Author: Dan Kennedy

How’s that trade working out? (XV)

Wily Mo Peña, who’s off to a fast start with the Nationals, pays tribute to the Red Sox and their fans, according to a statement that appears in today’s Herald:

To my sisters, brothers and fans of the Red Sox Nation. I want to take a moment to thank you and the entire Red Sox organization for your support during my time in Boston. Your constant passion for baseball and your beloved Red Sox is unmatched and has touched me deeply. I will always consider you with a special place in my heart.

The Red Sox organization deserves only the best and the Red Sox Nation is just that. Peace in life, Wily Modesto Peña.

No regrets over this trade, no matter how well he does in Washington. The only way Peña can develop into a serviceable major-league player is to play every day, out of the spotlight, and that wasn’t going to happen here. Give him this: If you sent up Wily Mo to pinch-hit with the game on the line, you can be sure he’d at least swing at something — unlike, say, J.D. Drew.

Meanwhile, Bronson Arroyo is now 6-13, with a 4.58 ERA. This one ends with a whimper.

RSS woes

RSS can be a great time-saver, but the glitches make it less than a complete solution. Here are a few examples:

  • My Mac-based newsreader, NewsFire, does not recognize the feed coming from Boston Magazine’s newish Boston Daily Blog. My first assumption was that the BoMag geeks were doing something wrong. But no. Because Google Reader tapped into the feed just fine.
  • So I started playing with Google Reader. Great interface, good organizational scheme, and I’ve been signing over more and more of my life to Google anyway (mail, calendar). But I quickly discovered that Google Reader is fantastically slow in updating — even items from days ago don’t appear, regardless of whether I bang away at the “refresh” button. It reminded me of another Web-based newsreader, Bloglines, which I abandoned for that very reason.
  • Too many blogs I like to check in on still aren’t using RSS, such as the Weekly Dig‘s, although I’m told that should change in the near future.

I’d be interested in hearing your RSS tales of woe — as well as any possible solutions.

More: I’ve been playing around instead of making the calls I should make, and I’ve found that fiddling makes a difference. For instance, the RSS feed for Media Nation seems to work better than the Atom feed. But the opposite is true at a couple of Phoenix blogs, Talking Politics and Don’t Quote Me, where switching from RSS to Atom brought me right up to speed. Obviously some standardization is needed.

The sagacious Dick Cheney (II)

Jon Garfunkel has some thoughts on the 1994 Dick Cheney tape. There’s a lot in here, including some ramblings from the conspiracy-minded left as to whether the media are deliberately ignoring evidence that George W. Bush is prematurely senile. But Garfunkel does get to the heart of the matter with this about the Cheney tape:

[W]hat’s remarkable is that no one found this earlier — five years ago would have been a good time. Vice President Cheney appeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russert on September 8, 2002 and then on March 16, 2003, three days before the Iraq war. Russert asked him reasonably tough questions. In the March interview he showed a video clip from Cheney’s appearance on the the show during the 2000 campaign. Cheney had said in 2000 that they didn’t go to Baghdad on the advice of the neighboring governments in the coalition. What had changed, to Cheney and the war’s supporters, was the world on 9/11. But while the specter of global terrorism may have changed the urgency for war, it could not have changed the expectations about the quagmire. Either the 1991 NPR clip or the 1994 C-SPAN clip would have brought that more directly.

Garfunkel makes an important point here. After I posted my earlier item, several Cheney defenders wrote comments saying, essentially, So what? Lots of politicians change their minds. Look at John Kerry! Karl Rove said the same thing yesterday in his appearance on “Meet the Press,” telling substitute host David Gregory:

He [Cheney], he was describing the conditions in 1994. By 2003 the world had changed. It changed on 9/11, and it became clear — it should be clear to every American that we live in a dangerous world where we cannot let emerging threats fully materialize in attacks on our homeland…. [P]eople are entitled over time to look at the conditions and change their mind, and that’s exactly what Dick Cheney did.

Well, yes. But, as Garfunkel observes, changing your mind about the threat posed by Iraq is one thing (John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”), but changing your mind about the consequences of war is quite another. We now know that Cheney got it exactly right in 1994. We have no idea why he later decided the invasion and its aftermath would be a cakewalk. Did Ahmed Chalabi really hold that much sway?

Not that it could have stopped the war, but it’s a shame that Cheney’s 1994 words couldn’t have been thrown in his face in 2002 and ’03, before the invasion. Forcing him to explain why he no longer believed the war would lead to a quagmire would have been a useful exercise. It’s nice that it’s come out now, but at this late date it only confirms what most Americans believe about a vice president they detest and a war they no longer support.

Update: The Telegraph quotes Media Nation.

A teaching moment

This, from the top story in today’s Boston Globe, is a very strange lede:

More than half the black and Hispanic applicants for teaching jobs in Massachusetts fail a state licensing exam, a trend that has created a major obstacle to greater diversity among public school faculty and stirred controversy over the fairness of the test.

Are diversity and fairness really the first things we ought to think about when we encounter such information? No, I didn’t think so.

Monday morning quarterbacking: An anonymous commenter thinks I’m being unfair to the Globe because the news hook was, in fact, a state investigation into why minority teaching candidates are faring so poorly on the test. A fair point, but in the main I disagree. In this case, the Globe shouldn’t have bought into the state’s notion of what’s newsworthy.

What’s news is that many teaching applicants are failing a basic state licensing test — and that, in the case of black and Latino applicants, at least some advocates are saying we should do away with the test. If all the questions are as easy as the two examples offered by the Globe, then blaming the test is ludicrous.

Smearing Al Gore again (and again)

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby today offers a newish twist on the old “Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet, har, har, har” canard — he quotes Gore accurately but twists the meaning. Jacoby’s intent is to mock Gore on global warming. He writes:

In the worlds [sic] of Al Gore, America’s leading global warming apostle: “There’s no more debate. We face a planetary emergency…. There is no more scientific debate among serious people who’ve looked at the evidence.”

But as with other claims Gore has made over the years (“I took the initiative in creating the Internet”), this one doesn’t mesh with reality.

Yet as the incomparable Bob Somerby has meticulously documented, Gore’s claim meshes perfectly with reality. It was Gore, more than any member of Congress, who pushed for the funding and provided the vision needed to lift a tiny, military- and university-oriented network called the ARPANET into the communications tool we have today.

If, after all these years, you still have any doubts, read this Somerby post. Don’t worry about what might strike you as Somerby’s partisan tone — look at the evidence he’s dug up. Here’s a taste, in the form of an excerpt Somerby found in the Guardian from 1988, 12 years before Gore made his comments to CNN:

American computing scientists are campaigning for the creation of a “superhighway” which would revolutionise data transmission.

 Legislation has already been laid before Congress by Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, calling for government funds to help establish the new network, which scientists say they can have working within five years, at a cost of $400 million.

Also note that none other than Newt Gingrich, among others, has acknowledged the truthfulness of Gore’s claim. I’m not sure we’ve ever had a major political figure as frequently and casually lied about as Al Gore. This phenomenon surely cost him the presidency in 2000, and I imagine it’s got a lot to do with why he won’t get into the race this time.

By the way, Jacoby also quotes NASA administrator Michael Griffin’s controversial comments that global warming is nothing to get excited about. But he seems to have missed Griffin’s subsequent apology. Keep in mind that Griffin has never denied the reality of global warming. Thus his personal view that we shouldn’t do anything about it has no more value than my personal view that Terry Francona ought to give Jason Varitek more days off.

Monday update: David Bernstein expertly analyzes Jacoby’s anti-global-warming case. “Surely,” Bernstein writes, “if nine oncologists tell Jacoby that he needs a growth removed, and one tells him that the evidence of malignancy was not as strong as the others suggest, he would demand a strong argument for listening to the one over the nine.”

Judge Murphy’s latest money grab

Is there no end to Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy’s greed? Apparently not. Murphy is now suing the Boston Herald’s insurance company for $6.8 million merely because it allowed the paper to defend itself against the judge’s libel suit, and then allowed an appeal of the jury’s $2 million-plus verdict (Globe story here; Herald story here). Absolutely incredible.

Murphy had already managed to squander nearly all of the goodwill he’d garnered as a victim of the Herald’s sensationalistic, flawed reporting about him — first by sending bizarre, threatening letters to publisher Pat Purcell, and then, more recently, by trying to grab a disability pension to which Gov. Deval Patrick rightly concluded he wasn’t entitled. Now this.

When this all started a few years ago, I was sympathetic to Murphy, though not to his lawsuit. As a public official, he had the platform he needed to speak out and defend himself against charges he believed were unfair and inaccurate. No need to turn it into a libel case.

Unless, that is, he saw this as a chance to cash in right from the beginning.

Analyzing the online news audience

The Shorenstein Center, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has issued an intriguing new study on user trends at news sites. You can read the whole thing (pdf) here, but let me offer a few observations and comments.

1. The study, titled “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet,” prepared by Shorenstein’s Tom Patterson, shows that a trend we’ve already seen with newspapers’ print editions is happening online as well: the national newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal) are doing much better than large and medium-size regional dailies, whose growth is stagnant. In fact, the study finds that the Times now accounts for “well over 10 percent of the online newspaper audience.”

This is serious — but not, I would argue, quite as serious as it might appear at first glance. Nor do I think it represents any major diminution in people’s interest in local news. Consider:

  • In most parts of the country, the national papers (especially the Post) are not as easy to get in hard copy as they are online. The Web sites of the national papers represent huge growth potential that simply isn’t available to regional papers, since getting the Baltimore Sun or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (to name two of the papers included in the study) in print is easier and more convenient than reading it on the Web.
  • Readers outside a regional paper’s coverage area aren’t all that interested in what that paper has to offer. Nearly all of a regional paper’s target audience already has the option of easy home delivery. An exception that proves the rule: the Globe’s Boston.com might be the most popular regional news site in the country (depending on whether you consider the Los Angeles Times to be a regional or a national newspaper). And a lot of that, Globe insiders will tell you, is because of the “Red Sox diaspora.”
  • Most regional papers’ Web sites fall far short of the Times’ and the Post’s, which are models of how to do online journalism. Thus readers have an additional incentive to stick to print.

2. Shorenstein reports that the Web sites of PBS and local public television stations are losing audience. I’m not sure what to make of that, but I will point out that news is not the dominant programming paradigm on public television. Perhaps what this really means is that “Arthur” and “Sesame Street” aren’t as popular as they used to be. Certainly “The NewsHour” site is looking pretty good these days.

3. But we also learn that NPR and local public radio stations, which are far more news-oriented than public television, are losing online audience as well. And though I don’t pretend to know why, I do wonder whether podcasting has something to do with it. If you go to the podcast directory at the iTunes Store, you’ll see that NPR programs do very well. (Actually, so does the aforementioned “NewsHour.”) It could well be that the most Net-savvy of public radio’s listeners are going straight for the podcasts and not bothering to visit the Web sites. Podcasts are powerful; streaming audio (and video) is a loser.

Besides: I’m willing to bet that more than 90 percent of public radio is consumed in people’s cars. Even though public stations like Boston’s WBUR (90.9 FM) are trying to beef up their Web presence, the Web-print synergy that exists in the newspaper world has no analogue when it comes to radio.

4. The Shorenstein study finds that the growth of Digg.com is off the charts. The report describes Digg as an aggregator not much different from Google News or Yahoo! News, but that’s not quite right. Digg is a social-networking site that allows users to submit news stories that the community then votes on. Those that get the most votes rise to the top.

The readers’ choices tend to be tech-oriented, and those that aren’t can often be pretty juvenile. But the Internet, especially in its Web 2.0 incarnation, is all about community, conversation and participation, and Digg.com has found a way to apply that to news. There are lessons to be learned from that.

Update: GateHouse Media’s Howard Owens calls the Shorenstein report “seriously flawed,” and points to this for another perspective.

You go first, Mr. Cohen

Don’t you feel completely reassured now that the state has told us the feds are wrong about the Zakim Bridge‘s being on the verge of collapse?

OK, I exaggerate — but not by nearly as much, I suspect, as state transportation secretary Bernard Cohen was when he told the Globe’s Scott Allen, “It is not a safety issue, but rather a defect associated with the installation.”

Of course, the loose bolts in the tunnel were not a safety issue unless you happened to be driving through it when one of them let go.

This is exactly the kind of story that can have a far bigger impact now, following the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis, than it normally would. Bridge- and road-safety stories can have a quality of abstractness to them unless readers have a clear picture in their minds of people plunging to their death.

I assume — I hope — that the Globe is going to keep hammering away at this. No doubt Cohen and his boss, Gov. Deval Patrick, are freaking out at the prospect of another multizillion-dollar repair job. But people will have to understand that it wasn’t the Patrick administration who oversaw this shoddy project, and that it’s worth any price to prevent what happened in Minneapolis from happening here.

Yesterday, the Outraged Liberal argued for a higher gas tax instead of an increase in tolls. Unfortunately, we may need both. As well as lawsuits against the responsible contractors from here to eternity.

Photo of Zakim Bridge (cc) by Ron’s Log. Some rights reserved.

The last “D&C” update

Pending any real news (and certainly Entercom’s acquistion of half of WCRB (99.5 FM) qualifies as real news), I’ll let David Scott round things up one more time. Bottom line: It’s now clear that no one — not Scott, not the Herald, not the Globe and certainly not yours truly — had any idea of what was really going on until the agreement was announced yesterday afternoon.

Perhaps Entercom and Nassau can now cut a deal that would allow John Dennis and Gerry Callahan to take over the morning show on WCRB. No disrespect to Laura Carlo, but wouldn’t you love to hear Dennis introducing one of the “Brandenburg Concertos” while Callahan wonders out loud if Bach was an illegal immigrant?