By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I’m debating Jay Rosen on the controversy over Mayhill Fowler, the citizen journalist who quoted Barack Obama on “bitter” white people who “cling” to religion and guns and, more recently, who prodded Bill Clinton into going off on Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum.
The question: Are citizen journalists bound by the same ethical rules as mainstream reporters? Read the set-up, then see the comments. Feel free to weigh in.
A couple of odd headlines in today’s Boston Globe:
No doubt the first thing you did after reading the papers this morning was log on to Curt Schilling’s blog so you could get the full rundown on his criticism of Kobe Bryant. It’s good stuff. Schilling even knows how to be disingenuous. While claiming that he’s a newcomer to basketball, and hey, maybe NBA players are supposed to act like self-centered crybabies, he offers this:
Kevin Garnett, and not that this needs to be stated, but I’ll say it anyway, is as focused and locked in as any athlete in any sport I’ve been around. From pre-game shoot around to last seconds on the clock, this kid is legit. The intensity and reputation are there, wow. His eyes are on the floor, or the ball, all game. What an incredible pleasure it is to watch and be a fan of. I am blown away in that he came out of high school, something that can be a huge disadvantage, and has ALWAYS maintained who he was purported to be.
The first game I saw from these seats the Coach for Washington was basically taunting KG when he was at the line, saying a bunch of things, KG was ignoring him for the most part until he said something that must have been a bit too much, KG pauses, looks over and basically tells him to go piss up a rope.
Last night KG goes to the line, Lamar Odom (who I became a fan of last night) is saying “Hey KG why don’t you help on the ball down here?” Pointing to the paint, and I am guessing he’s referencing the fact that KG wasn’t down in the paint mixing it up. He says it again, loudly, KG doesn’t even acknowledge him, and sinks both. Impressive, total focus.
Schilling also offers a spirited defense of Garnett over that technical that got called Sunday night: “These guys are playing for a world championship, they are as amped up as you expect the best players in the world to be, they are grown men, there’s going to be some PG-13 language, and you are giving a T to a guy for dropping an F bomb? Stupid.”
The section on Bryant comes shortly afterward, and the contrast couldn’t be more stark.
Schilling’s a pretty good writer. He’s got a way with words — who can forget his invocation of Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy’s “inherent ‘toolness,'” a phrase I swear I’m going to steal one of these days. He needs copy editing (who doesn’t?), but other than that, I’d think editors at the Globe or the Herald would jump at the chance to have him in their pages.
In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at a new study showing how the media reported on the presidential primaries — and I wonder what people mean when they generalize about something that encompasses everything from the New York Times to Michael Savage.
No, as a matter of fact, the MBTA is not tearing down a just-built bridge on the South Shore, as the Boston Globe reported the other day. The one it’s tearing down is more than 100 years old. (Via Universal Hub.)
What on earth is Gov. Deval Patrick doing? As I and many other casino opponents have pointed out repeatedly, the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe cannot open a full-fledged casino in Middleborough — or anywhere else — unless the state Legislature legalizes casino gambling.
Yet WBZ-TV (Channel 4) reports that Patrick is negotiating with the tribe in an attempt to strike a deal that will bring a casino to Middleborough. Unfortunately, casino opponents lost a bit of leverage last week, as federal officials backed away from a proposal to crack down on video bingo. The Mashpee would be able to build a bingo hall regardless of whether casino gambling is legal in Massachusetts.
But considerable obstacles remain. The tribe’s Middleborough application could well be rejected by the U.S. Department of Interior, as it seeks to allow a casino to be built on newly acquired property rather than traditional tribal land.
Moreover, the process followed by Middleborough town officials was a disgrace. Casino opponents could no doubt keep this tied up in court for years if they have the resources. It’s a shame they have to fight the governor, too.
The Watertown Tab & Press will be in Waltham District Court today to argue that a subpoena brought against one of its reporters should be dropped. The subpoena was filed by town council member Marilyn Devaney, who faces charges that she threw a box containing a curling iron at a clerk in a Waltham store in April 2007.
Devaney wants Tab reporter Jillian Fennimore to testify about her knowledge of the case. But Fennimore, through Tab lawyer (and Friend of Media Nation) Rob Bertsche, counters (PDF) that Fennimore has no direct knowledge of what happened, covering the story only through “the traditional tools of journalism: official police reports, interviews with witnesses, and other shoe-leather reporting.”
Forcing Fennimore to testify, Bertsche adds, would have “the effect of preventing her [Fennimore] — the reporter with the most extensive knowledge of these proceedings — from reporting to the public about this criminal trial.” Such a result, Bertsche says, would interfere with the Tab’s newsgathering activities as protected by the First Amendment.
But Devaney’s lawyer, Janice Bassil, counters (PDF) that Devaney is entitled to know who supplied Fennimore with a Waltham police report labeled “Not for Public Release,” saying, “The information sought by the defendant goes to the heart of her claim for vindictive prosecution.”
That report, appended to Bassil’s brief, is highly entertaining. What allegedly set Devaney off was the clerk’s insistence that she couldn’t write a check without the proper ID. By far the best part is this quote from Devaney, which she allegedly spoke to the clerk shortly before hurling the bag at her: “Do you know who I am? I work for the Governor! I’m a lawyer! I’m in the Senate!”
Now, there are a few problems here. Assuming that Devaney knows what positions she holds, there is a good chance that she has been misquoted. She does not work for the governor, but she is a member of the Governor’s Council. She is not in the Senate, but, rather, serves on the Watertown Town Council. I could not immediately determine whether she’s a lawyer.
Devaney is something of a local legend — a contentious presence on the town council who has battled with her colleagues (there’s a whole section of Devaney clips on YouTube). As a Governor’s Council member, well, let’s just say she fits right in.
All kidding aside, it’s appalling that the Tab — part of the GateHouse Media chain — has been forced to spend one dime and devote more than one minute to fighting Devaney’s subpoena. Bassil, in her brief, makes a ludicrously offensive assertion:
The free flow of information will not be damaged as Ms. Fennimore will continue to be able to report on numerous matters similar to this so long as the information sought was authorized to be placed in the public domain.
This is a Soviet-style definition of journalism: Fennimore will continue to be able to do what is authorized, so where is the harm? I hope the judge can see through that and throws out Devaney’s subpoena with alacrity that it deserves.
Photo found on TheBeautyBrains.com.
The cliché of the 2008 campaign is “pivot,” as in: When will Hillary Clinton drop out so that Barack Obama can pivot to the race against John McCain? Of course, Clinton has now pivoted back to her Senate seat, allowing the media to pivot on to the next story.
According to a LexisNexis search of U.S. newspapers and wire services, the word “pivot” appeared 370 times between Jan. 1 and today in stories that also included the words “Obama” or “McCain.” In the same period during 2004, “pivot” popped up only 147 times alongside “Kerry” or “Bush.” Granted, there’s much more interest this time around, and much more pivoting to be done. But that’s still a lot of pivots.
The New York Times strikes me as a particularly egregious offender. In just the past week, Jodi Kantor has asked whether Clinton would “pivot millions of supporters in the direction of Mr. Obama”; Frank Rich has written of Clinton and McCain’s alleged “inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest”; Maureen Dowd has snickered that Obama had “been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now”; and David Brooks has opined that neither Obama nor McCain “is planning a major pivot for the fall.”
A quick search of Google News shows that the Times is hardly alone.
Enough.
I read a GateHouse paper. You probably do, too. Maybe even two: the chain owns good-size dailies such as The Patriot Ledger (Quincy), The Enterprise (Brockton), The Daily News Tribune (Waltham) and The MetroWest Daily News (Framingham), in addition to 100 or so weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts.
Anyway, sorry to bury the lede. GateHouse Media may be in deep trouble. According to the blog 247WallSt.com, the chain — based in suburban Rochester, N.Y. — is doing so badly that you might be able to get some furniture and computers cheap in a few months. After turning itself into a publicly traded company several years ago, the stock price has tanked, falling 80 percent over the past year.
247’s Douglas McIntyre writes: “Watch for GHS to be broken up before the end of the year or to enter Chapter 11.” (GHS is GateHouse’s symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.) Wow.
What’s more, the Motley Fool recently listed GateHouse as one of “5 Deathbed Stocks.”
GateHouse does some interesting things, but it has clearly been hampered by a lack of resources. Its Wicked Local sites were supposed to be a model of hyperlocal and citizen journalism, but they have yet to achieve critical mass. The company also pushes its reporters to shoot and edit low-end video, which is pretty smart. Earlier this year I wrote a post on Cathryn O’Hare, editor of the Danvers Herald, after I followed her through the process.
Mostly, though, the GateHouse papers in Massachusetts are good, solid community papers that have suffered under revolving-door ownership for many years.
During the 1980s, they were owned by a half-dozen or so regional groups, some based in Massachusetts, some out of state. Then, in the 1990s, most of them were combined by Fidelity into a chain that was dubbed Community Newspaper Co. Fidelity sold CNC to Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell for a reported $150 million in 2001.
Purcell did one thing wrong and one thing right. On the one hand, he took the Herald downscale, which made his purported flagship a weird fit with the affluent, well-educated readership he had just acquired.
On the other hand, Purcell unloaded CNC for $225 million just five years later, making him one of the few people to turn a profit on a newspaper deal in the 21st century. The money, many insiders believe, has allowed him to keep the Herald afloat. The CNC deal was part of a larger, $400 million purchase by Liberty Group Publishing, which renamed itself GateHouse, moved to New York State and went public.
GateHouse may or may not survive, but its papers should probably be all right in the long run. Community newspapers are in a better market position than major metros these days. Providers of quality local news don’t face a lot of competition either from other papers or, with a few exceptions, from the Internet.
The problem is that chains amass huge amounts of debt when they buy papers ($1.2 billion at GateHouse, according to McIntyre), and need to turn an unrealistically high profit in order to pay down that debt and satisfy their investors.
If the economy were rocking along, maybe GateHouse could pull out of this. But it’s not. Unfortunately, McIntyre’s post is an indication that things are going to get worse both for those of us who read GateHouse papers and the people who work for them.