Saturday, April 26, 2003
Jumping Back in the Pool?
Could this be an early sign that investors are ready to trust Wall Street again: Ben Stein's "Yes, You Can Time the Market!" is at No. 16 on Amazon.
In general, I'm skeptical of any book that has to use an exclamation point in its title.
Death by Politics?
My hometown paper has a story about the widow of a county supervisor who hopes to at least double his retirement benefits to her by proving it was the stress of the job that caused his fatal heart attack. The story is in the Bakersfield Californian. (Super-secret password: laexaminer/laexaminer.)
Bookshelf Jackpot
On Thursday, I got an e-mail from Alibris online bookseller regarding their "buy a book for a soldier" program. I just checked back at the sergeant's wishlist: It grew to 364 and it looks like all but two have been purchased. One was out of stock and the other was a $70 medical tome. Pretty impressive. I wonder if it would do as well if they did a similar thing for schools, libraries, prisons or other places.
Earlier:
Filling a Soldier's Bookshelf in Afghanistan
Bernstein: J-Students Should Learn to Protect Sources
Carl Bernstein tells the Cleveland Plain Dealer he’s not happy with the Illinois journalism students who spent four years trying to figure out the identity of Deep Throat. "The last thing students in a journalism class should be doing is trying to find out who other reporters' sources are," he told the Plain Dealer. Instead, they should have spent time in the housing projects or at city hall to get real stories, he told the paper.
Oddly, the journalism professor who led the group defends himself by saying reporters Bob Woodward and Bernstein did not protect Deep Throat themselves since they turned him into a character in “All the President’s Men” and dropped enough clues so his identity could be deciphered.
Dropped enough clues did they? Hmmm. Nixon resigned nearly 30 years ago and the country still doesn’t know his identity. I’d say they protected him pretty well.
Another odd thing about this J-school investigation is that they have a web site that states the students “have determined the identity of Deep Throat, the most elusive, anonymous news source in history.” One would think they’d find space somewhere on their front page to mention that Fielding has denied that he’s Deep Throat.
As for me, I have no idea who it was. Though at 34, I’m glad I’ll probably outlive him.
Past posts on this topic:
Is Deep Throat Fred Fielding?
Confidential Lies of Watergate
Friday, April 25, 2003
Mexican Sandwich Co.
I had lunch at a good new Park Slope restaurant yesterday. It's a great find considering this neighborhood has only a handful of good places to begin with. The place is called the Mexican Sandwich Company, though the sandwich is actually a triple-decker quesadilla that comes stuffed with fillings such as spicy chicken, goat cheese, smoked bacon, caramelized onions, guacamole and duck confit. Prices range from $5 to $9 for a small -- which is plenty enough for a meal since it comes with a salad topped with a red pepper dressing. No booze yet, but they're already advertising their drink specials, including a blood-orange margarita you can order by the pitcher. They're on 5th Avenue at 3rd Street -- but the delivery area stretches all the way up to Prospect Park West. They just opened a month ago.
I found the place after I read a few reviews on Chowhounds, which I only recently rediscovered after following a link from fellow-former Prognosticator Alex Zucker.
Thursday, April 24, 2003
I Wasn't Expecting That
Here’s a little item you probably don’t find mentioned in “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” – “Leading cause of death in pregnant women: murder” (AP story in the LA Daily News.)
War Reporters and 'Souvenirs'
More news on reporters collecting souvenirs in Iraq:
Fox News Channel fires a satellite truck engineer charged after attempting to smuggle 12 paintings taken from a palace in Baghdad, according to the Associated Press.
The Boston Herald doesn’t plan to discipline its reporter who liberated items from Iraq because they are “clearly souvenirs” his editor told the Boston Globe. The reporter, Jules Crittendon, writes to Poynter Online (via Romenesko) to say “In Iraq, these items were being routinely discarded and destroyed, and clearly were of no value to the Iraqi people.”
Yesterday's post: One Man's Looter is Another's Souvenir Hunter
Gawker Interviews the Devil's Assistant
Elizabeth Spiers, the editor of Gawker, has a story in Salon. She interviews Lauren Weisberger, a dormer assistant to Vogue magazine's Anna Wintour and the author of "The Devil Wears Prada" - the fictional story of a personal assistant to a bitchy New York editor. From the Q&A with Weisberger:
Here in New York we're media obsessed. Writers write about writers who write about writers and reporters and freelancers, and it's just a festival of information. We're all analyzing and examining and predicting and I can't imagine that it's like that everywhere else.
NYT on 'Two-Buck Chuck' Vino
The New York Times dining section has run a feature on “Two-Buck Chuck” the Charles Shaw wine from Ceres, California that has been a huge hit at Trader Joe’s since it’s good and sells for a mere $1.99. One wine consultant called it “the fastest-growing table wine in the U.S. wine industry's history.” How long has it been popular? How popular is it? Even the slow-moving Los Angeles Times wrote about it four months ago. Check out the comments on this LA Examiner post from December for more background.
New York does have a handful of Trader Joe’s, but nothing within practical distance of Manhattan. Those in the know whine about it all the time and are hoping the success of Whole Foods and Gourmet Garage will persuade Trader Joe’s to dive in.
Welch Webcast on 'Bandar Bush'
My friend Matt Welch is doing a radio interview today regarding a column he wrote for Canada's National Post. The column is headlined: "Is 'Bandar Bush' above the law? Saudi ambassador to U.S. and wife linked to suspected Islamic terrorists." You can listen to the radio interview online from Vancouver’s CKNW. Scheduled for 10:30 a.m. (West Coast time)
Filling a Soldier's Bookshelf in Afghanistan
The Alibris online bookstore has started a “buy a book for a soldier” program after receiving a request from a U.S. sergeant in Afghanistan.
The fascinating wishlist compiled by Marine Sergeant Ryan McGeeney includes Dante’s “Inferno,” Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” the “Disaster Survival Handbook,” “Where Women Have No Doctor: A Health Guide for Women,” several Star Wars books, Maya Angelou, Dave Barry, Anne Rice, Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Sue Grafton and Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
There are 265 in all – and most have already been purchased. The full wishlist list is here.
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
E&P on the Medill Event
Here's Editor & Publisher's story on the media confab I attended Monday night. Their reporter focuses on the discussion of embedded reporters. Excerpts from my notes are posted below.
Is Deep Throat Fred Fielding?
Some journalism students in Illinois have determined the identity of Deep Throat was probably John Dean's assistant, a White House lawyer named Fred Fielding. (Fielding, incidentally, only gets one mention in All the President's Men.) From the Chicago Tribune (via Romenesko):
In their project, which lasted four years, the journalism students from the university's Urbana-Champaign campus and Gaines cited six specific instances of closely held inside information that Fielding knew and Deep Throat provided. These included the involvement of Nixon White House operative Howard Hunt in the burglary and Nixon aide John Ehrlichman's instructions to White House Counsel John Dean to throw a briefcase containing incriminating information about political tricks into the Potomac River.
They also said that Fielding was in a position to provide eight other revelations, including phone taps on reporters, Nixon campaign official G. Gordon Liddy's burning of his hand with a candle and problems with Nixon's White House tapes. He said Fielding also was a likely Woodward source on earlier stories about the shooting of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
In Ben Bradlee’s autobiography, he writes about how the Washington Post handled the Watergate situation while he was the executive editor there. There is a line in there (and unfortunately my copy is in storage, so I can’t quote from it directly) that says something like: I always figured that if someone took the time, they could figure out Deep Throat’s identity by figuring out who was in town when every revelation was made. Since Bradlee knows Deep Throat’s identity, you’d think he was actually giving a solid clue as to how someone could figure it out.
One Man's Looter is Another's Souvenir Hunter
Last week a friend of mind observed how Iraqi’s emptying out palaces were “looters” while U.S. soldiers were merely collecting “souvenirs.”
More on that theme from today’s Boston Globe, which shows the embedded reporters were among the souvenir hunters. Jules Crittenden, a reporter for the Boston Herald, brought back ornamental kitchen items and a painting (valued under $15,000) he liberated from a presidential palace.
The souvenirs will not be returned to Crittenden, and eventually will be transferred back to Iraq, officials said.
''He didn't think it was a big deal,'' the official said of Crittenden. ''He said all the embedded reporters were doing it.''
For more on Jules Crittendon’s misdeeds in Iraq, check out this Boston Phoenix story from a week ago that starts out this way:
It was perhaps the most astounding media story to come out of the war in Iraq. This past Sunday, Jules Crittenden, the Boston Herald reporter embedded with the Army’s Third Infantry Division, described how he "went over to the dark side." While rolling through Baghdad, Crittenden called out the positions of three Iraqi soldiers aiming rocket-propelled grenades at the vulnerable, "lightly armored" vehicle he was riding in so that an American gunner could kill them. " I saw one man’s body splatter as the large caliber bullets ripped it up," Crittenden wrote. "The man behind him appeared to be rising, and was cut down by repeated bursts."
Crittenden then added: "Some in our profession might think that as a reporter and non-combatant, I was there only to observe. Now that I have assisted in the deaths of three fellow human beings in the war I was sent to cover, I’m sure there are some people who will question my ethics, my objectivity, etc. I’ll keep the argument short. Screw them, they weren’t there. But they are welcome to join me next time if they care to test their professionalism.”
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Resumes for LA Examiner
I missed this when Ken Layne originally posted it, but I see now that he says he's received more than 600 resumes from people hoping to get hired to work on the new paper if it actually launches in Los Angeles.
Media War Coverage - Panel Discussion
On same days this blog actually lives up to it’s title, and today is one of the days. Last night I attended “What Are We Fighting For,” a panel discussion about media coverage of the war on Iraq. There were 10 people on the panel, plus a moderator, which turned out to be far too many to delve very far into any single issue. All 10 made opening remarks – which lasted an hour, allowing 45 minutes for questions.
I took notes, and I’ve typed up some of the interesting bits from my notebook.
Abderrahim Foukara, the United Nations reporter for Al-Jazeera. A native of Morocco, Foukara previously worked for the BBC World Service and AllAfrica.com and joined Al-Jazeera in 2002. He has a Ph.D. in African Studies from Glasgow University. Referring to his BBC background, he pointed out that he came from “empire journalism” – “where you don’t show your emotions.”
After Sept. 11, Foukara wanted to do a feature about how American media functions – a story he later realized was more than he bargained for. He was baffled by a CNN correspondent crying on air while covering the 9/11 story. When he interviewed CNN’s Aaron Brown, he was told “I am a reporter but I am also a patriot.” Foukara said he just didn’t know what to say after Brown’s statement.
Only when he saw an Al-Jazeera anchor crying on air over the death of an Al-Jazeera journalist did Foukara understand that the Arab media and U.S. media are more alike than he thought, he said.
Foukara first came to America in 1999. “I came to the United States thinking about the U.S. as one mass,” he said. But he started out in Boston, and quickly found that even the way people speak in New England clues you in pretty fast that all of America is not alike.
He said some of the most poignant stories have been one’s he’s covered where the Americans may not know a lot about the Arab world, but they are against war. He said that covering the peace rallies, some people actually sought out Al-Jazeera and told him “tell your people we’re not for war.”
Foukara went on to talk about Arab media as a whole, and how Arabs got a skewed view of the war’s progress. “At the beginning, you would think that Saddam Hussein was about to win the war,” he said. If Arabs did not think Saddam would win, they at least thought he would hold out for 6 months or so, which goes to explain why they were so shocked it was all but over within 21 days. The same thing happened in 1967, Foukara said. The main Arab radio station made it sound like Israel was losing and then five days later, the Arabs were surprised when they’d already lost.
On the success of Al-Jazeera as an independent station: “This is a first – they gloves are off, there are no taboos for Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera has pissed off a lot of governments.”
Jim Fuchs – former Air Force captain with the Pentagon’s media outreach program – former as in last Friday. “We looked at bringing the war to the generation fighting the war,” Fuchs said, citing the coverage of troops from MTV in particular.
“That’s our recruiting demographic,” Fuchs said, pointing out that most of the Americans fighting this war are 18 and 19 years old. In addition to MTV, they’ve targeted Telemundo, Univision, Latina Magazine and women’s magazines to help the military better reflect the demographics of the country. “The reason I’m here tonight is indirectly though a pitch we made to Seventeen magazine,” Fuchs said.
The media relations people tried to approach this war differently than in the past, Fuchs said, with a directive to ask “why not?” rather than “why?”
Fuchs said the war was “highly successful for the military” in terms of media coverage. He pointed out that the military sees it’s goal separate from the politics behind the decision – that his job was to show Americans that they have a “competent and well-trained force.”
T. Sean Herbert runs the CBS News Analyst’s desk, an assignment desk dedicated to war coverage. Herbert talked mostly about the network’s strategy leading up to the war – such as how those chose their embedded reporters and armchair generals. CBS tried to get military analysts as recently retired as possible who were most likely to have the best access and most recent knowledge from the inside. Those generals also talked with the embedded CBS journalists off-air to get a better idea of where they were and what it might mean based on which military unit they were attached to. The retired generals also helped plan media strategy before the war, Herbert said. They helped CBS determine which units were most likely to be newsworthy, so the network could request choice spots for their embeds. However, CBS gambled that the most important breaks would come not from the CentCom briefings or the imbeds, but from the roving, unattached journalists. “Our best journalists were unilaterals in Humvees” – put there at “great expense” he said – “ so they could get to the front, where ever that may be.”
Later, he talked about CBS’ miscalculation over the timing of the start of the war. CBS had assumed the war would start just after the December holidays, and staffers were doing a lot of nervous chuckling over the possibility that the war might be delayed into March, when CBS would be airing the NCAA basketball playoffs with ESPN.
“It does come down to competing corporate interests,” Herbert said. He said there was $42 million in advertising revenue at stake, which meant that when March madness began, CBS News was reduced to delivering 1-minute news updates every hour during the playoffs. Their viewership dropped 25 percent as people changed the channel looking for war coverage. “In the end, I think it hurt CBS News significantly,” he said “Those viewers never came back.”
AP had two veteran reporters on stage – Richard Pyle and Edith M. Lederer. I might be wrong, but it looked like there was a reason they were seated far apart from each other. He said: “Open coverage, what we had in Vietnam, is still the ideal.” She said: “You could go anywhere you wanted and talk to anyone you wanted and it’s the kind of freedom that hasn’t happened since.” She pointed out the embedding process isn’t new – that “pool” reporters were embedded with Army, Navy and Air Force divisions during the ’91 Gulf War and Pyle later noted he was “embedded” in Albania after the Gulf War.
Bill Weinberg, author of World War 3 Report, co-producer of the “Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade” and a reporter and former editor for High Times, “the American counter-culture monthly.” “It’s an honor for a left-wing blogger such as myself” to be invited to the panel, Weinberg said in his opening remarks. He pointed out that the extensive coverage of Iraq has obscured other stories such as the recent attacks on villages in Afghanistan and the plane crash and kidnapping of American defense contractors in Colombia.
“I don’t believe in objective journalism,” he said, explaining it can be fair without being objective – and that media need to be honest in revealing their biases. “Just about all media is descending to the level of propaganda,” he said.
Onnic Marashian, editor emeritus for Platts Oilgram News made a comment about perceptions of the media: “In the Middle East, which I used to cover, every journalist is a spy. How else could they make a living.” Whereas now, (unsure if he meant in the West, Middle East or both:) “If you’re too objective, you’re not patriotic enough.”
And finally:
Martin Langfield, deputy news editor of North America for Reuters and dashing spouse of Amy Langfield of Amy's New York Notebook, said that to begin to understand what was going on in the war, you needed to read and watch the news from numerous sources, including "even images that offend you deeply."
He also quoted Lord Wolseley, who commanded the British forces in the Sudan in the 1880s who said it was "very necessary to manipulate correspondents, and to be at all times on the best of terms with them."
Monday, April 21, 2003
Media Confab
Just got back from the Medill panel discussion on the media's war coverage. I took notes and will post some bits tomorrow. However, I do want to correct my statement from earlier about there being no new media on the panel. The panel included Bill Weinberg, who runs "World War 3 Report," which is indeed an online self-described "sentry of truth in the war on terrorism."
Media and War
My husband is among the panelists taking part in a discussion this evening about the media's coverage of the war in Iraq. He'll be representing Reuters but the panel also includes people from AP, the Wall Street Journal, CBS and Al-Jazeera. There are PR people included, yet no one from new media.
It's co-sponsored by the Medill journalism school's alumni group and will be held at the New-York Historical Society, located at 2 W. 77th Street and Central Park West (across the street from the Natural History Museum.) Drinks start at 6:30 p.m. The discussion begins an hour later. Admission is $20 for non-Medill members.
Here is their complete list of speakers:
Panelists are Edith Lederer and Richard Pyle, veteran war correspondents for the Associated Press; Sean Herbert, producer of war coverage for CBS News (MSJ '91); Onnic Marashian, editor emeritus of Platts Oilgram News, the standard for oil industry news; Martin Langfield, deputy news editor for North America at Reuters; Bill Weinberg, an award-winning 20-year veteran journalist, and editor of "World War 3 Report"; Lora Western, foreign news editor for The Wall Street Journal (BSJ/MSJ '86); the UN correspondent for Al-Jazeera; Jim Fuchs, a former Air Force Captain who is about to retire from his role as the deputy director of the Pentagon's New York media outreach office; Bruce Nussenbaum, the editorial page editor at BusinessWeek; and Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide.
Sunday, April 20, 2003
Saving Park Slope
So I was going to come home tonight and blog about how we saved all of Park Slope from blowing up tonight, but then I found a random e-mail from the creators of lostandfrowned.com --- also Park Slope residents, who apparently found me by way of a link on Gawker, rather than the fact that I probably saved them from a troubling explosion tonight. So I get home from dinner and click on lostandfrowned, trying to figure out what they have going on, and as it turns out, they own two of the fattest cats I've ever seen (and I used to own a real fat cat too, Norman. Now deceased.) So not only do they have a 24-hour "live" cat cam, but a good little FAQ on the fat cats, including these facts:
*SME likes to be taken on "sniffing tours," where he is lifted up and carried around and allowed to sniff things that are too high up for him to reach on his own.
*SME was adopted from the ASPCA in Houston, Texas, just a few hours before his scheduled termination. And yet, he still has the nerve to caterwaul when his dinner is not served on time.
They also have an interview with Sara Woster, an artist I've never heard of, probably because I stopped being cool around 1989. A key exchange:
L&F: To be a serious painter, do you have to have a messy space with all the brushes and squeezed-out pigments laying all over surrounded by empty coffee cups and full ashtrays and shit? Or can you be very tidy and organized and never get and paint on yourself?
SW: I don’t like that question.
OK, just so you don't think there was any terrorist threat in Park Slope tonight, here's what happened. My husband and I were walking to dinner, and just below 6th Avenue and Carroll, we get a real strong whiff of gas.I started to call 311 (the city's new non-emergency 911 number) but about that time, we found a guy at the mailboxes just inside the front of the building. So he comes out with us and agrees to call 311 so we can go to dinner. We had a bottle of wine and service was really slow, so it's about 10 p.m. by the time we're walking home. What do you know, three crews of really pissed off Keyspan gas guys are ripping up the street with jackhammers and neighbors are coming outside to investigate. A Keyspan guy told us that a main gas line was leaking and they were going to rip up the whole street. We said we originally smelled it and got a guy to call it in. We thought were some kind of do-gooders, though the Keyspan guy (who was probably getting triple overtime anyhow) was kind of ticked off at us: "You started all this? Where are you from?" -- as if only out-of-townwers would call in a gas leak on Easter Sunday? Anyhow, the neighborhood didn't blow up, and we're far away from the jackhammers, angry neighbors and Keyspan guys working on a holiday.
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