Media Nation

Last week I received an e-mail from someone who thought it was curious, to say the least, that “60 Minutes” failed to mention former Massachusetts Senate president Bill Bulger in its piece on ex-Whitey Bulger goon Kevin Weeks.

I didn’t do anything on it at the time, but Romenesko today links to a worthwhile piece by J. Max Robins, who doesn’t think “60 Minutes” has played it straight when it comes to the Bulgers — or to Howie Carr, on whose radio show Robins is a regular.

Good, asterisk-laden quotes from “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager.

Here is the Web version of the “60 Minutes” piece.

I’m afraid I know the answer to this already, having spent the last half-hour poking around the Web. But does anyone know if it’s possible to rent, borrow or buy “The Selling of the Pentagon” in either DVD or VHS? I would like to show it to my History of Journalism students, but it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Update: Problem solved. And thank you for the suggestions I received.

Ramesh Ponnuru, writing for National Review Online, repeats a lie about Charles Pierce today. I’m calling it a lie because the essential untruth of this has long since been established, and because — something I didn’t know until today — Ponnuru had a hand, however slight, in creating this lie. [But wait! It wasn’t Ponnuru — it was Jonah Goldberg. See “Update and correction,” below.]

Anyway, the purported subject of Ponnuru’s item (at least I think it was Ponnuru; Jonah Goldberg’s name is slapped on this, too) is something Pierce wrote that established him as such a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal that he actually believed Ted Kennedy’s support for social problems more than negated his reprehensible behavior in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Imagine that. Only in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts! Here is Ponnuru’s item:

Ramesh: That reminds me of the winner of MRC’s wackiest comment award from 2004 (the year I was a presenter):

“Charles Pierce, Boston Globe Magazine:

” ‘If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.’ “

But hold on. The truth is that Pierce was employing irony in the service of a breathtakingly vicious putdown of Kennedy, in the midst of a profile that was far, far tougher than the Kennedys are accustomed to receiving in the Globe. Here is what I wrote at the time. As you will see, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, an honest conservative, accurately described what Pierce had written as a “paragraph of pure poison.” And a letter-writer to the Globe Magazine divined that Pierce had written “a savage attack” on Kennedy. (Fun fact: Mark Steyn didn’t get it. But of course.)

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center from completely misconstruing Pierce’s intent. Here is the MRC’s account of the award, complete with video I watched a little of before my computer choked (I’m not sure whether to attribute that to a bandwidth problem or good taste), in which Jonah Goldberg called Pierce’s line “one of the most metaphorically moronic observations ever penned by a journalist,” and joked about Pierce hanging out with Jim Morrison and Osama bin Laden.

From there it was a simple leap. Bernard Goldberg picked up the MRC’s award in his idiotic book “Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite.” (No, I haven’t read it, but I most definitely have read its predecessor, “Bias: A Media Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.” I am confident that “Arrogance” is more of the same.) And a lie was born — a lie that smears both Pierce and the Globe.

It lives on.

Update and correction: Anon. 5:04 has figured out what’s going on here, and my hat’s off to him (or her; and while I’m at it, I’m not wearing a hat). In the original National Review Online item, posted yesterday at 4:24 p.m., Jonah Goldberg was addressing Ramesh Ponnuru. So it was written by Goldberg, not Ponnuru. Then, at 5:27 p.m., Ponnuru wrote:

One of Lindgren’s commenters mentioned the Pierce quote, and another one responded that it had been taken out of context — and linked to this article by Pierce about the controversy. Not having read the original article, I’m inclined to take Pierce’s word on his intent.

So Ponnuru is blameless in this affair, and I’m sorry I doubted him, given that he’s struck me in the past as being pretty reasonable. For that matter, so has Goldberg (Jonah, that is; certainly not Bernie!). But Jonah’s way, way off on this, just as he was when he presented the “award” two years ago.

Good grief. Read this (third item), about this.

Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr may have bigger problems with David Boeri than with Whitey Bulger or Kevin Weeks. Boeri, a respected reporter for WCVB-TV (Channel 5), has written an exhaustive deconstruction of Carr’s much-hyped book, “The Brothers Bulger,” for the new Boston Phoenix.

The numerous Carr errors that Boeri cites strike me as piddling for the most part, although I can understand why someone who has done as much reporting on the story as Boeri has would be irritated. Probably the most egregious error Boeri alleges involves what might be called “the tale of two cars.” It’s arcane, but it speaks to the crucial question of how hard the FBI did or didn’t try to find Bulger when he disappeared a decade ago.

More damaging to Carr is what all these small errors add up to: that “The Brothers Bulger” is little more than a clip job, pieced together from what reporters for the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have written over the years — right down to the inevitable mistakes that get made in the rush of daily journalism, but that certainly should have been fixed before being placed between two hard covers. As Boeri tells it, Carr just didn’t have the time to do any original reporting for his own book.

As Boeri observes, Carr is hardly the Lone Ranger of the Bulger saga. A host of first-rate Boston journalists have unearthed voluminous amounts of information about Bulger and his corrupt ties to the FBI. Carr, despite his self-styled persona as the world’s oldest juvenile delinquent, is a reliable and fearless reporter, which Boeri acknowledges. But so are current and former Globe reporters such as Dick Lehr, Gerry O’Neill, Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, all of whom come in for kudos from Boeri. So is Boeri himself.

Though Boeri doesn’t name names at the Herald, columnist Peter Gelzinis immediately comes to mind as someone who was every bit as courageous as Carr in his willingness to go after Bulger — and Gelzinis did it while living on the Bulgers’ turf, in South Boston, rather than in the wealthy suburbs. (Not that it matters. If former Bulger associate Kevin Weeks is telling the truth, Carr’s living in Acton was no obstacle to the Bulger gang’s almost taking murderous revenge. Carr today lives in the even-more-upscale Wellesley.)

Will Carr fire back? He’s certainly got plenty of opportunities — in the Herald, on his radio show on WRKO (AM 680) and on either of his two Web sites (click here and here). My guess is that he won’t. Boeri is too respected, and he’s got the goods.

Besides, Boeri isn’t accusing Carr of being an unethical journalist — just lazy. I suspect Carr can live with that, as long as the checks keeps rolling in.

I’m late getting to this, but did you see the “Editors’ Note” in today’s New York Times? To wit:

The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon.

The Times’s policy rules out alteration of photographs that depict actual news scenes and, even in a contrived illustration, requires acknowledgment in a credit. In this case, the film that was used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors.

Nothing about making Warner’s teeth look too big for his head, but it’s a start.

Irene Sege’s profile of Jason Wolfe in today’s Boston Globe raises a lot more questions than it answers. Wolfe, the 38-year-old vice president of programming at all-sports WEEI Radio (AM 850), was recently named to the same position at its news-talk sister station, WRKO (AM 680).

Wolfe helped turn WEEI into a huge success by encouraging a crude, locker-room approach that often veers into homophobia. (To be fair, he also presided over the hiring of Michael Holley and Mike Adams, the two best things to happen to the station in years.) Now, what will Wolfe do to WRKO? It’s a station many of us still care about thanks to the glory days of Jerry Williams and Gene Burns, even though it has offered less-than-compelling listening in recent years. (Disclosure: I’ve been known to cash a few freelance checks from the station, although not for quite a while.)

Wolfe tells Sege he wants to make the station “more exciting.” That sounds like a code phrase for something bad. Certainly mid-morning host John DePetro has made things more exciting by telling his listeners that murder victim Imette St. Guillen was “asking for trouble.” I don’t want to make too much of this — I’ve also heard DePetro says that what happened to her was not her fault (obviously). But I agree with Mark Jurkowitz’s observation that WRKO has been “shamelessly milking this for all its worth.”

Also, Wolfe seems to have liberated afternoon host Howie Carr to be himself, which is surely an ominous sign. I’ve definitely noticed that the David Scondras tape, which had been banned for a while, has been restored to airwaves.

When Wolfe took the helm, WRKO was in the midst of adding more local programming with a greater emphasis on quality. It would be a shame if he decided that what the station needs is WEEI-style towel-snapping “excitement.”

The New York Times Magazine, to put it mildly, is not known for its flattering photo-editing. Still, I thought yesterday’s treatment of former Virginia governor Mark Warner was over the top. After all, the magazine was introducing a potential presidential candidate to a readership that, overwhelmingly, had not seen him before. Far from being another take on a well-known person, this was our first look at the Democrat Who Might Challenge Hillary.

And what a first look photographer Alexei Hay gave us — 1940s-style lighting combined with a supremely unattractive obsession with Warner’s teeth and chin. Warner ends up looking like a half-forgotten character actor who plays a small-town murderer in an old movie you think you might have seen some years ago.

For comparison, I’ve included an official photo of Warner. Maybe its depiction of Warner as a steel-jawed man of destiny is as deceptive, in its way, as the Times’ — but surely it’s no more deceptive than the Times’.

Two competing versions of the sale of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain to McClatchy Co.

First, from a New York Times story that, according to the home page, was updated at 7:33 a.m. today:

Analysts speculate that the company could shut down The Philadelphia Daily News and possibly sell The Inquirer, since the business climate in Philadelphia is sluggish and the papers face tough competition from a ring of suburban dailies. On the other hand, they say, The Inquirer generates a lot of cash, something McClatchy will need as it goes into debt to pay for Knight Ridder.

From a Wall Street Journal story stamped 7:38 a.m. today:

McClatchy, which is paying $67.25 a share for the rival publishing chain, plans to sell a dozen Knight Ridder newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and the San Jose Mercury News. McClatchy said those papers are located in cities that “do not fit the company’s longstanding acquisition criteria, chiefly involving growing markets.”

Based on this, at least, it looks like while the Times was speculating, the Journal was finding out what was really going on.

Catching up: From the Times’ 8:47 a.m. update:

The combined company plans to sell 12 Knight-Ridder papers, including both its papers in Philadelphia, the Inquirer and the Daily News, along with The San Jose Mercury News, according to the announcement. Knight-Ridder papers, including both its papers in Philadelphia, the Inquirer and the Daily News, along with The San Jose Mercury News, according to the announcement.

Tom Fox sounds like he was a remarkable person. A Quaker working with the people of Iraq, he was kidnapped several months ago. This weekend it was learned that he’d been tortured and murdered by his captors. Lest we forget, he leaves three fellow hostages behind. Their organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, released a statement on Friday that says in part:

We mourn the loss of Tom Fox who combined a lightness of spirit, a firm opposition to all oppression, and the recognition of God in everyone.

We renew our plea for the safe release of Harmeet Sooden, Jim Loney and Norman Kember. Each of our teammates has responded to Jesus’ prophetic call to live out a nonviolent alternative to the cycle of violence and revenge.

Fox kept a blog during his time in Iraq called Waiting in the Light. At the moment, it’s still online. ElectronicIraq.net has posted excerpts here and here. I find Fox’s analysis of how the United States ended up in Iraq particularly striking. Wrote Fox:

It has become increasing evident to me that after stripping away all the rationales for the US invasion of Iraq, what is left is the reality that the current U.S. Administration felt compelled to invade from a basis of hate. I can envision them saying, ‘Saddam is evil. We hate evil. Therefore we need to rid the world of this evil man and his cronies.’ I can see that actions taken by Saddam could lead them to feel hatred towards him. He and his associates built palaces and enclaves where they lived in luxury while across the Tigris River was a slum where over a million residents of Baghdad lived in poverty and squalor. He maintained control of the country by devoting huge amounts of material resources to his military and security forces, a decision that allowed the infrastructure of the city to deteriorate. And most hateful of all was his use of imprisonment and torture to keep the population of Baghdad living in a state of fear.

This is rather complex — after all, shouldn’t we hate evil? What I think Fox is saying is that though it may be natural to hate evil, it is dangerous to act on the basis of that hate, because it becomes easy to become caught up in the same evil that you’re trying to vanquish. Sadly, Fox himself, a man who had transcended such weaknesses, fell victim to the weakness — to the evil — of others.

By the way, there’s a story making its way around blogland that Rush Limbaugh actually poked fun at Fox and his fellow missionaries when they were taken captive last November, saying, “But any time a bunch of people that walk around with the head in the sand practicing a bunch of irresponsible, idiotic theory confront reality, I’m kind of happy about it, because I’m eager for people to see reality, change their minds if necessary, and have things sized up.” See the Daily Kos on this. Unbelievable, except that it’s not.

If he wanted to, Limbaugh could have an apology up on his Web site right now. He does not.