Author: Dan Kennedy

Keller on Obama and Patrick

I’m ridiculously late to the party, but if you haven’t read Jon Keller’s Wall Street Journal piece comparing Barack Obama to Deval Patrick, you should. It’s more timely than ever, given Obama’s emergence today as the all-but-certain nominee.

As Keller notes (joining many others), there are numerous stylistic and rhetorical similarities between Obama and Patrick, and he wonders what that portends for an Obama administration, given Patrick’s rocky stint (it’s now officially too late to call it a rocky start) as governor of Massachusetts.

Personally, I’ve thought for some time that the similarities between the two men are exaggerated, mainly because they’re both African-American. Their life stories couldn’t be more different. Obama, who deliberately chose the life of a community organizer and state legislator, knows his way around the streets; Patrick knows his way around a corporate boardroom.

Then there’s this nugget from an unnamed Republican analyst, dug up by Mickey Kaus and brought to my attention by Jay Fitzgerald: “Deval Patrick is an idiot. Obama is not an idiot.” Oof. Pretty harsh. But the evidence thus far suggests that there may be something to it.

Aftermath of the Burmese cyclone

What is a cyclone? It’s a hurricane, according to Wikipedia. According to the BBC, state media in Myanmar (Burma) are now reporting that the death toll has exceeded 22,000, a far cry from the 4,000 deaths that were claimed in the print edition of today’s New York Times. With another 41,000 missing, it’s certain that the body count will keep rising.

This Al-Jazeera English report is pretty interesting:

The cyclone could be a paradigm-changing event for Myanmar, once of the world’s most closed and repressive regimes, as the ruling junta has apparently decided to accept international assistance. On the other hand, the Al-Jazeera report notes that the junta has not given the green light to non-governmental organizations, and that it plans to go ahead with a May 10 referendum aimed at strengthening its repressive grip.

The Democratic Voice of Burma (via Global Voices Online) says that the authorities have done little to help beleaguered storm victims. One anonymous resident of Rangoon, the capital, is quoted as saying:

We don’t know where they [the authorities] are, which corners they have gone to. It is not good to talk about it. They only know how to beat up people. In this kind of situation, we don’t know where they are. These people only know how to beat up people.

Danny Schechter hails Laura Bush for speaking out, and adds: “I spoke with a veteran UN Correspondent last night who said that the infrastructure in Burma is in such poor shape [that] he doubted that they had the capacity to warn the public.”

“Russert Watch” watch

Question: Would Todd Gitlin be capable of writing an interesting analysis of Tim Russert’s interview with Barack Obama if he weren’t trying to thread the needle of producing a weekly column for the Columbia Journalism Review called “Russert Watch” after having outed himself as an Obama supporter — a fact that he does not disclose even though it is still probably not widely known?

Answer: I have no idea. I do know that this certainly isn’t interesting.

Right and wrong on a new casino poll

The Herald’s Scott Van Voorhis rightly notes that a new UMass Dartmouth poll purporting to show an increase in support for casino gambling is undercut considerably by the fact that it “was commissioned by Northeast Resorts, a real estate firm that owns sites in Palmer and New Bedford that have been identified as possible casino sites.”

But he’s at least partly wrong in reporting that a March survey showed public opinion was split. That was indeed the lede, as reported by Stephanie Vosk in this story in the Cape Cod Times. Scroll down a bit, though, and you’ll see that the key finding was that 57 percent of respondents were “strongly opposed” to a casino’s being built in their community, and another 10 percent were “somewhat opposed.”

Barbara Walters’ twice-told tale

Barbara Walters must think that if you wait for everyone to forget, you can trot out an old affair and tout it as news. The media world is buzzing softly (very softly) over Walters’ revelation that she had an affair with then-senator Ed Brooke in the 1970s. She is, of course, peddling a book.

Maybe it’s because I’m old, but my first reaction was: “I knew that.” It sounded very familiar to me when we talked about it on “Beat the Press” yesterday on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). When I started searching, I found this line from a March 5, 2000, Globe profile of Brooke by staff writer Sally Jacobs, referring to his life in the ’70s: “A regular at the lavish parties at the Iranian Embassy, he did the hustle with Elizabeth Taylor and squired Barbara Walters about town.”

There’s also this, from a Feb. 17, 1980, story on Walters by then-staffer Marian Christy:

Walters has dated Alexis Lichine, the wine expert who was once married to Arlene Dahl. She used to count among her friends former Sen. Ed Brooke and Secretary General of the Organization of American States Alex Orfila. Both Brooke and Orfila are married now and, for some years, Walters’ closest friend has been Alan Greenspan, the financial wizard.

Do we not understand the plain meaning of this? Especially that Brooke became a “former” friend of Walters after he got married?

Unfortunately, the Globe’s online archives only go back to 1980, and this isn’t exactly worth an afternoon in the microfilm room. But these two tidbits make me think I’m not hallucinating about having seen gossip items in the papers during the 1970s, when the Walters-Brooke affair took place.

I don’t recall people as caring much back then. I can’t imagine anyone cares now.

More: Media Nation reader Esther points to a New York Magazine item reporting that the Walters-Brooke affair made the Washington Post gossip column, “VIP,” way back in 1975.

Brian Williams protects his friends

That’s not an accusation. NBC News anchor Brian Williams actually comes right out and says it in response to complaints that he’s been silent about a recent New York Times article regarding retired generals and other military officers who analyze the war in Iraq for NBC and other news organizations.

To recap briefly — these officers are working as well-compensated executives for military contractors, which are, in turn, highly dependent on the good graces of the White House and the Defense Department. And Bush administration officials have not been not shy about telling the officers what to say.

Here’s a chunk of what Williams writes on his blog:

I read the article with great interest. I’ve worked with two men since I’ve had this job — both retired, heavily-decorated U.S. Army four-star Generals — Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey. As I’m sure is obvious to even a casual viewer, I quickly entered into a close friendship with both men. I wish Wayne were alive today to respond to the article himself.

The “picking on the dead” motif is a nice touch, don’t you think? Anyway, Williams goes on to say that he’s seen no need to comment on the Times article because, in his view, the officers were “tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq.”

And you know what? Perhaps they were, at least sometimes. But the thing about conflicts of interest is that viewers have a right to know what associations commentators have regardless of what comes tumbling out of their mouths. What Williams seems to be saying is that there was no need for such disclosure in these two cases because, in his personal opinion, neither man was susceptible to being spun. Is that the standard at NBC News?

In Salon, Glenn Greenwald notes that both Downing and McCaffrey were founding members of something called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, headed by a slew of pro-war neocons such as Bill Kristol, Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle. According to Greenwald, this fact was never disclosed in Downing’s and McCaffrey’s numerous appearances on NBC. Here is a choice tidbit from the committee’s stated purpose:

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq will engage in educational and advocacy efforts to mobilize domestic and international support for policies aimed at ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein and freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny.

You can call this idealism. But it makes laughable Williams’ assertion that his “friends” were independent. To make matters worse, Greenwald also documents the two officers’ ties to the military industry, making it clear that they could have lost a lot of money both for themselves and their employers if they had gone too far in their “tough, honest” analysis.

Recently I called the Times’ revelations “as sickening a media scandal as we have seen in our lifetime.” I was wrong. The larger scandal is that folks like Brian Williams, whom I’ve always considered to be a straight shooter, have been allowed to sweep this story under the rug.

Thanks to Media Nation reader M.T.S. for calling my attention to Greenwald’s piece.

Williams photo by David Shankbone, and republished here under a GNU Free Documentation License.