By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
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.
I’ve got a commentary up at the Guardian on the latest skirmishes in the paid-content wars, from Times Reader to Rupert Murdoch’s new scheme.
Just got a look at the Nielsen Online numbers for April, passed along by a Media Nation reader. A few things leap out:
Wish I had a link for you. And thanks to Mr. or Ms. X for sending this along.
We’ve had a lively discussion going on in the comments section as to whether steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs actually improve baseball players’ performance. The bottom line: studies of major-league statistics are inconclusive.
But I think we’ve been looking at the wrong thing. As this well-sourced Wikipedia article makes clear, steroid use builds muscle and increases “baseline strength” by somewhere between 5 percent and 20 percent. All things being equal, a baseball player would rather be stronger than not.
I’m old enough to remember the stories about Carl Yastrzemski‘s punishing workouts following the 1966 season, which enabled him to up his homer total from 16 to 44 during the Red Sox’ “Impossible Dream” year. And there’s a reason that Jim Rice had 382 career home runs to Jerry Remy‘s seven. Strength matters, and it always has, long before steroids became available.
But now factor in another 5 percent to 20 percent in chemically induced strength. Granted, some will be able to translate that into more home runs or a harder fastball and some won’t. But to argue that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire et al. would have done just as well without steroids strikes me as silly. We know their enhancements made them stronger. That has to count for something.
Media Nation is picking up reliable buzz that GateHouse Media, which owns some 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts, will be announcing significant downsizing moves in the very near future.
GateHouse owns midsize dailies such as the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham, the Patriot Ledger of Quincy and the Enterprise of Brockton as well as scores of weeklies, from the Cambridge Chronicle, the Somerville Journal and the Newton Tab to tiny papers in the exurbs.
Not good news.
I’m trying out the new Times Reader software. It’s based on the Adobe Air platform, so there are no longer separate Windows and Mac versions. I was ambivalent about the previous version, but Times Reader 2.0 is faster and more attractive.
The new version abandons the Times print-edition font — too fussy for the computer screen — with what appears to be Cambria, an excellent choice. Photos are better integrated. Videos are part of the mix. Scrolling is smoother. You can even do the crossword puzzle on your computer — something you were supposed to be able to do on the previous version, though I couldn’t get it to work on my Mac.
The questions remain: Where does this fit in the hierarchy of news products the Times offers, and does it point the way for other papers? Times Reader costs $3.45 a week. It’s definitely a faster, smoother read than the regular, free Web edition, and, once you’ve downloaded the paper, you don’t need a WiFi connection to read it.
But free is free. In addition, the Times Web edition is a livelier place, with more ads (perhaps that will change as Times Reader gains in acceptance), blogs and other extra content. In addition, if you’re a blogger and you want to post something you see in Times Reader, you have to leave, access the Web edition and find the story again in order to grab the URL.
On the other hand, Times Reader really does offer a superior online reading experience. You’re more likely actually to read the paper rather than just skip around. And it’s a lot cheaper (we get the Sunday print edition delivered, so there’s no extra charge for us) — not to mention more environmentally friendly — than the print edition.
Might there come a day when the Times and other papers can dump their print editions and instead offer various paid electronic versions via Times Reader, the Kindle and the like? I don’t know. But I do know that Times Reader 2.0 is a huge improvement over its predecessor.
Iran has released the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi from prison.
This would be a good time for the United States to release the Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj from Guantánamo, no? According to Reporters Without Borders, al-Haj, arrested in 2001, has never been charged and has been interrogated more than 200 times.
Correction: Reporters Without Borders really needs to update its information — it turns out that al-Haj was released in 2007. Glenn Greenwald has all the details at Salon, including our continued detainment of Reuters freelance photographer Ibrahim Jassam. (Hat tip to Steve.)