Tag: media criticism

Unwarranted speculation

Speculation, the bane of political journalism, is even more out of place when it comes to covering religion. For instance: a piece by Jeff Israely about the late Ted Kennedy and the Catholic Church, posted on Time.com last Friday and revised as events proved Israely’s sources to be misguided.

Israely reported that, during the summer, President Obama delivered a letter from Kennedy to Pope Benedict XVI, the contents of which were secret, but which likely made the case for a papal blessing. Quoting conservative sources, Israely suggested that such a blessing was unlikely, given Kennedy’s pro-choice stand on abortion rights. Israely wrote:

One veteran official at the Vatican, of U.S. nationality, expressed the view of many conservatives about the Kennedy clan’s rapport with the Catholic Church: “Why would he even write a letter to the Pope? The Kennedys have always been defiantly in opposition to the Roman Catholic magisterium.”

As it turned out, the contents of Kennedy’s letter were revealed at a graveside service, as was the Vatican’s response. According to the Boston Globe:

The Vatican reply came two weeks [after Obama delivered Kennedy’s letter]: “His Holiness prays that in the days ahead you may be sustained in faith and hope, and granted the precious grace of joyful surrender to the will of God our merciful Father.”…

The Vatican response was strikingly pastoral in tone, expressing the pope’s “concern and his spiritual closeness’’ to Kennedy, and bestowing on the senator an apostolic blessing from the pope. That the Vatican responded at all is news — conservative bloggers have for days been claiming that the alleged lack of a response was evidence of the Vatican’s antipathy to Kennedy.

Israely also indulged in speculation as to whether Cardinal Seán O’Malley would decline to preside over Kennedy’s funeral because of the late senator’s pro-choice policies. O’Malley didn’t preside — but the prominent role he nevertheless played would seem to prove that bit of speculation wrong as well.

To be sure, Israely wasn’t predicting the future so much as he was reporting the speculation of conservative church officials as to what might happen. But he still managed to leave the mistaken impression that the church would use Kennedy’s death to send a stern message to pro-choice politicians.

(Thanks to Steve Burgard, director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern, for helping me think this item through.)

The Times’ missing corrections

The New York Times today is loaded with corrections, including a dread “Editor’s Note.” None of them appear in Times Reader, the paper’s paid downloadable edition optimized for laptop reading.

This problem goes back months. I’ve posted about it on Twitter, and was told by a Times staffer that she was sure someone was on it. Well, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Times doesn’t take Times Reader all that seriously. Too bad.

Commenting on comments with Keller

WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller will be interviewing Doug Bailey and me about Bailey’s column in today’s Boston Globe, in which he argues that newspaper comments are worthless. (They are if you’re going to do them the way the Globe and the Boston Herald do them. But we’ll talk.)

The segment should pop up on the 11 p.m. news.

And by the way, has anyone yet figured out the identity of the anonymous blogger whom Bailey attacked?

Thursday update: Here’s the link to Keller’s story.

An anonymous straw man

Doug Bailey want you to know there’s a local blog out there that’s not as reliable as maybe it should be. (Imagine that.) But he doesn’t want you to know what the blog is. Bailey, a former Boston Globe staffer-turned-media consultant, writes on the Globe’s op-ed page:

I recently contacted a blog that has apparently gained a reputation as an “authoritative source” on local news to point out an outrageously inaccurate — and easily verifiable — item posted on the site, attributed to one of its many “insiders.” The editor of the site conceded to me his “inside” information had actually come from an anonymous posting he saw on a newspaper website. If this wasn’t outrageous enough, this site has developed a following among traditional media reporters who apparently believe this blogger is wired and who regularly republish his missives unaware that his “exclusive” sources come from anonymous comments on their own websites. The identities of the “insiders” are unknown even to the original blogger.

Without the name of the blog and its author, and a chance for him to respond, the value of Bailey’s anecdote is approximately zero. Let’s have it, Doug. And let’s see the Globe give his target an opportunity to defend himself.

Younger drivers are a bigger problem

We have become obsessed with elderly drivers. Today’s example: this story in the Boston Globe about an 83-year-old woman who crashed through the front of a Natick liquor store. My guess is that it wouldn’t even have made the Globe a year ago.

To be sure, there are elderly drivers who should be off the road. But it’s long been known that younger drivers are more dangerous than older ones. That perspective has been entirely lacking from recent coverage.

In 2001, for instance, the Washington Post reported that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety had found that older drivers were involved in fewer crashes than any other age group, but that the fatality rate in those crashes was higher because the elderly drivers themselves were more likely to die of their injuries. From the Post:

The studies show that older drivers kill fewer motorists and pedestrians than any other age group and have the lowest crash rates per licensed driver….

Younger drivers aged 16 to 24 had the highest accident rate, more than double the rate for older drivers.

My 95-year-old uncle continues to drive. I know that anecdotal evidence is suspect, but I think his sense of responsibility is typical of his generation. He no longer drives at night, and he’s talked about public-transportation options for the day that he should give up his license.

More-frequent testing for older drivers is probably a good idea. But coverage has grown completely out of proportion when you consider the reality of who’s the greatest menace behind the wheel.

NPR ombudsman Shepard responds

NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard has responded to my item of last week in which I criticized her for defending NPR’s policy of refusing to refer to waterboarding as “torture.” She writes:

Yes, President Obama and AG Eric Holder have said that waterboarding was torture. I’d personally call it torture. But if you were an editor at the Globe, would you say that someone tortured another person? Or would you want to use a direct or indirect quote, i.e., “John Smith said the guard tortured him”?

I’m not trying to say what is and is not torture, but is every abuse classified as torture now or are there degrees? When a police officer throws a suspect to the ground and handcuffs them, is that torture or simply abuse?

Would it be better to, say, describe the technique and then say some call it torture? I do not think enhanced interrogation techniques is acceptable either. That’s why I come down on describing the technique and adding that some call it torture.

Shepard asks, so I’ll attempt a few answers.

I’m not sure what Shepard thinks there is to gain by skiing down the slippery slope from waterboarding to getting rough with a suspect during an arrest. In my original item, I strictly limited my remarks to waterboarding, recognized as torture by just about everyone on the planet.

The opinions of Obama and Holder are entirely unnecessary to determining whether waterboarding is torture.

As John McCain and others have pointed out, the United States executed several Japanese military officers for waterboarding American prisoners of war after World War II. And as I wrote last week, if NPR really can’t bring itself to use the T-word, perhaps it can describe waterboarding as “an interrogation technique once considered so heinous by the United States that it hanged Japanese officers for doing it to Americans.”

So yes, if I were an editor at the Boston Globe, you’re damn right I would refer to waterboarding as torture. That seems about as solid as referring to oil as a fossil fuel, or baseball as a sport. By eschewing the term “torture” to describe a practice that the entire international community regards as such, NPR is not being neutral. Rather, it is embracing a euphemism that places the network squarely on the side of the torturers and their enablers.

NPR should not use enhanced interrogation techniques on the English language.

Thursday update: I was not as precise as I wanted to be when I wrote about “everyone on the planet,” as I was in a rush and had lousy Internet access. Last week, Bob Garfield of “On the Media” interviewed Shepard and made the point I was trying to make:

The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights says that waterboarding is torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross have called what the U.S. did “torture.” Waterboarding is unambiguously in violation of the International Convention on Torture, which has been ratified by 140-some countries.

The United States is among those 140 countries, but, as the Associated Press reported in 2002, the Bush administration sought to block enforcement of the measure when inspectors wanted to visit Guantánamo.

Torture is not only a moral problem, but it has a precise legal meaning that most definitely encompasses waterboarding.

Calling torture torture

Alicia Shepard is as sharp a media observer as they come. A longtime writer for the American Journalism Review and the author of “Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate,” she is a serious and respected voice.

That said, I’m scratching my head over how wrong Shepard gets it on NPR’s refusal to use the term “torture” to describe the “enhanced interrogation techniques” practiced during the Bush years. Shepard, now NPR’s ombudsman, writes:

I recognize that it’s frustrating for some listeners to have NPR not use the word torture to describe certain practices that seem barbaric. But the role of a news organization is not to choose sides in this or any debate. People have different definitions of torture and different feelings about what constitutes torture. NPR’s job is to give listeners all perspectives, and present the news as detailed as possible and put it in context.

Let’s forget “certain practices” and focus on just one: waterboarding, long recognized as torture. In November 2007, Sen. John McCain pointed out that the United States executed Japanese officers after World War II for waterboarding American prisoners of war.

And when McCain was challenged, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Web site PolitiFact.com investigated McCain’s assertion. Its conclusion: McCain was right — a number of Japanese officers were hanged, and others were sentenced to long prison terms, because they had engaged in waterboarding.

Shepard writes that rather than describing waterboarding as torture, it makes more sense just to say what happened: “To me, it makes more sense to describe the techniques and skip the characterization…. A basic rule of vivid writing is: ‘Show, Don’t Tell.'”

All right. Perhaps NPR can eschew the T-word and instead describe waterboarding as “an interrogation technique once considered so heinous by the United States that it hanged Japanese officers for doing it to Americans.”