Media Nation

And no, I’m not referring to the polar ice caps.

Jay Fitzgerald reports in today’s Boston Herald that CNHI — the Alabama-based newspaper chain that scooped up the Eagle-Tribune papers last year — is suspected of retaliating against employees who were involved in a failed union organizing campaign by sticking them in far-flung bureaus or saddling them with night shifts. A company official denies all.

The papers involved are the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence (well, North Andover), the Salem News, the Gloucester Daily Times and the Daily News of Newburyport.

Regardless of what happened — and I hope someone gets to the bottom of this — it’s sad to ponder the decline of the newspaper scene north of Boston over the past decade.

A dozen or so years ago, the region was dominated by three independently owned papers: the Eagle-Tribune, the Salem News (then the Salem Evening News) and the Sun of Lowell. Ottaway, a division of Dow Jones, owned three smaller dailies: the Beverly-Peabody Times and the Gloucester and Newburyport papers.

Today, those six papers have become five (the Beverly-Peabody Times was merged into the Salem News), and the three local owners have all given way to out-of-state corporations.

And it could get worse. Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell has his flagship tabloid and Community Newspaper Co. subsidiary on the block, which could result in out-of-town ownership for another 100 or so papers. Among those rumored to be interested: CNHI.

Is the Entwistle murder saga the biggest story of this or any other time? That was the rather overheated question tonight on “My TV Prime,” a New Hampshire talk show hosted by Democratic politico Deborah “Arnie” Arnesen. I was a guest along with Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan (sub. req.) and defense attorney John Swomley. Just as Eagan and I were wrapping up, we disagreed. “Take it outside,” Arnesen instructed us. So here I go.

I expressed the opinion that stories such as Entwistle are obsessively followed by just a small subset of viewers who gorge on cable news programs — and that, therefore, the end of civilization is not at hand. No, I heard Eagan say as we were fading out; the ratings for those shows are “huge.”

Well, then. Here are the audiences for such shows on Wednesday night (a big Entwistle night), as reported by the redoubtable TVNewser:

• Nancy Grace, CNN Headline News, 8 p.m., 545,000
• Rita Cosby, MSNBC, 9 p.m., 346,000
• Greta Van Susteren, Fox News, 10 p.m., 1.26 million

Not chickenfeed. But the combined audience for the three network nightly newscasts is more than 20 million, and it can approach 30 million when there’s major news breaking. The Tyndall Report right now is a bit behind, but Entwistle was pretty big news at the beginning of February, which is when it gathered its most recent numbers. Yet it didn’t even move the needle on the nets.

Similarly, NPR claims that its drive-time newscasts, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” are the second- and third-most-listened-to radio programs in the United States. And NPR has not exactly been a bastion of Entwistle excess.

So I’ll stick with what I said: Though there’s undoubtedly more Entwistle coverage out there than is absolutely necessary, it is primarily a phenomenon of low-rated cable news shows that get far more attention from media-watchers than they deserve given their small audiences.

Anyone who’s watching Entwistle coverage rather than presumably more nutritious fare is doing so by choice.

Assuming that Harry Whittington makes a rapid recovery, Dick Cheney today — finally — did what he had to do to put the hunting accident behind him. FoxNews.com just quit on me, so I’ll link to the Washington Post account of Cheney’s interview with Brit Hume:

“You can’t blame anybody else,” Cheney said in an interview with Fox News Channel. “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. It’s a moment I’ll never forget.”

Cheney said that after he shot Harry Whittington on Saturday afternoon at a Texas ranch, he ran over to him and said, “I had no idea that you were there. He didn’t respond.”

Cheney said that Whittington was laying on his back, bleeding on the ground. “You could see where the shot had struck him,” Cheney said. “It was one of the worst days of my life.”

What else could Cheney say? Nevertheless, these are the right words, and he should have spoken them three days ago.

This just in from the Associated Press:

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had a “minor heart attack,” a hospital official said Tuesday.

Peter Banko, the hospital administrator at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial, said Harry Whittington had the heart attack early Tuesday while being evaluated.

He said there was an irregularity in the heartbeat caused by a birdshot pellet, and doctors performed a cardiac catheterization. Whittington expressed a desire to leave the hospital, but Banko said he would probably stay for another week.

Ol’ Harry got peppered pretty good, didn’t he?

Your move, Rush.

Pending any further developments, the Washington Post today may have the last word on the Dick Cheney affair.

It turns out that a Post staff member, the aptly named Stephen Hunter, is himself an experienced bird hunter. He’s not entirely unsympathetic to Cheney, as he acknowledges how easy it is to be so focused on your prey that you lose sight of your surroundings. But Hunter makes two important points about Cheney:

1. Yes, folks, the accident was Cheney’s fault. Incredibly, the White House spinners are still trying to blame this on the victim, Harry Whittington. But Hunter writes:

The fundamental etiquette and safety device of bird hunting is: Obey the line.

The line is between you and the game ahead of you, and by you I mean everybody in your party. The line is invisible but should exist in the imagination as powerfully as the Great Wall of China. It is the simple geography of safety that determines that we are here and we only shoot there — that is, ahead of us. It has certain mandates. One is that at any given moment, one should know where everybody in the hunting party is. You have to keep those images in mind as you move over the ground. It has to be second nature….

It appears the vice president lost contact with the line.

2. Whittington is very fortunate to be alive. According to Hunter, if Cheney were not such an expert shot, he would likely have been firing heavier, cruder ammunition. Hunter explains:

He [Cheney] was lucky to be so superb a wing shot that he carried a shotgun in 28-gauge rather than 12-gauge. That probably saved Harry Whittington’s life. The 28 is for advanced bird hunters who’ve killed their thousands with a 12 — the common hunting shell of America’s shotgunners — and want something more refined, lighter, more beautiful. With the 28 you have to get closer, shoot faster and more accurately. The little pieces of shot break their cluster sooner, spray more widely, lose velocity faster.

Incredibly, the White House and its partisan allies continue to attempt to minimize this and to shift the blame to the victim. Here is how Anne Kornblut ends her New York Times account today:

Ms. Armstrong and Ms. Willeford said the accident was largely the fault of Mr. Whittington, who had reappeared alongside two of his hunting companions without giving proper warning. Mr. Cheney, who was carrying a 28-gauge shotgun, had already begun to fire and sprayed Mr. Whittington.

“He got peppered pretty good,” Ms. Armstrong said. “He fell with his head toward me.” She said she ran over to Mr. Whittington, who had fallen, but stayed out of the way while Secret Service agents tended to him.

“There was some bleeding, but it wasn’t horrible,” she said. “He was more bruised.”

Ms. Willeford, whose husband was also at the ranch, said in an interview after visiting the victim at the hospital that Mr. Whittington accepted responsibility for the accident. “He understands that he could have handled it better,” Ms. Willeford said. “Harry should have let us know he was back there.”

This is bogus, and Stephen Hunter has exposed it as such. “He got peppered pretty good.” Please. The bottom line remains the same: The vice president shot a 78-year-old man in the face, putting him in intensive care for several days, and let nearly a day to pass before allowing the news to become public. That’s kind of important, isn’t it?

Katharine Armstrong’s spin has given way to reality. The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reports:

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s incident report on Vice President Dick Cheney’s accidental shooting of a hunting partner Saturday pins the blame largely on Cheney….

In evaluating “contributing factors,” the game warden checked off the box: “Victim covered by shooter who was swinging on game.”

The game warden’s report contradicts earlier claims from the White House and Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the Texas ranch where the shooting occurred. Earlier Monday, the White House cited Armstrong’s view that Whittington was at fault.

Here are the documents, from (of course) The Smoking Gun.

On the plus side for Cheney, it does appear that he stuck around until the local authorities had completed their investigation.

Not to mention the fact that his reputation as the baddest veep ever has been enhanced considerably. (Via Wonkette.)

John Dickerson, writing in Slate:

When you nearly commit homicide as a public official shouldn’t the honor of your office compel you to stand up and explain yourself in some fashion, at least say something in a press release and not just whisper it to a Texas rancher?

You would think so.

I’m slightly embarrassed at not having weighed in on the Muslim cartoon controversy in any significant way. The Boston Globe and the MetroWest Daily News spoke with me, but if you read my comments, you will see that I — like a lot of people — am having a hard time figuring out just what to think.

So let me recommend two op-ed pieces from yesterday’s New York Times that are brilliant, nuanced and — best of all — freely available, and not hidden behind the TimesSelect wall.

The first, by Emran Qureshi, a fellow at Harvard Law School, takes his fellow Muslims to task for the violent protests that have broken out over the depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. And he sees a motive, writing:

Within the Muslim world, the cartoon imbroglio has given ammunition to the two entrenched forces for censorship — namely, authoritarian regimes and their Islamic fundamentalist opposition. Both would prefer to silence their critics. By evincing outrage over the Danish cartoons, authoritarian regimes seek to divert attention from their own manifold failures and to bolster their religious credentials against the Islamists who seek to unseat them.

But Qureshi adds:

[T]he answer is not more censorship. But it would be nice if Western champions of freedom of speech didn’t trivialize it by deriving pleasure from their ability to gratuitously offend Muslims. They view freedom of speech much as Islamic fundamentalists do — simply as the ability to offend — rather than as the cornerstone of a liberal democratic polity that uses such freedoms wisely and responsibly. Worse, these advocates insist on handing Muslim radicals a platform from which to pose as defenders of the faith against an alleged Western assault on Islam.

The second, by law professor Stanley Fish, portrays the controversy as a clash between religions — with the West, and particularly Europeans, finding comfort and solace in the religion of liberalism. Fish writes:

Strongly held faiths are exhibits in liberalism’s museum; we appreciate them, and we congratulate ourselves for affording them a space, but should one of them ask of us more than we are prepared to give — ask for deference rather than mere respect — it will be met with the barrage of platitudinous arguments that for the last week have filled the pages of every newspaper in the country.

As a nominal member of the religion of liberalism, I found Fish’s analysis both counterintuitive and bracing.

Anne Kornblut’s New York Times account of Dick Cheney’s Excellent Misadventure contains a fascinating passage. The interviewee is Katharine Armstrong, a member of the family that owns the Texas ranch where Cheney was hunting on Saturday. Whittington, of course, is Harry Whittington, who’s in intensive care after being shot by the vice president.

“This all happened pretty quickly,” Ms. Armstrong said in a telephone interview from her ranch. Mr. Whittington, she said, “did not announce — which would be protocol — ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m coming up,’ ” she said.

“He didn’t do what he was supposed to do,” she added, referring to Mr. Whittington. “So when a bird flushed and the vice president swung in to shoot it, Harry was where the bird was.”

Mr. Whittington was “sprayed — peppered, is what we call it — on his right side, on part of his face, neck, shoulder and rib cage,” she said, noting that she, too, had been sprayed on her leg in a hunting accident.

Apparently the lesson here is that Cheney did do what he was supposed to do by blasting Whittington in the face.

So not only did Vice President Dick Cheney shoot a hunting buddy, but he apparently tried to cover it up, at least for a while. The Associated Press account includes this: “The vice president’s office did not disclose the accident until the day after it happened.”

This isn’t a matter of intent, obviously. It’s a matter of an out-of-control hunter blasting away at a quail and placing a 78-year-old fellow hunter in mortal danger. Is there anyone outside a small circle of elite politicians who could do this without getting taken into custody?

To ask the question is to answer it.