Say what, George?

Al Sharpton, debating former Imus producer Bernard McGuirk on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes” on May 11:

Forgiveness has nothing to do with penalty. If you abuse a job, you can forgive somebody and say you lose the job. Moses was forgiven. He didn’t get to the Promised Land. There is penalty…. I think that there must not be amnesty. There must be — people pay for their deeds. And I think it was appropriate that y’all paid.

Boston-based PR magnate George Regan, in the Boston Herald today, talking about WRKO Radio’s decision to audition McGuirk for a possible stint as Tom Finneran’s sidekick:

If Al Sharpton has no problems with this man, neither do we.

Well, George, Sharpton does have a problem with McGuirk. Does that change your thinking?

Curious George: The deceptive headline of the day appears in today’s Globe. “WRKO clarifies McGuirk bid” may be the head, but the story consists of a Regan obfuscation job worthy of Scott McClellan. To wit: “Regan said yesterday that the three-day spot was not an audition, but said he could not rule out the possibility that McGuirk would be offered a job.”

So it’s not an audition, but if McGuirk does well, he might be offered a job. Right.

Even curiouser: Brian Maloney on Regan’s triple play.

Jeff Greenfield on the “liberal” media

Jeff Greenfield on liberal media bias:

[I]n my view the danger of bias does not lie in political coverage. I mean, ask Al Gore and John Kerry if they were the beneficiary of a poodle press. They were treated very critically — appropriately.

“Appropriately”? As has been well-documented (start here and here), Gore in 2000 was subjected to the most viciously false media pounding of any modern presidential candidate. From the media-created lie that Gore had claimed to have “invented” the Internet to the hue and cry that he give up on a race that he’d actually won, the 2000 presidential campaign amounted to a shocking eruption of media irresponsibility. The media’s shoddy performance was just as responsible for Gore’s loss as the five Supreme Court justices who handed George W. Bush a victory he hadn’t earned.

No, it wasn’t as bad with Kerry. The swift-boat lies never really broke out of the cable and radio talk ghetto (although Eric Boehlert shows the mainstream media deserve at least some blame), and by 2004 the media were finally starting to catch on to Bush. But Greenfield really needs to bone up on what happened in 2000.

Then again, I remember Greenfield’s popping up on the radio some years ago — on Imus, naturally — to say that he wasn’t all that troubled by the outcome in Florida, because whatever went wrong was balanced off by the fact that the media had mistakenly called the state for Gore before folks in the Panhandle had finished voting. Good grief. (Via Romenesko.)

The serious and the frivolous

Should newspapers report what’s important or what interests people? Good ones do both, attempting to strike a balance between the serious and the frivolous.

Last night, at a panel discussion at the Boston Public Library sponsored by the fledgling New England News Forum, I caught an interesting exchange between John Wilpers, the editor of the free commuter tabloid BostonNOW, and Ellen Hume, director of the Center on Media and Society at UMass Boston.

Among BostonNOW’s innovations is a daily webcast of its editorial meeting, and the ability of viewers to send text messages about what they’re watching. On one occasion, Wilpers said, he and his staff were discussing a government story, and a viewer wrote in, “I’m bored already, and you haven’t even written the story.” Wilpers said he decided on the spot to kill the story, and then proceeded to offer a few disparaging words about the notion of government stories in general.

When Hume next got a chance to speak, she responded, “Part of what you said, John, gave me a little bit of a creepy feeling. You’ve got to cover government. I don’t want to kill the government stories.”

Wilpers responded, “I would never kill a story just because a blogger or a viewer of the webcast didn’t like it. I’m not going to turn my newsroom over to whoever happens to be
watching.”

Well, that’s a relief — even if Wilpers did seem to contradict what he’d said just a few moments earlier. Yes, it can sometimes be difficult to make government stories interesting. But the First Amendment wasn’t written into the Constitution to protect the right of newspaper publishers to cover Paris Hilton endlessly. That’s just a side effect.

Finneran’s race-baiting co-host

If talk-radio executives know one thing, they know this: racism sells. It’s titillating, it’s naughty, it gives some middle-aged white guys a thrill as they’re driving to work in the morning to hear jokes they’d never dare tell at the office being blasted out at 50,000 watts.

How else can we explain the decision by WRKO (AM 680) to audition fired Imus producer Bernard McGuirk alongside the substantive but ratings-challenged morning host, former Massachusetts House speaker Tom Finneran? (The Globe reports on the story here, along with a quote from yours truly; the Herald’s “Inside Track” weighs in here.)

Let’s be clear. McGuirk, at least in terms of his on-air persona, is worse than Imus. The standard shtick on the late, unlamented “Imus in the Morning” show was for McGuirk to come out with something so offensive that Imus would stop him, professing to be horrified. Indeed, it was McGuirk’s reference to “hardcore hos” that started the infamous exchange that led to Imus’ putting a torch to his own career.

And lest we forget, Imus told “60 Minutes” back in 1998 that he’d hired McGuirk to tell “[N-word] jokes.”

Media Matters has gathered a few of McGuirk’s greatest hits:

  • While portraying a stereotyped Irish cardinal, McGuirk referred to Barack Obama as a “young colored fellah.”
  • Claiming that Hillary Clinton was “trying to sound black in front of a black audience,” McGuirk exclaimed that Clinton “will have cornrows and gold teeth before this fight with Obama is over.”
  • During an appearance on “Imus in the Morning” by Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson, McGuirk was heard saying in the background, in Spanish, “Kiss my ass, fat one.” Richardson’s mother is Mexican.

Finneran’s show is not off to a good start. His ratings are worse than those of Scott Allen Miller, the host he replaced. Having a local morning program helmed by a smart host who really knows the Boston area is a good idea, and I want to like it. But it’s pretty dull.

But attempting to save it by pairing Finneran with an out-of-towner who made his reputation telling racist, sexist and homophobic jokes is reprehensible.

Jerry Falwell

Just because Jerry Falwell is dead doesn’t mean I’m obligated to weigh in, does it? I hope not — I’m not sure I can muster the energy, except to say that the only good thing about him I can think of is that he, like Pat Robertson, had lost much of his influence over the years. (Not that James Dobson and Tony Perkins are an improvement.)

Timothy Noah has a great roundup on Slate of the worst things Falwell ever said. Jon Keller shares some thoughts about what it was like to be David Brudnoy’s producer at the peak of Falwell’s influence.

Not-so-local news

Now this is a truly wretched idea.

The Associated Press reports that the Web site Pasadena Now has decided to outsource coverage of the local city council to reporters in India. In a follow-up, the Los Angeles Times says that one of these distant journalists, based in Mumbai, will make $12,000 a year, while the other, in Bangalore, will make $7,200. They’ll watch webcasts of the council meetings, consult relevant documents online and send their stories by e-mail. Who cares if they wouldn’t know Pasadena from Rawalpindi?

Pasadena Now editor and publisher James Macpherson tells the Times: “A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages.”

Reacting to Macpherson’s quote, Kevin Roderick of LA Observed digs up a terrific rejoinder from an anonymous Pasadena blogger:

That’s true, to a certain degree. The type of journalistic coverage McPherson [sic] is talking about really could be done by someone in another country, largely because their “coverage” often consists of little more than glorified press releases and parroting of the local media.

This is really quite a bit worse than the Boston Globe’s decision to outsource some circulation and advertising functions to India. Indeed, they’re even scratching their heads at the Hindustan Times, observing that “it remains to be seen how reporters would file their dispatches on local news — with all its flavour — from such a distant geographical location.”

No telltale byline, but here’s a possible example.

Dan Gillmor: “For the money he’s paying, he [Macpherson] could hire local bloggers. They’d do it better, with more perspectives — and have the advantage of, uh, being there.”

Political whoppers, Bush edition

Jon Keller has nominated his top five list of all-time political whoppers. Although Dick Cheney makes an appearance, President Bush is strangely absent. To rectify that, the crack staff at Media Nation has been hard at work for the past 12 or 13 minutes, putting together an all-Bush edition.

We think this holds up well even against such classics as “I am not a crook” (Richard Nixon) and “Last night I announced to the American people that the North Vietnamese regime had conducted further deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters” (Lyndon Johnson). But we’ll let you be the judge.

Here are our top five Bush whoppers, in chronological order. We realize we could have chosen many, many more.

1. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” (Jan. 23, 2003)

2. “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” (May 1, 2003)

3. “There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” (July 2, 2003)

4. “[W]e are fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we will not have to face them and fight them in the streets of our own cities.” (Oct. 3, 2003)

5. “We do not torture.” (Nov. 7, 2005)

David Ortiz’s non-roid rage

Did the Herald do David Ortiz wrong? Globe columnist Jackie MacMullan ups the ante today with a lengthy piece on the fallout from the headline on a short Michael Silverman item in Tuesday’s Herald. The headline: “Papi unwitting ‘roid user?”

MacMullan writes: “The headline was a disservice to Ortiz, and to Silverman, who does not write his own headlines. In fact, no writer at a major paper writes his or her headlines.”

OK, the headline was kind of idiotic. But, as these things go, it wasn’t that bad. Here’s how Silverman’s item begins:

On the topic of steroids, Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz said he is not 100 percent positive that he’s never used them. If he did, it happened when he was much younger.

“I tell you, I don’t know too much about steroids, but I started listening about steroids when they started to bring that [expletive] up, and I started realizing and getting to know a little bit about it,” Ortiz said Sunday. “You’ve got to be careful…. I used to buy a protein shake in my country. I don’t do that any more because they don’t have the approval for that here, so I know that, so I’m off of buying things at the GNC back in the Dominican [Republic]. But it can happen anytime, it can happen. I don’t know. I don’t know if I drank something in my youth, not knowing it.”

I’d say the headline was an exaggeration of what Ortiz actually said, but not by that much. MacMullan says this about the Herald’s headline:

It was an inflammatory rhetorical question that set off a national chain reaction of speculation. One of the first hints was when Red Sox manager Terry Francona said a Toronto reporter entered his office and declared that Ortiz had exposed himself as a steroid user.

The Toronto reporter needs a reading-comprehension lesson.

This is the second time the Globe has let Ortiz vent about the Herald; here is Gordon Edes’ piece from Thursday’s paper. And yes, I think the Herald could have written a more deft headline to describe Ortiz’s remarks.

But the real story here is that Ortiz let himself get caught thinking out loud at a moment when everyone is baseball is freaked out about steroids. He said nothing wrong, but, sadly, in the current climate, he probably shouldn’t have said anything.

Bush boosts Michael Moore

You can’t make this stuff up. The Bush administration has given a huge boost to Michael Moore’s upcoming documentary, “SiCKO,” by investigating a trip he took to Cuba. The New York Times reports that Moore may have violated the travel ban by taking sick 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba in order to seek free medical care.

As a publicity stunt, what Moore did pales in comparison to what the White House has done for him. Moore’s having great fun with it on his Web site, and, as this Google News search shows, the administration’s attempt to intimidate Moore has garnered worldwide attention.

What the Bushies seem not to understand is that if you’re going to attempt to exercise Putin-like controls over your critics, you need Putin-like powers. Fortunately, they never quite succeeded in getting those powers — although they certainly tried.