Officials with the Boston Police Department are upset over a tough cartoon about police shootings of black men that appeared on the opinion pages of Monday’s Boston Globe. But the Globe’s editorial-page editor is standing by it. And the president of the local NAACP defends the cartoon as a satirical comment on a tragic reality.
The cartoon, by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose work is nationally syndicated, depicts a white police officer. In one frame, labeled “For White People,” he is seen holding a piece of paper that says “Miranda Rights.” In the other, “For Black People,” a piece of paper says “Last Rites.”
Yes, I would read a story about a cat that looks like a raccoon or, for that matter, a raccoon that looks like a cat. When I scroll through a digital newspaper, though, I’m looking for something else: journalism I need to be a well-informed citizen—and, OK, the occasional cat that looks like a raccoon.
By now you may have at least heard about a 19-minute rant by John Oliver on his HBO program Last Week Tonight in which he reminds us of newspapers’ central role in our democracy and laments their demise.
I’m on the road without my laptop. But my friends at WGBH News have posted a memo I received from a source earlier today in which Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory updated the staff on issues involving downsizing, possible layoffs, and a massive reinvention effort.
My first inclination today was to write something about this being a moment that we might look back on as the beginning of the end for the Trump campaign.
But rather than belabor the obvious, I’d like to examine the proper role of the news media in covering a campaign like this, which is utterly unique in the post-World War II era—possibly even in the post-Civil War era. Let me start by laying out what I hope the vast majority of you will regard as self-evident truths about the two major-party candidates.
In case you haven’t heard, the New York Post today is running 20-year-old nude photos of Melania Trump. The pictures were taken during a modeling session for which she was presumably paid. There doesn’t seem to be any scandal associated with the photos. And yet, last night, I saw a number of people denounce the Post‘s decision to publish them as “sexist.”
Is it? I wouldn’t have published the photos. You’ll notice that I’m not linking to them. Yet when various media outlets published a mostly nude photo of Scott Brown during his mercifully brief career as a national political figure, I don’t recall anyone denouncing that as sexist.
File this under “no big deal.” Especially after Donald Trump viciously attacked the Khans, the Constitution-waving Gold Star parents who spoke out against Trump’s hatred of Muslims at last week’s Democratic National Convention. That, folks, is a big deal.
Update: Here’s a worthwhile distinction. Not sure why I didn’t think of it myself.
not sure it's sexist but I think it's wildly inappropriate. Brown was a candidate; Melania is not.
The person who sent me this included a one-word message: “Chutzpah.”
Dear Subscriber,
We wanted to let you know about a change to our home delivery vacation suspension policy.
Effective August 1, we will be offering credits only for vacation holds of 22 days or longer. Rest assured that this will not affect your ability to temporarily suspend your delivery while you are away. We will still accommodate those requests for any length of time you wish.
Remember, as a subscriber you still have access to the Globe’s award-winning coverage even while you’re away: Log in to BostonGlobe.com anytime from your phone, tablet or laptop, or download the ePaper, an exact digital replica of the Boston Globe in print.
My favorite part is the reassurance that, yes, you can still suspend home delivery. Just as long as you understand that you’ll keep paying if you’re away for three weeks or less.
Roger Ailes is out at Fox News. The media tycoon resigned on Thursday, just two weeks after former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment. Ailes, the founder and now former CEO of Fox News, had a long history in Republican politics before building Fox News into a media powerhouse. Here, Dan Kennedy, associate professor in the School of Journalism and a nationally known media commentator, talks about Ailes’ swift downfall and what his departure may mean for the future of journalism.
Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post wrote, “Two weeks. That’s all it took from Gretchen Carlson’s filing a sexual harassment suit against Fox News chief Roger Ailes to the evident demise of one of the most powerful figures in American media and politics.” Are you surprised at the swiftness of the investigation and Ailes’s ultimate resignation?
I’m surprised and I’m not surprised. We talked about this recently on WGBH-TV’s Beat the Press. At the time we were all in agreement that if no other women came forward, then Carlson’s claims were likely to fizzle into a he said/she said standoff. As it turned out, numerous other women emerged to level serious accusations of sexual harassment against Ailes. Once that occurred, it was only a matter of time before he’d be shown the door.
Update: I was so excited to get a copy of Sheehan’s announcement in my inbox that I didn’t check to see whether the Globe had the story. They did. Here it is.
The Boston Globe has found a buyer for its headquarters at 135 Morrissey Blvd. The announcement was made in an email to the staff Friday night from Mike Sheehan, chief executive of Boston Globe Media Partners. (Thanks, source! You are a prince or princess among men or women.) Here’s Sheehan:
Just wanted you to know that BGMP has entered into an agreement to sell our headquarters at 135 Morrissey Boulevard. We have also entered into a confidentiality agreement with the buyer, so I can offer no details about the transaction at this time. This is just the beginning of the process; I’ll keep you updated as it proceeds.
Have a great weekend.
Mike
I tweeted out the news a little while ago, but it’s raised more questions than answers among people who don’t follow this stuff obsessively. So here’s a bit of background.
1. The Globe‘s editorial and business operations are moving downtown, into rented office space at 53 State St. The target date for the move is January 1, but I’m guessing that will prove to be ambitious.
4. In 2013 John Henry bought the Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, and the Morrissey Boulevard headquarters from the New York Times Company for a total of $70 million. He later sold the T&G for an undisclosed amount that has been estimated at somewhere between $7 million and $19 million. In 2014, the Globe reported that the Morrissey Boulevard property might be worth somewhere between $50 million and $70 million. So it is likely that Henry will have ended up getting the Globe for free. On the other hand, he’s losing money—or, as Globe editor Brian McGrory put it recently in a memo announcing buyouts, “The Globe’s numbers aren’t as good as our words (or photos, videos, and graphics).”
5. As Sheehan wrote, the identity of the new owner of the Morrissey Boulevard property and his intentions are not being announced at this time. So here’s some speculation from me and some sharp observations from Bill Forry, editor of the Dorchester Reporter.
A half-century after Marshall McLuhan warned us that our media tools shape who we are (“The medium is the message”), and a half-dozen years after Nicholas Carr lamented that the Internet was undermining our ability to read and think in a linear, coherent manner, Virginia Heffernan has written a book that proves both of them right.
Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $26) is an honest-to-God book, with paper, ink, and a binding. (Or so I’ve heard. I downloaded the Kindle version.) Reading it, though, feels more like randomly browsing the web than it does like reading a book.
Look here: An essay on the aesthetics of Instagram and Flickr photography. Click. An argument that closed apps offer a better—yet more elitist—experience than the open web. Click. A discussion of epigrammatic poetry demonstrating that its most influential practitioners would have been right at home on Twitter. (Blaise Pascal’s “Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don’t speak,” published in 1669, takes up just 58 characters.) Click. Newton Minow did all of us a favor by calling television “a vast wasteland,” since it imbued the young medium with the transgressive quality that all great art needs. Click.
But if Heffernan offers us a lot of little ideas, she has a big one as well: that the Internet giveth, and it taketh away. At 46, she isn’t quite a digital native, though she’s certainly more of one than I am. Perhaps more relevant is that she’s been around just long enough to experience the digital revolution in its many forms. The good and bad of life online is clearer to her than it would be to someone 20 years younger.
“The Internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization,” she writes, adding: “As an idea it rivals monotheism.” But even monotheism has its drawbacks. In her chapter on music, for instance, she offers a compelling argument on what has been lost as music was transformed from performers on a stage to tinny, ultracompressed sounds that you listen to on your smartphone. (Click. A diversion into the rise of military headphones in World War II and how returning veterans embraced them as a way to listen to music while tuning out the rest of the family.)
Of course, the assertion that MP3s offer sound quality inferior to the CDs and LPs that preceded them is hardly novel. But Heffernan gives it an unexpected twist, writing that she bought her first iPod around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that she welcomed a mechanical tone untethered from the messy reality of how music is actually supposed to sound. (But Norah Jones? Really?) Only later did she realize that she missed “the echo of the chirp of the bassist’s sneakers on the wooden stage as he nervously kicks his foot or the sound of the backup singer’s lungs still metabolizing pot smoke.”
There is more, much more—on the humanistic orientation of technologists like Steve Jobs versus the cold rationality of scientists; on the aesthetic differences between electricity (“the province of the engineer and the rationalist”) and electronics (“the province of the irrationalist, the deconstructionist, the druggie, and the mystic”).
Heffernan ties these disparate strands together in a closing chapter that starts off as annoyingly self-indulgent but ends with a measure of humility and grace. She traces her development from an Episcopalian-turned-Jew-turned-Episcopalian (with detours into something like atheism); as someone who rejected philosophy in favor of literary criticism (she has a Ph.D. in English from Harvard); and as the author of a widely mocked 2013 essay titled “Why I’m a Creationist,” whose ethos (“They say it works even if you don’t believe in it,” she writes, quoting a physicist Twitter friend) remains a guidepost for her.
I started out reading Magic and Loss hoping to glean some ideas that would be useful for my work as a journalist and academic who writes about journalism. What I encountered was an extended meditation on the nature of art and God, on immortality and death. Heffernan has written a book that is by turns frustrating and insightful—and that always aims high.
