Not wild about Harry

I might have stumbled across the blog Squaring the Globe once or twice in the past. This morning, though, I paid a visit on Universal Hub‘s recommendation. What I found was — well, odd.

Today’s complaint by our blogger, Harry, is that a Globe story by Charles Radin about the closing of an Episcopal church in Attleboro is biased against the priest and the congregation, who are being forced to leave by the diocese after affiliating with a Rwandan branch that opposes the American church’s liberal views on homosexuality. As Radin points out, this is becoming increasingly common as liberal and conservative Episcopalians split apart.

Harry lodges a couple of weird complaints in this post. First, he writes:

Monday’s Boston Globe front page carries this picture of the last service of an Episcopal congregation in their Attleboro church. The photo’s label “Schism brings a church closing” as well as the story’s headline “Worshipers vacate Episcopal church” are both inaccurate half-truths. This congregation is being evicted on 2 weeks notice by the US Episcopal church hierarchy.

Really? How are either the caption or the headline even remotely incompatible with the word “eviction”? In any case, here is Radin’s lede, from which Harry does not quote:

In a service overflowing with tears, hugs, and evocations of historic persecution of Christians, members of All Saints Anglican Church of Attleboro held their last service yesterday in their North Main Street building and bowed to orders from the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts that they vacate the premises.

An eviction, in other words.

The other part of Harry’s post that I’m scratching my head over is his conclusion, in which he approvingly cites a story in the Sun Chronicle of Attleboro for quoting the Rev. Lance Giuffrida. Writes Harry: “The story about the church closing in the local Attleboro Sun Chronicle quotes the priest’s dilemma more poignantly: ‘I didn’t change. … I preached the same thing for 30 years. I didn’t move. I just stood.'”

The clear implication is that Radin’s Globe story fell short by not offering up a similar quote from Giuffrida. Yet here is the second paragraph of Radin’s story:

“I never meant us to be at this time and place,” said the Rev. Lance Giuffrida, his voice cracking as he addressed about 160 worshipers who filled the sanctuary nearly to capacity. “I didn’t do anything differently than when you called me” to the church’s pulpit in 2001.

Different words, but precisely the same sentiment.

I love the idea of citizen journalists like Harry holding the mainstream media to account. Squaring the Globe may not have a huge following, but it’s important because it’s part of the blogging ecosystem. (After all, with a very few exceptions no single blog is so important that it stands on its own.)

Unfortunately, based on this post, it seems that Harry is so caught up in his belief that the Globe is biased that he can’t see a straightforward news story when it smacks him in the face.

What Joseph Wilson said

I have to laugh at Josh Marshall for charging Charles Krauthammer with telling a “lie” about former ambassador Joseph Wilson — namely, that Wilson had claimed he was sent on his infamous mission to Niger by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Marshall approvingly reproduces an e-mail from someone who had seen Krauthammer make that accusation on a TV show. The reader points out, quite accurately, that Wilson never made such a claim in his celebrated New York Times op-ed piece. Marshall concludes: “Does someone know where one can find transcripts for this show. It doesn’t surprise me that Krauthammer is still peddling this lie.”

But wait. No, Wilson didn’t say it in his op-ed. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t say it. For instance, check out this Wilson statement, which he made on CNN in July 7, 2003 (thanks to Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler):

Well, I went in, actually in February of 2002 was my most recent trip there — at the request, I was told, of the office of the vice president, which had seen a report in intelligence channels about this purported memorandum of agreement on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq.

Yes, Wilson gave himself some wiggle room, but clearly he wanted viewers to believe he’d been sent to Niger by Cheney. I’m sure there are other examples out there, too. And yes, for some time now I’ve shared Somerby’s view that critics of the Bush administration have hurt themselves with their unquestioning embrace of the dubious Mr. Wilson.

It sounds like Krauthammer got it right.

An allegation of intimidation

Lucas Mearian, a reporter for the trade publication Computerworld, writes on his blog that the John Hancock insurance company is using legal threats in an attempt to intimidate him and his editors into disappearing a story. Mearian writes:

Today, I received a phone call from someone who claimed to be a lawyer with John Hancock asking me if I’d obtained a legal release to post a story about the company. “No,” I said. I was then told by a rather zealous attorney that I must immediately take the story off our Web site.

Mearian comes back with the First Amendment, which is a very good comeback indeed.

Note to John Hancock’s lawyers: I’d be happy to post your response.

Rooney and Severin

The Herald goes public with some news that’s been brewing for a while: Emily Rooney, the host of “Greater Boston” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), will be sparring with WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Jay Severin every Friday at 6 p.m., starting today. (The Herald Web site is down at the moment, but I think the story will pop up here.)

Severin thinks Rooney is a liberal, which shows that he’s wrong about at least two things: he also thinks his audience is callers are “the best and the brightest.” Anyway, Severin’s going to have his hands full unless he uses the mute button — and I can guarantee you that won’t go over well at all.

(Disclosure: I’m a paid contributor to “Greater Boston”‘s Friday media panel, “Beat the Press.”)

Tag (or don’t tag) this

I’ve got a question for the more technically oriented members of Media Nation’s readership. Ever since I switched to Blogger 2.0, I’ve been attaching “labels” — what most folks call “tags” — to my posts.

But I’ve got to tell you, I’m not sure why. After all, you can already search Media Nation for anything that might be buried within a post. What do tags add?

From what I’ve seen, tags are great within a community of other users. For instance, go to Flickr, search for photos that have been tagged “northeasternuniversity,” and you’ll find 710 photos taken by a number of different people. If readers could use my tags to find other blogs using the same tags, that would be great. But I don’t think that’s the case.

WordPress lets you stack up your tags in “Categories,” as Seth Gitell has done, and which also makes sense. (Seth is also considerably more disciplined than Media Nation in separating his posts into broad categories.)

So what about it? Am I missing something? Or is Blogger’s tagging feature just too lame to be bothered with?

A lot more than inconvenient

In what reads like a culture-war parody, the Washington Post reports that a father who’s an evangelical Christian has intimidated public-school officials into not showing Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

What really makes this story special is that the father, Frosty Hardison, who lives in the Seattle suburbs, actually accepts the reality of global warming — with a twist. The Post’s Blaine Harden writes, “The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is ‘one of the signs’ of Jesus Christ’s imminent return for Judgment Day.”

So even though Hardison refers to “An Inconvenient Truth” as “that propagandist Al Gore video,” it appears his problem isn’t with Gore’s findings (which amount to nothing more than the consensus scientific view) but, rather, that Gore thinks we should do something.

Yet Hardison won. The screening was canceled, and the teacher has been told she’ll receive a disciplinary letter for not seeking permission to show a “controversial” film.

I’m not familiar with Hardison’s community, Federal Way, Wash., but it’s probably safe to say that it has more in common with Cambridge and Ann Arbor, Mich., than it does with Lubbock, Texas, or Tupelo, Miss. It is incredible — and incredibly disturbing — that school officials would cave in to the idiosyncratic religious views of a few outspoken parents.

The public schools’ mission, after all, is to teach science. If that tiny minority of scientists who deny the existence of human-caused global warming wants to speak up, well fine. It’s possible that they’re right. But Hardison’s complaint has nothing to do with science. If he can’t handle reality-based education, let him home-school his seven kids.

By the way, I know I’m late to this. Check out Google Blogsearch for what others have been saying.

Department of self-promotion

I’ll be on “The Paul Sullivan Show,” on WBZ Radio (AM 1030), tonight at 9 to talk about Wolf Blitzer’s question to Dick Cheney about right-wing criticism over the pregnancy of his lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney.

Also, in the new issue of CommonWealth Magazine I’ve got a profile of Joe Heisler and Chris Lovett of Boston Neighborhood Network, who specialize in grassroots-level local journalism.