen, the unnamed Geffen “confidante” who’s quoted or perhaps all three — doesn’t really understand the model.
The example that’s cited is the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the non-profit Poynter Institute. But the Times itself is a for-profit organization. If that’s what Geffen’s really got in mind, then that might be the ideal ownership situation — unlike a true non-profit, the St. Pete Times is free to endorse political candidates, for instance.
But though the hybrid model eliminates the pressure of quarterly reports and shareholder discontent, a paper such as the St. Pete Times (the New Hampshire Union Leader has a similar ownership arrangement) still needs to break even. In the current economic climate, that’s a challenge.
Rory O’Connor has an excellent post that illustrates how torture has warped the thinking of otherwise sensible folks like Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and the New York Times’ Tom Friedman.
He also takes on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s bizarro decision to give a column to torture advocate John Yoo.
The Financial Times reports that entertainment mogul David Geffen has set his sights on buying the New York Times. So — would Geffen keep the Boston Globe or spin it off? (Via David Carr.)
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, in the course of thrashing Colin Powell, cites a 16-year-old William Raspberry column in which Raspberry apologized for accusing Rush Limbaugh of bigotry without having listened to him for more than a few minutes in bits and pieces.
Powell, who’s been critical of Limbaugh, must be similarly ignorant, according to Jacoby.
But wait. Has Jacoby seen the “Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes”? [Link now fixed.] Two of them, at least, have been verified by Snopes, the gold standard for such things:
Two of the most incendiary quotes on the list — a paean to James Earl Ray, who assassinated the Rev. Martin Luther King, and a comment that the streets were “safer after dark” during slavery — appear to come from a book by Jack Huberman called “101 People Who Are REALLY Screwing America (and Bernard Goldberg is Only #73).”
I do not know the provenance of those quotes, and Wikiquote says they are in dispute because Huberman did not provide dates. So we’ll leave those in the interesting-if-true category.
On the other hand, there is no question that Limbaugh lost his gig as a football analyst after he made racially insensitive remarks about Donovan McNabb, a quarterback who’s black. And he’s had great fun with a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro,” not least because he gets to claim, over and over, that his critics don’t get it and he’s not really racist.
William Raspberry retired in 2005. But he might want to consider his 1993 apology to Limbaugh. The evidence is clear that Raspberry got it right the first time.
If you click here, you’ll see that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is in the paper today.* But he doesn’t show up if you choose the “Today’s Paper” feature. Nor will you find him if you read the paper using Times Reader — which, after all, is a paid product.
Even before the new version of Times Reader came out, I noticed that David Pogue’s Thursday technology column, “State of the Art,” was generally missing.
If the Times is serious about charging people for certain types of enhanced online access, it’s going to have to do better.
*Correction: Well, this is really stupid of me. Several readers have written in to point out at Douthat simply wasn’t in the print edition today. D’oh! Looks like Media Nation is experiencing some quality-control problems.