Media Nation

Day One, and I’m already peeved about TimesSelect, the disaster-in-the-making by which the New York Times will charge if you want to keep reading its columnists and a few other “premium” features.

I’m a paid-up, bona fide subscriber to the print edition, which right now is sitting on our kitchen table 25 miles away. So I tried entering the username and password I’ve had for NYTimes.com since those dark, long-ago days when I was running Lynx on a Unix account. No go: “Your ID must be either the e-mail address you used to register at NYTimes.com or your Home Delivery user ID, not your NYTimes.com member ID.”

So I tried to figure out how to get my “Home Delivery user ID,” only to be told it was either (1) the credit-card number we use to pay for our subscription (we pay by check); or (2) a number that’s on the delivery label. Our paper doesn’t come with a delivery label, so I’m not sure what that’s about. My last remaining option is to dig out an old bill. Which, of course, is 25 miles away.

Fie! Fie!

Thanks to Media Nation reader SCO, I was able to find a video of Gov. Mitt Romney’s remarks on wiretapping mosques, a statement that got him into trouble last week when his words were reported by the Boston Globe. I captured the audio to my Mac using WireTap (weirdly appropriate, no?), copied it to iTunes, converted it to an AAC file and moved it to my iPod. (Whew!) I listened on my way to work this morning, and identified a five-minute segment that goes to the heart of the matter.

The Globe article, by Scott Helman, placed Romney’s words in their proper context. Hearing the whole thing doesn’t make the governor look any better (or worse). Still, a fuller explication does reveal more about Romney’s thinking, and is thus worth a look.

Romney began by attempting to draw an analogy between the smaller/ faster/ more-nimble ethos embraced by the business world in recent years and how the struggle against terrorism ought to be pursued. He managed to work in word of praise for the war in Iraq, calling it part of a necessary “offensive” strategy against terror. And he addressed the futility of local efforts such as trying to defend, say, every bridge in the state, noting that even if it were possible to station a police cruiser at each one, there would be no way of knowing whether any particular vehicle represented a threat.

He then said this:

ROMNEY: In my opinion, based upon the work that I’ve done, it’s virtually impossible to have a homeland-security system based upon the principle only of protecting key assets and response. The key to a multilayered strategy begins with effective prevention. And for me, prevention begins with intelligence and counter-terrorist activity. And if you look back, … of all those billions that went out to the states, how much got spent in that activity, it would be a very, very small portion, if any, in many, many states. And as a nation, I think our number in that regard. How much more are we spending in domestic intelligence and domestic counter-terrorism relative to what we’re spending on protection and response? And I think the number would be very, very small indeed.

What do I mean? … Domestic intelligence – you know, I’m talking about monitoring people who come here from foreign countries that are terrorist-sponsored countries, individuals that may have been taught at places where terrorist training is going on. Tracking students, visitors. We have 120 colleges and universities in Massachusetts, roughly. 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 – who may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror? Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping? Are we following what’s going on? Are we seeing who’s coming in, who’s coming out? Are we eavesdropping, carrying out surveillance on those individuals that are coming from places that have sponsored domestic terror?

And by the way, whose job is it do that? Should I do that as a governor? I’ve got those colleges and universities. Should my state police have an intelligence unit that’s monitoring people that are coming in? We’re an international port. Boston gets a lot of flights in. Should we be checking people coming from places of concern and following them, finding out where they go? Checking their hotels, seeing who they meet at their hotels? Should I be doing that at the state level? Should the federal government be doing it instead?

New York City … said, hey, the federal government’s not doing the job, we’d better do it as a city. New York City has substantially more people doing intelligence work, counter-terror work, than my whole state does. [An editorial aside: The population of New York City is about 8 million; of Massachusetts, less than 6.5 million.] As a matter of fact, I wondered whether as governor I was failing by not having this kind of a unit. So I got together with our colleagues on the Homeland Security Advisory Committee and said, we need to understand what the state’s role is and the local role is. Should we do what New York City is doing? Should I establish several hundred or several thousand people in an intelligence capability at the state level? Or should the city of Boston do it, or all 351 cities and towns?… And after working with a lot of different states, I came to some interesting conclusions. First, it is not the state’s role to organize a counter-terror and intelligence capability. That states are free to do that if they’d like to, but by and large that’s the role of the federal government, that’s the FBI. It’s their job to be doing that kind of work.

But it is, however, the state’s role to do something else, and that is to take advantage of the one intelligence source where we have a substantial advantage relative to the terrorists. And that is the advantage of lots of eyes and ears. And that is, it’s the state’s role to find out how to gather the data from its citizens, from the private sector, from the local police departments, from the water and meter readers and so forth, to get the eyes and ears that we have. It’s the state’s responsibility to figure out how to gather that information and fuse it together, interpret it, analyze it, fuse it together, and send it to Washington where it can be connected with eyes and ears from other states, and foreign intelligence, to determine where real threats exist.

Before moving on to another topic, he spent a few moments praising Massachusetts’s own so-called fusion center, which itself has been a matter of some controversy among civil libertarians. And, yes, his reference to meter-readers sounded positively Poindexteresque.

Romney’s comments strike me as troubling but not outrageous. The real problem, I think, is that Romney – while trying to pump up his presidential hopes – said things that could be interpreted as offensive to Muslims without having made the effort to reach out to them first.

As Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, told Helman in a follow-up story, “If the governor is not going to apologize, the least he could do is reach out to the Muslim and immigrant community and say, ‘This is where I was coming from.’ Nobody is going to disagree that there are extremists who are looking to hurt us. We’re just asking for some time around the table to have a conversation.”

I know exactly when I attended my first Bruce Springsteen concert: Oct. 30, 1974, the night of the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Springsteen was playing in the old Music Hall in Boston, later renovated and renamed the Wang Center, and I was up somewhere in the balcony. Dr. John opened. And at 9 p.m., Springsteen and an early version of the E Street Band took the stage.

Bruce began with “Incident on 57th Street,” accompanied only by a young woman playing an electric violin – a spine-tingling performance that presaged the piano-and-glock version of “Thunder Road.” I was already hooked on the strength of his 1973 album, “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,” which still might be his best. (Certainly it’s the greatest summer album ever.) The band did three and a half hours without much material, stretching “Kitty’s Back,” for instance, to a half-hour workout. At 12:30 a.m., after a series of encores, he finally left the stage for good. The last thing I remember was the promoter walking out to announce that Ali, against all odds, had defeated the mighty Foreman. Pandemonium.

What calls this to mind is a snide piece in today’s Boston Globe by James Parker on the matter of Springsteen-worshippers in academe. Parker has fun lampooning these earnest Bruce fans; and though he acknowledges Springsteen’s undeniable talent, he also disdains him as the most mainstream and conventional of musicians.

To which I say: neither Parker nor the academics get it. The problem stems from the misunderstood arc of Springsteen’s career. His image is that of a rock-and-roller who never really lost whatever it was he had, and who has managed to age gracefully with ever-more-mature songs and performances. The reality is that he was King of the Universe from 1973 to ’82, but has been pretty much sucking wind ever since.

Before there was punk rock, Springsteen was sometimes called a punk. It was a label he deserved: his music was a raucous, street-wise antidote to the bloated, pretentious synth-garbage being put out in the ’70s by the likes of Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer. “Born to Run” (1975) and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (1978) established him as the coolest guy in rock, “The River” (1980) as its most literate and ambitious, the acoustic howl of “Nebraska” (1982) as its most daring and original.

Now here he is, 23 years later, still recording, still rocking. But the truth is that those early albums were just … about … it. “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984) instantly became the huge hit he had earned, but it was also an artistic comedown. Since then, he’s produced one good album (“Tunnel of Love,” 1987), one very good album (“The Ghost of Tom Joad,” 1995) and some real dreck. His 9/11 album, “The Rising” (2002), is such an embarrassment that it makes my skin crawl when I listen to it. (The one decent song, “My City of Ruins,” was written before 9/11.) His new album, “Devils & Dust,” is notable mainly for the title song, which is about the Iraq war, and the sweet “Jesus Was an Only Son.” (But what happened to James? Jesus’ brother, that is, not Parker.)

It’s hardly surprising that a man who was a celebrated rock star in his 20s and 30s would see the quality of his output diminish considerably in his 40s and 50s. Certainly “Devils & Dust” is a damn sight better than anything a whole raft of ’60s and ’70s stars have managed to produce since their golden days. Thus it’s not so much Springsteen I’m objecting to as it is the notion advanced by his most ardent fans that he hasn’t lost a thing, and that he’s as vital as he ever was. Well, yes he has, and no he isn’t.

As for Parker, he correctly observes that Springsteen doesn’t matter nearly as much as these folks believe, but he makes the mistake of extrapolating backwards to assert that he never did. Sorry, James. Bruce Springsteen saved rock and roll. For a decade, he mattered like few pop stars have ever mattered, just a few steps behind Bob Dylan, John Lennon and a tiny handful of others.

That Dylan himself has turned out to be more interesting in his 60s than Springsteen is in his 50s is just one of those unfortunate facts of life. But don’t try to take away from what Bruce did when he was damn close to being the only musician who mattered.

In his column on Jay Severin in yesterday’s Globe, Scot Lehigh reported that Severin’s claim of having won a Pulitzer Prize was false – that, in fact, Severin had merely been writing for MSNBC.com back in 2000, when the site won an Online Journalism Award. Severin, in trying to explain his hyperbole, told Lehigh that the award was “the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Web journalism.”

Which begs the question: Were Severin’s contributions specifically acknowledged in the award that MSNBC.com won? Unfortunately, the Online Journalism Awards have changed sponsors several times, and a Google search led me down a trail of broken links. However, I did find the judges’ comments for the 2000 award in a press release on LexisNexis. Here are those comments:

THE JUDGES: MSNBC.com creates a highly successful blend of online and interactive elements, making innovative use of most every interactive application, such as charts, maps, surveys, and streaming video. The site offers a commendable marriage of original journalism with video resources, and, more broadly, a successful integration of journalism from its partners and alliance members. In this case, bigger surely is better.

Given those criteria, Severin’s reported claim that “I received a Pulitzer Prize for my columns for excellence in online journalism” looks even more ridiculous.

By the way, Severin was not at his post yesterday on the airwaves of WTKK Radio (96.9 FM). His usual custom when attacked is to spend most of his show whipping “The Best and the Brightest” into a frenzy. It would be unfair of me to speculate why he took yesterday off (his absence could easily be explained by contract complications raised by his new syndication deal), but it certainly would have been interesting to hear his response to Lehigh’s column.

The Globe’s Geoff Edgers today reports that right-wing/ libertarian/ frat-boy radio-talk-show host Jay Severin is going national. Severin, of course, is best known for his charming descriptions of Hillary Clinton as a “socialist” and a “pig,” and for his blow-torch rhetoric against “towelheads” and “wetbacks.”

The silver lining in Edgers’s piece is that there’s a chance Severin will disappear from the local airwaves.

Meanwhile, longtime Severin nemesis Scot Lehigh, in his Globe column today, accuses Severin of having falsely claimed to have won a Pulitzer Prize. No doubt Severin will be trashing Lehigh today from 3 to 7 p.m.

Oh, look: here’s a website that claims Severin is too liberal. Good grief.

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.