Please join us for a “Mockingbird” reading

If you’re on the North Shore this Sunday, I hope you’ll consider dropping by Cornerstone Books in Salem, where I will be among several people reading excerpts from Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The event begins at 2 p.m.

I came very late to “Mockingbird,” published 50 years ago this year. On the recommendation of my wife and daughter, I rented the movie this past spring. It was, I realized, one of the best I’d ever seen. The racial drama is compelling. But what riveted me was Mary Badham‘s performance as Scout, as realistic a depiction of childhood as has come to the screen. She should have won the Oscar for Best Actress.

As for Lee’s original work, I finished it just a few days ago. I found it odd to read a good novel after having seen such a first-rate film depiction of it. And, frankly, the reason I call it good but not great is that there’s a certain one-dimensional quality to it that we expect in movies but not in books. This Slate essay by Stephen Metcalf is too harsh, but I agree that “Mockingbird” is essentially a children’s book.

But what a children’s book. Lee’s achievement is worth celebrating, and I’m excited to be part of it.

Waterboarding and the T-word

A recent study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School, shows that our largest newspapers invariably referred to waterboarding as torture before the Bush-Cheney administration began using it on terrorism suspects — and almost never thereafter.

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the media’s failure to call waterboarding by its proper name helped contribute to a dishonest conversation about what was done in our name during the darkest years of the Bush presidency.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (IX)

The series explained.

Sharon Begley lays it out:

[N]ot only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim — namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was “unsubstantiated.” The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

I realize I’m being intellectually dishonest by not pointing out that Al Gore got a massage, but that’s the way it is.

All posts in this series.

Presenting the 13th annual Phoenix Muzzle Awards

Just in time for your Fourth of July celebrations, we present the 13th annual Muzzle Awards, published in the Phoenix newspapers of Boston, Portland and Providence.

Starting in 1998, I’ve been rounding up enemies of free speech and personal liberties in New England, based on news reports over the previous year. For the past several years my friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate has been writing a sidebar about free speech and the lack thereof on campus.

Yes, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department makes the list for his failure to understand that you shouldn’t arrest someone who’s done nothing wrong other than mouth off to you in his own home. So does former Newton mayor David Cohen, who should not seek a second career as a newspaper editor. So does the MBTA, a hardy perennial.

But my personal favorite is the Portland Press Herald, whose editorial page came out in support of a proposal by the Falmouth Town Council to clamp down on the right of residents to speak out at council meetings. When the council itself unanimously voted against the proposal several weeks later, citing free-speech concerns, the newspaper found itself in the bizarre position of showing less regard for the First Amendment than elected officials.

On Friday at 9 p.m., I’ll join Dan Rea of WBZ Radio (AM 1030) to talk about the Muzzles and anything else that might come up.

Orwell, waterboarding and torture

Before the Bush-Cheney years, the New York Times and other large newspapers regularly referred to waterboarding as “torture.” After it was revealed that the United States was waterboarding terrorism suspects, those papers largely stopped. After all, President Bush explained in 2005, “This government does not torture people.”

So in true Orwellian fashion, editors decided that to describe waterboarding as torture would amount to a breach of objectivity, for no reason except that, all of a sudden, there were powerful people who disputed that characterization.

That is the conclusion of a paper released earlier this year by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Titled “Torture at the Times: Waterboarding in the Media” (pdf), the study includes the following findings:

  • From the early 1930s until 1999, the New York Times characterized waterboarding as torture in 44 of 54 articles on the subject (81.5 percent), and the Los Angeles Times in 26 of 27 articles (96.3 percent).
  • From 2002 to 2008, the New York Times referred to waterboarding as torture in just two of 143 articles (1.4 percent); the Los Angeles Times, three of 63 (4.8 percent); the Wall Street Journal, one of 63 (1.6 percent); and USA Today, not at all.
  • “[T]he newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator.”

The study also finds that opinion writers at those papers were more likely to associate waterboarding with the T-word than were the news columns — further evidence that news editors deviated from the long-established understanding of what waterboarding really is in order to avoid being accused of anti-administration bias.

The study concludes:

The results of this study demonstrate that there was a sudden, significant, shift in major print media’s treatment of waterboarding at the beginning of the 21st century. The media’s modern coverage of waterboarding did not begin in earnest until 2004, when the first stories about abuses at Abu Ghraib were released. After this point, articles most often used words such as “harsh” or “coercive” to describe waterboarding or simply gave the practice no treatment, rather than labeling it torture as they had done for the previous seven decades.

The Shorenstein Center has documented a shocking abrogation of duty by our top newspapers in helping Americans understand what the Bush-Cheney administration was doing in their name.

The study came out in April. I’m writing about it now because the redoubtable Jay Rosen tweeted about it yesterday. This is important stuff, and I hope Rosen has given it the push it needs to become more widely discussed.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In Cambridge, a dubious balancing act

I have not yet read the report of the Cambridge Review Committee, which investigated last July’s arrest of Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. But unless someone tells me otherwise, I’m not sure I need to — the bottom line is enough.

According to news accounts, the committee found that both Gates and Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, were to blame, and that each man missed opportunities to “de-escalate” the situation, which ended when Gates was arrested on disorderly-conduct charges. Those charges were quickly dismissed.

The only thing that strikes me as worth saying — again — is that Gates clearly lost it that day. But he was standing in his own home, believing (probably falsely) that he was the victim of racial profiling. Crowley had a badge, a gun and the certain knowledge that Gates was the resident, not an intruder.

Both men are not to blame. Crowley should have left.

Martin Finucane of the Boston Globe covers the story here, and Laura Crimaldi of the Boston Herald catches up with Gates’ lawyer, Harvard Law school professor Charles Ogletree.

Earlier coverage.

Donna Halper’s long journey with Rush

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04tniBnlcHc&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Lesley University professor, longtime radio consultant and friend of Media Nation Donna Halper was on hand in Hollywood last Friday when members of the band Rush were honored with a star on the Walk of Fame.

Halper discovered Rush when she was working as a disc jockey in Cleveland in 1974, and tirelessly promoted the band’s music. In her remarks last Friday, Halper said:

For nearly four decades, the members of Rush have remained true to themselves and true to their music. They have never allowed success to spoil them. They have never lost their integrity. And in a world where it often seems the good guys never win, Rush are living proof that sometimes, good people do finish first.

Halper also appears in a documentary about Rush called “Beyond the Lighted Stage,” which has had several local showings since its debut earlier this year. Here she talks about the film and her career.

Halper was right — sometimes good people do finish first.

At the Phoenix, new roles for Gantz, Garelick

The Boston Phoenix has announced more changes to the top of its masthead, as associate arts editor Jon Garelick has been named arts editor, and arts editor Jeffrey Gantz will become managing editor for arts.

The titles are more than semantic, according to an internal memo from new editor Carly Carioli. Jon will be in charge of the paper’s arts coverage, while Jeffrey’s role — a three-month assignment — will consist of easing the transition.

I had the privilege of working with both Jeffrey and Jon during my years at the Phoenix. In fact, Jeffrey was one of several people responsible for hiring me in 1991, as it was he who determined I had performed somewhat less miserably on the Phoenix’s notorious copy-editing test than other candidates.

In addition to being an admirably meticulous copy editor, Jeffrey was an expert on an eclectic variety of subjects that caught his interest — from soccer (I still remember my son, Tim, kicking a ball around with him at a company picnic on Georges Island), to espresso, to which varieties of cheese should be uppercased and which ones lowercased.

Jon, like Jeffrey, is a journalist with a daunting intellect. He has a deep background in music, especially jazz, and is highly regarded in the local arts community. He is also married to well-known local writer Clea Simon.

Jon is originally from Woonsocket, where I spent a couple of years as a student-reporter for the Woonsocket Call in the mid-1970s. Jon, a keen observer of his surroundings, once provided me with a hilarious example of the fractured syntax used by many old-time residents, who speak English that is heavily inflected with the French they learned growing up in Quebec: “Please throw me down the stairs my keys.”

Carly, in his memo, referred to Jeffrey as “a tireless editor, critic, protector of style, and keeper of institutional wisdom,” and to Jon as “a fantastic judge and incubator of raw writing talent.” Best of luck to both of them.