Author: Dan Kennedy

Lydon on the move?

When UMass Lowell announced last October that it would stop funding Christopher Lydon’s public radio program, “Open Source,” you had to wonder what the long-term effect would be. Though UMass wasn’t Lydon’s sole source of support, all indications were that the university was his major backer.

Still, “Open Source” kept chugging along, and nearly two months ago the program received a $250,000 MacArthur grant for its Internet component.

But now the Globe reports that Lydon is talking with Bloomberg Radio about a New York-based commercial show. Nothing on the “Open Source” Web site, but this bears watching.

Update: Mary McGrath, Lydon’s longtime producer, says not to worry. (Thanks to this alert but pseudonymous Media Nation reader.)

Thank God we’re a two-newspaper town*

The Globe knows what we need, but the Herald knows what we want. In today’s Globe, Barbara Matson reports that Boston College women’s hockey coach Tom Mutch has resigned over “allegations of inappropriate conduct with a student-athlete.” Oh, yes. We get the picture.

Well, actually, we didn’t — at least, we didn’t until we turned to the Herald, which makes the Mutch resignation the subject of its front-page splash: “SEX SCANDAL ICES COACH.” Inside, we learn this, from reporter Laurel Sweet:

Hockey East Coach of the Year Tom Mutch, 39, who’s married and whose wife just had a baby, abruptly stepped down hours after the Herald began making inquiries to authorities at the Heights.

Sexually graphic text messages that BC hockey star [name omitted by Media Nation], 19, allegedly wrote to Mutch were discovered on a cell phone [she] gave to a teammate, neglecting to delete them first, sources said.

One source familiar with the messages described them as “filthy. They were very sexual in nature.”

And, oh yeah, there’s this: “Sources stressed that BC’s probe had yet to find an actual sexual relationship between Mutch and [the student].”

I’m under no illusions about protecting the 19-year-old student’s identity — I’m withholding it as a protest, and a rather futile one at that. I like reading about sex-related scandals as much as anyone, and the fact that BC officials are taking this so seriously means that Mutch is definitely fair game.

But to blast this on the front, and to identify the young woman at the center of this, seems way out of line, especially since all the facts are not yet in. Sweet deserves credit for breaking this story, but her editors blew it way out of proportion.

Update: The Heights, Boston College’s student newspaper, is reporting the student’s name as well. So I’ll concede that I may be alone on this one.

*With apologies, as always, to Boston Magazine, which used to have great fun with this feature.

David Halberstam

David Halberstam died with his boots on. The 73-year-old legend was killed in a car accident near San Francisco yesterday while he on his way to interview former NFL star Y.A. Tittle for his next book.

May I make a confession? I’ve never read his best-known book, “The Best and the Brightest,” his exposé of the American policy failures that led to the quagmire in Vietnam.

I do, however, vividly recall plowing through “The Powers That Be,” his four-way biography of media giants Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine; Donald and Katharine Graham, publishers of the Washington Post; Otis Chandler, who inherited the Los Angeles Times and made it great; and William Paley, the CBS founder who made its news division a paragon of excellence but never quite seemed comfortable with it. I read it in the summer of 1979, right after I’d graduated from college. “The Powers That Be” was — and is — and astounding piece of reportage and historical research, and it made an indelible impression on the way I think about the media.

In November 2001 I interviewed Halberstam for a piece I was writing on liberalism after 9/11. I remember his being somewhat gruff and abrupt, especially when he realized I had not read his then-new book “War in a Time of Peace.” I think I broke into a sweat. The story I was reporting was not about Halberstam or his book; I was just looking for a few insights from someone I greatly admired. As I recall, he warmed up a bit, but I was relieved when the interview came to its rather uncomfortable end.

Somewhere in my house, unread, is a copy of Halberstam’s “The Teammates,” about Red Sox players Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr and Johnny Pesky. I will soon rectify that. It goes without saying that Halberstam will be misssed. But for him to be cut down in his prime — at an age when most people are retired — seems especially unfair, not just to him, but to us.

The Northeastern Globe

Congratulations to Michael Naughton and Hailey Heinz, two Northeastern journalism students whose investigative report on a dubious anti-gun initiative by Boston Mayor Tom Menino appears on the front page of today’s Boston Globe.The mayor has proposed suspending the driver’s licenses of gun offenders; but Naughton and Heinz found that few gun criminals even have licenses.

Naughton and Heinz did their work as part of an investigative-reporting class led by my NU colleague Walter Robinson, the Globe’s Pulitzer-winning retired Spotlight Team editor.

One way to get free content

BostonNOW, the new freebie commuter tab, has attracted a lot of attention for its goal of loading up on local blog content. Participating bloggers wouldn’t be paid right away, but might share in BostonNOW’s revenues somewhere down the line.

Well, guess what? Boing Boing caught BostonNOW running an item from the Bostonist without permission. BostonNOW provided credit and a link, but obviously that’s not good enough. It was especially stupid given that the Bostonist, unlike most Boston-area blogs, is a commercial, profit-seeking enterprise. BostonNOW editor John Wilpers has apologized and said it won’t happen again. Meanwhile, we await BostonNOW’s first authorized blog item.

You can read Wilpers’ apology here. (Via Universal Hub.)

More: We talked about BostonNOW’s prospects Friday on “Greater Boston.” The video should pop up here at some point. I also shared my thoughts on BostonNOW recently with Paul McMorrow of the Weekly Dig.

I’m with Fred

Jesse Noyes reports in the Boston Herald today that the folks at Facebook are upset with the media for using the social-network service to track down interview subjects in the Virginia Tech story. A Facebook spokeswoman is quoted as saying, “We see this as a violation of user privacy.” Really? Good thing Ma Bell didn’t try to take our phone books away back in the 1970s and ’80s because we were violating people’s privacy by, you know, calling them up.

I’m with Boston University journalism professor Fred Bayles, who tells Noyes that journalists are going to use any method they can to contact people. Indeed, I tell my students that it’s perfectly ethical to use Facebook, listservs and Usenet (most easily accessed through Google Groups) for exactly that purpose as long as they make it clear that they’re reporters working on a story.

I am more sympathetic to Facebook’s objection that the media shouldn’t reproduce text and images from people’s online profiles without permission — although, again, Facebook, MySpace and the like aren’t exactly private forums.

A media manifesto

It was around 5:30 p.m. yesterday when I heard an NPR report that NBC News had obtained a video and pictures from Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech mass murderer. According to the report, NBC had turned over the material to law-enforcement officials. From what I could glean, it sounded as though the network had decided not to air it. I’ll confess that I didn’t think too deeply about it at that moment, but it seemed like the right decision.

Of course, I was wrong. Later in the evening, after I got home from a meeting, I learned from talk-show-host-in-exile Scott Allen Miller’s blog that NBC had indeed broadcast Cho’s hateful words and images. Miller wrote:

Words have yet to be invented to describe the callousness with which NBC News has re-victimized those who survived or lost loved ones in the massacre and rewarded Cho Seung-hui with post mortem television stardom. Cho’s place in history was assured by his murderous rampage, and now he’s a TV star. Even better, he’s a dead TV star. Ooooooh!

I can’t help but wonder how the families and friends of the dead and wounded reacted when they tuned in to NBC News tonight and saw Cho’s martyrdom video — not a transcript of it being read, but the actual video — in which he cursed those he was about to murder and maim.

At that point, I started flipping around the cable channels. MSNBC, CNN and Fox News all had the Cho videos in heavy rotation as Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper and Greta Van Susteren interviewed various experts and officials about what it all meant. This morning, the New York Times, the Washington Post, both Boston dailies and virtually every other media outlet of note have posted the video on their Web sites. So if NBC executives made the wrong call, they’re hardly alone.

But did they in fact make the wrong call? Or is the Cho video so newsworthy that it can’t be suppressed? On reflection, I would argue the latter. As I wrote yesterday, the critics of the Jamal Albarghouti video are right to lament the utter lack of context in which it has been shown, but wrong to argue that, therefore, it shouldn’t be shown.

It’s the same with the Cho video. Running it in an endless loop struck me as offensive, mainly because it was decontextualized, disembodied, displayed purely for shock value. But not to run it at all? How could any news organization withhold such explosive material about the worst mass murderer in history? Miller is absolutely right that the video further traumatized survivors and family members if they were unfortunate enough to see it. But journalists edit the news for the public, not for family members. I also think the original report on the “NBC Nightly News,” still available on MSNBC.com, was handled professionally and sensitively.

Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of people who agree with Miller. Check out some of the comments on NBC News anchor Brian Williams’ blog:

Please, please, take the videos of Cho down….

Leading off your national newscast with the ramblings of this disturbed maniac just gave birth to God knows how many more….

You should be ashamed. While the families of those that died are trying to deal with this horrible act of violence you provide the killer with exactly what he wanted, world wide viewing of his hatred….

Oh, my god, your news cast has made me so enraged I cannot even see straight. You are glamorizing this man and his rambling by giving him a national stage for his words? What the hell are you thinking?…

I could go on, but you get the idea. And let me add this, from blogger and frequent Media Nation contributor Peter Porcupine: “By choosing to give this presentation the validation of platform, NBC has sent our nation and our heritage just one more step down a dank and violent road.”

So what, exactly, were NBC News officials thinking? Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz attempts to answer that this morning on his blog, passing along a colleague’s report on what went into the decision. Law-enforcement officials reportedly told NBC at 4:30 p.m. that airing the material would not jeopardize their investigation. NBC went with the story two hours later. Offering some historical perspective, Kurtz writes:

This was no easy decision. Not since the Unabomber demanded that the New York Times and Washington Post publish his endless manifesto has a news organization faced this kind of judgment. In this case, of course, the killer is dead by his own hand, so the only reason to publish his invective is to aid public understanding of the worst gun massacre in American history — or allow him, posthumously, to gloat.

The idea that there may be some sick individuals who’ll see the Cho video and pictures and seek to emulate him is not to be dismissed. It’s that, rather than the families’ sensibilities, that gives me the greatest pause.

Still, I think NBC made the right call. And yes, it’s possible that someday we’ll look back and see that it was a terrible mistake. But there isn’t an editor or a news director in the country who wouldn’t have done what NBC News did yesterday. I realize there are many who will say that’s evidence a twisted media culture. They might be right; I hope they’re wrong.

Update: On “Today,” Matt Lauer had this to say: “We feel strongly that this is not video that we need to run in some kind of an endless loop, and so we will severely limit the amount of footage that you’re going to see” (via NewsBusters). So why was MSNBC doing exactly that the night before?

Citizen journalism and Virginia Tech

If the tragedy at Virginia Tech has produced a media star, it is surely Jamal Albarghouti, the graduate student who captured some as-it-happened video of the gunfire on his cell-phone camera. The video was posted on CNN.com and shown repeatedly on the cable channel. Albarghouti himself has been the subject of frequent interviews.

But is Albarghouti’s bravery and striking footage an example of citizen journalism at its best? Interestingly enough, NewAssignment.Net, a virtual watering hole for the citizen-journalism movement, has given voice to some skepticism. Steve Fox writes:

Consider this: the video had no inherent news value and told no story.

It did have sounds of bullets being fired and screams.

Those were bullets that killed, maimed and injured students and faculty members. This wasn’t a video game.

Is such video responsible journalism? Are these the types of Citizen Journalists that people want to see? Are we doomed to create “citizen journalists” to play the I-patsies for cable television?

Adds John McQuaid: “What is the value of something ‘live’ if you don’t know what you’re looking at? Cable execs will disagree, but ‘live and on-scene’ is not an end in itself.”

At the Citizen Media Center blog, Dan Gillmor takes a more sanguine view of how amateur and professional journalism has come together to cover the Virginia Tech story. And at Poynter.org, Al Tompkins has an extensive roundup of how students — including some hiding under desks — got out information about shootings via text messages, blogs and online forums. “If you ever had a doubt about how important it is for your newsroom to be able to tap into user-generated content, the Virginia Tech story will change that,” Tompkins writes.

What’s at a premium in confusing breaking-news stories such as this is perspective and understanding. As Fox and McQuaid suggest, the problem with the Albarghouti video isn’t that it was produced by a citizen journalist, but that it provided no context, and only added to the confusion. It was dramatic, so CNN showed it. But news has to be about more than that.

On Monday evening, I was flipping through the cable news channels, and quickly wound up watching a documentary on U.S. soldiers in Iraq instead. Why? Well, the news value of what the cable nets were reporting could be summed up in a minute or two. The rest was filler, some of it harmless, some of it not.

CNN was showing an interview with Albarghouti — and Larry King was threatening to put Dr. Phil on. I took the threat seriously and left. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly had right-wing pundette Michelle Malkin; her presence struck me as so weirdly inappropriate that I confess I didn’t stick around long enough to hear what she had to say. On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann was actually asking someone from washingtonpost.com what effect the shootings might have on the presidential campaign. Answer: Who knows?

I also heard it “reported” that it appeared the shooter was Chinese and not a student. Of course, as we soon learned, he was Korean and was indeed a student. What on earth is the value of these unverified tidbits, shoveled out there as fast as they come in and just as likely to be wrong as right? The Politico‘s Ben Smith must wonder why he got singled out for wrongly reporting that John Edwards would suspend his presidential campaign. Smith’s screw-up, after all, was hardly unique.

I don’t entirely agree with Fox and McQuaid. Surely Albarghouti’s video has some news value. But it wasn’t the story — it was part of a much bigger story. If the video lacks perspective — and it does — then it’s the media’s fault for showing it without providing that perspective.