By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Earlier this week, Sidney Blumenthal wrote a long piece for Salon headlined “Dan Rather stands by his story,” based on the false premise that it’s somehow necessary to rehabilitate Rather in order to believe George W. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard service in the early 1970s.
Several Media Nation readers are using Blumenthal’s piece to attack my Guardian column on Rather. I have posted a response here.
This Reuters photo is destined to become the symbol of the Burmese government’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. Kenji Nagai, a video photographer for Japan’s APFN news service, was fatally shot while covering the protests yesterday.
It’s early, and there are no doubt details we don’t know yet. But according to the photo caption in the Boston Globe, Nagai kept shooting even after he’d been injured. The Washington Post reports that Nagai was taken away by soldiers, but it’s not clear whether he was alive or dead at that point.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has a pretty detailed account that also reports Nagai kept doing his job after he’d been shot. The CPJ’s post includes this statement:
The Committee to Protect Journalists strongly condemns the shootings and the heavy government interference and ongoing harassment of journalists who are attempting to cover the unfolding political events in Burma.
The Guardian has posted a remarkable video of Nagai covering the fall of Baghdad in 2003.
Could the Massachusetts House be losing its backbone? Casey Ross reports in the Boston Herald today that, in an informal survey of 111 House members, 65, or 58 percent, say they either support Gov. Deval Patrick’s proposal to build three casinos in Massachusetts or they’re undecided.
Coupled with this Matt Viser story in the Boston Globe, which says that Patrick is now leaning against building casinos in cities (including Boston and New Bedford), it now looks as though the proposed Middleborough casino may not be quite dead yet.
But wait. This Saturday, Middleborough voters will go to the polls to decide whether three of the five selectmen should be recalled. Brockton Enterprise reporter Alice Elwell has the details, as does Steve Decosta of the New Bedford Standard-Times.
For those of you just tuning in, here’s some more of the back story: All five selectmen support the casino, but two of them were elected or re-elected too recently to be subject to recall. One of those two, Adam Bond, has been the town’s main pro-casino cheerleader. There is a very good possibility that, after Saturday’s vote, three of the five selectmen will be anti-casino.
But will they be able to say so? Take a look at Section 22, Parts B and C, of the agreement (PDF) signed by the selectmen on July 28:
B. The Town will support the Project and agrees to actively work with and assist the Tribe and its contractors and agents to obtain any and all approvals, legislation, liquor licensing or other enactments required for the Project from governmental entities and officials of the United States, the Commonwealth and the Town.
C. The Town will reasonably assist the Tribe in responding to negative comments about the Project, reiterating the Town’s support and the basis therefor.
Part C is a doozy. It says, in effect, that town officials are prohibited from speaking out against the casino, and that if they do, they could be subject to legal action. I am reliably told that the anti-casino candidates for selectmen are puzzling over how much freedom of speech they’ll have if they win election on Saturday.
Meanwhile, I would think that no reporter should quote a Middleborough town official saying anything about the casino plan without noting that said official is legally obligated to say only positive things.
On another front, I join Jon Keller and David Kravitz in praising this Weekly Dig analysis by Julia Reischel and Paul McMorrow, which shows that Patrick’s proposal is pretty much a direct lift from a dubious study conducted by Clyde Barrow of UMass Dartmouth. If you can count cars in the parking lot, you, too, can become a casino expert.
Finally, here is a three-part series on gambling addiction published in April 2006 by the CNHI News Service. CNHI’s Massachusetts papers include the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, the Newburyport Daily News, the Salem News and the Gloucester Times — all of them right in the path of a possible casino, given Patrick’s desire to build one somewhere north of Boston.
My latest for The Guardian recounts an earlier lawsuit involving Dan Rather that hinged on — yes — an apparently phony document that Rather waved in front of his CBS viewers.
Boston Globe reporter Sean Murphy has a 7,000-word retrospective on the lessons of the proposed Middleborough casino in the forthcoming issue of CommonWealth Magazine.
The whole thing is worth reading, but to me, the best part comes near the end. Here is Murphy’s description of the July 28 town meeting at which an agreement negotiated by the selectmen with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe was put to a vote:
Moderator James Thomas kept the meeting under a tight rein. When the votes were counted, he announced that the casino agreement had passed, 2,387 to 1,335. A cheer went up. But there was a second item on the agenda, a nonbinding question to town residents. It asked a more basic question: Do you want a casino in Middleborough?
Thomas asked for a show of hands. Remarkably, the vote was overwhelming against a casino. Some chalked it up to proponents having left the football field after the binding vote on the selectmen’s casino deal was taken. What did they care once that deal had been validated? But others saw it as evidence that Middleborough residents really didn’t want a casino at all, but voted for the selectmen’s deal because, once the tribe and its bigfoot partners had scooped up the land, they felt painted into a corner.
Murphy closes with an anecdote about Ted Eayrs, a town assessor in Middleborough, who says he voted in favor of the agreement, but then turned around and voted “no” on the nonbinding question because, all things considered, he’d rather not see a casino come to town at all.
Indeed. Eayrs told me the same thing several months ago, saying he hoped the state would step in and kill the casino.
The second vote matters. I’m glad Murphy knows it, but I’d be even more glad if his newspaper would acknowledge it, too.
Disclosure #1: I write the “Mass.Media” feature for CommonWealth.
Disclosure #2: Just click here.
If you haven’t seen it, I want to call your attention to a terrific story on the front page of today’s Boston Globe about the effects of casino gambling. According to reporter Stephen Smith, the rate of gambling addiction is twice as high as it would otherwise be among people who live within 50 miles of a casino. Smith writes:
Psychiatrists and compulsive behavior specialists have shown that gambling can turn addictive in much the same way that alcohol or illicit drugs do, through a process in which the brain causes the dependence and then is damaged by it. Gamblers can be treated — with counseling, medication, and 12-step programs — but success is far from guaranteed. A year after entering treatment, studies suggest, about half of gamblers return to the slots and gaming tables.
How many times have you heard casino proponents say that people are going to gamble anyway, and that Massachusetts might as well benefit from the tax revenue that’s now going to Connecticut? In case there was any doubt, now we know: That’s less than a half-truth.
And look at where our population centers are. If Gov. Deval Patrick’s plan for casinos in Western Massachusetts, Southeastern Massachusetts and north of Boston comes to pass, then at least two-thirds of state residents — maybe more — will be within 50 miles of a casino.
Over at Blue Mass. Group, Charley Blandy links to a Boston Business Journal editorial that’s dripping with disdain for Patrick’s view that building casinos equals economic development. My favorite line: “We now have a governor who defends a major policy initiative on the basis that it won’t be ‘the end of civilization.’ What an endorsement for setting the stage for ruining more lives to gambling.”
Accusations that the New York Times gave a price break to MoveOn.org for its ad attacking Gen. David Petraeus didn’t strike me as all that interesting. When it comes to newspaper advertising, everything is for sale, and the official rate card is often just a way to start negotiations.
But Times public editor Clark Hoyt says the Times made a mistake — that the price MoveOn paid ($65,000 as opposed to $142,000) was for a “standby” ad for which a specific day of publication could not be guaranteed. The MoveOn folks wanted their ad run on the Monday of the week that Petraeus was to testify on Capitol Hill, and they got their wish.
So how did it happen? Hoyt doesn’t quite say. But it sounds like an ad salesman wanted a commission.
Hoyt also doesn’t think the ad should have run at all. I disagree. As I’ve said before, the ad was an unfair attack on an honorable public official, although it’s hardly so offensive that it warranted breaking out the smelling salts.
The Times is a public trust, and its ad pages ought to be as open to political speech as possible, offensive or otherwise. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. gets it right when he tells Hoyt, “If we’re going to err, it’s better to err on the side of more political dialogue.”
Update: Looks like MoveOn just cost Rudy Giuliani $77,000. From a press release:
Now that the Times has revealed this mistake for the first time, and while we believe that the $142,083 figure is above the market rate paid by most organization, out of an abundance of caution we have decided to pay that rate for this ad. We will therefore wire the $77,083 difference to the Times tomorrow (Monday, September 24, 2007).
We call on Mayor Giuliani, who received exactly the same ad deal for the same price, to pay the corrected fee also.
Just a guess, but I’m betting Howie “What Is the Frequency?” Carr wrote this Boston Herald column long before Star Simpson walked into Logan Airport yesterday. After Simpson got arrested for wearing a blinking jacket, all Carr had to do was call up his generic rant about “wacky college kids” and update it with a few details.
OK, I’m kidding. But he could have save himself, oh, four or five minutes yesterday if he’d had this one parked on his laptop.
Here’s what I don’t get about Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS. Before yesterday, he could at least maintain the façade that he was all over the story and that he messed up. Now he’s saying that his role was nothing more than that of a trained monkey. Personally, I’d rather be known for messing up.
“Recovering Journalist” Mark Potts has a great post on New York Times executives’ decision to get rid of their pay service, TimesSelect.
I’ll confess that my glee over the demise of TimesSelect earlier this week was a bit knee-jerk. For consumers, there’s nothing not to like about free. As a blogger, I like being able to link to all Times content. And since the Times Web site is by far the largest news newspaper site, it may be uniquely suited to the advertiser-only model.
But the Times’ move still doesn’t address the question of how to pay for journalism, especially at news organizations that lack the Times’ cachet. (That is, everybody else.) Even Times executives may not have thought this through completely. Potts writes:
[C]ommitting good journalism is expensive, and so far, there’s no indication that advertising will pay the entire way, especially for premium content from the likes of organizations like the Times. By dropping TimesSelect, the Times is walking away from more than $10 million in annual revenue, and it remains to be seen how quickly the resulting traffic bump — and attendant advertising — can make that up. A blanket statement that “content is now and forever free,” as Jeff Jarvis put it in his triumphant posting is just misguided — and belied by ESPN.com, ConsumerReports.org and Zagat.com, not to mention countless high-end subscription-based information and analysis services that serve professional markets. Oh, and print media are still successfully enjoying a revenue stream from subscriptions, you may have noticed.
Typical news junkies may regularly visit five, 10 or more sites. Given that, I think the subscription model remains impractical. (And thus I still don’t lament the passing of TimesSelect.) But microtransactions of some sort — that is, an account from which some small amount of money, perhaps on the order of less than a penny, would be deducted for every article you read — loom on the horizon as a possible solution of how to pay for the news.
Bill Densmore, the founder of one such system known as Clickshare, has further thoughts here.