Author: Dan Kennedy

After a week of trying, I was finally able to reconnect to my Northeastern e-mail account yesterday. Unfortunately, the first thing I discovered was that a number of people had been trying to reach me since early July: there were dozens of messages in my inbox that I hadn’t been able to access. So, if you’re one of them, my apologies – and please try again. I’m going to change the contact e-mail for Media Nation back to my Northeastern account, since it seems to be working fine now. But I’ll try to keep a closer eye on it.

The latest issue of The Masthead, published by the National Conference of Editorial Writers, has a diverse roundup of commentary on Michael Kinsley’s controversial stewardship of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial and opinion pages. But you can’t read it without jumping through some technological hoops. (The website LA Observed has a meaty summary online here.) Given that the whole point of Kinsley’s reign has been the melding of newspaper editorials with the Web, that’s more than a little ironic. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, a brief recap.

Kinsley – who has said he’ll likely be leaving his post this fall – has raised hackles with such dubious innovations as publishing freelance pieces as unsigned editorials and, most disastrously, posting a “wikitorial” on the Times’ website that readers could revise as they saw fit. Not surprisingly, the piece became a magnet for X-rated contributions. There’s no doubt that the editorial and op-ed pages of daily newspapers could use some serious rethinking. But Kinsley, despite a long, successful career editing publications such as The New Republic and Slate, as well as co-hosting CNN’s “Crossfire” back when even Jon Stewart would have liked it, seemed to lose his way.

The Masthead contributions range from pro-wiki commentators such as Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, to the more traditionalist Stephen Burgard, director of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Both Niles and Burgard have worked for the Times, Burgard as an editorial writer.

Yet unless you’re a member of the editorial-writers group or a subscriber to The Masthead, you are almost certainly not going to put in the effort needed to read these pieces. Because The Masthead, oddly enough, is not on the Web. You can find it online through some specialized databases; I was able to access the articles via EBSCO, available for free with my public-library card. But the path I had to take was nonintuitive bordering on counterintuitive.

By not making its contents freely available, The Masthead is withholding itself from what could be a broader conversation. Romenesko loves this stuff, and a posting on his site would have guaranteed national distribution to an audience of both professionals and lay people – which is what this package deserves. Bloggers would have at it, too. I can’t imagine the editorial-writers group would suffer much of a financial hit by giving away The Masthead. If anything, the organization would achieve a higher profile, and perhaps more people would join.

Jay Rosen, among others, is a staunch advocate of free, permanent links, explaining:

ROSEN: If you linked to the Los Angeles Times, your link would be dead in a week or two, as the content moved, in some grindingly mechanical fashion, off the “free” site, into an closed and gated archive, with tolls, thereby removing the journalism part from circulation on the Read/Write web, which means removing it from Google, from active cultural memory, and interrupting the very patterns by which value is added to a piece of journalism – post-publication, online, because of how the web works.

The danger, of course, is that news organizations, already hard-pressed for revenue because they’re giving away their current content on the Web, will lose yet another revenue stream by giving away their archives. Yet surely there is reputational value in taking part in the national conversation. When was the last time you heard anyone talk about The New Republic? It’s not because it’s not just as good as it ever was; it’s because it now hides most of its content behind a subscriber-only wall. Now the New York Times is ready to places its columnists off-limits to non-subscribers. Many observers are predicting that people who don’t subscribe already will simply find new columnists to read – and I think those predictions are right.

What’s obvious is that if you’re not on the Web, you’re not part of the conversation. The Masthead’s LA Times package could help foster a wide-ranging discussion about the future of the editorial page. But not if only a select few can read it.

The first order of business for the media today should be to check out the shocking claims of Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish. Broussard became the face of the disaster on Sunday. In an emotional appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the mother of a local emergency-management official drowned at her nursing home despite repeated assurances that help was on the way.

But if you only saw the clips, you might have missed something even more important. Broussard told host Tim Russert:

BROUSSARD: We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA – we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, “Come get the fuel right away.” When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. “FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.” Yesterday – yesterday – FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, “No one is getting near these lines.” Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America – American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.

These claims are so mind-boggling that I find them hard to believe, even after a week of grotesque incompetence on the part of FEMA and other federal agencies. But Broussard’s charges shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, either. Let’s find out if they’re true or not. Certainly the Bush administration has forfeited any benefit of the doubt. (Speaking of which, Josh Marshall is following how an apparent White House attempt to smear Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has unraveled.)

And by the way, add Russert to the list of journalists who’ve been laudably aggressive in their questioning of government officials – a development I took note of last Friday in the case of NPR’s Robert Siegel, and that Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and Alessandra Stanley and David Carr of the New York Times write about today.

“Now a Band That It Once Would Parody” – The New York Times, reviewing Green Day’s Sept. 1 concert at Giants Stadium

“Punk and Proud of It; Green Day Remains True to Its Roots” – The Boston Globe, reviewing Green Day’s Sept. 4 show in Foxborough

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans today has a tough “open letter” to President Bush on its editorial page. Here’s the heart of it:

TIMES-PICAYUNE: Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, “We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day.”

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, “You’re doing a heck of a job.”

That’s unbelievable.

And that’s courageous editorializing.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist is dead, and the tragedy in New Orleans and beyond continues. So pardon the trivial nature of this post. But if the New York Times is going to run a headline for a Philip Roth story that asks, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” shouldn’t it find a photo of Roth, you know, smiling?

Michael Brown didn’t just work for the International Arabian Horse Association before becoming the hopelessly unqualified head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He was asked to resign by the horse group, Brett Arends reports in today’s Boston Herald. (Via Jay Fitzgerald.)

By the way, the current lead item on the horse association’s website is headlined, “Help Horse Victims of Hurricane Katrina.” Just a guess, but I’d say the horses are in better hands than the people of New Orleans.

Over the past six months, major newspapers and wire services have produced 58 articles that mention both Planned Parenthood and the Plan B emergency-contraceptive pill, according to a search of Lexis-Nexis. Not until today, though, did we learn that the organization actually has a financial stake in Plan B.

According to a page-one story in the Boston Globe, “the national not-for-profit organization reaps millions of dollars in revenue by dispensing Plan B.” Reporter Diedtra Henderson continues:

HENDERSON: Internal e-mails exchanged between Planned Parenthood employees, and provided to the Globe by an attorney who filed a wrongful firing lawsuit on behalf of a former executive, indicate the drug’s manufacturer sells Plan B kits – with one or two pills in each – to Planned Parenthood clinics at a ”special” price of $4.25 apiece. The kits are usually sold to consumers for about $30.

Public-interest groups with hidden agendas are the bane of news organizations. (Media Nation recently exposed a conflict to which the Globe fell victim.) Who wouldn’t seek out Planned Parenthood’s views on emergency contraception? As Henderson observes, reporters have done that repeatedly without having any knowledge that the organization’s finances were involved in the debate.

At the same time, this is an odd conflict. It seems that Planned Parenthood’s advocacy of over-the-counter sales of Plan B drugs would actually cost the organization money, since women could simply go to their neighborhood drug store, as a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman tells Henderson.

Still, Planned Parenthood has clearly damaged its credibility on an important public-policy issue.

Say this for the mainstream media: you’re not going to see a lead sentence like the one Randall Robinson wrote today on his Huffington Post blog. Said Robinson, “It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.”

“It is reported”? By whom? Lacking any other information, I can only assume that Robinson’s embrace of the passive is aimed at obscuring just how unfounded this really is. Certainly searching Google News for “hurricane eat corpses” yields nothing. I’m not saying Robinson made it up. I am saying he probably heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody.

I found a link to Robinson’s silly post on Drudge, who seems to be testing the bottom of his “80 percent accurate” guarantee.

The biggest emerging Katrina story is that the disaster in New Orleans had been predicted for years, yet no one did anything about it. Plenty of stuff to choose from, but this piece by Joel K. Bourne Jr. in National Geographic – found on the Daily Kos by Media Nation reader Paul – is particularly striking because of when it was published: October of last year. Read this and shake your head:

BOURNE: Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn’t – yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.