Media Nation

Is it just me? Is the Web ridiculously slow today? Or is that guy in the pickup truck across the street pilfering my WiFi signal?

It certainly doesn’t make me feel like blogging, although I’ll try again later. For now, I’ll leave you with Jody Rosen’s ridiculous Slate essay about Johnny Cash in which he asks: “Can pop music be both great art and shameless kitsch?”

Answers: (1) Uh, yes; and (2) I believe that was settled about 50 years ago.

David Scott on Boston’s lily-white sportswriting brigade.

According to this post at Blue Mass Group, Attorney General Tom Reilly is pushing ahead in his efforts to help the State Police suppress an online video of a man being arrested in his home.

In April, a federal judge ruled that the video — posted with the arrestee’s permission — could remain on the Web as a matter of free speech. The arrestee, Paul Pechonis, and the person who posted the video, Leominster resident Mary T. Jean, claim that the clip shows State Police taking Pechonis into custody without a warrant.

Last month I gave the State Police a Phoenix Muzzle Award for their persecution of Jean, who could be facing up to two years in prison for having the temerity to exercise her constitutional rights.

I don’t know the identity of the person who posted the item to Blue Mass Group, and I’m also concerned that the item links back to Jean’s own Web site — hardly a neutral source of information.

But as this May 12 story the Worcester Telegram & Gazette makes clear, Reilly’s stand on the wrong side of this First Amendment issue is not new. Let’s hope that U.S. District Court Judge Dennis Saylor makes his preliminary injunction permanent.

And perhaps someone can ask Reilly at the next gubernatorial debate whether he would have prosecuted the person who made the Rodney King video.

I deleted my Media Nation settings for Ecto and recreated them. It seems to be working again.

Firefox quit on me just as I was about to post a long entry on the Christian Science Monitor, the Web and its 11-part series by (and about) Jill Carroll.

Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow. One point I do want to make is that the Monitor has moved so far down the road toward being a Web-only publication that its executives don’t mind syndicating the series to the Boston Herald.

Meanwhile, it looks like I need to try Ecto again, even though I’d given up on it because of its frequent refusal to communicate with Blogger. I suppose I can always cut and paste.

Bill O’Reilly might be interested to know that the Globe’s Brian MacQuarrie was actually following up this story in the Dorchester Reporter when he interviewed injured Iraq war veteran Brian Fountaine. In the July 27 issue of the Reporter, Fountaine had this to say:

Fountaine says that he, like many other injured soldiers, are angry about their Iraq experience and aren’t afraid to tell the president or anyone else about it.

“My guys ask me all the time: ‘Are we just riding around waiting to get blown up?’ And I’d always say, ‘No, shut up, that’s not our mission.’ But, you’ve got to sit back and ask yourself, what is our mission?”

In Fountaine’s opinion, fighting a surrogate war on behalf of the Iraqi people will never pay off.

“They’ve been at war with themselves and others for a thousand years,” he told the Reporter. “There’s blood hatred between the Shia and Sunnis. They take it very seriously. It’s going to take a lot of work and I don’t know if it will work.

“I think we need to get the guys out of there. There’s more and more guys getting killed, and what’s the purpose?”

Check out this comment from the Reporter’s managing editor, Bill Forry.

Remember the promo that O’Reilly stuck on his Web site earlier this week: “The Boston Globe is at it again, turning a pro-war disabled veteran into a critic of the Iraq war.” Fountaine may have changed his mind. But MacQuarrie clearly got it right at the time.

The Christian Science Monitor has posted a promo of its upcoming Jill Carroll series on YouTube. Have a look.

There’s still much to learn about the terrorist plot revealed yesterday, and I’m not going to flatter myself into thinking I have anything intelligent or useful to add at this point.

Like anyone else, I’m grateful that the British authorities were able to nip this in the bud, although it will be interesting to learn how serious the threat really was. Sorry to sound cynical, but we’ve all learned that we can’t take these things at face value.

Republican and conservative attempts to take political advantage of this (here’s an example) are as predictable as they are loathsome.

But I guess, more than anything, I’m wondering about radical Islamists within Britain’s Muslim population, and how much of a comparison can be drawn to the United States. Where is all this going to lead? Probably to some pretty nasty places.

I’m astounded that Nick Lemann would slash the budget for CJRDaily while attempting to prop up the print edition of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Lemann has gotten cuffed around by many in blogworld for his recent New Yorker article on citizen journalism. I didn’t think he deserved it — it was a smart and nuanced piece.

But this latest move is just dumb. Jay Rosen tells the New York Times that, instead, Lemann should dump the print edition. Rosen is being predictable, of course. But he’s also right.

Update: Lemann explains his reasoning in a letter to Romenesko.

It’s hard to know what to make of this. Army Sgt. Brian Fountaine, who lost his legs in Iraq, went on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” last night and claimed the Globe had falsely portrayed him as having turned against the war.

The Herald, naturally, was all over it — but seemed to conclude that the Globe story, by Brian MacQuarrie, was accurate.

Fountaine has been big in the Herald of late because of his publicly expressed desire to become a firefighter, despite his serious injuries. Mayor Tom Menino has said the city will try to accommodate him.

Just to complicate matters, the Weekly Dig’s blog recently whacked the Herald for portraying Fountaine as a supporter of the war while failing to acknowledge MacQuarrie’s story.

A transcript of Fountaine’s appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” (available only via LexisNexis) shows that though Fountaine thinks he had been treated unfairly by the Globe, veteran media-watcher Marvin Kalb — who’s on Fox’s payroll — believes the Globe story was accurate. Here’s an excerpt from Kalb:

I had the pleasure of talking with Sgt. Fountaine and his mother before we went on air. And my understanding, from what they told me, was they objected to the photograph that was used and to the headline but he told me that all of the quotes are accurate. It is simply the way in which the story is presented.

Every story is the result of a reporter’s instinct. The reporter who wrote this story did it his way. I would have done it my way.

So what do we make of this? Fountaine comes across as a brave young man who paid a terrible price for his military service, and who is still sorting it all out. He was probably shocked to see that the Globe played his story on page one, and then began to have second thoughts.

Credit the Herald and reporter Jessica Heslam for not turning this into another exercise in knee-jerk Globe-bashing.

O’Reilly, of course, deserves no credit. Here’s what he’s got promoting the second hour of his radio show yesterday: “The Boston Globe is at it again, turning a pro-war disabled veteran into a critic of the Iraq war. How did it happen? And more importantly, why did it happen?” Please.