Media Nation

I fell asleep right after President Bush’s second recitation of the 800 number, although I did read the transcript this morning. The media buzz seems to be that he met the low expectations that had been set for him, but that this was no New York bullhorn moment.

Josh Marshall, who’s obsessing (I mean that in a good way) over Bush’s choice of Karl Rove to oversee the reconstruction, says this:

MARSHALL: Then there’s the president’s great line from the speech: “It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces.”

No, it’s not. Actually, every actual fact that’s surfaced in the last two weeks points to just the opposite conclusion. There was no lack of federal authority to handle the situation. There was faulty organization, poor coordination and incompetence.

Show me the instance where the federal government was prevented from doing anything that needed to be done because it lacked the requisite authority….

This is how repressive governments operate – mixing inefficiency with authoritarian tendencies.

You don’t repair disorganized or incompetent government by granting it more power. You fix it by making it more organized and more competent. If conservatism can’t grasp that point, what is it good for?

That sounds about right to me.

The ACLU of Massachusetts strikes back:

ACLU: The ACLU of Massachusetts calls upon all freedom and privacy-loving Americans to email Governor Romney and tell him he is WRONG!

Yesterday, Governor Romney recommended wiretapping mosques and surveilling international students as counter-terrorism measures. Last year, Romney urged local agencies and businesses to collect “details and observations that might, when stitched together, point to a potential terrorist attack.” Apparently, religion and ethnicity are such details.

Massachusetts residents who believe in religious freedom, privacy and immigrant rights, and stand against ethnic profiling must demand that Governor Romney uphold the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment rights of all Massachusetts residents.

You will also be presented with an e-mail form that you can use to send Romney a message – an action that Media Nation, as a journalism blog, neither endorses nor opposes.

Still waiting for a transcript of Romney’s remarks.

The Globe certainly has a bombshell today on Gov. Mitt Romney. Scott Helman reports on Romney’s speech before the Heritage Foundation yesterday in Washington. He quotes the governor thusly:

ROMNEY: How many individuals are coming to our state and going to those institutions who have come from terrorist-sponsored states? Do we know where they are? Are we tracking them?

How about people who are in settings – mosques, for instance – that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror. Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping? Are we following what’s going on?

Not to be simplistic: of course mosques that teach “doctrines of hate and terror” ought to be monitored. But Romney seems to be proposing a surveillance regime that would make John Poindexter blush.

I would love to see a transcript of Romney’s remarks. If anyone finds one, please pass along a link.

If William Koch sues the Boston Globe and its columnist Alex Beam for libel, the outcome will depend in large measure on a decision written in 1990 by the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Koch, a wealthy businessman, yachtsman and art lover whose collection is the subject of a coolly received exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, is angry over an Aug. 9 Beam column that pores over some less savory aspects of Koch’s past. Among them: an accusation – later dropped – that he had threatened his family with physical violence, and that, in Beam’s telling at least, Koch once got caught up in some dicey business practices with respect to an impenetrably complicated transaction regarding Turkish coins. (Koch appears to have been an unwitting player.) The Boston Phoenix’s Mark Jurkowitz has all the details in this piece, which will be coming out in tomorrow’s print edition, and a follow-up blog entry.

Assuming that Koch actually sues, one of the Globe’s principal defenses no doubt will be that Beam, as a columnist, was merely expressing his opinion, and that opinion is constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment. But is that really the case? Well, yes and no. In Milkovich v. Lorain Journal, the Supreme Court essentially wrote into law the old dictum that while you’re entitled to your own opinion, you are not entitled to your own facts.

The case involved a high-school wrestling coach who was accused by a sports columnist of lying at a judicial proceeding about an altercation in which the coach’s team had been involved. Rehnquist, writing for the 7-2 majority, held that the columnist’s assertion was not merely his opinion, but was a verifiable statement of fact – and that, therefore, Milkovich, the coach, could proceed in the lower courts with a suit claiming that the column was false and defamatory. The decision continues:

REHNQUIST: If a speaker says, “In my opinion John Jones is a liar,” he implies a knowledge of facts which lead to the conclusion that Jones told an untruth. Even if the speaker states the facts upon which he bases his opinion, if those facts are either incorrect or incomplete, or if his assessment of them is erroneous, the statement may still imply a false assertion of fact. Simply couching such statements in terms of opinion does not dispel these implications; and the statement, “In my opinion Jones is a liar,” can cause as much damage to reputation as the statement, “Jones is a liar.”

In no way am I going to try to parse what Beam wrote. I will make one observation about the most explosive section in Beam’s column: his noting that Koch was once accused by his wife (now his ex-wife) of threatening violence against his family. Consider this:

BEAM: Lawyers again rushed to Koch’s rescue in 2000, when he was arrested at his luxurious Osterville mansion for threatening “to beat his whole family to death with his belt,” according to Barnstable Deputy Police Chief Michael Martin. Four months later Koch’s soon-to-be ex-wife Angela dropped her lawsuit against him, and the criminal charges also disappeared. Angela Koch’s divorce lawyer told the Globe that the case ended as part of a divorce settlement in which his client got “substantially more” than the $5 million she was due under a prenuptial agreement – an assertion denied by Koch’s spokesman at the time.

Jurkowitz quotes a letter to the Globe written by Koch’s lawyer, Howard Cooper, who pointed out that Koch’s ex-wife “recanted allegations that Koch had threatened to kill her and his son with a belt.” Well, yes. And the Globe’s lawyers will no doubt note that Beam reported that. The issue, then, is whether Beam libeled Koch by couching it so as to make it appear that Koch really did threaten his family despite the fact that the charges were dropped. Arguing that distinction will earn lawyers many, many thousands of dollars if this ever goes to court.

Will Koch really sue? The fact that his complaint has become public suggests that he and Cooper would rather force a settlement. But as Jurkowitz writes, Cooper, against all odds, took the Boston Herald to court last winter on behalf of state Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy, who claimed the Herald had libeled him by falsely portraying him as “heartless” judge who had “demeaned” victims. Cooper won $2.1 million on Murphy’s behalf, an outcome that surely made an impression on Koch when he started searching for a lawyer.

My one not-very-courageous prediction: This case is going to be with us for quite a while to come.

Follow-up: I’m told that Jurkowitz’s Phoenix piece will not run in tomorrow’s print edition – it’s a Web exclusive. And I thought I knew how things worked over there. Also, I’ve tweaked my description of Beam’s column with respect to the Turkish coins; as best as I can tell, Koch’s role appears to have been an unwitting one, and I don’t want to imply otherwise.

Like many observers, Media Nation has been heartened by signs that journalists are finally starting to push back against government officials, even if it took the worst natural disaster in American history to goad them into it. (Jay Rosen’s roundup is here.) CNN’s newly angry man, Anderson Cooper, is becoming more prominent by the day. Yesterday morning, Cooper got front-of-the-arts-section treatment in the New York Times. By last night, he was expounding on “The Charlie Rose Show.”

But is the media’s get-real moment, uh, real? Not to generalize; I’m sure most of what we’ve seen, heard and read is heartfelt. Yesterday, though, Drudge flagged a stray paragraph deep inside Michael Kinsley’s Los Angeles Times column that makes you wonder. Kinsley – who is reportedly stepping down today as editor of the Times’ editorial and opinion pages – wrote:

KINSLEY: The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to “get angry.”

Kinsley’s column is really about something else: the human instinct to ignore warnings about disaster until they actually occur. And his “get angry” line is tossed off in such a way that it doesn’t appear he attached much importance to it. But if this has become standard operating procedure at CNN rather than just an odd moment experienced by one of his Times colleagues, then it’s worth investigating further. Spontaneous anger and staged anger are two different things, obviously.

In a post on The New Republic’s website yesterday (sub. req.), Franklin Foer argued that Cooper is nothing but “a Yale-educated Geraldo Rivera.” After describing several examples of Cooper’s heart-on-his-sleeve reporting, Foer continued:

FOER: Cooper, who at times seems to posses a sophisticated ironist’s view of his business, must surely appreciate the dangers of this brand of emotionalism. The suits at TV networks swoon for tears and outrage because they draw larger audiences. (It’s the reason that Geraldo keeps getting hired.) But melodrama and sputtering outrage aren’t precisely the same as truth telling. In fact, they are often the enemies of it. (See Fox News for the obvious case in point.)

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with journalists asking tough questions of government officials, whether those officials are inclined to answer them or not. For too long, the Bush White House managed to avoid those kinds of questions. But to substitute fake anger for supine cravenness isn’t an improvement.

Please understand: I’m not saying that Cooper’s anger is fake. As best as I can tell, it seems to be genuine. But Kinsley’s tidbit suggests there may be something deeper and more disturbing going on at CNN. I’d like to know more.

Last night Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix I helped lead a discussion about a play that is built around a toxic brew of race and the media. As it happened, it took place within the context of a different real-life public controversy over race and the media taking place in and around New Orleans. But first, the play.

“The Story,” written by Tracey Scott Wilson, is based on the downfall of Janet Cooke, the young African-American reporter for the Washington Post who was forced to return her Pulitzer Prize in 1981 after it was revealed that the 8-year-old heroin addict she had heart-breakingly portrayed didn’t really exist. “The Story” is built around a young African-American reporter named Yvonne (played in the Zeitgeist Stage production by Nydia Calón), whose journalistic lapses are more morally ambiguous than Cooke’s, but who nevertheless finds herself in a world of trouble because of those lapses.

For good measure, “The Story” also draws on the Charles Stuart spectacle. In 1989, Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol DiMaiti Stuart, were found shot in their car in a black neighborhood of Boston after having attended a childbirth class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Carol was dead; Charles, seriously injured, claimed they were attacked by a black man. Boston’s black neighborhoods were turned upside-down for weeks before Charles – who had in fact murdered his wife for insurance money – leapt from the Tobin Bridge.

More than anything, what leads Yvonne and her white editor/boyfriend, Jeff (Gabriel Field), to ruin is their naivete about some serious racial realities – the same naivete we’ve seen on display in New Orleans, as credulous news people, virtually all white, have gone ballistic over the mostly black looters, rapists and murderers who have supposedly run wild in the path of Hurricane Katrina.

Of course there have been some looters, although many of them – stranded by officialdom – were simply helping themselves to life’s necessities, mainly food and water. But the idea that there was a complete breakdown of the social order in New Orleans is now giving way to actual evidence.

The Boston Globe yesterday published an important story by Christopher Shea on what really happened in New Orleans. Shea wrote:

[A]s journalists like Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune and Matt Welch of Reason magazine, have pointed out, many widely reported rumors have proved false or are at least unconfirmed.

”We don’t have any substantiated rapes,” the New Orleans Police superintendent Edwin Compass told the British newspaper The Guardian, speaking of the situation at the Superdome. Nor have any bodies of victims of foul play turned up there. The Federal Aviation Administration and military officials have cast doubt on the story of the rescue helicopter that came under fire outside Kenner Memorial Hospital on Aug. 31.

And television reporters’ tales of refugees from New Orleans hijacking cars at gunpoint in Baton Rouge or rioting in shelters there, Witt wrote, turned out to be groundless too. The Baton Rouge police told The Washington Post that crime levels had not risen noticeably in that city. There were clearly armed thugs on the street in New Orleans – and there are five murders there a week in ”normal” times, among the highest per capita rates in the country – but something not unlike the fog of war has so far kept us from determining just how many.

For the likes of Sean Hannity, the notion that New Orleans was taken over by black criminals is a comfortable trope. The truth, though, appears to be that the looting was grotesquely exaggerated, and the murders and rapes remain unproven rumors.

There’s not much in common between “The Story” and New Orleans except that a ghettoized newsroom, with few African-Americans in a position of power and influence, can lead to a complete misunderstanding on the part of white editors of what’s going on in the community. “The Story,” of course, is fiction (even though it’s based on real-life events). The consequences in New Orleans are quite a bit more serious.

By the way, “The Story” is terrific. It’s playing at the Boston Center for the Arts, in the South End, through Sept. 24.

After deadline: One of the anonymous folks who left comments to this message is right in suggesting that I could have found a better Hannity link. Here’s one.

Jay Fitzgerald asks: “Am I the only one who thinks Gillette’s James Kilts is wallowing in a form of self-pity?” Uh, no, Jay. Everyone thinks the greedy mogul who sold Gillette down the river is wallowing in self-pity. And Kilts’s attacks on his critics last week (click here, here and here) give a whole new meaning to the phrase “PR offensive.”

“He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.” Here is Time’s must-read deconstruction of Michael Brown’s résumé. The magazine did a heck of a job on Brownie.

Salon has posted a video highlight reel of outraged journalists reporting on (and from) New Orleans. Although watching Ted Koppel and Tim Russert skewer Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff is irresistible, the best part is when Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera put Sean Hannity in his place. (If you’re not a subscriber, the ACLU ad you’ll have to sit through is pretty good, too.)