Media Nation

Media Nation reader Harvey Silverglate points out that I was too quick to endorse Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole’s approach in urging merchants to stop selling T-shirts that say “Stop Snitchin.”

In fact, in a letter (PDF file) to O’Toole and Mayor Tom Menino, ACLU officials Carol Rose and John Reinstein note that the not-so-gentle art of police persuasion can be considered just as much an abridgment of the First Amendment as yanking the shirts off the store shelf and slapping handcuffs on the proprietor. Rose and Reinstein write:

Over forty years ago, in Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963), the United States Supreme Court held that this type of official pressure to eliminate objectionable material violates the First Amendment. In that case, a state created commission had circulated to bookstores a list of publications which it considered objectionable. The notice sent by the commission solicited or thanked the booksellers in advance for their “cooperation” and reminded them that obscenity could be prosecuted. The result was that the objectionable books were no longer offered for sale. In the Supreme Court, the commission argued that it did not regulate or suppress the books, but simply exhorted booksellers not to offer them for sale. The Court disagreed. Although the commission had no formal power, it “deliberately set out to achieve the suppression of publications deemed ‘objectionable’ and succeeded in its aim.”

The T-shirts’ message, needless to say, is completely irresponsible, and could help contribute to an atmosphere of intimidation that makes it harder to solve murders and other violent crimes. No store owner should carry them. But that’s a different issue.

There’s no question that Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s threat to confiscate “Stop Snitchin” T-shirts from stores that sell them would be a violation of the First Amendment’s freedom-of-speech guarantee (Globe coverage here; Herald coverage here).

But everyone ought to chill out — it’s not going to happen.

Menino’s no fool, and a little bit of over-the-top anti-crime rhetoric is hardly surprising given the rise in the city’s murder rate. This morning, though, Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole told WBZ Radio (AM 1030) that city officials would restrict themselves to asking merchants to do the right thing by getting rid of the shirts. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Here (PDF file) is the ACLU of Massachusetts press release on the subject. Perhaps its quick response was the reason for O’Toole’s measured reaction.

And by the way, can’t our two dailies at least get it right in reporting on the T-shirt’s message? The Globe has it as “Stop Snitching.” The Herald says it’s “Stop Snitchin’.” But the Herald also runs a photo of one of the shirts, and it clearly says, “Stop Snitchin” — no “g,” no grammatically correct apostrophe.

Like many bloggers, Media Nation is fond of linking to the Wikipedia, the free, user-created and -maintained online encyclopedia. But I do wonder where some of this stuff comes from, and I try to give the items to which I link a critical scan to make sure they’re rooted in reality.

I’ve noticed that, increasingly, students are citing it the way those of an earlier generation would have cited the Encyclopedia Britannica. Generally, the information seems reasonable. But you never know.

So here is a cautionary tale: a column in USA Today by former Robert Kennedy aide John Siegenthaler, who says that, for 132 days, the Wikipedia’s entry on him included false information that he had once been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. Siegenthaler, understandably, calls the Wikipedia “a flawed and irresponsible research tool.”

Last July, NPR’s “On the Media” took a look at the Wikipedia. When co-host Bob Garfield asked New York University professor and wiki fan Clay Shirky about what happens to bogus material uploaded to the Wikipedia, Shirky responded with this:

There was actually a very interesting study done up at IBM in Cambridge around a project called History Flow that looked at the history of vandalism for highly contentious subjects on the Wikipedia, whether it was abortion or Islam or Microsoft, or any topic that got some group exercised. And what they found was that vandalism tended to last less than two minutes. People get e-mailed when a page is changed, so it’s not passive monitoring. There’s highly active monitoring around page changes, particularly for contentious pages, so that the vandalism is found and undone very quickly.

To which it now seems reasonable to add: Not always.

Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey today confirms that the owners of Quincy’s Patriot Ledger and Brockton’s Enterprise are interested in buying the Boston Herald and its suburban affiliate, Community Newspaper Co. Bailey writes:

[A] private equity firm, keen on synergy and cost savings, could merge many of the operations while preserving the papers’ identities. Could there, for instance, be a single headquarters, and printing plant, for all the papers? And it need not be in Boston. The Boston Herald property, owned separately by the Purcell family, could be a valuable development site.

Bailey couldn’t reach Herald/CNC principal owner Pat Purcell. But Purcell tells his own paper: “We’re very encouraged by the level of interest in investing with us. We would hope it could be concluded in the next several weeks.”

Still unknown is the meaning of “it.” A sale of the entire operation? New investors, with Purcell remaining as the chief executive? Stay tuned.

I’m perplexed by Sydney Schanberg’s latest in the Village Voice, lamenting a future in which the Internet has supplanted newspapers. “[T]he puzzlement,” he asks, “is where will the new digital providers of information get their fresh news?” And though Schanberg swears his intent is not to slam the bloggers, be aware that you will find the obligatory reference to pajamas.

I assume — I hope — that the “new digital providers of information” will be newspapers, transformed and perhaps revitalized by their move to an all-digital or almost-all-digital incarnation. Of course, the biggest ongoing story in journalism right now is who’s going to pay the bills. But that’s what we’re all trying to figure out.

Schanberg concludes with a laundry list of important stories broken in recent weeks by the Old Media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, National Journal, the Washington Post, The Nation and Rolling Stone.

Uh, Mr. Schanberg — did you have the print versions of every one of those publications? Or did you read some of them on, you know, the Internet?

Dan Primack, writing for PE Week Wire, says Pat Purcell is now actively soliciting bids for the Boston Herald and Community Newspaper Co., which comprises about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts. (“PE” stands for “private equity.”) First-round bids are due today, according to the item. Primack writes:

What exactly is for sale? Is it just the private equity consortium’s minority stake? Is it just the community papers? Is it also The Boston Herald itself?

The answer is that Wachovia [the financial firm that’s helping Purcell broker the deal] is seeking bids for the entirety of Herald Media Inc., and that it hasn’t been too receptive to partial proposals. Why? Because, on a cash-flow basis, the community newspapers are the jewel while the Boston Herald is the millstone. As I’ve discussed previously, community papers continue to outshine most big city dailies because (A) They often has exclusive news-you-can-use content (school lunch menus, pee-wee football scores, church events, etc.) and (B) Their classifieds have not been cannibalized too much by Monster, Craigslist, etc. This dichotomy is particularly striking in the case of Herald Media, where the big-city daily is a secondary read that doesn’t have much home delivery distribution outside the city limits. It also has been hurt by a free tabloid partially owned by The Boston Globe (thus lessening the Herald’s number of subway/bus readers).

To reiterate, bids are due today. Expect offers anywhere from 9x-12x cash-flow, and a new Herald Media owner by springtime.

Among the possible buyers, according to Primack: Enterprise NewsMedia, which owns the Patriot Ledger of Quincy and the Enterprise of Brockton. Kind of ironic, given that Purcell had long wanted to buy those papers himself.

Nearly seven years ago the Atlantic Monthly published a terrifying cover story by the scientist William H. Calvin titled “The Great Climate Flip-Flop.”

Calvin’s thesis, simply put, was that global warming could disrupt the northward flow of the Gulf Stream and thus, paradoxically, kick off a new ice age in Northern Europe — which is, after all, at approximately the same latitude as Labrador.

Now a new scientific study, reported in the journal Nature, finds that it may already be happening, according to this New York Times story.

Here’s an excerpt from the Nature press release:

Failures of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation system are thought to have been responsible for abrupt and extreme climate changes during the ice age that lasted from 110,000 to 23,000 years ago. More recently, a fictional shutdown of the Gulf Stream inspired the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day after Tomorrow.

The climate shifts depicted in the movie, in which New York is engulfed by an instant ice age, are mere fancy. But scientists are worried about the real changes measured in the North Atlantic. Both salinity and water density, which influence the transport of warm waters, have previously been found to be decreasing.

Global warming is often thought to be a gradual process. But, as Calvin noted in the Atlantic, the effects of it could come in catastrophic waves, as tipping points are reached and then breached. This isn’t alarmism — it’s realism.

There may be more to say in the coming days about the U.S. military’s secret advertorial campaign in Iraq, a story that was broken yesterday by the Los Angeles Times.

For now, though, kudos to NPR’s new Pentagon correspondent, John Hendren, who scored an interview with David Halberstam, the author of a classic history of American involvement in Vietnam, “The Best and the Brightest.”

Halberstam: “The only people they fool are themselves. And then they begin to believe it, and then they begin to believe in the Potemkin village. And so it’s stupid. It doesn’t work, and it’s dangerous in the sense that it corrupts those who are trying to corrupt others.”

You can listen to Hendren’s piece here.

Mickey Kaus has some worthwhile thoughts on what’s wrong with TimesSelect. No, information doesn’t want to be free. But it does want to be available.

The New York Times finally publishes a toughly worded editorial about reports that white phosphorus used by U.S. forces against insurgents in Fallujah last year wound up injuring and killing civilians as well. An excerpt:

Now the use of a ghastly weapon called white phosphorus has raised questions about how careful the military has been in avoiding civilian casualties. It has also further tarnished America’s credibility on international treaties and the rules of warfare.

White phosphorus, which dates to World War II, should have been banned generations ago. Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy’s positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body.

The United States restricted the use of incendiaries like white phosphorus after Vietnam, and in 1983, an international convention banned its use against civilians. In fact, one of the many crimes ascribed to Saddam Hussein was dropping white phosphorus on Kurdish rebels and civilians in 1991.

Among other things, the editorial is invaluable for its implicit challenge to the news side to start investigating this story.