Category: Media

Media round-up: Losing our religion

A few local media tidbits for your perusal:

• The Boston Globe’s Michael Paulson, who may be the country’s best religion reporter working at a mainstream news organization, is taking a new position at the paper. According to the Boston Phoenix’s Adam Reilly, Paulson has been named city editor, reporting to new metro editor Jen Peter. I share Reilly’s hope that this doesn’t mean the Globe has reduced its commitment to serious coverage of religion.

• Local political junkies rejoice: Peter Lucas is back on the beat. A longtime reporter for the Phoenix and the Boston Herald, Lucas disappeared into the state bureaucracy for several decades. He has now re-emerged, and will write a twice-weekly column for the Lowell Sun, according to Jon Keller. I once had the privilege of hearing Lucas’ hilarious retelling of the “White Will Run” incident Keller describes that nearly brought a premature end to Lucas’ reporting career. I look forward to reading his Sun column.

• Sharp-eyed Universal Hubster Adam Gaffin flags a tidbit from Boston Radio Watch hinting that Greater Boston may be getting yet another talk station — WXKS (AM 1430), owned by Clear Channel. Given its weak signal, it presumably would not pose much of a threat to WRKO (AM 680), WTKK (96.9 FM) or WWZN (AM 1510) — the last a liberal station that itself is no great shakes when it comes to having a listenable signal.

    Boston Media Tweeters goes 1.0

    Boston Media Tweeters today exits beta and is ready for prime time.

    What is it? It’s a wiki that lists Greater Boston journalists, including independent bloggers engaged in some form of journalism. I’ve made it a permanent addition to the Media Nation navigation bar, and I hope it will grow into a useful directory.

    Feel free to add yourself or someone else. And enjoy.

    Why Climategate doesn’t matter (VII)

    Click on photo for GlobalPost slideshow

    The series explained.

    Ashar Chor, an island that’s part of the desperately poor nation of Bangladesh, is literally drowning, as rising seas eat away at the shore. Within 25 to 30 years, according to GlobalPost, the island could be gone.

    “Ten years ago we lived three kilometers farther out to what is now sea, but now we have to move our houses back once or twice a year as the sea takes more of the island,” according to Deb Mondol, described in the GlobalPost report as someone who has worked on the island for 15 years.

    The GlobalPost report consists mainly of a photo essay by Khaled Hasan, who provides graphic evidence of Ashar Chor’s watery fate. But the island is far from being the only part of Bangladesh being affected by global warming. Earlier this year, Anuj Chopra wrote in U.S. News & World Report that Bangladesh’s fresh water is being contaminated by sea water, ruining drinking-water supplies and rice paddies.

    Bangladesh has been identified by the Global Climate Risk Index as the country most threatened by climate change. But unlike rising industrial powerhouses like China and India, whose output of carbon dioxide rivals that of the United States, Bangladesh contributes very little to global warming. In 2008 Fakhruddin Ahmed, the then-head of Bangladesh’s interim government, was quoted in the Guardian:

    There is every reason to feel angry and upset. The least developed are suffering the most. It is unfair. We are suffering the most from climate change, but we did not contribute [to it] at all. We are prepared to do our part, but we require, and demand, access to a large amount of investment, resources and technologies that will be needed to adapt.

    According to GlobalPost, Bangladesh has asked that the industrialized countries reduce their CO2 emissions by as much as 40 percent over the next 15 years — a goal that is almost certainly unattainable. Yet if the reduction is not achieved, Ashar Chor may disappear. And the suffering of Bangladesh will grow.

    All posts in this series.

    How to write a lede

    Thomas MacMillan writes in the New Haven Independent:

    Michael Chaves was a “lumper”: He worked as a laborer for long-haul truckers and slept in their trailers. Dale Anderson was a lumper too. One night they were hanging out at a truck stop when Anderson, drunk, urinated on the spot where Chaves slept. They argued, and Chaves beat him to death with a bat.

    That’s the story Chaves told to police in Phoenix, Arizona.

    And that’s one hell of a good way to begin.

    Are you a Boston media tweeter?

    I’ve started a wiki called Boston Media Tweeters. I’ve seeded it with a few obvious choices so that you can tell how it should be formatted. Depending on how it goes, I may make it a permanent part of Media Nation. So, please, if you fit the criteria (you must be engaged in journalism of some sort, and I won’t allow institutional feeds), go ahead and add yourself to the list.

    Garrison Keillor’s base attack on his base

    I have long detested Garrison Keillor, host of the faux-populist program “Prairie Home Companion” on public radio (not, I should note, National Public Radio). I have practically injured myself in my haste to change the station so as not to have to listen to his voice, oozing with smug insincerity. So I’m happy to report that, at long last, Keillor is returning my dislike.

    Recently Keillor wrote a column attacking (are you ready?) Unitarians, for the sin of rewriting the words to “Silent Night” to make them less Christian. (For the record, we sing “Silent Night” to close the Christmas Eve service at our Unitarian Universalist church, and we don’t change the words, even though few of us are believing Christians.) Keillor has a few unkind words for the Jews as well. He writes:

    If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

    For good measure, Keillor does not know that people who live in Cambridge are Cantabrigians, not — as he writes, crayon firmly in hand — “Cambridgeans.”

    No doubt Keillor would respond that he was trying to be humorous. And I have no problem with making fun of people’s religion, not even Unitarian Universalism. But Keillor is as humor-impaired a humorist as has ever walked among us, so when he tries to be funny, mayhem is the almost-certain outcome.

    What I find especially delightful about this is that liberal, affluent, public radio-listening UUs are Keillor’s base. He has just succeeded in alienating a rather substantial percentage of his microscopic audience. At the very least, I’d like to see him grovel and deliver an apology, insincere though it would be.

    Here is a response from one of his former listeners, a member of the Cambridge UU church that was the proximate cause of Keillor’s outburst.

    Update: And mea culpa. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby went after Keillor yesterday. “Remember when Keillor was endearing and witty?” asks Jacoby. Uh, no, Jeff. I don’t. But nice slam.

    The decade in media

    Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz has written as good a summation of the decade in media as you’re likely to find: a tremendous explosion in innovation and diversity; mind-boggling failures by the legacy media, especially during the run-up to the war in Iraq and their continued obsession with celebrity non-news; and the meltdown of the business model. Definitely worth a read.