Original Face

Fly on the wall

    If you were glued to your television sets watching the primary coverage, you missed the best show on tonight.  Fox had a live web-tv experience of Democratic and Republican analysts just speaking among themselves real time.  People coming and going with small talk, technical tv stuff, seeing the pros react to the candidate's speeches and the campaigns' flacks spin as well as hearing their inside jokes.  It has been fascinating, and as someone who has spent many a election night in those rooms, it was as candid a way to experience political pros talk that I have ever seen.  It has been wonderful for those of us political junkies out here in the cyberworld.
    Thanks, Fox.  Do it every election night.  I'll be glued to my computer monitor from now on--not the tv.

Maybe the Times DOES want McCain to win

    If not, they certainly helped him a great deal today.  Publishing an eight year old story, which they had ready to go in early January, the Times did something which the McCain camp thought would take weeks, if not months to do.  It has bonded the Republican nominee to his base.  Conservatives, especially the movement's mouthpieces, have been lukewarm to the McCain candidacy.  The Arizona senators victory came not so much from declared Republicans as independents who were eligible to vote in most of the early primary and caucus states.  Since that time, the candidate and his handlers have been trying to reach out to the rank and file GOP with mixed success.  Insiders to the campaign figured that most of the Spring would have to be devoted to gaining the Party's trust and enthusiasm.
    But with one headline, one story, the NY Times took care of much of that problem.  By publishing a story so obviously calculated to tarnish the Senator's "white knight" image based upon unnamed sources none of whom declared that anything illegal, immoral or untoward occurred, the "Paper of Record" has gotten the Republican base angry.  The Times is to most conservatives incarnate evil.  To earn its wrath is a badge of honor.
    The Democrats had hoped that the Republican electorate would be demoralized and lackadaisical about the upcoming election.  Without Hillary on the ticket, there would be little reason for most Republicans to do more than go to the polls.  This would be the "ace in the hole" for the Obama camp.
    Too bad. The ace has turned out to be a joker. 

This year's "keen grasp of the obvious" award

Goes to the Los Angeles Times for its insightful article today entitled: "Kerik Indictment Could Wreak Havoc for Giuliani."  No, really?  My stars!

Jeez, these people get paid to be pundits????

The Red shall be Red and the Blue shall be Blue...

In a famous incident Pauline Kael, the prominent movie critic from New York City, remarked to a colleague that she was stunned that Ronald Reagan had been elected president.  After all, she mused, no one she knew voted for him.  Kael's successor as a myopic critic is the New York Times' popular music writer, Kalefa Sanneh. 

Sanneh figures that the only time most people who could afford to have televisions would ever hear country music was the annual Country Music Awards.    What they "gawk"ed at was "garish" and a "mismash" where, according to Sanneh, the songs had lyrics that a rapper would have had banned from television.  It was clear that Sanneh must have watched the program with the door locked, for fear that anyone, anyone of substance, would (shudder) think that it was being watched without the necessary sense of cultural superiority or detached irony.

I hadn't ever been a fan of country music.  I grew up in New York, have attended all the right universities and have a profession which makes me as Eastern Establishment as someone in 2007 could be. Very few of the songs, and only a couple of the performers, were names with which I had been very familiar.  Yet, I understand that this is a very big (Yo, Sanneh, check it out, country sold more CDs than rock last year...) and very powerful genre.

One little story, when I was traveling to Outward Bound in western North Carolina one summer while in college, I had a couple of hours to kill changing buses in a little town in the foothills.  Being Sunday, I figured that I would do the crossword so I went into the local drugstore and asked the cashier if they had a copy of the Sunday New York Times. 

"The what?," she asked.  I repeated my request.  Again, a blank look appeared on the woman's face.

"Nope, never heard of it." 

Well, Sanneh, I guess you are now even.

Didn't think so...

As so this writing no one has been able to make a case as to why Matthew Parris of the Times is not the most pathetic excuse for a columnist of a major media outlet.  Can't say I am a bit surprised.

Those are tough ones

Ok, everyone, here is a real brainteaser...name a bigger moron of a columnist than Matthew Parris of the Times.   Baker and Maddox don't count as they are "free spaces" on any "jackass bingo" card.

For extra credit state a plausible reason why that newspaper's opinion pages are full of the biggest set of boobyheads in the English speaking world.

Its called Newsweek not Viewsweek

Finally, the internal gyroscope of the news media is beginning to spin again and point their compasses toward true north.  Two weeks ago Newsweek the magazine published by the Washington Post Company devoted a substantial portion of its issue, and the cover, to a journalistic jihad against the opponents of global warming.  Not content to label them wrong, science editor and the piece's author, Sharon Begley (personal aside, I was a staffer with Sharon on the Yale Daily News.  I remember her as mousy and not particularly engaging.  Her writing now, like her writing then, is best described as workman-like.), attacks them as paid hit-men working against the salvation of the planet, virtual fifth columnists without independent thought, merely doing the bidding of their corporate masters.

A bit melodramatic, yes?  Not particularly unbiased, wouldn't you say? 

Robert Samuelson, the magazine's own long time economic columnist would, and did, say.  In a recent column he took his own publication to task for leaving the realm of journalism for that of advocacy opinion writing.  He skewers Begley's style, tactics and premises.  At the end of Samuelson's column, I was left wondering how his editors would handle his blunt words, and, if they ignore them, whether Samuelson would feel as if he needed to resign his column.  As of this writing, such issues remain open.

Now word comes that the two senior newsmen at the British Broadcasting Company are launching a preemptive strike against their own network for future programing which they say smacks of the same lack of objective journalism as Begley's Newsweek issue.  Peter Horrocks and Peter Barron have come out publicly stating that the role of the BBC is not to "save the planet" but rather to be journalists.  Noting that many of their colleagues have crossed the line into issue advocacy, they fear that all journalism will be tainted by such associations and will be dismissed by readers and viewers as just another interest group.

I hope that Samuelson, Horrocks and Barron have begun to re-inject some perspective into newsrooms.  Society is not well served by the continued blurring of the roles of advocate and journalist, regardless of the motivation of those concerned.  In the end they will harm both the causes they champion as well as the institutions and profession in which they work.

Is this the end of Little TNR?

The New Republic may have reached the end of its long illustrious history.  Once again it has been caught publishing a series of articles that the editors must have guessed were too good to be true.  Problem for TNR, they were too good to be true.  This may be one time too many for the venerable magazine.

Several years ago TNR published a number of first person reportage pieces by a young reporter, Stephen Glass.  The pieces always struck me as a bit too perfect.  The quotes fit too well, the stories was too on point to the ideological agenda Glass was peddling.  Then he published a piece that purported to be a behind the scenes look at a Young Americans Forum, a conservative organization for twenty-somethings.  I, like others who have been to such events, had a hard time recognizing the picture Glass was creating.  It certainly was unlike the meetings I recall.  I, like a number of others, called around to see if YAF had changed.  Was there an overwhelming stench of cynical debauchery at the meetings now (and if so, why the hell wasn't it around when I attended, dammit)?

It wasn't long before TNR had to retract Glass' work as complete fabrications. He had never been at any YAF meetings.  A number of his other pieces were also made up whole cloth.  It was a huge black eye for the journal of news and opinion.  Indeed, Glass' scandal was close on the heels of a plagarism problem when another up and coming writer, Ruth Shalit, borrowed without attribution the work of others.  The journal pledged to edit their writers more carefully, with stronger fact checking before an article was published. 

Now TNR's war correspondent, a solider named Scott Thomas Beauchamps, has signed a sworn affidavit that his dispatches from the Iraqi front, which TNR said where true, where actually fictional.  They were almost complete fabrications woven from innocent incidents--such as discovering a fresh set of graves by his platoon, about which he wrote that his comrades wore skulls that still had hair attached like yamulkes.

For a journal, like for a journalist, reputation is all.  The New Republic no longer has any to speak of.  It is too bad.  The magazine of Walter Lippmann deserved a better fate.

Glance in the window

One of my favorite novelists, Allegra Goodman, in her wonderful novel, Kaaterskill Falls, gives us a glimpse of life as if we are passing by and watching a scene that has begun before we looked in and will continue after our attention moves on to other things.  In that book, we come across a woman in transition, a member of a small hasidic sect whose rules for living almost every moment of one's life are immutable.  Elizabeth Schulmann begins to wonder if the rules bind too tightly, if her life while secure is unfulfilling. 

Readers catch her as the process begins to unfold, but it seems clear that the issues that are being related have their origins in episodes and thoughts before the story comes to us.  At the end of the novel, the story arcs are not neatly resolved.  The players in the drama do not have revelations.   Their problems have no climax.  There is no denouement.  It remains messy, yet it is time for us to look away.

The same occurred in tonight's final episode of David Chase's The Sopranos.  Tony's fate is not decided.  The marriage is not fixed or heading to the divorce court.  While one enemy is killed, there are more to take his place. The cops are still on the Mob's trail.  His children's futures are unknown.  Happy or sad?  It is a bit of both.  Junior's response to Tony's cheering him up about how he and Tony's father ran Northern New Jersey is no more than a "That's nice" from the addled old man.  Just "That's nice" to sum up a life of murder and mayhem, sex, money and power.

In the end, both stories ask us to take it from here.  We need to bring our values to play to create the resolutions to the stories. Is Elizabeth drawn strong enough to break free from the familial and societal pressures to make her own, if lonely, way?  Does Tony get what he deserves?  And if so, what is that?  In the 1950s Ayn Rand wrote a play The Night of January 16th in which the audience becomes the trial jury.  The evidence was evenly balanced from an objective stand point, it was an audience member's way of looking at life that would lead her or him to vote guilty or innocent.

That is what Chase and Goodman have us do as well.