Media Nation

Today’s Globe has a great column by former Atlantic Monthly editor Robert Manning on the death of the Atlantic — or at least the death of the Atlantic as We Know It, as the venerable monthly prepares to move to Washington.

Manning makes a valuable point, arguing that the Atlantic’s outside-the-Beltway location was one of the things that made it a vital source of unconventional wisdom, as it was during the Vietnam War. He writes:

I realized that Boston was a far better site from which to take the measure of the sectors to which The Atlantic Monthly was devoted — literature, science, art, and politics — than was Washington. That is why I am disturbed that the magazine is leaving the city on the hill for the city on the Potomac.

Now fiction-free and increasingly neocon in outlook, the Atlantic is severing its last ties to the past: Cullen Murphy, the gifted managing editor, will not make the move. The Atlantic may survive and even thrive. But now it’s just another Washington magazine. Don’t be fooled by the nameplate.

The year would not be complete without Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby’s telling us that, yes, he’s still in favor of the death penalty. What makes today’s column special is that he presumes to teach religion to the Catholic bishops. It comes right after the sentence in which he writes, “I wouldn’t presume to teach religion to a bishop.”

Part one of Jacoby’s two-parter is here.

When Jonathan Alter of Newsweek reviewed Mary Mapes’ book for the New York Times Book Review on Nov. 20, he opened with a devastating reminder: that the Boston Globe had exploded the credibility of her chief source, Bill Burkett, months before she relied on him in producing the “60 Minutes” story on George W. Bush’s National Guard service. That story, of course, ended her career.

Today Walter V. Robinson, editor of the Globe’s Spotlight Team and the lead reporter on several stories about Bush’s military service (or lack thereof) dating back to 2000, weighs in with his own review of Mapes’ book, which is titled “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power.” Robinson recalls that Globe reporter Michael Rezendes, in February 2004, cast serious doubt on “Burkett’s bizarre eyewitness account of how embarrassing documents in Bush’s military records were destroyed in 1997.”

The Rezendes account is still online. In it, he reports that George O. Conn, “a key witness to some of the events described by Burkett has told the Globe that the central elements of his story are false.” As Robinson suggests, it is unimaginable that Mapes didn’t take this more seriously before she rushed her unproven, unprovable allegations onto the air.

As we all know, the avalanche that would eventually destroy Mapes’ career was begun with a few pebbles tossed by conservative bloggers, who charged that the memos on which CBS relied — purportedly typed up in the early 1970s — were almost certainly produced on a computer and printer of recent vintage, using Microsoft Word’s default settings. Mapes has some choice words for the bloggers — and Robinson has some choice words for her. Robinson writes:

Mapes’s opinion of the bloggers is venomous: “A digital lynch mob at work,” she calls them. “With political blogging,” she explains, “there is very little gate-keeping, very little vetting of information before it goes out into the ether. For many of the more amateurish sites, the operators don’t seem to want any fact-checking.” And on and on.

How, one has to wonder, can Mapes be so deaf to the irony in her attack? It was her own amateurish, unvetted reporting that gave the bloggers all the ammunition they needed.

By contrast, Robinson is respectful of anchor Dan Rather — too much so, in my view. If Rather had not been so overworked, Robinson writes, he probably would have asked for the clips — and would have seen Rezendes’ report, which would have “likely halted the broadcast.”

Perhaps. But what of Rather’s over-the-top defense of Mapes, and his statement to the outside commission that investigated the story that he regretted having issued an apology? What about the fact that the National Guard story tracks so closely with another phony-documents story in which Rather was involved in the 1970s?

Mapes may deserve most of the blame. But as Christiane Amanpour said when Peter Arnett tried to duck responsibility for CNN’s Tailwind fiasco, even though he had anchored the flawed report and had allowed his byline to be published atop the Time magazine version of the story, “I object to this new image of correspondent as nincompoop.”

Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald has posted an alternate take on his paper’s prospects. In a letter to Romenesko, he writes:

I work at a newspaper that underwent severe staffing cuts six months ago. The situation forced managers to make difficult and painful choices, and some talented people went out the door. It was predicted to be the death of our news operation and beginning of the end of the Boston Herald. We’ve heard that many times before, so it was hardly worth paying attention to.

In fact, our news operation experienced a rebirth.

Read the whole thing here.

Dan Primack’s latest:

First, it has been reconfirmed that the sale is for the entire company, which includes The Boston Herald, over 100 community papers in Eastern Massachusetts and a sweet piece of Boston real estate. Second, Wachovia [the firm that’s managing the sale] received over 10 first-round bids last Thursday from both strategic and private equity players, of which a handful will be invited back into Round 2. Third, Heritage Partners [which owns Quincy’s Patriot Ledger and Brockton’s Enterprise] is looking more like a seller than a buyer. If it is ultimately involved in this deal, expect it to package its Enterprise NewsMedia LLC platform along with Herald Media for a buyer looking for significant regional expansion. Finally, the whole thing should be wrapped up by the end of Q1 2006.

Very interesting. If this all plays out — and, granted, it sounds more complicated than the Red Sox’ attempt to move Edgar Renteria — it sounds like a big media company could move in and take charge not only of the Herald and its associated 100-plus community papers, but also of the Ledger and the Enterprise.

Two aspects of this are particularly worth watching:

1. Primack’s reporting would seem to suggest that Herald Media’s principal owner, Pat Purcell, is not looking just to replace the venture capitalists who want out, but to sell his entire company. Anything’s possible, of course, but it looks like the end of the Purcell era looms. Unless —

2. Whoever buys Herald Media is so smitten with Purcell’s newspaper-management skills that the new owners decide to keep Purcell on. But I wonder. By aggressively taking the Herald downscale over the past few years, it strikes me that Purcell blew the best opportunity he had to reinvent his flagship and turn it into something that would be more attractive to advertisers — not to mention readers.

There are reasons that the Encyclopedia Britannica has been around for 237 years. One of them, obviously, is that its editors do not allow anyone to post anything and claim it’s authoritative. An example of that would be the Wikipedia.

It’s easy to see why the Wikipedia had become a darling among Internet users. It’s well-designed, free and comprehensive. It also taps into the notion — a dubious one, in my estimation — that the “wisdom of the crowd” is superior to that of professional editors. (When did the “madness of the mob” become the “wisdom of the crowd,” anyway? When they got computers?)

Right now the Wikipedia is under siege as the result of two scandals. The better-known involves former Robert Kennedy aide John Siegenthaler, who wrote an op-ed piece for USA Today last week about how he’d been falsely cast as a conspirator in both Kennedy assassinations — and that this horrifying error was not removed for months.

But there’s more. It seems that Adam Curry, the former MTV veejay who helped launch podcasting, has been caught messing around with the Wikipedia entry on that subject, possibly to aggrandize his own role. Curry tells CNET’s News.com that his motives were pure, and whines that he’s now been cast as “the asshole of the week.”

Back to Siegenthaler. According to this News.com piece, the Wikipedia may have some responsibility for the slime job, but it’s probably not liable. The reason is that a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 exempts Internet service providers from legal liability for anything posted on their sites.

As News.com notes, publishers — even exclusively online publishers such as Salon — may be successfully sued for libel by those who are able to demonstrate that they were defamed with false information, and that the publisher acted with some degree of fault. But ISPs were given a get-out-of-court card in the 1996 law on the theory that it would be impossible to monitor the thousands, even millions, of posts from their users.

News.com quotes Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying that the guiding case in this area is Zeran v. America Online, 1997 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (not the Third Circuit, as News.com claims). Kenneth Zeran was the victim of a malicious AOL subscriber who posted messages in which, claiming to be Zeran, he offered T-shirts for sale that mocked victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. The court ruled that the 1996 law clearly exempted AOL from any liability.

Now, I don’t want to go toe to toe with a lawyer. Logically, though, the Wikipedia strikes me as being more of a publishing venture like Salon than an ISP like America Online or EarthLink. The Wikipedia’s model of allowing anyone to contribute content doesn’t strike me as somehow magically transforming it into an ISP.

But those are questions for lawyers and judges to decide. Either way, the Wikipedia’s honeymoon is over.

My Northeastern colleague Bill Kirtz attended the Nieman Narrative Journalism conference this past weekend. Among the speakers: new-journalism giant Tom Wolfe and former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll.

The predominant theme was that old-fashioned story-telling may be an effective way to keep readers — yet the resources it takes may be more than today’s corporate owners are willing to spend.

Here is Kirtz’s report.

Adam Gaffin checks out Boston Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón’s new blog and finds evidence in this post (about why he’s not allowing real-time comments) that Chacón’s technical knowledge is wanting.

Still, I’m not sure I want Chacón to turn his blog into an open forum. Steve wrote the other day that Chacón would be likely to receive 10 times as many comments as Media Nation. Try 100 times. I want someone to wade through the comments Chacón receives and post only those that are the most on-point.

Michael Jonas’ column in the current Boston Globe City Weekly is on state Sen. Steve Tolman, D-Watertown, who was the co-author of the 1998 law that requires Massachusetts schoolchildren to be taught about fate of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Jonas writes:

Tolman, who urged the state to remove from the curriculum guide any references to Turkish websites that contest the genocide label, says he’s all for freewheeling debate about matters on which reasonable people may disagree. He says this simply is not such a case.

“You cannot change historical fact by saying it did not happen,” he says. “They tried to wipe out everything to make it look like Armenians never existed,” he says of the Turkish rampage. Tolman points to a well-known 1915 telegram to the US secretary of state from the American envoy to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, in which he warns of a “campaign of race extermination” underway against the Armenians.

Because the question of whether or not the deaths of up to one million Armenians was genocide has become controversial, I thought I’d check and see what the Turkish government has to say about the matter. I found an essay titled “Armenian Allegations of Genocide: The Issue and the Facts.” Here is a sample:

A century of ever-increasing conflict, beginning roughly in 1820 and culminating with the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, characterized the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire participated in no fewer than a dozen named wars, nearly all to the detriment of the empire and its citizens. The empire contracted against an onslaught of external invaders and internal nationalist independence movements. In this context — an imperiled empire waging and losing battles on remote and disparate fronts, grasping to continue a reign of over 700 years — must the tragic experience of the Ottoman Armenians of Eastern Anatolia be understood. For during these waning days of the Ottoman Empire did millions die, Muslim, Jew, and Christian alike.

Yet Armenian Americans have attempted to extricate and isolate their history from the complex circumstances in which their ancestors were embroiled. In so doing, they describe a world populated only by white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains. The heroes are always Christian and the villains are always Muslim. Infusing history with myth, Armenian Americans vilify the Republic of Turkey, Turkish Americans, and ethnic Turks worldwide. Armenian Americans bent on this prosecution choose their evidence carefully, omitting all evidence that tends to exonerate those whom they presume guilty, ignoring important events and verifiable accounts, and sometimes relying on dubious or prejudiced sources and even falsified documents. Though this portrayal is necessarily one-sided and steeped in bias, the Armenian American community presents it as a complete history and unassailable fact.

A lot of observers, including Michael Jonas and Media Nation, have tried to draw an analogy between the Armenian catastrophe and the Holocaust — that is, we have asked, without knowing the answer, whether this is a story with two legitimate sides, or whether the no-it-wasn’t-genocide faction is no more credible than those who deny that the Holocaust took place.

In that light, I think the Turkish statement is important, not because I accept it at face value (I don’t), but because of what it represents. There is no credible person, government or organization that denies the reality of what happened to the Jews during World War II. But the Turkish government — a semi-democratic, friendly, pro-Western regime — does deny that what happened to the Armenians during World War I was genocide.

Regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong, I think Turkey’s position needs to be taken into account.

A few quick observations:

1. Boston Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón writes today that he’s started a blog. You can find it here. Cruise on over, and you’ll run into his assertion that “this particular blog does not yet have the technical capability to allow people to post their comments directly.” Really? Blogger.com does, and it’s free. Then again, as much as I’m for transparency, if Chacón opens things up to all comers, there will be so many idiotic comments to wade through that it will be nearly impossible to find the worthwhile stuff. A dilemma.

2. Genocide historians Peter Balakian and George H. Stanton follow up in a Globe op-ed piece on the dispute over the Armenian catastrophe of World War I. Massachusetts education officials have eliminated materials that suggest the deaths of one million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire may not have constituted genocide. The question: Did those Massachusetts officials somehow abridge the First Amendment, as my friend Harvey Silverglate, the noted civil-liberties lawyer, contends? The answer, according to Balakian and Stanton: No. They write:

The Turkish government and its supporters are free to express their thoughts, but it does not follow that their genocide denial websites are entitled to endorsement in Massachusetts classrooms.

The First Amendment permits us to express anything, but is does not enable a foreign government’s falsification of history to be taught in our public schools.

To which I add: They’re right if they’re right. That is, if there is absolutely no legitimate scholarship showing that what happened may not have been genocide, then I agree with Balakian and Stanton. But I don’t know the answer to that contentious question.

3. Katharine Seelye has more in today’s New York Times on what’s good — and bad — about the Wikipedia, adding some details to John Siegenthaler’s harrowing tale of anonymous libel. I’m not going to give up linking to Wikipedia entries, but I’m going to look at them more closely than ever.

4. Finally, a production note: Yesterday I made the switch to Ecto (or, as the programmer would have it, ecto), a sort-of word-processing program that makes it easy to write and post blog entries without having to go to the Blogger.com Web site.

Among other things, Ecto makes it simple to have links open in windows of their own. Now, if you click on a link, Media Nation will remain open rather than disappearing into the ether.