Media Nation

The Rev. Pat Robertson has some advice for the voters of Dover, Pa., who threw the intelligent-design theocrats off their school board earlier this week. (Via Raw Story.)

I’m Miller’d out and Theo’d out today. Enough is enough. So let me return briefly to an item I posted recently on problems I was having with the iTunes Music Store.

Bottom line: The distortion I was experiencing disappeared after I turned on Sound Enhancer in iTunes (set half-way) and Sound Check both in iTunes and on my iPod. Suddenly John Prine’s “Fair & Square” sounded as clear as if he were sitting in my living room.

Nice album, too, by the way — not quite as creative as “The Missing Years” (1991), but a big improvement over his last album of originals, “Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings” (1995). “Fair & Square” sounds very familiar, but in a good way. Unobtrusive production, too, unlike “Lost Dogs.”

She couldn’t go back. And now she won’t. The New York Times reports:

Lawyers for Ms. Miller and the paper negotiated a severance package, the details of which they would not disclose. Under the agreement, Ms. Miller will retire from the newspaper, and The Times will print a letter she wrote to the editor explaining her position. Ms. Miller originally demanded that she be able to write an essay for the paper’s Op-Ed page challenging the allegations against her. The Times refused that demand – Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, said, “We don’t use the Op-Ed page for back and forth between one part of the paper and another” – but agreed to let her write the letter.

In that letter, to be published in The New York Times on Thursday under the heading, “Judith Miller’s Farewell,” Ms. Miller said she was leaving partly because some of her colleagues disagreed with her decision to testify in the C.I.A. leak case.

“But mainly,” she wrote, “I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be.”

Romenesko is compiling links, and already has Times executive editor Bill Keller’s memo.

The Phoenix’s Mark Jurkowitz defends the integrity of his fellow “Beat the Press” panelist Bob Zelnick, but says Zelnick probably should disclose the fact that he received a $4,000 fee to testify against the Boston Herald in a libel case whenever the Herald comes up as a topic. (Zelnick never actually testified.)

I’m with Mark. And, yes, I’m a semi-regular on “Beat the Press” as well, so make of that what you will. But I have not changed my belief that Zelnick’s ethics are above reproach.

If the folks at CNN were smart and/or still cared about news, they would have tried to destroy every copy of this in existence. Instead, they’re recycling it for those of us who were fortunate enough to miss it the first time.

“It” is an essay written by Anderson Cooper — successor to Edward R. Murrow, smiter of Aaron Brown, certified as the Next Big Thing — that ran more than two years ago in Details magazine. You can follow the link if you wish, but here’s all you need to know:

Going gray is like ejaculation. You know it can happen prematurely, but when it actually does, it’s a total shock.

Mind you, I don’t actually hate Cooper. He comes across as bright and hard-working. He’s no Aaron Brown, but neither is he Sean Hannity.

But what Cooper needs more than anything — a gravitas implant — is going to take time. And the fact that he would willingly make such a fool of himself in the not-too-distant past is not going to help, especially with CNN’s bonehead promotion clowns putting it front and center. (Via Drudge.)

The Boston Globe today hits the Boston Herald where it hurts — reporting not just that the Herald’s circulation, like the Globe’s (and like most newspapers), is plummeting, but that its numbers are squishy-soft.

According to figures compiled by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) and reported by the Globe, the Herald’s weekday circulation fell by 4 percent, from 240,759 to 230,543, compared to the same six-month period a year earlier. On Sunday, the situation at One Herald Square is much worse: circulation is down nearly 14 percent, from 152,813 to 131,833.

But that’s not the heart of Robert Gavin’s Globe article. Here’s the real shot across Herald publisher Pat Purcell’s bow:

[T]he Herald has been relying increasingly on so-called bulk sales to bolster circulation. In those sales, single parties, such as a hotel, school, airline, or other business, buy many papers, typically at a discount, and distribute them, often for free. Bulk sales accounted for 19 percent of the Herald’s daily circulation, or almost one in five papers.

Traditionally, advertisers have looked less favorably on bulk sales, because it’s difficult to track how many papers end up in the hands of readers, and who those readers are, industry specialists said. Bulk buyers must pay at least 25 percent of the papers’ basic price in order to be counted as paid circulation….

The 19 percent of the Herald’s daily circulation accounted for by bulk sales was up from 11 percent a year ago. In contrast, the Globe cut its daily bulk sales by 37 percent, and they accounted for only about 7 percent of daily circulation, compared to 10 percent a year ago.

The Herald has been slamming the Globe’s circulation woes since Oct. 20, when the Globe’s corporate parent, the New York Times Co., released ABC figures showing that the Globe’s circulation was down by about 8 percent on weekdays and on Sunday. Just this past Saturday, the Herald’s Jesse Noyes poked fun at a New York-area circulation drive apparently aimed at selling Globes to Yankees fans.

The Globe, meanwhile, has not exactly been shy about flogging the latest rumors that the Herald and its suburban community-newspaper chain may be for sale.

Coming tomorrow: The Herald fights back?

From the New York Observer:

It looks like Judith Miller won’t be returning to the New York Times newsroom Monday morning. Last week, the Times asked Miller to cut short her leave of absence and return to the paper Monday or Tuesday in an “unspecified editing” role, a source with knowledge of the situation said.

Making her edit? Cruel and unusual punishment, I’d say — both for Miller and for whoever’s unlucky enough to find him- or herself being edited by the wayward scribe.

Barton Gellman’s in-depth report on the administration’s use of national-security letters, in Sunday’s Washington Post, raises a number of fascinating and disturbing questions. Here’s one: From the time that the Patriot Act was approved in the days following 9/11, civil libertarians have railed against Section 215, which would, among other things, allow federal agents to snoop on library and bookstore records with virtually no judicial oversight. Now it appears that those critics may have been looking in the wrong place.

Gellman begins his article by recounting an ongoing struggle in Windsor, Conn., over a national-security letter that the FBI sent to a library official ordering him to turn over “‘all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person’ who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away.”

Former attorney general John Ashcroft liked to brag that Section 215 had never actually been invoked. For instance, here is a CBS News report from September 2003 in which Ashcroft was quoted as saying, “The number of times section 215 has been used to date is zero.” That assertion, based as it was on secret information, seemed dubious. (Among other things, the Patriot Act forbids anyone who’s been subpoenaed under Section 215 from making that information public.) In any case, when the Windor situation came to light earlier this year, it appeared that — at the very least — the count had risen from zero to one.

But wait. It turns out that the Windor library order was invoked not under Section 215 but under Section 505 — the provision that allows for the increased use of national-security letters. For instance, see this report from the American Library Association, which has been following the case. And, as Gellman observes:

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

In a 2003 assessment of the Patriot Act, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Julia Turner wrote:

This section authorizes the attorney general or a delegate to compel holders of your personal records to turn them over to the government, simply by writing a “national security” letter. Section 505 has garnered a lot less national attention than Section 215 — the library records section of the act — which may be why it is invoked a lot more often.

Maybe Ashcroft was right — maybe civil libertarians did get too worked up about Section 215. But if that’s the case, it’s mainly because Section 505 was the more dangerous provision all along.

The San Francisco Chronicle yesterday carried a horrifying tale about a 4-year-old boy who’s dying from a rare form of dwarfism. He can’t see the one doctor who might be able to save his life because his HMO won’t let him.

I posted an item about this on Dwarfblog, part of LPA Online, Little People of America’s Web site, which I edit. You can read it here.

Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Oct. 22:

I’ve always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate’s Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy — her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur — never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Eileen McNamara, Boston Globe, Nov. 6:

I’ve always liked Maureen Dowd. I have often wondered what Dorothy Parker would have made of her 21st-century impersonator.

The traits she has that drive so many feminists crazy — the red hair dye and the fishnet stockings — never bothered me. I enjoy flamboyant types.

Good stuff from McNamara, a columnist not generally known for her sense of humor.