Ted Kennedy has brain cancer

Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson writes that Sen. Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Though the prognosis is uncertain, this is truly bad news both for the Kennedy family and for Massachusetts.

According to Johnson’s story, the usual course of treatment is radiation and chemotherapy, with survival ranging from less than a year to five years or more. Obviously it’s way too soon to tell whether Kennedy might be able to return to a vigorous and effective Senate career, but it’s a real possibility.

Sen. Arlen Specter, for one, has served while battling various forms of cancer, including a brain tumor, since the early 1990s.

Photo (cc) by diggersf and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Correcting a correction

Can’t editors at the New York Times check their own archives before subjecting one of their reporters to the ignominy of a published correction? On May 14, Times sportswriter William Rhoden wrote a column about the New York Knicks that contained the following passage about former coach Isiah Thomas:

No coach in recent Knicks history was treated as harshly as Thomas. From the moment Thomas was named team president to the moment he was forced to coach the team he assembled, Thomas was the object of an intense dislike that, near the end, bordered on hatred. Some old-timers in the news media never forgot his comment about Larry Bird (if Bird were black, he would be regarded as just another player).

But you’ll no longer find the passage about Bird in the online version; it’s been expunged, as though the Times fears you’ll go blind if you read it. There’s now a correction at the bottom that says:

The Sports of The Times column on Wednesday, about the harsh environment surrounding the Knicks while Isiah Thomas was the coach, erroneously linked Thomas to a racially charged comment about Larry Bird when both men were top N.B.A. players. It was Dennis Rodman — once a teammate of Thomas’s — who famously suggested that Bird would have been regarded as an ordinary player had he been black.

Trouble is, Rhoden got it exactly right. After the Detroit Pistons lost to the Boston Celtics in the 1987 playoffs, both Rodman and Thomas, then the team’s star players, made the incisive observation that Bird was, you know, white. Here’s how the Times’ Ira Berkow described it on June 2, 1987:

In the visiting and losing team’s locker room Saturday afternoon in Boston Garden, Isiah Thomas, the Detroit guard, said he didn’t want it to sound like sour grapes, and that there was no question that his team got beat, and that they came up short, but he harbored a resentment.

In regard to Bird, he [Thomas] said, ”I think Larry is a very, very good basketball player. An exceptional talent, but I’d have to agree with Rodman. If Bird was black, he’d be just another good guy.”

Dennis Rodman, the teammate to whom Thomas had referred, had said that Bird was ”overrated,” and that the only reason he had won three straight league most valuable player awards (until this year, that is), ”is because he’s white. That’s the only reason.”

So, yes, Rodman spoke first. But Thomas agreed with him, and used language that was just as offensive, if you’re inclined to be offended. Rhoden was not using quotation marks, so there was no reason for him to capture Thomas’ quote word-for-word. But it strikes me that Rhoden’s construction comes closer to Thomas than to Rodman. Gee, he must have done his research.

The simple fact is that Rhoden got hung out to dry by editors who apparently couldn’t have been bothered to dig out what really happened 21 years ago. Heck, I remember it, which is why I started diving into the archives. Anyone who was following basketball in 1987 remembers Thomas’ crass comments — more so than Rodman’s, since Thomas was a nationally known celebrity.

Rhoden should demand a retraction.

Zoned out

Recently Miss Media Nation bought a DVD from Amazon UK with her allowance money. She tried to play it on our iMac, and encountered a message that we were in the wrong zone. I switched it for her, but that was hardly an ideal solution for two reasons:

  • You can only switch back and forth a few times before the drive locks forever.
  • Though she can now watch her British-origin DVD, she can’t watch anything else unless I switch it back. See my first complaint.

Nor does the DVD play on the unit connected to our television.

As I understand it, this is supposed to be some sort of protection against piracy or trafficking in early-release movies or something. All I know is that my daughter bought a legitimate product, legally, and now she’s limited in how she can use it.

There are fixes, but they’re more daunting than anything I want to tackle. To say this is abusive treatment on the part of the movie studios is an understatement.

Walking through the fallout

Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan puts the Boston Herald walk-through fiasco in perspective today by pointing out the obvious — that Patriots coach Bill Belichick has forever branded himself as a cheater. Ryan writes:

How could anyone not feel sorry for Bob Kraft?…

His was said to be a model organization, where the owner owned, the personnel people found the right players, and the dour defensive genius coached ’em right up to championships, or close to ’em.

And now?

And now he has to live with the reality that he presides over the most despised and reviled franchise in all of contemporary American sport, and all because the coach he trusted has betrayed him.

In the New York Times, Mark Bowden offers a different sort of perspective, arguing, essentially, that it’s not a big deal and that everyone does it.

Bowden compares the Patriots taping scandal to, among other things, Gaylord Perry’s spitball. Not to condone what Perry did, but, somehow, I don’t buy the comparison. I’m with Ryan on this one.

Ted Kennedy’s illness

Sen. Ted Kennedy has fallen ill, and Media Nation extends its best wishes. Meanwhile, there are signs of early media confusion over what’s wrong.

The Boston Herald reports that Kennedy experienced “stroke-like symptoms.” The Cape Cod Times, whose account of Kennedy’s illness is otherwise thorough, makes no mention of the nature of the senator’s illness. (Those two links via Universal Hub.)

By contrast, the Boston Globe, relying on an anonymous “official briefed on the situation,” tells us that Kennedy suffered a seizure, then a second as he was being transported by helicopter to Massachusetts General Hospital.

Not that the Herald and the Globe couldn’t both be right.

Instant update: The Herald’s Casey Ross has more details, and describes Kennedy’s “stroke-like symptoms” as “mild.” And the AP, among others, is also using the phrase “stroke-like symptoms.”

Threatening “the voice of Black Boston”

Interesting story in the Dorchester Reporter on “TOUCH 106.1 FM,” a pirate radio station serving the black community that’s been targeted for elimination by the FCC. Managing editor Bill Forry writes:

Touch FM (officially LP-WTCH Boston) — which sprang from the bosom of the Grove Hall Neighborhood Development Corporation offices in the fall of 2005 — is unlicensed. They admit it. They’re pirates.

And they are unrepentant, even in the face of the most recent broadside from the government: A May 7 forfeiture order from the FCC that levies a $17,000 fine on station founder Charles Clemons. The ruling stems from a pair of site visits made to the suspected TOUCH offices at the corner of Cheney Street and Blue Hill Avenue in 2007. The order accuses Clemons of “willfully and repeatedly” using the frequency without a license and for “failing to permit a station inspection.”

This is the Catch-22 of radio. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed local commercial radio and gave rise to corporate-owned, lowest-common-denominator pap.

Touch FM’s 100-watt signal — broadcast from an undisclosed location — puts it between WMJX (106.7 FM) and WROR (105.7 FM), two stations owned by Greater Media, which also employs the likes of right-wingers like Jay Severin and Michael Graham on another of its stations, WTKK (96.9 FM). Who’s doing more to serve the local community, TOUCH or Greater Media? Does the question even need to be asked?

Last June I covered a hearing by the FCC on localism in broadcast media. The agency claims to be very concerned about local content. Well, if officials would like to travel to Dorchester, they will find some.

Duxbury’s Afghan connection

Here’s something you don’t see every day. The weekly Duxbury Clipper recently sent columnist Bruce Barrett to Afghanistan to cover the opening of a girls school funded by the Duxbury Rotary Club. Barrett did his reporting in the form of a blog, complete with photos, video, a map of the area, even a real-time weather report from the Afghan capital of Kabul.

An excerpt from Barrett’s final dispatch:

Kalashnikovs. In Duxbury, a band of men armed with assault rifles attending the opening of an elementary school would make the national news. But the Zabuli School for Girls isn’t in Duxbury. It’s in Deh Sabz, Afghanistan, a gritty town of 1,000 families on the outskirts of the capital city Kabul. Out here, standing among men armed to the teeth is calming, not frightening. It means that security is strong. Fear comes when standing among men who have turned their attention toward you, and you can’t see their weapons. More unsettling, perhaps, are the moments when you can see their weapons and the barrels are pointed up. That’s when they’re ready for action.

Not only is the series evidence of some terrific enterprise on the part of Barrett and the Clipper, but the online implementation is state-of-the-art.