Author: Dan Kennedy

Latecomers to the work of Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw, who died yesterday, may know him for little more than an ill-considered screed against bloggers that he wrote this past spring.

Among media critics, though, Shaw was a legend – the only one of us, to the best of my knowledge, ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. That’s sort of like a second baseman winning the home-run title.

Shaw was not as celebrated as he should have been because he worked well outside the East Coast media orbit. Today’s LA Times obituary sets the record straight. So does this appreciation, by National Journal’s William Powers.

Today’s New York Times further cements Governor Mitt Romney’s status as 2005’s “It” boy in the 2008 Republican presidential sweepstakes. In a front-page piece headlined “Massachusetts Governor Tries to Accentuate the Conservative,” Pam Belluck essentially describes Romney’s strategy as positioning himself approximately a half-inch to the left of George W. Bush.

The Times article is just the latest evidence that Romney is having considerable success in the media pre-primary that will determine who’s serious and who isn’t. The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a long, effusively positive profile of the governor by former New York Observer media columnist Sridhar Pappu. In June, National Review put Romney on its cover, with writer John Miller exploring whether the governor was conservative enough for Republican primary voters. (The article – available online by subscription only – created a minor sensation because of a quote from Romney political adviser Michael Murphy, who referred to his client as “a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly.” Well, at least Romney is no longer faking it.) Just weeks before that, the Weekly Standard published a cover story by Terry Eastland that explored whether Romney’s Mormon religion would be a help or a hindrance were he to run for president.

Of the three magazine articles, Eastland’s is the most useful, because it explores in some depth the relationship between Mormonism and evangelical Christianity. Eastland dares to say out loud that Mormonism deviates so significantly from traditional Christianity that many observers do not consider Mormons to be Christians – potentially a real drawback among the conservative religious voters who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process. Indeed, Eastland begins by observing that, as recently as 1999, a poll showed that 17 percent of Americans would not vote for a Mormon for president. (Of course, Romney’s Mormonism carries with it certain advantages, too, as this Adam Reilly piece in the Boston Phoenix demonstrates.)

By contrast, Miller’s National Review piece is a once-over-lightly, and Pappu’s borders on hagiography – although it does have the virtue of letting the reader see Romney the way he sees himself, always a useful service and one the media rarely perform.

The Romney rush is unusual for two reasons: it’s at least a year too early, and these media lovefests usually involve Democrats rather than Republicans. Inevitably, some months before everyone gets serious, the press falls in love with a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, straight-talking Democrat with little or no chance of winning – Mo Udall, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, even Howard Dean before his weird, mid-2003 rise miscast him as some sort of a left-wing rabble-rouser. The only Republican I can think of who got this sort of treatment was John McCain in late 1999 and early 2000. (Media Nation’s 2008 Democratic candidate for the early media massage: Iowa governor Tom Vilsack. Just watch.)

Far from straight talk, Romney’s public pronouncements tend toward bland marketing-speak. Indeed, Romney suggests to Pappu that his substance-free rhetoric is a direct result of what happened to his father, George, whose 1968 presidential campaign went into freefall after he described himself as having undergone a “brainwashing” administered by American military officials during a visit to Vietnam. “It did tell me you have to be very, very careful in your choice of words,” Mitt Romney told Pappu. “The careful selection of words is something I’m more attuned to because Dad fell into that quagmire.”

The early rush of media attention Romney has received is the result of several factors. For one thing, the 2008 presidential campaign is wide open – as wide open as it’s been in many decades. For another, most of the attention on the Democratic side is going to the celebrity pseudo-candidacy of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may or may not run. Then, too, Romney, as a social conservative in liberal Massachusetts and as a Mormon, is exotic, something the media always like. Finally, the Republican field at this point is so fractured that Romney seems plausible.

Romney had better enjoy all the attention while he can. Should he find himself to be a legitimate frontrunner in, say, mid-2007, he’ll be getting far more attention than he is today. Chances are, though, that it won’t be the kind that he’ll frame and put on the wall.

Slate’s Jack Shafer has the takedown I wanted to write about Richard Posner, whose nearly 5,000-word typing exercise on the state of the media appears in the current New York Times Book Review.

Since Shafer beat me to it, let me instead whine a bit about the Sam Tanenhaus-edited NYTBR. I had thought it was settling down into something resembling its old self – that is, the slightly boring but indispensable guide to Books I’ll Never Read That I Need to Know Something About. I mean, according to this, there have only been three Christopher Hitchens bylines in the Review all year. That’s something to be grateful for, and it’s more than can be said of, um, Slate.

Posner’s poorly researched, clumsily written opus suggests that Tanenhaus still hasn’t quite figured out that his job is to provide a service, not to create a sensation – let alone an embarrassing one like this.

Mark Jurkowitz has an entertaining item on the past week’s contretemps over Manny being Manny. But something doesn’t set right with me over this. As Mark observes, Ramírez’s annual freakout “is tiresome and relatively inconsequential.”

Which is why part of me feels as though the local sports media were complicit in a fairly transparent attempt by ownership to run the oddball slugger out of town. Fortunately, the owners themselves pulled back when they realized they’d have had to give up too much.

Yesterday morning I fired up iTunes to check on my podcasts. (Currently I’m subscribed to just two – “On the Media” and Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source.”) Lo and behold, I saw that, on Monday, Lydon had done an hour on Miles Davis, marking the 50th anniversary of a memorable Miles appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival. I downloaded it to my iPod and listened through my car stereo via iTrip. It was a terrific program, though it would have been better if there had been less talk and more music.

I saw Miles twice. The first time was in 1974, when my friend Jim and I caught him at the old Paul’s Mall, in the Back Bay. Within a year, Miles would begin his infamous drug-induced retirement, and the show was a strange one. A loud, largely anonymous electric band cranked away with no discernible breaks between pieces. Miles, meanwhile, came and went as he pleased, occasionally sitting on a stool to blow straight down into a microphone that was emanating from a six-inch stand on the floor. He’d leave the stage – for all we knew, he’d left the building – only to return occasionally for a few more staccato stabs. What was most memorable was that Jim and I got to shake his hand briefly during one of his forays down the aisle.

Then, in 1981, my wife, Barbara, and I were on hand for his comeback performance at Kix Disco, near Kenmore Square. Miles was in a good mood that night, interacting with the audience in what almost might be described as an expansive mood; for him, at least, it certainly was. The performance was marred only by the fact that we were hard up against a sound tower, which nearly shattered our eardrums.

Anecdotes aside, it’s Miles’s records that have meant the most to me – “Kind of Blue,” of course, but also “In a Silent Way” and his flat-out rock albums, most notably “Bitches Brew” but also such underrated discs as “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It.” The best part of the Lydon program was that he didn’t stint on Miles’s later work, even his much-maligned albums from the 1980s. Indeed, I’m now tempted to check out “Tutu,” the best-known of those albums.

“Open Source” is an example of how rapidly podcasts are going mainstream. When I wrote about podcasting in the Phoenix last December, the technology – which greatly simplifies the process of finding and downloading audio programs from the Internet – was still in its infancy, though it was taking off. Lydon’s embrace of blogging and podcasting for his new radio program recently attracted the attention of the New York Times. And, as David Pogue observed yesterday, Apple Computer’s decision to embrace podcasting in its latest version of iTunes has given it an enormous boost. I can attest that iTunes’s podcasting module is far easier to use than the software I had been using, iPodderX – although, according to this chart, the latter has way more geeky features.

What podcasting promises is a theoretically limitless source of audio on demand, with producers ranging from professionals like Lydon to foul-mouthed amateurs like Dawn and Drew. We’re still several technological breakthroughs away from podcasting (or its successor) overtaking traditional radio. But I never would have heard Chris Lydon and his guests talking about Miles Davis without podcasting. That’s a pretty good start.

Another local newspaper owner bit the dust yesterday, as the Eagle-Tribune Company announced it was selling its four Massachusetts dailies – and a few assorted weeklies – to an Alabama-based holding company. Mark Jurkowitz had details on this yesterday; the Herald and the Globe follow today.

It was only a few years ago that the Eagle-Tribune Company, whose flagship is the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, bought three North Shore papers from Dow Jones’s Ottaway division: the Salem News, the Daily News of Newburyport and the Gloucester Daily Times. As a reader of the Salem News, I haven’t been particularly impressed by the Eagle-Tribune’s stewardship. News coverage seems thinner, and the editorial page has moved considerably to the right, out of step, I think, with the liberal communities it serves.

But local ownership has its advantages, and there’s no question that the Rogers family put considerable resources into the Eagle-Tribune itself, which has won two Pulitzer Prizes over the years. (Disclosure: My wife, Barbara Kennedy, is a former photographer for the Salem News.)

It struck me as oddly inappropriate for a newspaper company that no Eagle-Tribune officials would speak to the media after the sale was announced. Indeed, NECN’s Mont Fennel (scroll to “Alabama company to buy Eagle-Tribune”), hardly a pit bull, traveled to Eagle-Tribune headquarters in North Andover only to be told that no one was talking. Maybe Chip Rogers was afraid someone would ask some tough questions about the intentions of the new owner, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI).

In a statement, Rogers said the right things about CNHI being dedicated “high-quality local journalism.” But the fact is that the company is largely funded by the Teachers’ Retirement System of Alabama, which, one can safely assume, has a fiduciary responsibility to earn the highest possible rate of return for all those retired schoolteachers. I’m sure that if you asked any of them whether they’d rather have an extra city-hall reporter in Peabody or another $20 in their monthly check, every last one of them is going to vote for Andrew Jackson.

Check out the top of this May 26, 2004, story from the Birmingham News, which reports on the not-so-glowing outlook of the retirement system:

MONTGOMERY – A looming rise in interest rates and concerns over oil, Iraq and China mean investment returns won’t be as rosy in coming months for the Teachers’ Retirement System, system executive David Bronner predicted Tuesday.

Teachers’ Retirement System is Alabama’s pension program for 186,000 active and retired public education employees.

It held stocks, bonds and other assets worth nearly $17.1 billion on March 31, and reported a six-month return on investments of 11.98 percent, according to State Street Corp. in Boston, the system’s custodian.

That was less than the return of 15.98 percent the pension program posted for the 2003 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Even so, Bronner said he was pleased with the “fantastic” results from the first half of the system’s 2004 fiscal year.

But Bronner predicted performance would slow even more in the year’s second half, which ends Sept. 30. “It would be nice if we had that for the whole year, but it’s highly improbable,” Bronner said. “It’s sliding day by day the other way.”

Bronner said he would be happy if investment returns for the six months ending Sept. 30 managed to grow by 5 percent.

“Hopefully, it’ll be positive, but with the exterior volatility out there, it could easily be the opposite and be a losing half year,” Bronner said.

Teachers’ lobbyist Paul Hubbert, who chairs the system’s board, said he would be pleased if the return for 2004 ended up at 8 percent or 9 percent.

“You like to see those 18 to 20 percent years, but they don’t come very often,” Hubbert said.

You like to see those 18 to 20 percent years, but they don’t come very often. There’s the essence of it. Journalists in the Merrimack Valley and on the North Shore can be expected to help Alabama’s retired schoolteachers earn 18 to 20 percent on their pension money, on top of whatever debt CNHI took on in order to buy out the Rogers family.

This is not a happy day for local news consumers.

Former Boston Herald sports columnist Michael Gee, who’s had his troubles of late, contributes a nice piece to the Village Voice on what he sees as the fading Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. A sample:

GEE: A rural game, baseball is based on the growing cycle. The Yanks and Sox are hothouse plants, hybrids generated by deranged agronomists in their front offices and owners’ suites. Each team and its fan base have come to see the presence of a rookie in the starting lineup as a symbol of failure. That’s a guarantee of sterility. All societies have myths cautioning that wealth cannot buy youth. The Sox and Yanks have become baseball’s.

It’s good to see Gee stretch out, as he used to do in the Phoenix but was unable to do in the Herald. Someone ought to take a chance on this guy.

I’ve changed the name of this blog yet again, moved it Blogspot.com, and turned on comments and syndication. If everything shakes down properly in the next day or so, I’ll revise this to version 1.0.

The New York Times yesterday reported on the cases of two self-described journalists who have been jailed in the Middle East under American auspices. One, a filmmaker named Cyrus Kar, is now free; he had been imprisoned in Iraq after the vehicle in which he was riding was found to contain timers that are often used in explosives. Though what happened to Kar is troubling, it at least appears that officials eventually did the right thing. But the matter of Edward Caraballo, a Bronx documentarian with four Emmys to his credit, is – at least based on what we know – outrageous.

Both of these cases have gotten some media attention; I was not entirely unfamiliar with either of them. But neither story has received the coverage it deserves. Caraballo, in particular, appears to have been abandoned. When I visited the website of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, I could find only one reference, a link to a wire story from last fall. And I came up with nothing when I searched the websites of the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.

To be sure, Caraballo’s is not an easy case. According to the Times report, he accompanied two American military veterans who were convicted of entering Afghanistan as mercenaries and engaging in torture. Caraballo has been accused of being employed by the ringleader, Jack Idema. Caraballo insists he was there as an independent journalist, although he admits to having had a business relationship with Idema in the past.

According to this “Democracy Now!” report from last September, Caraballo’s lawyer and brother claim that Idema’s crew was acting as bounty hunters for the United States, and that Idema had a Pentagon contact with whom he frequently exchanged messages. If true, that would certainly give US and Afghan officials powerful incentive not to let Caraballo go free until he has finished serving his two-year sentence in a Kabul prison, where he has been the target of anti-American violence. In the “Democracy Now!” transcript, Richard Caraballo, Edward’s brother, claims that the Committee to Protect Journalists refused to take up his brother’s cause because of Edward Caraballo’s alleged business ties to Jack Imeda.

At the very least, the mainstream media ought to follow up on the charges contained in the “Democracy Now!” report, which raise the specter of a journalist being silenced under extreme conditions in order to cover up a dubious secret operation.

The New York Times has a typo on its website right now – a headline that reads “Britian [sic] Says Man Killed by Police Had No Tie to Bombing.” So, naturally, Drudge goes ahead and copies it – typo and all.