Media Nation

I had missed Dan Golden’s article (sub. req.) in the Wall Street Journal on diversity quotas in textbooks, so I’m glad that Jeff Jacoby decided to write about it today in the Boston Globe.

Golden — and Jacoby — devote a considerable amount of space to requirements that photos of children from various ethnic and racial groups be included. But I want to focus on rules that kids with disabilities be depicted — and that, incredibly, publishers often get around this by photographing able-bodied children in wheelchairs. Golden writes:

Thomas Hehir, a Harvard professor of education and former director of special education at the U.S. Department of Education, says the able-bodied models in wheelchairs don’t resemble most disabled children, who have conditions such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy that “affect their appearance in other ways. I look at the pictures in the textbooks and I say, ‘This doesn’t look like a kid I know. How did this kid become disabled?'”

[Company spokesman Collin] Earnst says Houghton Mifflin enlists able-bodied models for the disabled only as a last resort, and “makes a very strong effort” to photograph disabled children. It has “done casting” at Children’s Hospital in Boston, and featured a Down syndrome child in one textbook, he says. But he says it is “challenging” and “expensive” to find disabled models, because there are few talent agencies for them.

Laura Rakauskas, whose son has modeled for textbooks, said she attended a photo shoot for a Houghton math book where organizers sought a girl to pose in a wheelchair. She said several mothers refused on their children’s behalf before a volunteer came forward. She says she wasn’t troubled because seeing able-bodied children in a wheelchair is a “gentle introduction” to disability for students who haven’t encountered it.

I’m sorry, but this is pandering — benign pandering, but pandering nevertheless. In fact, any child who attends a decent-size school is likely to encounter fellow students with real disabilities. They don’t need a “gentle introduction.” Including kids with disabilities in textbooks is potentially a good thing, but not if it’s used to promote unrealistic ideas of what disability is about. If anything, it could help lead to unfair expectations about what disabled kids ought to be able to do.

One of my daughter’s classmates, for instance, has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a progressive, often fatal disorder. Over the years Nick has gone from walking to using a wheelchair. He has a service dog with him in school. It’s a terrible situation for him and his family, of course, but it’s been a valuable — and real — lesson for his fellow students.

When I was growing up, one of our classmates, Terri, was in a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy. Terri was a smart kid who participated in activities as best as she could. But as Golden and Jacoby observe, no one would confuse her with one of the able-bodied kids that textbook publishers put in wheelchairs to fill their quotas.

Golden and Jacoby invoke “political correctness” to explain the dysfunction at work in the textbook diversity campaign. Well, I guess. But I’d say that cynicism is a more apt description. For instance, check out this bit from Golden:

“Make sure physically challenged people are visible enough to comply with state requirements” and “appear on right-hand pages for a ‘thumb test,'” McGraw-Hill 2004 guidelines advise. Translation: Time-pressed state officials sometimes use their thumbs to flip through the pages speedily looking for images of minorities or the disabled. Generally, this results in examining only the right-hand pages.

Yes, parents, this is how your children’s textbooks are being chosen. Gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it?

Update: Jay Fitzgerald doesn’t think this is a big deal. “Don’t you kind of assume that most people assume all the photos are staged?” he asks. But Jay — isn’t it offensive when disabled kids, already somewhat excluded from the culture, are shunted aside so that more “normal”-looking able-bodied children are put in wheelchairs — and the purpose is to fill a diversity quota?

Media Nation is not going to link to every example of media handwringing that’s online following the decision by Colorado authorities to drop the case against John Karr in the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

But here are two, just to give you a flavor.

Howard Kurtz begins his washingtonpost.com blog today with this:

Will every anchor, correspondent and producer who shamelessly hyped the John Mark Karr story now apologize for taking the country for a ride?

Don’t hold your breath.

This was such a sham, from the opening moments, that it instantly goes down with the greatest media embarrassments in modern history.

And, over at the Huffington Post, Bob Geiger writes:

There should be a lot of very red faces in newsrooms all over the United States right about now — there should be, but I doubt there will be….

What is amazing to me is the media circus that has followed this “case” for almost two weeks now without really a shred of proof that anything had truly developed in the 10-year-old mystery.

I’m not going to defend the media’s endless coverage of a private, decade-old tragedy. For more on that, I recommend this Boston Phoenix editorial as well as Scot Lehigh’s column in the Boston Globe last Friday. As the invaluable Andrew Tyndall notes, even the three nightly network newscasts, supposedly a bastion of sobriety compared to the morning shows and the wretched cable stations, wallowed in JonBenetmania.

But I do think one small corrective is in order. The media did not arrest Karr in Thailand and fly him back to the United States. The media did not wine and dine Karr while airborne in an attempt to get him to talk. The media did not publicly state that Karr was the killer.

It was law-enforcement officials in Colorado who did all that, and it is they who bear most of the blame for this fiasco.

And I would note that most responsible media accounts have made it clear from the first or second day that the case against Karr was shaky at best.

Yes the quantity of coverage has been ludicrous. But the quality? Not so bad.

Is anyone blaming Terry Francona for the Red Sox’ collapse? I didn’t think so. Nick Cafardo this morning tells us not to blame Francona. OK, Nick. We won’t.

And best wishes to David Ortiz.

Is the New York Times Web site “published” in Britain? Times lawyers are concerned that the Brits will try to argue that, as the paper has decided to withhold from its online edition what is apparently a blockbuster story about the evidence against the bombing-plot suspects.

Under British law, news organizations are prohibited from publishing all kinds of things about criminal defendants lest the case against them be prejudiced. For Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to give in so quickly to the concern that the Times Web site would be covered by that law strikes me as overcautious in the extreme.

This is the paper whose top officials risked prison for publishing the Pentagon Papers, and who are at least theoretically risking prison now for their aggressive reporting on President Bush’s surveillance programs — something for which Sulzberger deserves huge props.

So why this? The Times is an American newspaper published in the United States. The fact that its Web site is available worldwide shouldn’t stop the paper from including stories that might run afoul of local laws. Or is the Times going to start dropping its coverage of human-rights violations in China? (Via Romenesko.)

Update: The story is now online.

Update II: And blocked in the U.K.

The Providence Journal news blog reports that the Journal Register Co. is looking to sell the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times and the Fall River Herald News.

Media Nation spent 15 happy months as a co-op student at the Call in the mid-’70s, learning the ropes from outstanding journalists such as managing editor Bill Crouse, city editors Ed Berman and Jim Anagnostos, reporters Tim Manigan, Frank Visgatis and George Farrar, and a host of others. Presiding over all this was publisher Andy Palmer and his family, who epitomized the best in local ownership.

Is it possible that local ownership is once again in these papers’ future?

It’s not as though Charles Laquidara hasn’t gotten in trouble for his political views before. Years ago, he was nearly fired from WBCN (104.1 FM), now part of the CBS conglomerate, for going off on an advertiser that helped manufacture Agent Orange.

Now it’s happened again, although this time it appears that Charles quit. The Boston Herald’s Inside Track reports that Laquidara decided to stop doing his show for WBOS (92.9 FM) — from semi-retirement in Hawaii — after station management informed him that he was being too political. Among his alleged sins: playing Neil Young’s “Let’s Impeach the President,” from “Living with War,” his best album in years. (And not just because of Young’s political point of view.)

The Herald report follows more than a week of intrigue. On Aug. 17, Clea Simon wrote in the Boston Globe that Laquidara’s ‘BOS program, “Back Spin,” had been canceled. Phil Redo, an executive with WBOS’s corporate owner, Greater Media, called the decision “a mutual parting of the ways.” Laquidara would only tell Simon that he’d been “wanting more time to kayak.”

Laquidara was unhappy with the Globe article and what he called its “smug” attempt to correct it, so he wrote a letter to the paper that he’s reproduced on his blog. Among other things, he says, “With six months left to go on my contract, I resigned — end of story. Just because WBOS accepted my resignation (not that they had any other choice) does not automatically mean the word ‘mutual’ comes into play.”

WBOS has not yet taken down the Laquidara page from its Web site.

The Herald item is based entirely on unnamed sources. Laquidara declines to comment, and Greater Media official Peter Smyth sort-of denies that Charles’ politics were an issue. But if I had to bet, I’d say that the Tracksters got this one exactly right.

Laquidara, for those of you who may be new to Boston, was a legend at ‘BCN in the 1960s (he replaced Peter Wolf) and ’70s, back when the station was an independently owned “underground” operation devoted to experimental music and left-wing politics. The station — and Laquidara — were famous for playing everything from John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” (F-bomb intact) to Monty Python bits, Miles Davis and, on occasion, Tchaikovsky. Along with “News Dissector” Danny Schechter, ‘BCN in those days was simply the only station that mattered if you were young and antiwar. Here’s Charles’ bio.

As WBCN came under corporate ownership in the 1980s and ’90s, his show, “The Big Mattress,” became increasingly conventional. Eventually he was shunted off to sister station WZLX (100.7 FM) and, finally, retirement. Even toward the end, though, Laquidara brought an intelligence and a consciousness to the air that is long gone.

For one hour a day, Charles was back. And now he’s gone again, unless you want to try tuning in here on Wednesdays between noon and 4 p.m.

Blogger is actually up and running — amazing.

I have a question. I’m trying to find a site that would give me a month-by-month breakdown of rainfall in Boston for 2006 to date, as well as historical figures. It seems like something I should have been able to Google up in a minute, but no luck. Given that Blogger’s been down more than it’s been up, I’d appreciate it if you could e-mail me. Thanks!

It usually takes a few listens for a new Bob Dylan album to sink in, so a week from now I might be raving about “Modern Times.” Right now, though, I’m a little disappointed.

A couple of days ago I, uh, obtained an MP3 version of the album, which doesn’t come out until next week. I’ve listened to it all the way through just once, but my first reaction is that it sounds like leftovers from 2001’s “‘Love and Theft.'”

The song that’s got me hopping right now is “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” But it doesn’t sound any different from the Muddy Waters original, except that Muddy could sing better. Dylan does add some new lines, like “Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains,” which all the critics, including the Boston Globe’s Joan Anderman, are making sure to include in their reviews.

“Thunder on the Mountain,” “Someday Baby,” and the downbeat “Nettie Moore” and “Ain’t Talkin'” are all promising, and Dylan’s wreck of a voice at least sounds no worse than it did five years ago. But none of the songs stands out like “Tweedledum & Tweedledee” or “High Water,” both from “‘Love and Theft.'” And let’s not even try comparing “Modern Times” to his transcendent 1997 comeback, “Time Out of Mind.”

For an absolutely hilarious review of “Modern Times,” check out Alex Petridis in the Guardian. He manages to give it four stars (out of five) while still getting in a few shots, at his fellow critics as much as at Zimmy. It’s very British. For example:

Certainly, Dylan has enjoyed an artistic renaissance, in that he published a fantastic autobiography and stopped releasing records that made you want to rip your own head off with embarrassment — but that alone isn’t enough to explain the mania that greets his every action. Perhaps it is linked to his 1997 brush with pericarditis and intimations of mortality; praise him unequivocally now, while he can still read it.

Andy Gill’s song-by-song breakdown in the Independent is worth reading, too.

The MP3 version I’ve got is pretty murky, so I’m looking forward to picking up the CD. It’s may not be great Dylan, but on first blush it sounds like pretty good Dylan. And, yes, that’s good enough for me.

Chet Curtis has a blog. I always knew he was a new-media type.

The gubernatorial debate wars, simmering beneath the surface for a while, break out today in the Herald. The headline refers to the media consortium organizing the debates as (of course!) a “Globe-led group.” Near the bottom of the story, we learn that the consortium also includes “WGBH (Ch. 2), WCVB (Ch. 5), WHDH (Ch. 7), New England Cable News and WBUR (90.9 FM).”

Yet to fire back are Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4), who was trying to put together a Nov. 1 debate without the consortium, and, of course, the Globe.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of media organizations’ working together when they ought to be competing, so I say good for Keller. But for the Herald to use this as a pretext for tweaking the Globe is kind of ludicrous.

The Herald also gives big play today to the Boston Newspaper Guild’s decision to take out anti-Globe radio ads. Sound clips included.