More on Fournier and the AP

Some years ago I remember reading a profile of Ron Fournier, who was then fairly new as a political reporter for the Associated Press.

It’s not likely I’m going to find a link at this late date, so I’ll have to rely on my memory. What I recall was his saying he’d never been all that interested in politics, an attitude he thought had helped him break some stories. He was a hard-news reporter, not a partisan.

Well, now. I want to follow up my post of earlier today, because I think Fournier’s “analysis” of the Joe Biden pick is remarkable enough that we shouldn’t let go of it too quickly. It’s not that Fournier’s anti-Obama bias is so obvious, though it is. It’s that his take is embarrassingly dumb and shallow. A news analysis is an odd duck; neither a news story nor an opinion piece, it is supposed to make sense of the news. Fournier’s attempt fails dismally.

Steve Stein has posted some terrific links, and I recommend the Washington Monthly item he flags. What I like about that item, written by Steve Benen, is that it gets to the heart of how lazy Fournier is to suggest that Barack Obama’s choice shows a “lack of confidence” in his reformist, outsider message. As Benen notes, you could say that about any vice-presidential pick: if Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton, it would show a “lack of confidence” that he could win the women’s vote without her. You get the idea. Benen also notes that Fournier nearly took a job with the McCain campaign in 2007.

Drilling down a little further, Eric Boehlert’s excellent overview — which gathers everything from Fournier’s inappropriately supportive e-mail to Karl Rove to his supplying McCain with his favorite donuts (ooh, sprinkles!) — links out to a Politico piece that explains Fournier’s rationale for the AP’s increasingly edgy, opinionated journalism. Michael Calderone writes:

Fournier is a main engine in a high-stakes experiment at the 162-year old wire to move from its signature neutral and detached tone to an aggressive, plain-spoken style of writing that Fournier often describes as “cutting through the clutter.”

In the stories the new boss is encouraging, first-person writing and emotive language are okay.

So is scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers.

I’m not buying it. I’m no fan of traditional objectivity and its passive reliance on official statements. But we need tough, fair, neutral reporting more than ever, and it seems to me that the AP ought to be at the forefront of providing it. With regional newspapers cutting back on their national and international coverage, this should be a chance for the AP to shine.

In an e-mail to Media Nation, Stephen Burgard, director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University (i.e., my chairman), writes:

I read Fournier’s “analysis” before checking your blog today and was independently appalled. Since when is choosing somebody knowledgeable in foreign affairs and the Senate Judiciary Committee, who balances a ticket as well, a sign of lack of confidence or weakness?

The suggestion that the confident move would be to bring in somebody inexperienced who represents the “politics of change” and “hope” is ludicrous; it’s something you might expect to see in a student lefty publication, not from the AP, which is supposed to understand how presidential politics works.

I can’t help remembering that the AP’s Walter Mears wrote the book on the journalistic form “news analysis.” In addition to writing good ones, he was able to explain what they were when done right. Not straight news stories. Not opinion pieces. But somehow interpretive in a way that shed an informed reporter’s light beyond just being a stenographer of events.

Perhaps Fournier thinks he was being “intrepretive.” He wasn’t. Fournier may well be in the tank for McCain, but I would feel only slightly better if he were dishing it out equally to both sides. The fact is that Fournier’s “analysis” is a piece of pure opinion, unsophisticated and uninformed.

It’s not just that it should have been better. It’s that we depend on the AP to provide us with something fundamentally different.

Photo of Fournier by Josh Hallett and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Spinning the obvious

In an “analysis” headlined “Biden pick shows lack of confidence,” Ron Fournier of the Associated Press writes:

For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn’t beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

That’s because, well, Obama probably can’t beat McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack.

Let me lend a hand and help Fournier with what he may be writing one week from today:

For all his self-confidence, the 72-year-old Arizona senator worried that he couldn’t beat Democrat Barack Obama without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Romney selection is the next logistical step in a McCain campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

Any questions? Other than wondering how many brain cells Fournier fired up before putting fingers to keyboard?

David Brooks on Friday: “Biden’s the one. The only question is whether Obama was wise and self-aware enough to know that.”

Biden his time

Granted, the Olympics messed up the timing, and no one announces his running mate during the convention anymore. But why would Barack Obama tell everyone his choice is Joe Biden “in the wee hours of Saturday morning”?

If nothing else, we’ll get to see how many Sunday talk shows Biden can hit tomorrow. There are — what — five? He can do it. The man does like to talk.

Correction TK?

The Newton Tab blog says that a Boston Globe reporter may have quoted the wrong Baker when he wrote a story about the arrest of a Newton firefighter on heroin-possession charges. Greg Reibman, who’s been following this for most of the day, links to all the relevant background.

Newton Board of Alderman president Lisle Baker was originally quoted as saying that the arrest pointed to the need for mandatory drug testing of public-safety workers. But the Globe then removed the quote, at least from its online story. Baker insists he never spoke with the Globe. Supposedly a correction is going to appear tomorrow.

Good thing the Newton Fire Department is otherwise quiet. Oh, wait. A bag of pot was found inside the 62-year-old fire chief’s car. The chief says he has no idea of how it got there.

Saturday morning update: Here’s the correction. The Globe did reach the wrong Baker. I’m scratching my head. How is it that Mr. Wrong provided exactly the sort of quotes you might have expected from Mr. Right?

Thinking about “the religious test”

Chris Lehmann repeats an oft-heard fallacy in an interview conducted by Ken Silverstein for Harpers.org. Reacting to Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s appearances with evangelical minister Rick Warren last Saturday, Lehmann says:

The only important issue about Saddleback is that the Constitution specifically forbids any religious test for office, so why are you having an evangelical minister asking the two candidates about their relationship to Christ? But the people who are in charge of delivering useful information to the public about the process have no historical frame of reference. They literally don’t know what they’re doing.

Lehmann’s right about what the Constitution says regarding a religious test, but he suggests that it somehow applies to the media and to voters. It does not. Here’s the exact language, from Article VI:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

That’s pretty clear: the government may not establish a religious test for candidates. If Congress were to pass a law stating that only believing Christians may run for president, or that practicing Muslims may not, then that would be unconstitutional under Article VI.

If, on the other hand, a voter decides he will not consider any candidate who isn’t an evangelical, that’s not only his right, but it’s perfectly in accord with both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. Likewise, Rick Warren is free to invite the candidates in for a talk; the candidates are free to accept or decline; and the media are free to cover it or not.

Needless to say, this is a relevant issue, as Mitt Romney remains the subject of some speculation as to whether John McCain will choose him as his running mate. Some evangelicals have made it clear that they would object vociferously because Romney is a Mormon. That sentiment may be offensive to you and me, but it’s not offensive in the least to the Constitution.

If you think about it, we’ve all got our religious tests. Would you vote for a so-called Christian who believes we should hasten the Apocalypse through nuclear war? Of course you wouldn’t. The Constitution says such a person can run for office. It doesn’t say you have to vote for him. Neither does it say the press and the public can’t make an issue of his beliefs.

The Constitution is supposed to be a check on the government, not on the people.

DePetro blames it all on his wife

Former Boston radio talk-show host John DePetro, class act that he is, has decided to blame his wife for the book-cooking that resulted in his meteoric — and, as it turns out, fraudulent — climb in the Providence ratings.

“It’s embarrassing all the way around,” DePetro tells Alisha Pina of the Providence Journal. “I don’t have a lot to add. My wife was asked to take part in a radio survey, she did and she shouldn’t have. It was wrong.”

Ratings for DePetro, the morning host on WPRO Radio (AM 630), had showed him zooming from 11th to fourth place recently. Now we know why. The six ratings diaries submitted to Arbitron by Kristen DePetro represented more than 3,800 listeners, according to the ProJo.

DePetro was canned by Boston’s WRKO (AM 680) in November 2006 after he referred to independent gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross as a “fat lesbian.” Worse than that is heard on WRKO every day, of course, but DePetro’s problems were compounded by his minuscule ratings. (DePetro’s bio on the WPRO Web site says that he “left Boston with much fanfare, and returns to Rhode Island as a well known name.”)

Looks like he — or at least his wife — tried to fix his ratings problem in Providence, and I mean that in both senses of the word.

More from Jessica Heslam of the Boston Herald.

A media scandal that wasn’t?

Remember the Scott Beauchamp scandal? Beauchamp was the soldier who wrote a series of essays for The New Republic documenting some pretty atrocious behavior involving him and his comrades who were serving in Iraq, including running over dogs and playing with a human skull.

As you may recall, Beauchamp was discredited after he admitted to “exaggerations and falsehoods.” Except that Spencer Ackerman, in an explosive story for Radar, now says Beauchamp never made any such admission, and that TNR editor Franklin Foer threw Beauchamp overboard in an attempt to get the magazine’s right-wing critics off his back.

Ackerman admits that there’s bad blood between him and Foer, and that Foer would not be interviewed for the Radar piece. But Ackerman has a lot of on-the-record material backing up his claims. Fascinating stuff.

As I wrote for the Guardian a year ago this week, the Beauchamp scandal gave war supporters an excuse to ignore a dauntingly well-documented report on ugly behavior by American troops that had been published by The Nation.

Now it looks as though the real Beauchamp scandal may have been that The New Republic allowed his reputation to be sacrificed for no good reason.

Nothing on the TNR Web site so far.

The worst … person … in the world!

Keith Olbermann, if you’re taking nominations for tonight’s show, please consider David Davis, the principal of Ponce de Leon High School in Florida.

According to the Associated Press, when one of his students told him she was a lesbian and that she wanted him to stop her fellow students from harassing her, Davis outed her to her parents, told her to stay away from children and suspended friends who wore T-shirts supporting her.

Despite all that, folks in Ponce de Leon are reportedly wondering what it was, exactly, that Davis did wrong.

The audacity of Mother Jones (II)

Jay Rosen got an answer out of Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief, David Corn, as to why the magazine is asking the question “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”

Corn points to a speech Obama gave earlier this year in which he conjured up visions of the American Revolution, Abolition, the Depression, World War II and other patriotic touchstones in order to drive home his campaign theme of “Yes we can.” MoJo has since added that in the form of a blog post from February unsubtly titled “Barack Obama’s Messiah Complex.”

I’m not going to reproduce the Obama speech excerpts here, because you can just follow the links. But I do want to consider Rosen’s three questions:

Which comes closest to your view?

1.) Sure enough, Obama in this except “compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history” and Mother Jones caught him at it, puncturing the Obama hype. Good for them!

2.) No, Obama does not “claim that his campaign is comparable to the great progressive movements in U.S. history.” Not even close. Mother Jones is engaging in the kind of audacious hype it claims to be opposing. Bad move.

3.) It doesn’t matter whether Obama actually said anything like that because his supporters believe his campaign is a movement of transcendent historical importance, and that’s what Mother Jones really meant, it’s just that the editors phrased it badly, attributing to the candidate claims that have been made by others about him.

Jay thinks the correct answer is #2. Strictly on a factual, non-emotional basis, I agree. But it’s more complicated than that. I think the truth is #2 plus a strong dose of #3, along with at least a slight whiff of #1.

All politicians invoke great moments in American history, as Obama did. But Obama has gone farther by explicitly drawing parallels between his candidacy and those moments. It’s understandable — the election of an African-American as president would rank as a stunning achievement for our race-benighted culture. But it’s got nothing to do with Obama personally.

The thing is, I think Obama understands that, and I think David Corn and company understand it, too. So the question becomes why journalists would compress Obama’s argument into a shallow soundbite that makes it sounds like Obama thinks of himself as a combination of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s not so much that MoJo is completely wrong; it’s that the magazine is being reductionist and stupid. Why?

By the way, I know Corn and have a lot of respect for him. We spent part of the afternoon on Election Day 2004 at a Starbucks near Copley Square, picking out John Kerry’s cabinet for him. But to the extent that he agrees with this particular editorial decision, well, I think he’s wrong.

MIT gag order has been lifted

Media Nation reader J.H. passes along word from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that the MIT gag order has been lifted. U.S. District Judge George O’Toole reportedly found that the MBTA is unlikely to prevail in its lawsuit against three MIT students and the university itself.

Background on the case here and here.

Although this is clearly better than not lifting the gag order, it’s also not much of a victory for the First Amendment. The fact is that the MIT students had every right to make their presentation on flaws in the MBTA’s electronic fare system, and they were not allowed to do so.

It makes a mockery of the principle that prior restraint is to be reserved only for serious issues of national security, obscenity and incitement to violence.