Media Nation

There is no “controversy” over James Frey’s admission that his book “A Million Little Pieces” is not the nonfiction memoir he had claimed it to be; only the exposure of a literary crime. There’s been a voluminous amount of commentary since last week. Michiko Kakutani’s, in today’s New York Times, is especially good.

Bloviation over whether a memoir has to be entirely true is especially troubling because, at root, nonfiction — whether it’s memoir, history, biography or social science — is a form of journalism, or at least its first cousin. If it isn’t true, it’s worthless, regardless of its literary merits. (I’m not talking about an inadvertent error or two. I’m talking about intent.)

Several years ago I published my one and, so far, only book — a nonfiction work on the culture of dwarfism that combined social criticism, interviews, medical and science journalism, historical research and, yes, memoir. Titled “Little People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter’s Eyes” (that’s where the memoir comes in), it is currently out of print, although I have some hopes for a paperback edition.

Readers can like what I wrote or not. But the one promise I made every effort to deliver on was that “Little People” would be a work of nonfiction. I taped hours upon hour of interviews. I kept reconstructed quotes from years past to a minimum, and explained their limits in the footnotes. When my editor asked for more of our daughter, Becky’s, voice, I didn’t try to rely on the vagaries of memory. Rather, I sat down with Becky — who was 10 at the time — and told her exactly what I was up to. She could have cooperated or not. Fortunately, she wanted to do it, and we had our first serious conversation about her dwarfism. With a tape recorder rolling.

There are so many authors trying to do it right that it’s depressing to see someone like Frey succeed by cheating. The diminution of trust that accompanies such a revelation harms all of us — readers and, of course, writers, who have a hard enough time getting published and noticed as it is.

Right after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the Washington Post published a report on people who thought the disaster was God’s retribution. Post writer Alan Cooperman led with this:

Steve Lefemine, an antiabortion activist in Columbia, S.C., was looking at a full-color satellite map of Hurricane Katrina when something in the swirls jumped out at him: the image of an 8-week-old fetus.

“In my belief, God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion,” said Lefemine, who e-mailed the flesh-toned weather map to fellow activists across the country and put a stark message on the answering machine of his organization, Columbia Christians for Life.

Well, yesterday New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who did so much to spread false rumors of rapes and killings last fall, was at it again, making common cause with Lefemine. Only Nagin’s God is upset about a, uh, different set of issues. John Pope writes about Nagin’s Martin Luther King Day speech in today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune:

“This city will be a majority African-American city. It’s the way God wants it to be,” Nagin said. “You can’t have it no other way. It wouldn’t be New Orleans.”
Nagin’s remarks were tucked into a wide-ranging speech, delivered on the steps of the federal courthouse, in which the mayor related a dream conversation he had with the slain civil rights leader.

In addition to discussing New Orleans’ reconstruction, unity and numerous issues in the black community, in his speech Nagin attributed the recent hurricanes striking the United States to a God who is “mad at America” for waging a war in Iraq based on false pretenses. Nagin said God also is upset at the black community for not taking better care of its people….

“We ask black people…. It’s time for us to come together,” said the mayor, who is black.

“It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans,” he said. “And I don’t care what people are saying in Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day.”

Nagin also said that last year’s devastating hurricanes were signs of God’s wrath.

“Surely God is mad at America,” he said.

I think we finally have the definitive answer to the question of whether we need to take Ray Nagin seriously.

Earlier this afternoon I stopped by my local Apple store, hoping one of the “geniuses,” as Apple actually calls them, would accept the offering of my iBook-from-hell and ship it out for the fifth time in less than three years. (This time it’s the video — again.)

I was unsuccessful. The Genius Bar was booked for the day, and my rather heated argument that I shouldn’t have to wait behind a bunch of people trying to figure out how to turn on their new iPods when I had an oft-broken computer to ship out failed to persuade the smug young manager.

While I was waiting, though, I did see something incredibly cool on the back-of-the-store projection screen — a Mac version of Google Earth. As soon as I got home, I fired up the family iMac and went looking for the download. Alas — it requires OS X 10.4, and we’ve only got 10.3.

Is this really necessary? Does Google Earth absolutely require something that’s only available in 10.4, or did Google’s programmers just not want to make the effort? By way of analogy, it’s interesting that the latest version of Firefox, an open-source browser, works just fine with 10.3, whereas if you want to keep Apple’s inferior Safari up to date you’ve got to upgrade to 10.4.

Google Maps offers much of what Google Earth has, and it doesn’t require extra software. I guess it will have to do for now.

Instant update! Google says, “Currently, Google Earth isn’t supported on the Mac OS 10.3.9 or earlier versions. We’re working on this issue and hope to have Google Earth available for more Mac OS versions in the near future.” Very nice. All is forgiven.

If you click on the “contact” link at former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox’s Web site, it will automatically start your e-mail program and fill in the subject header with this: “Love your website!” Somehow apt.

Joseph Epstein has a terrific essay in Commentary about the ongoing death of newspapers. As you might expect, it’s filled with conservative disdain for what he sees as a media overcome with liberal bias. But never mind. The writing is literate and elegant, and it closes with this wonderful passage:

The time of transition we are currently going through, with the interest in traditional newspapers beginning to fade and news on the computer still a vast confusion, can be likened to a great city banishing horses from its streets before anyone has yet perfected the automobile.

Nevertheless, if I had to prophesy, my guess would be that newspapers will hobble along, getting ever more desperate and ever more vulgar. More of them will attempt the complicated mental acrobatic of further dumbing down while straining to keep up, relentlessly exerting themselves to sustain the mighty cataract of inessential information that threatens to drown us all. Those of us who grew up with newspapers will continue to read them, with ever less trust and interest, while younger readers, soon enough grown into middle age, will ignore them.

My own preference would be for a few serious newspapers to take the high road: to smarten up instead of dumbing down, to honor the principles of integrity and impartiality in their coverage, and to become institutions that even those who disagreed with them would have to respect for the reasoned cogency of their editorial positions. I imagine such papers directed by editors who could choose for me — as neither the Internet nor I on my own can do — the serious issues, questions, and problems of the day and, with the aid of intelligence born of concern, give each the emphasis it deserves.

In all likelihood a newspaper taking this route would go under; but at least it would do so in a cloud of glory, guns blazing. And at least its loss would be a genuine subtraction. About our newspapers as they now stand, little more can be said in their favor than that they do not require batteries to operate, you can swat flies with them, and they can still be used to wrap fish.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Mark Jurkowitz has got what you want — his first big takeout on the Boston Globe since he left that paper and returned to the Boston Phoenix last summer. I don’t want to read anything this long on the Web, so I’ll wait until tomorrow. But you may, if you choose, get started right now.

I rarely watch “The O’Reilly Factor” — for that matter, I rarely have the TV on at 8 p.m. — but I tuned in tonight to catch Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who was on to talk about the NSA wiretapping story and his related essay in last week’s Boston Phoenix.

O’Reilly was unusually respectful of Silverglate. But next up were Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Marvin Kalb, Jones’ predecessor, who now heads up the school’s Washington branch. The ostensible subject was why the Shorenstein Center has gone “far left.” But the subtext — actually, it was right on the surface — was O’Reilly’s continued resentment of the fact that Al Franken researched his bestseller “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” while he was at Shorenstein a few years ago.

O’Reilly, himself a K-School alumnus, referred incessantly to Franken’s “defamation” book and to the fact (I guess it’s a fact; maybe it isn’t) that Franken used Shorenstein research assistants and misused Shorenstein letterhead in gathering material for his book, of which O’Reilly is one of the main targets. O’Reilly also claimed that his own research shows Shorenstein currently has 22 Democrats on board and just one Republican. (I’m using the ambiguous “on board” because O’Reilly seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between fellows, faculty and staff.)

Where it really got weird, though, was when O’Reilly began attacking former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll, who recently joined Shorenstein as a visiting professor, as “far left.” His voice rising, O’Reilly claimed that both Carroll and editorial-page editor Michael Kinsley, whom Carroll brought to the L.A. Times, were forced out because of their “far left” views. What?

Carroll, who turned the Times into a Pulitzer machine, is well-known for, among other things, criticizing his staff for its alleged liberal bias. In May 2003 he wrote a memo that began:

I’m concerned about the perception — and the occasional reality — that the Times is a liberal, “politically correct” newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer.

The apparent bias of the writer and/or the desk reveals itself in the third paragraph, which characterizes such bills in Texas and elsewhere as requiring “so-called counseling of patients.” I don’t think people on the anti-abortion side would consider it “so-called,” a phrase that is loaded with derision.

Was Carroll sincere? Consider the words of conservative pundit Catherine Seipp, writing in 2004 for National Review Online:

The longstanding leftist orthodoxy of the Los Angeles Times has improved noticeably under editor-in-chief John Carroll, a respected newsman who moved here from the Baltimore Sun four years ago. Carroll has made a real effort to rein in the paper’s liberal bias, at least in straight news stories. Earlier this year, Carroll wrote a famous (in media circles) in-house memo scolding a reporter for a story about a Texas abortion law; the piece had implied anyone against abortion is obviously nuts.

As for why Carroll left, it’s been pretty widely reported that he could no longer put up with the cost-cutting ways of the Times’ corporate owner, Tribune Company. His hand-picked successor, Dean Baquet, is now in charge, so it’s not as though the Carroll era has been discredited. As for Kinsley, well, he just didn’t work out. Kinsley has always been the most tepid of liberals, and his problems at the L.A. Times appear to have had more to do with his refusal to move to Los Angeles and to his embrace of ridiculous notions such as wikitorials.

I know that pointing out O’Reilly’s misrepresentations is pretty cheap entertainment. Still, I haven’t done it for a while, and I’m not planning to tune in again any time soon. So there you have it.

Romenesko‘s got a link to an exceptionally good post on the kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor freelancer Jill Carroll. It’s by the Moderate Voice, a.k.a. Joe Gandelman, who is himself a former Monitor stringer. Gandelman sees clues that Carroll was grabbed by loyalists of a Sunni politician she was scheduled to interview. Somehow that leaves me optimistic — if Gandelman’s right, at least it’s not Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

It doesn’t seem likely that we’re being told the truth about Dick Cheney’s medical condition, does it?

In December 2004, Josh Marshall wrote a speculative but informed item on the possibility that Cheney is suffering from congestive heart failure. It’s worth another look now that it’s making its way into mainstream outlets such as the New York Times.

“Meet the Press” host Tim Russert seems to think he extracted a significant admission out of U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer on Sunday. I’m not even sure how to describe this, so just follow along with Media Nation and see if you agree with Russert — or if you instead have the same head-scratching reaction that I had.

The subject: Whether and under what circumstances Schumer, a New York Democrat, would support a filibuster aimed at defeating the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel Alito. From the transcript:

SCHUMER: I haven’t made up my mind about how to vote and certainly whether to block him or not, whether to urge my colleagues in the caucus to filibuster. But he’s got to answer a lot of questions.

RUSSERT: But you haven’t ruled out a filibuster?

SCHUMER: Have not ruled it out, no.

Later in the program came this exchange:

SCHUMER: Judge Alito has stated unequivocally, just as you said, not only his personal view on pro-life, on pro-choice — we approved lots of judges who were pro-life. I’m very strongly pro-choice, but I voted for 190 judges who were pro-life that the president has nominated. But he [Alito] has stated his constitutional view, his legal view, and that is that the Constitution does not provide for a right to an abortion. The worst thing that could happen with Judge Alito is if he tries to duck the question. Let him say, as you said, one way or the another, he doesn’t agree but he’ll respect precedent or this is one of those precedents that should be re-examined and turned over. But if he says, “I can’t answer that question ’cause it might show bias,” which is what John Roberts said, he can’t do that because he’s already shown bias, not in a pejorative sense. He’s shown his view on this.

RUSSERT: Well, if he has 51 votes, he can do it.

SCHUMER: Well, you know — but that’s the issue here. And we Democrats —

RUSSERT: If he did that, would you filibuster?

SCHUMER: Well, it would certainly — if he continued to do that on all of these issues that I mentioned, if he ducked the question, the American people have a right to answer and we know what’s going on here. Seventy percent of the American people say they don’t want a justice nominated who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

RUSSERT: No, but on the question of abortion, if he in your mind ducks that question, is that enough to filibuster?

SCHUMER: You can’t judge on one specific question. If he continuously, given his previous record, refuses to answer questions and hid behind this shibboleth, “I can’t answer this ’cause it might come before me,” it would increase the chance of a filibuster, absolutely.

Still later, Russert was interviewing Kate Michelman, former head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, when he suddenly said this:

RUSSERT: You just heard Senator Schumer, Kate Michelman, say that even if Judge Alito will not answer questions about Roe v. Wade, that in itself is not grounds for filibuster.

Is that what Schumer said? Maybe my ability to understand plain English isn’t what it used to be. But I don’t think so. It strikes me that Russert is reading universes into Schumer’s statement that “You can’t judge on one specific question.” But Schumer’s statement that he hasn’t ruled out a filibuster seems a lot more pertinent.