By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I really should be working, but I can’t let this pass. Forbes has posted its rankings of colleges and universities, and Northeastern comes in at a very low 534th.
Dig a little deeper, as one of my former students, @rachelsarahsays, did, and you’ll see that one of the reasons for the poor ranking is Northeastern’s four-year graduation rate — zero percent.
Uh, Northeastern is a five-year school. Good work, Forbes! Or, as @rachelsarahsays puts it, “such horrific journalism.” Indeed.
A suspect’s lawyer blurts out the name of a 15-year-old girl whom prosecutors say was forced into prostitution. Several newspaper reporters hear the name. Even though they have the right to use it under the First Amendment, it’s understood that they won’t — it would be unethical journalistically, it would compromise the criminal case and it would traumatize the alleged victim.
Despite all that, the district attorney’s office goes to court to prevent a news organization’s video from being posted online, even though the folks who run that organization say they have no intention of uploading it until the identifying information has been removed.
In essence, that’s how OpenCourt characterizes a lawsuit brought by Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey, which will be heard before Supreme Judicial Court Justice Margaret Botsford later today. The Boston Globe reports on the suit here; WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), with which OpenCourt is affiliated, reports on it here; and Open Court has its own take, with lots of background material, here.
Headed by WBUR’s executive editor for new media, John Davidow, OpenCourt received a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to livestream court proceedings and to make it easier for journalists, both professional and citizen, to provide coverage via Twitter and live-blogging. OpenCourt began livestreaming from Quincy District Court in May.
The issue of archiving those videos has proved to be contentious, with Morrissey’s office arguing that the archives — including the one involving the 15-year-old — could compromise “the privacy and safety of victims and witnesses.” Davidow responds that OpenCourt would be guided by the same ethical guidelines as any news organization, and that a legally imposed ban would be an unconstitutional abridgement of free speech. Davidow tells the Globe’s John Ellement:
This is really taking reporting that is done every day and then trying to take the editorial aspects away from journalists and put them in the hands of the state to decide what is published and what is not…. [O]nce we lawfully covered a story that was published, then it is up to the news organization to decide what to do with that material.
What Morrissey’s office is trying to do is to take long-established customs recognized by journalists and law-enforcement authorities alike and codify those customs into law, even though there is no reason to believe OpenCourt would act less responsibly than, say, the Quincy Patriot Ledger. It would set a dangerous precedent, and I hope the SJC does what is clearly the right thing.
Thanks to intemperate remarks by pundits such as Tom Friedman and Joe Nocera, and to an anonymously sourced item in Politico about Vice President Joe Biden, liberals have been on the defensive about civility following the debt-ceiling debate. It seems that folks like Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby think it’s wrong to call Tea Partiers and right-wing Republicans “terrorists.”
If you want to be offended, be my guest. I agree that it’s uncivil, and frankly I’d much rather call Tea Partiers economic illiterates, which is more descriptive and more accurate. Economists explain.
But now comes Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who, according to the Washington Post, wants us to know that it’s perfectly all right if we want to refer to Republicans as hostage-takers and to crack wise about them shooting their victims. After all, he does. This is amazing:
“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”
Ah, yes. You see, McConnell is a moderate Republican, which in 2011 means you hold the hostage for ransom, like civilized folks do. Although he concedes that those who wanted to shoot the hostage have a point, too. After all, he has to keep the caucus together.
You. Can’t. Make. This. Up.
Should a news site label the disappearance and death of an 11-year-old girl a “Hot Topic”?
Frankly, it’s not something I had given any thought to until yesterday, when I heard from a “Beat the Press” viewer who complained that Boston.com had included “Celina Cass” in its “Hot Topics” menu bar near the top of the page. The story is still there as I write this, along with “Debt limit,” “TSA,” “Cash WinFall,” “Boston public schools” and “Red Sox.”
My caller told me that including such a tragic story involving a child as a “Hot Topic” was offensive, and said she had complained to Boston.com in the past over similar matters. I instantly understood what she meant, though I wasn’t sure whether I agreed.
Last night I ran it by Mrs. Media Nation, who agreed with the caller: “Hot Topics” was just the wrong phrase for a catch-all category that includes everything from sports and politics to heartbreaking tragedies. So here’s some free advice to Boston.com — call it something else, like “Top News,” “Headlines” or whatever phrase you like that’s succinct but also neutral.
Oh, and when you click on “Celina Cass,” it would also be nice if you didn’t encounter a story labeled “Our Pick.”
I can’t go to Twitter or Facebook without being bombarded by angry messages from fellow liberals that President Obama and congressional Democrats sold out the country in the debt-limit deal, and that this is capitulation rather than compromise.
I explained yesterday why the deal was inevitable, so I won’t go there again. For today, a simple question: If this is capitulation, why did 66 House Republicans vote no? In fact, this is compromise — an ugly compromise in which Obama was whipsawed between conservative Republicans and extreme right-wingers. But a compromise nevertheless.
Mike Silverman has a very worrying report in today’s Boston Herald about Red Sox pitcher Clay Buchholz. Yes, we already knew that Buchholz was done for the 2011 season, barring a medical miracle. We also all knew that Buchholz had a stress fracture in his back.
But now Silverman reports that Buchholz last week was diagnosed with “a new stress fracture (in addition to pre-existing ones),” and that the Red Sox knew before the All-Star break that he “had multiple, small stress fractures.”
That doesn’t sound like an injury Buchholz can reasonably expected to come back from without it happening again. Some players — especially pitchers — just don’t have major-league bodies. Buchholz could be one of them. It would be a shame, given his promise and ability.
We should know more later today, according to the Boston Globe’s Julian Benbow.
I want to offer a counterintuitive view of why President Obama and congressional Democrats caved to the demands of Republicans, and to challenge the notion that if only they had held firm we could have ended up with a better debt-limit bill that would at least include a few tax hikes on the wealthy.
Yes, I agree with liberal critics who think Obama botched it. He and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should have staked out a clear position somewhere to the left of where they were willing to end up, and then held as fast as they could for as long as they could. But though that would have been a better political strategy in terms of public consumption, I don’t think it would have changed the end result.
The flaw is in thinking that because Democrats control the White House and the Senate, then they shouldn’t let the Republican House push them around. This is a variation on the widely accepted (and wrong) idea we often heard during Obama’s first two years — that he and Democrats had no excuse for not getting what they wanted given that they controlled the White House and both branches of Congress.
In fact, and as should be obvious to anyone, a determined minority is far more powerful in our constitutional system than the majority, because members of that minority can just say no — and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do to change that no to yes. Especially with the Tea Party Republicans, many of whom were perfectly willing to drive the economy off a cliff by letting the government go into default.
What happened in the Senate, of course, is that under the Republicans — and it really has been an almost entirely Republican phenomenon — the filibuster became routine, which meant that a minority of 40 senators could prevent anything from happening. (This is compounded by the constitutional requirement that gives each state two senators, which tilts power toward small, Republican-leaning states.) Add to that a Republican House, and you’re left with a situation in which liberals fulminate about Obama’s weakness without having a clue as to how it might be otherwise.
And, as we have seen, even a minority of a minority can bring everything to a halt. Although it’s not entirely clear what happened with the “grand bargain” that Obama and House Speaker John Boehner nearly reached (it could well be that the Gang of Six chose exactly the wrong moment to speak up, since Obama was pushed into backing more tax hikes than he and Boehner had already agreed to), there’s no question that part of it involved a revolt against Boehner on the part of Tea Party freshmen. (When Eric Cantor pats Boehner on the back, he’s feeling for soft spots.)
Again, I don’t want to let Obama off the hook. He has utterly failed at Negotiating 101, as he did with health-care reform by never telling us exactly what he wanted. He could have pushed the Republicans into rejecting what most people would have regarded as an attractive alternative. Instead, he looks irrelevant. Substantively, though, it probably didn’t matter.
So what do we do about it? At a minimum, we all know now that the Senate filibuster doesn’t work in an age of highly ideological partisan politics. Get rid of it.
At a maximum, we ought to admit that divided government no longer works, either, and for the same reason. It worked reasonably well, or at least better than it did today, when the two major parties comprised broad coalitions of liberals, conservatives and moderates. That’s no longer the case.
Virtually every democracy other than ours gives its government the chance to enact its program, and to rise or fall accordingly. Under a parliamentary democracy, there’s no such thing as divided government. And though I’m under no illusion that we would ever adopt such a system in the United States, at times like this I wish we could.
I’ve been trying to think of a way to add some value to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s blog post on the “cult of centrism,” which he’s now expanded into a column. I can’t think of much other than to urge you to read it. The media’s insistence on balancing sanity with insanity and truth with lies is not only infuriating, but it’s having a deleterious effect on our democracy, especially in the unspeakably stupid debate over the debt limit. Today, even John Boehner might agree.
Here’s one thing I can recommend that might help place Krugman in context. In early 2009 — even before President Obama took office — Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote a series of columns arguing that the economic stimulus Obama was proposing would not be enough to offset the worst economic crisis to come along in many decades. Krugman pulled all the strings together in early March, arguing that the $787 billion stimulus was too small and too tilted toward tax breaks, and that when it failed, Obama would be blamed for “massive,” out-of-control spending.
It doesn’t get more prescient than that. And this week Krugman proves himself to be as an astute a media critic as he is a political economist.
Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam has a little fun with Media Nation (last item).
Republican political consultant Eric Fehrnstrom, whose clients include U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, issued a challenge to Media Nation on Twitter earlier today: “You should research some of the vile things that video maker Dan Savage has said about Scott Brown and other public figtures.”
Fehrnstrom was responding to my post asking why Brown didn’t take part in the “It Gets Better” video put together by the Massachusetts congressional delegation. Savage, a gay journalist and sex-advice columnist, is the originator of and driving force behind the “It Gets Better” campaign.
So, Media Nation readers, what of it? I am well aware of what Savage has said about former senator Rick Santorum. But to my mind, that doesn’t count, since Santorum had already said what Savage and his husband do in bed is just slightly more acceptable than “man on dog” sex or pedophilia. Nothing, no matter how vile, can top that.
I did a little idle Googling around and couldn’t really come up with anything Savage has ever said about Brown. But yes, I could have missed something. Please let me know in the comments.
Update: We have a winner! Check the comments.
