By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I’ve made some minor changes to the look and feel of Media Nation, mainly to accommodate the newish, extreme-vertical ad that takes up the top of the right-hand column.
I’m also thinking about switching to WordPress.org so that I can have a little more control as well as multiple static pages. But this should do for the time being.
As the father of a son who recently earned his Eagle award and a daughter who just got her Silver, I’m appalled at a comment from a spokeswoman for the Boy Scouts of America that appears in today’s Boston Globe. Renee Fairrer tells reporter Irene Sege:
The Girl Scouts, pretty much they’re known for the Girl Scout cookies. When people think of Boy Scouts, they think of Eagle awards. They think of service.
Girl Scouts have to put in a tremendous number of service hours for their awards. The requirements can’t be directly compared, but the Silver award, for girls 11 to 14 years old, specifies that a girl put in 40 hours. The Gold, for girls up to the age of 18, requires 65 hours, according to a workbook my daughter has.
The Eagle, which a boy can earn up until he turns 18, does not specify a minimum number of hours for a service project, though such projects usually run about 100 cumulative hours from everyone who participates. In practical terms, that means the scout himself generally puts in fewer than 40 hours of his own time.
Too bad Fairrer didn’t understand that before she opened her mouth and inserted her foot.
Gov. Deval Patrick’s politically clueless performance of recent days has brought out some sharp commentary from local pundits. A quick round-up — not meant to be comprehensive, just stuff that caught my eye:
We are now past the half-way point of Patrick’s four-year term. It’s pretty sobering — and discouraging — to realize that, without a major turnaround, we’re looking at yet another disappointment in the governor’s office.
This past Saturday, I had the honor of introducing the 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck,” about the life of Edward R. Murrow, at the Boston Athenaeum, part of a “Civic Discourse” series it’s running along with Suffolk University.
I also had a chance to meet Jim Sullivan, who writes the excellent local blog Suldog, as well as Mrs. Suldog. Jim has got some interesting things to say about Murrow and the how the media landscape has changed since the 1950s, when Murrow’s CBS program “See It Now” played a major role in ending the witch-hunting career of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston has refused to overturn a ruling (PDF) that statements made in matters of private concern may be found libelous even if true.
The court has also declined to accept (PDF) an amicus curiae brief filed by several dozen of the largest and most influential media organizations in the country, citing a conflict of interest that would be created if it were to do so. Apparently one of the judges has a tie to a media organization, which would force a recusal.
No word on what comes next. Is it possible that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on this? The idea that a statement must be defamatory and false in order to be held libelous is so fundamental to our notion of a free press that it’s hard to imagine the ruling will stand, even if it pertains only to Massachusetts, based as it is on a 1902 state law.
From the time I reported on this case for The Guardian, I’ve heard a low buzz suggesting that the ruling may not matter all that much, given that it pertains to private parties — and that, in fact, private persons deserve more protection under the libel laws than public officials and public figures.
My answer to that is that they already do, but that private figures — according to all the libel law that we understand — still have to prove falsehood.
I think the most telling case is that of Gertz v. Robert Welch, a 1974 Supreme Court decision about a libel suit brought by a lawyer who had been falsely defamed by a John Birch Society publication. The court ruled that the lawyer, Elmer Gertz, was a private figure, and would thus not to have to prove “actual malice” as defined by Times v. Sullivan (1964) — that is, he would not have to prove that the Birchers had published defamatory material knowing it was false, or with reckless disregard for the truth. Instead, the court ruled that, henceforth, private figures would have to show negligence at the very least, with the states free to adopt more stringent language if they chose.
Reading the Gertz decision, you can’t help but be struck how the notion of falsehood is raised over and over. The phrase “defamatory falsehood” is used repeatedly. The most famous section of the majority decision, written by Justice Lewis Powell, is built around the principle that libel is a false and defamatory statement of fact:
We begin with the common ground. Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas. But there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact. Neither the intentional lie nor the careless error materially advances society’s interest in “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate on public issues. They belong to that category of utterances which “are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”
Remember, Gertz was a private figure. Powell was writing quite specifically about the libel standards that should prevail when a private citizen brings a libel suit, yet he made it absolutely clear that falsehood and defamation are the two key elements of libel.
It’s hard to imagine what the First Circuit is thinking.
No, Don Imus shouldn’t have said he’d “shoot” Jay Severin — but, based on Jessica Heslam’s account, it sounds like no one ever would have known about it if the Severin camp hadn’t started blabbing. And come on — does Severin actually believe Imus was going to pull out a gun and blow him away if he refused to get off the stage?
The shooting remark aside, you can’t argue with Imus’ judgment.
Matt explains. I’m steaming because I just discovered that Facebook’s new, improved Links feature no longer lets you eliminate the photo or edit the text. Unless I’m missing something.
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that a new survey showing that people don’t make much of a connection between their local newspaper and civic life gets it exactly backwards. In fact, folks have lost interest in journalism because they’ve lost interest in democracy. For newspapers and Web sites to succeed, they’re first going to have to re-establish a sense of community.
Problem solved, although not the way I would have liked. I’m now using Apple Mail to pull in my Northeastern mail (via POP) and Gmail (via IMAP) separately. I’m able to use Northeastern’s SMTP server off-campus as well as on. So all of my outgoing NU mail contains official-looking header information, and will thus not be intercepted by anyone’s spam filter.
Oh, well. Apple Mail’s not so bad, I suppose.
Let’s begin with the obvious. It’s a damn shame that about 145 newsroom folks are losing their jobs, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer becomes the largest newspaper in the country to move to an online-only platform. Only about 20 people will cover the news at seattlepi.com.
That said, I think 20 people could do a lot of useful damage if they’re focused on the right things — covering local news that really matters and offering intelligent aggregation of other content, including local bloggers. Given that the Post-Intelligencer was the number-two paper in Seattle, I can think of no better place to try such an experiment. Too bad the dominant paper, the Seattle Times, is in such tough shape, too. But that’s the case pretty much everywhere.
I was interested in see in Ken Doctor’s analysis that Lincoln Millstein, the head of Hearst News Digital, will have an indirect hand in the Seattle experiment. Way back when, Millstein was editor of what was then the Boston Globe’s Living/Arts section, and a good one.
That said, I’m skeptical of the online-only model. Maybe if seattlepi.com enjoys some initial success, the Hearst folks might consider a free daily tabloid consisting of the best of what’s online. As long as advertising remains more lucrative in print than on the Web, that might be the way to go.
Some sort of print presence would also help to distinguish it from Crosscut, a non-profit community news site that serves the Seattle area.