In my latest for the Guardian, I ponder Ted Kennedy’s decision to throw Hillary Clinton over the side of the yacht last week — a far more significant move than his endorsement of Barack Obama earlier this year.
An old lie recycled
Unexpectedly, it’s turned into Charlie Pierce Week here at Media Nation. Why? Because conservative media critic Tim Graham is smearing Pierce with a five-year-old lie — a lie that Graham had a hand in spreading in the first place.
Pierce has a story in the new Esquire on the presidential campaign. Graham doesn’t like it very much. Fair enough. But Graham, writing for NewsBusters, begins with this:
Charles Pierce is the infamous Boston Globe writer who tried to insist in 2003 that if Mary Jo Kopechne had survived Chappaquiddick, she would enjoy all the senior citizen benefits provided by Ted Kennedy’s beneficent policies.
Graham links to an old item at his own organization, the Media Research Center, which later bestowed on Pierce its “Quote of the Year” for what it considered his extreme liberal bias.
I’ve written about this several times before, and I don’t feel like doing it again; just read this and this. As you will see, Graham deliberately misconstrues what may be the single meanest thing ever written about Ted Kennedy (by a liberal, anyway), strips out the irony and sarcasm, and then pretends that Pierce is tastelessly using Kopechne’s death to praise Kennedy.
Since the record has been corrected several times, Graham is no longer mistaken. Now he’s lying.
Younger and cheaper (III)
Yet another knowledgeable source tells me that there will be some external hires at the Globe. My judgment is that this source supersedes the previous source.
What we’ve got here is the eternal blogger’s dilemma. Standard blogging practice is to post information as it becomes available. When stuff like this happens, though, I find myself wishing I’d done it the old-fashioned way — make calls, and hold off until I have the whole story.
Anyway, I’m now confident that I do have the whole story. Start polishing those résumés, kids.
Younger and cheaper (II)
A knowledgeable source tells me that the Globe job listings are all internal moves — outsiders need not apply.
Piercing talk radio
Charlie Pierce is on a talk-radio rampage. Last month he went after WTKK (96.9 FM), and specifically Don Imus, Michael Graham, Jay Severin, Laura Ingraham and Michele McPhee, whom he doesn’t actually name, referring to her only as “a woman who sounds like she’s shouting her program off the back porch of a three-decker in Revere.”
Now he’s back, targeting Tom Finneran of WRKO (AM 680) as host of “one of the lamest shows in the history of the electric radio device.”
I can’t say I disagree, except to note that McPhee doesn’t actually shout. It only seems that way.
JFK’s posthumous terrorist-coddling
Why is it that hardly anyone bothers to notice that the Hamas spokesman who “endorsed” Barack Obama did so by comparing him to John Kennedy? I mean, it’s weird, and Obama is right to label Hamas a terrorist organization. But by embracing Obama, Hamas is clearly trying to portray itself as reasonable and moderate. Which makes John McCain’s attempt to exploit this all the more deplorable. This is about Hamas trying to change its own image, nothing more.
Joe Lieberman has jumped in, too.
Younger and cheaper
Check out these job postings for six reporters (including Charlie Savage‘s replacement) and an assistant metro editor at the Boston Globe. (Thanks to Media Nation reader T.W.)
That didn’t take long*
John McCain’s Burma-coddling convention chairman, Doug Goodyear, is gone.
*I just noticed that Josh Marshall used the same headline. I wrote mine before I read his. Honest!
McCain’s Burma shave
Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reports that John McCain has chosen a convention chair who once worked as a lobbyist for Burma’s repressive government.
“It was six years ago,” protests Doug Goodyear. Well, gee, he’s got a point. In 2002, the military junta had only been in power for 40 years.
Even better: According to Isikoff, Goodyear got the call because the other guy McCain was considering had once represented Ferdinand Marcos as well as the corrupt former prime minister of Ukraine.
Spyware versus spyware
Hmmm … within the last 20 minutes, I started getting a message that my Mac has either a virus or a spyware problem whenever I try to access a Blogspot blog. The message, from Google (which owns Blogspot), begins:
We’re sorry … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
It happens with both Firefox and Safari, but I have no problem accessing non-Blogspot sites. I could install a spyware-wiping program, but this review says wiping out all my private data, including cookies, should accomplish the same thing. Which I just did. No go.
Interestingly enough, I can’t even view Media Nation, although I can get into Blogger in order to post, edit and moderate comments.
Thoughts?
11:25 a.m. update: Shhh! I just switched to a neighbor’s WiFi connection, and everything works fine. I’ll try rebooting our network later today.
1:15 p.m. update: Seems to be OK now, without rebooting.