Media Nation

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.

Last week I took New York Times columnist Joseph Nocera to task for falsely claiming that (1) you can’t move your music from your iPod to another portable music player and (2) you’ll lose all the music from your iPod if you send it to Apple for a battery replacement.

Today Nocera comes half-clean, writing (sub. req.):

Many readers chided me for writing last week that if you send an iPod to Apple to have the battery replaced you lose all your data. They noted, correctly, that so long as your music is stored in iTunes, you can easily download it onto the new iPod Apple sends you. When I wrote that line I was thinking of situations — which happen more often than you’d imagine — where your computer has crashed, and the iPod is the only place your music is stored. But when I pointed this out to a few of my correspondents, their rejoinder was swift: you should always back up the data on your computer. In the modern age, a computer crash is as inevitable as death and taxes.

Better than nothing. Although I’m scratching my head over his alibi.

I have an article (free reg. req.) in the new issue of CommonWealth Magazine on the citizen-journalism movement as exemplified by H2otown, a weblog covering Watertown. The piece focuses on Lisa Williams, who started the site about a year ago, and who covers town-council meetings by TiVoing them on the local-access channel and then taking notes after her kids have gone to bed.

Among other things, Williams tells me:

I don’t see H2otown as a newspaper, but it’s important to me that it add up to something. I’m not a professionally trained journalist. My coverage is limited by my babysitting coverage. I’m perfectly willing to be humble about that. But volunteer media is a heck of a lot better than no media. I’m angry at the economic realities of media consolidation. This is an extremely widespread problem.

Other folks I interviewed include Christopher Lydon, host of the blogified radio program “Open Source”; citizen-journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor; Universal Hub impresario Adam Gaffin; the Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain; the Poynter Institute’s Steve Outing; Baristanet founder Debbie Galant; and Greg Reibman and Dan Atkinson of Community Newspaper Co., which publishes the Watertown Tab & Press.

From today’s Boston Globe:

A campaign to build a wireless data network in Boston picked up momentum yesterday as Mayor Thomas M. Menino said he would mount an effort to spread wireless Internet access across the city.

From today’s Boston Herald:

Hub grudge politics may be delaying free Internet access in Boston as critics charge a power grab by Mayor Thomas M. Menino is stalling the spread of coveted free Wi-Fi.

*With apologies to Boston Magazine, which posted an update yesterday for the first time in months.

Give Media Nation credit. I believe I’ve come up with the least interesting sidebar to the violent international dispute over those cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Simply put: Why does the Boston Globe spell it “Mohammed”? I remember that spelling from childhood. But, at some point, “Mohammed” became “Muhammad” and “Moslem” became “Muslim,” apparently out of some language expert’s desire to make the English versions of those words conform more closely to the Arabic.

The Associated Press Stylebook specifies “Muhammad.” The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.), and the Los Angeles Times have all been going with “Muhammad.” Yet the Globe steadfastly renders the name as “Mohammed,” as it did in this Colin Nickerson piece today.

Of course, the Globe is free to develop its own house style and to go with spellings that other publications spurn. But the paper hasn’t been especially consistent. I did a LexisNexis search that showed the Globe has referred to “the prophet Muhammad” on at least a half-dozen occasions since November 2004. Granted, it has gone with “Mohammed” far more often. But the whole point of having a stylebook is to eliminate such disparities, which can be confusing to readers.

I realize that, while I’m obsessing over trivia, people are dying. Thus I offer you Mark Jurkowitz’s thoughtful commentary on the larger issues surrounding this.

The 24-year-old Bush campaign operative who tried to silence one of the world’s leading climate scientists has resigned after it was learned he’d lied about having received a journalism degree from Texas A&M University. The New York Times has the story (picking up on a blogger), which, as of this writing, is the lead item on Romenesko.

Never mind the specific details of the case about George Deutsch, which are bad enough. Think about what it means that Karl Rove and company would send an arrogant twit like Deutsch — even if he wasn’t a liar — to NASA in order to make sure that publicly paid-for science conformed to the White House’s political needs. I’m afraid that we’ve almost become accustomed to such things, but we shouldn’t.

James Hansen, the scientist whom Deutsch had targeted for telling inconvenient truths, finally popped up for his long-delayed interview on WBUR’s “On Point” last week. You can listen to it here.

Richard Sloan is a doctor and I’m not. No doubt his medical credentials are what led the folks at NPR’s “On the Media” to correct one of their guests from the previous week, Northeastern University professor Robert Gilbert. But his medical degree aside, Sloan’s e-mail turns out to be yet another example of something I’ve complained about before: a letter to the editor that should have been fact-checked but wasn’t, and was — as best as I can tell — just plain wrong.

Gilbert, the author of “The Mortal Presidency: Illness and Anguish in the White House,” appeared on “OTM” on Jan. 27 to discuss speculation that Vice President Dick Cheney’s changing shoe size is evidence of congestive heart failure, and that the bulge on President Bush’s back — briefly a cause célèbre during the 2004 presidential campaign — was related to a cardiac problem. Here’s what Gilbert told cohost Bob Garfield:

Well, I don’t think the modern press is particularly vigilant when it comes to the President’s health. For example, when President Bush supposedly fainted a few years ago after eating a pretzel and choking on a pretzel, the press basically accepted that explanation. But there certainly had been intimations by some doctors that the President might, in point of fact, have certain health problems. One problem that I’ve heard is that he might have the same condition that his father had, atrial fibrillation, and might actually be wearing an electrical device to monitor his heart and shock his heart back into normal rhythm if it goes out of rhythm.

This past Friday, the following letter from Professor Richard Sloan of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York, was read on the air (there is no transcript available yet):

Your speculation, endorsed by your guest, was that George Bush’s losing battle with a pretzel was evidence of an undisclosed heart condition, possibly explaining that squarish bulge on his back during the first debate with John Kerry. That is, the bulge might be an electrical device designed to control atrial fibrillation, the same condition that his father had. Pacemakers, the devices that perform this function, are implanted in the chest and not visible in outline on a person’s back. Whatever that bulge was it was not a pacemaker.

Gotcha, Professor Gilbert! But wait. A year ago I wrote a column on this very subject. And the speculation was that Bush was wearing something called a LifeVest. Please understand — I’m not claiming to be any type of medical expert. But the LifeVest is a real device, and it is a portable defibrillator worn outside the body designed, as Gilbert said, to “shock [the] heart back into a normal rhythm if it goes out of rhythm.”

Here is a description of the LifeVest by its manufacturer, LifeCor:

The LifeVest is the first wearable defibrillator. Unlike an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), the LifeVest is worn outside the body rather than implanted in the chest. This device continuously monitors the patient’s heart with dry, non-adhesive sensing electrodes to detect life-threatening abnormal heart rhythms. If a life-threatening rhythm is detected, the device alerts the patient prior to delivering a shock, and thus allows a conscious patient to disarm the shock. If the patient is unconscious, the device releases a gel over the therapy electrodes and delivers an electrical shock to restore normal rhythm.

I’m sure that Dr. Sloan knows his stuff inside and out. Maybe I’m missing something. But it certainly looks like he misunderstood Gilbert and fired off an e-mail without giving it much thought. And “OTM,” by reading Sloan’s letter on the air, allowed Gilbert to look like someone engaged in irresponsible speculation.

“OTM” needs to correct the correction — and apologize to Gilbert.