ADAM REILLY

Rolled

ADAM REILLY — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:39:49 GMT

Where’s the outrage over media mistreatment at the RNC?

‘WELL-CONNECTED’: After taking the photo above, of a conflict between law enforcement and RNC protesters, Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke was himself tackled and bloodied by police. He was arrested and held for 10 hours, then released without being charged.

• Among the Republican thugs: Fear and pepper spray in St. Paul. By Anne Elizabeth Moore.

• Photos: Republican National Convention 2008.

Given the media’s reputation for self-absorption, it’s remarkable how little attention the press has paid to the crackdown on journalists during September’s Republican National Convention. While the exact tally varies from source to source, it seems that close to 50 journalists were detained or arrested in St. Paul (out of approximately 800 arrests total) while covering protests outside the convention. Some of them were treated gently and released quickly, but others were held at length or roughed up by the police. What’s more, a pre-convention raid on a St. Paul home targeted members of I-Witness Video, a New York group whose work exonerated hundreds of protesters following the 2004 RNC. And while St. Paul city attorney John Choi announced, on September 19, that many cases against journalists wouldn’t be pursued — in particular, those involving the possible misdemeanor count of presence at an unlawful assembly — these decisions are being made on a case-by-case basis and are far from complete.

Oddly, though, the jeopardy that journalists faced in St. Paul never became much of a story. There wasn’t a news blackout, exactly: the Associated Press (AP) and the local Minnesota media covered the issue, as did left-leaning outlets like the Nation and Salon, and national heavyweights like ABC News and the Washington Post gave it some early, blog-based coverage.

The problem, instead, is that the story was ignored or minimized by other important organizations — the New York Times being the most prominent example — and, as the weeks progressed, never seemed to generate any sort of sustained concern inside the media itself, the efforts of groups like the Society for Professional Journalists notwithstanding. In the words of Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “It never really got into the conversation at a level where it had an impact.”

What’s especially strange about this is that the activity that got these journalists into trouble — monitoring the exercise of government power — is one of the most important things the fourth estate does. So why the muted response to their plight?

Twitheads

ADAM REILLY — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:45:36 GMT

Is it time to dial down journalism’s latest fad?
Is Twitter bad for journalism?

It’s always dicey to question technology’s forward march: do so, and you risk being labeled a fogey, a Luddite, an enemy of Progress. But every now and then, something happens that makes it acceptable to question whether the new and shiny is necessarily the good. Nuclear power had Three Mile Island. Cloning had Dolly, the short-lived sheep. And Twitter — or, more precisely, the use of Twitter by journalists — had the Rocky Mountain News’ (RMN) coverage, earlier this month, of the funeral of three-year-old Marten Kudlis.

Some background: on September 4, Francis Hernandez, a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala, broadsided a truck in Aurora, Colorado. The truck and Hernandez’s vehicle then careened into a Baskin-Robbins, killing the truck’s two occupants and Kudlis, who was in the ice-cream store with his mother. The tragedy quickly became fodder for anti-illegal-immigrant activists, such as former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, who accused Colorado’s Democratic governor and Denver’s mayor of having “blood on their hands.” (Hernandez had been arrested for traffic violations in the past but had never been reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency that could have had him deported.)

Fast forward to five days after the crash, when RMN reporter Berny Morson used Twitter to report live from Kudlis’s funeral. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a social-networking mechanism that lets individuals give and receive real-time status updates — but only in 140 characters or fewer. (Here’s how twitter.com puts it: “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”) Sign up for Joe Blow’s Twitter feed, for instance, and you’ll be contacted every time Joe has something he’d like to share. Sign up for a news organization’s general Twitter feed, and you’ll be informed when new articles are published. Sign up for a specific feed, and you’ll get updates from a particular correspondent, or on a particular topic.

In the case of Kudlis’s funeral, that meant such observations as the following (where “RMN_Berny” serves as the reporter’s online handle):

RMN_Berny: people again are sobbing. rabbi again asks god to give
marten everlasting life.
09:46 AM September 10, 2008 from txt

RMN_Berny: pallbearers carry out coffin followed by mourners.
09:48 AM September 10, 2008 from txt

RMN_Berny: cars queueing [sic] up to follow hearse
09:59 AM September 10, 2008 from txt

RMN_Berny: procession begins
10:01 AM September 10, 2008 from txt

True dat?

ADAM REILLY — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:02:01 GMT

Rory O’Connor ponders the future of journalistic trust at Harvard
Rory O’Connor’s timing couldn’t be much better.

Rory O’Connor’s timing couldn’t be much better. We’re in the midst of a presidential campaign where the very notion of Truth-with-a-capital-T seems to be at risk: think Barack Obama’s alleged Muslim-ness or Sarah Palin’s alleged rejection of the Bridge to Nowhere. And now O’Connor — the veteran journalist and media critic and alum of the Phoenix, the Real Paper, Boston magazine, the Globe, WGBH, and WCVB — has returned to Boston from New York for a fellowship at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, where he’ll be pondering the future of journalistic truth and trust. An edited excerpt of his recent conversation with the Phoenix follows; for a fuller version, visit the “Don’t Quote Me” blog.

What is the goal of your study at Harvard?
How do we know that what we see and hear is really true? That goes both ways. There’s a high level of distrust between the citizenry and the professional journalism priesthood, whether they’re on the right or the left. And the professionals are up in arms, too. They don’t trust citizen journalism at all; they’re afraid of people getting their news and information from viral e-mails; they know things are changing rapidly throughout the mainstream media; they feel, quite rightly, like they’re under assault. What I’m going to be looking at is trust, journalism, and social networks, and the role they can play in enabling people to get news and information they can trust. Obviously, that’s really vital to having a fully functioning democracy. And one could argue we don’t have one at the moment, or that we’re right on the edge of not having one.

So are John McCain and the GOP being savvy in telling people, “don't get your information from the media because they’re not trustworthy”?
Attacking the media hasn’t worked so well in the past, but I think it's working better now because of personalization — my Yahoo, my news, my Republican Party, my Democratic friends. And as people move away from mainstream transition belts, everything becomes media. You’re getting pushed directly from the campaign, or seeing their information on YouTube — that’s media. You’re mashing it up and making something new: photoshopping and putting Sarah Palin’s head on top of somebody in a red, white, and blue bikini, holding a giant gun, which also wasn’t true. That’s media. The other thing I want to look at is the mainstream media playing in fields of Facebook and MySpace. What are they doing? YouTube just partnered with the Pulitzer Center; CNN has a new thing going with Digg; Reuters built a bureau in Second Life. Nobody knows if any of this stuff’s going to work, but they know something’s happening.

Beating the press

ADAM REILLY — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:16:25 GMT

Why McCain’s Machiavellian war on the media could cost him the presidency
If you’re a liberal, you quadrennially reconcile yourself to the fact that the GOP is going to win the White House. Again.

If you’re a liberal, you quadrennially reconcile yourself to the fact that the GOP is going to win the White House. Again. Republicans are just better than Democrats at scoring points with snark — think John Kerry windsurfing, or Mike Dukakis in that goddamn tank. They’re also adept at whipping up patriotic fear and fervor, whether it’s using 9/11 as a campaign prop or casting Barack Obama’s candidacy as an exercise in self-indulgence. And at crucial moments — like the 2000 Florida recount — the Republicans seem to simply will themselves to victory.

This time, though, there’s actually reason for optimism. Never mind the fact that this past week’s Republican National Convention demonstrated the GOP’s mastery of the darker political arts, or that Gallup shows John McCain with a post-convention lead over Obama, 49 percent to 44 percent. The RNC also featured McCain’s formal, foolhardy declaration of war on the press — the same press, by the way, that made him a political superstar. Now the press seems inclined to fire back. And if this dynamic continues over the next two months — and the election is as close as everyone expects it to be — it could be the factor that makes Obama president.

An opportunity lost
Absent McCain’s decision to demonize the press, the RNC would have been a home run. Take the cynically brilliant way that the Republicans spun Hurricane Gustav. By suspending the big speeches of September 1, the convention’s first day, the GOP transformed Gustav from a dangerous reminder of past Republican failures (Hurricane Katrina, anyone?) into an inspiring example of selfless leadership that perfectly fit McCain’s campaign slogan, “Country First.” (Granted, ignoring Gustav was never really an option; the showiness surrounding the sacrifice of that first evening felt pretty political; and there actually was plenty of partisanship on display that evening — e.g., Laura Bush noting that all the governors saving the Gulf Coast from Gustav just happened to be Republicans. Still, it was a lucky break.)

And Gustav didn’t just reinforce McCain’s master narrative. It also made it easier for him and the rest of the GOP to distance themselves from President Bush. Thanks to the weather gods, the president and his debilitating unfavorable ratings never made it to Minnesota. Bush restricted himself to a video address on September 2, thereby de-emphasizing his central role in the party and avoiding any awkward reprise of 2000’s infamous Bush-McCain hug. And all this, in turn, made it easier for McCain — who, according to Congressional Quarterly, voted with the president 95 percent of the time this past year — to cast himself as an Obama-esque agent of change when he accepted the nomination two days later. (The party faithful got the message, too; when I chatted with one California delegate in the Fox News tent, she answered every reference I made to the president with this riposte: he’s not running. That’s a tough point to debate.)

The good soldier

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:45:20 GMT

In Minnesota, Mitt keeps the faith
It can’t be easy being Mitt Romney nowadays.

It's all okay with Mitt, even though he’s been upstaged by a sportscaster turned one-term governor.

BLOOMINGTON, MN — It can’t be easy being Mitt Romney nowadays. Imagine: you find your place in the Republican firmament, make a serious run at the GOP’s presidential nomination, earn frequent mention as a possible running mate for John McCain — and then watch as McCain picks an obscure, untested, deeply flawed hockey-mom-cum-Alaska-secessionist for the job.

Maybe, deep down inside, our former Massachusetts governor rages at the injustice of it all. But rather than retreating to Belmont to lick his wounds, Romney is here in Minnesota for the Republican National Convention, doing his darndest to get McCain and Sarah Palin elected in November. Speaking to the Massachusetts GOP delegation over brunch on Tuesday, Romney offered some insight into how he does it.

“When you lose an election, lose the nomination, if you think the election is just about the person — one person — then of course you have sour grapes,” Romney said. “You don’t get involved with the new person. But if you believe, as I do, that the election is about a series of beliefs and values you think are important — for your constituency, for your state, and for your nation — then when one person loses and the other person wins, who shares those values and those views, then you jump on that team and work just as hard as you did the first time.”

Bless his heart, Romney seems to be doing just that. There was no sense at Tuesday’s exhortatory breakfast that Mitt was going through the motions. He was earnest, animated, alternately humorous and heartfelt. Take, for example, this little joke, which was delivered with characteristic Romney aplomb.

“The story is, John McCain and Barack Obama, the race’ll be so close that neither the voters nor the Electoral College will be able to decide it. So it’ll be determined — the next president — based upon an ice-fishing contest in Minnesota, right here! And the person that catches the most fish over four days wins.

“They separate them on different lakes. On day one, John McCain comes in; he’s got 10 fish, Barack Obama’s got none. Day two, John McCain has 20 fish, Barack Obama has none. Day three, [Senate majority leader] Harry Reid goes to Barack Obama and says, ‘It’s clear John McCain is cheating; go spy on him and find out how he’s winning!’ So Barack Obama goes and watches John McCain, and he comes back to Harry Reid and says, ‘You won’t believe what John McCain is doing. He’s cutting a hole in the ice!’ ”

RNC 2008 Wrap-Up

ADAM REILLY — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:48:32 GMT

Protest-to-podium coverage of the Republican National Convention from our reporter in St. Paul

Laurels for a Boston media vet

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:29:25 GMT

Breaking down barriers
Congrats to Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers, who’ll receive the Society of Professional Journalists’ Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Fiedler on the spot

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:11:12 GMT

Having taken the reins of BU’s contentious College of Communication, Pulitzer winner Tom Fiedler learns to navigate the thorny world of academia
As jobs in journalism-education go, Tom Fiedler’s new gig isn’t bad. Quite the contrary.

Paper chase: The counterintuitive, durable case for journalism education. By Adam Reilly.

As jobs in journalism-education go, Tom Fiedler’s new gig isn’t bad. Quite the contrary. Fiedler — the ex–Miami Herald executive editor who took over as dean of Boston University’s College of Communication (COM) back in June — gets to run an institution that’s already graced with a high-powered faculty and which, though not quite elite, might be the best of its sort in New England. He’ll be operating in Boston, a city with perennial appeal for prospective students and professors. And he’ll be implementing a vision that he himself crafted as head of the external-review committee that sized up the state of the college in 2007.

But Fiedler’s also inheriting some serious headaches. As COM’s run-down building on Comm Ave suggests, the college is strapped for cash. It’s also a factionalized, turbulent place where the three departments — journalism; mass communication, advertising, and public relations; and film and television — don’t always get along. Plus, Fiedler, who got a master’s degree from COM in 1971, has a vision of journalism education that’s sure to ruffle some feathers. Throw in the fact that he’s a relative newcomer to academia — where, as Henry Kissinger famously observed, the arguments are so bitter because the stakes are so low — and his seemingly cozy new perch suddenly looks like it should come with a complimentary flak jacket. Welcome to town!

I’m not Dick Cheney
Fiedler wasn't supposed to end up running his alma mater. Instead, as head of the external-review committee that took stock of COM following the scandal-tinged September 2006 resignation of Dean John Schulz (more on that in a bit), he was going to chart a course for COM’s future, and then step aside.

Then the plan changed — but not, Fiedler emphasizes, in a Dick-Cheney-nominates-himself-for-veep sort of way (our analogy, not his). In the fall of 2007, a few months after the external-review committee issued its report, Fiedler was contacted about the dean’s job at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, and asked BU president Robert A. Brown if he could use him as a reference. (At the time, Fiedler was also a BU overseer; he’s since resigned that position.)

Paper chase

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:17:08 GMT

The counterintuitive, durable case for journalism education
On the face of it, this isn’t a great time to study journalism.

Boston University's College of Communication

Fiedler on the spot: Having taken the reins of BU’s contentious College of Communication, Pulitzer winner Tom Fiedler learns to navigate the thorny world of academia. By Adam Reilly.

On the face of it, this isn’t a great time to study journalism. Consider, for example, the ongoing bloodletting in American newspapers: earlier this month, Mark Potts, the author of the Recovering Journalist blog, reported that a whopping 6300 employees at the 100 biggest American newspapers had lost their jobs — either by layoff or buyout — in the past year. Granted, the status quo is bleaker in newspapers than in radio or TV. But with the Web cannibalizing those forms of media, too — as well as rendering the old notions of national and regional readerships, viewerships, and listenerships obsolete — the future looks ominously uncertain everywhere in the news business.

And yet, counterintuitively, the schools charged with training the next generation of journalists keep pumping out graduates. In 2007, for example, nearly 50,000 students received bachelor’s degrees in journalism and mass communication, according to the 2007 Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates, which was conducted by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Meanwhile, the number of master’s students was close to 3800. (By way of comparison, the 2003 numbers were approximately 46,000 and 4100, respectively.)

True, they didn’t all want to be journalists: the 2007 Annual Survey also found that more new bachelor’s recipients sought work in PR or advertising (about 24 percent) than at daily newspapers (about 21 percent) or in broadcasting (also about 21 percent). Still, given the bleak realities of the journalistic marketplace, isn’t this steady output of embryonic journalists a bit irresponsible?

Not necessarily. For starters — and despite the angst that currently pervades newsrooms around the country — the job market for new journalism grads actually isn’t all that bad. According to the 2007 Annual Survey, for example, 71.7 percent of new bachelor’s degree recipients with news/editorial specializations have full-time work. The job market was better before the dot-com boom went bust: in 1999, that number peaked at 80.4 percent. That said, the 2007 employment rate is better than 2003 (63.5), 2004 (68.8), and 2006 (69.9) — and, somewhat surprisingly, 1990, as well (66.1). Employment for new bachelor’s holders who specialized in broadcast specialists is up too: 67.3 percent of them have full-time jobs — the best figure in seven years, and (once again) an improvement over 1990 (63.4).

In harm's way

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:59:21 GMT

The tragedy of Rakan Hassan and the impossibility of a Hippocratic Oath for journalists
Most of the job-related fears that keep journalists up at night are relatively mundane, but on rare occasions, a more ominous scenario presents itself.

Most of the job-related fears that keep journalists up at night are relatively mundane. We worry about getting scooped, making factual errors, pissing off the occasional source or story subject. But on rare occasions, a more ominous scenario presents itself — namely, the possibility that our reporting could cause actual harm to someone we cover.

In a grim front-page piece published in the Sunday, August 3, edition of the Boston Globe, columnist Kevin Cullen wrestled with just this concern. Cullen’s subject was the death of Rakan Hassan, a 14-year-old Iraqi boy who was brought to Boston for medical treatment in 2005, after a mistaken attack by US soldiers killed his parents and left him paralyzed.

Cullen had written about Hassan before, in a series of stories that detailed his evacuation from Iraq, recuperation at Massachusetts General and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospitals, and return to his home city of Mosul. Those pieces — published in 2006, before Cullen was tapped as a metro columnist — were models of great feature writing: highly readable, packed with evocative detail, touching but never maudlin.

This story was different. Hassan, Cullen told his readers, had been killed earlier this summer, in a bomb blast at his family’s home. As the story progressed, Cullen explored whether Hassan’s Boston caretakers should have allowed him to return to Iraq — and whether the Globe’s coverage of Hassan’s story might have somehow led to his death.

“All of us who cared about this boy, who loved this boy, are left to wonder: did we do something, however unwittingly, that got him killed?” Cullen wrote. “Did somebody somehow read Rakan’s story, maybe online, and set out to kill him and his family, to prove that anybody who takes sweets or help or anything from the Americans is a collaborator who shall die the death of an infidel?”

After mentioning other potential factors that may have made Hassan a target (his treatment by US Army physicians stationed in Iraq; his brother-in-law’s security job with the Iraqi government), Cullen concluded that the motivations of Hassan’s killers might never be known. But then, a few paragraphs later, he found himself returning to the question: “Would he still be alive if I didn’t write about him? If Michele McDonald’s beautiful photos of him never appeared in this newspaper?”

The Night James Brown Saved Boston

ADAM REILLY — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:33:59 GMT

Documentary that situates the concert in a larger context
The memory of what Brown and White accomplished 40 years ago should endure.

Leggo my ego!

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:50:31 GMT

The GOP is smearing Obama as a narcissist. So why is the press playing along?
If Barack Obama loses the presidency this November, it won’t be because of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or “Bitter-gate,” or sundry other vulnerabilities.

If Barack Obama loses the presidency this November, it won’t be because of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or “Bitter-gate,” or sundry other vulnerabilities. Instead, it’ll be because the public — and the pundits who tell them what to think about politics — has decided that Obama is a bit too big for his britches.

Yeah, that’s a strange assessment of someone who’s running for president. (“Why . . . he’s acting like he could be the leader of the free world!”) But in recent weeks, it’s become accepted political dogma. On July 18, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer outlined the Obama-as-narcissist case in a piece titled “The Audacity of Vanity.” Obama is a man of profoundly limited achievement, Krauthammer claimed. Yet he wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, put a faux presidential seal on his lectern, told Americans to learn a second language, and speaks of himself, using the royal “we,” as a harbinger of great change. “Who does he think he is?”, Krauthammer asked. “We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more.”

Leaving aside the obvious problems with Krauthammer’s argument — e.g., Obama’s use of “we” is a rhetorical device aimed at making his supporters feel like they’re part of a movement, not just a campaign — the fact that he made it hardly came as a surprise. Sneering conservative partisanship is, after all, Krauthammer’s whole shtick. And Krauthammer was merely following the lead that his candidate, John McCain, offered in February 2008 after the “Potomac Primary.” (McCain’s line: “I do not seek the presidency on the presumption that I am blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save my country in its hour of need.”)

The avidity with which the rest of the press has embraced this line of reasoning, however, is a bit more unexpected. Two days after Krauthammer’s column ran, for example, Joan Vennochi, the fine Boston Globe columnist, cited (among other things) Obama’s trip to Europe, his upcoming nomination-acceptance speech in the Denver Broncos’ 75,000-seat stadium, and Michelle Obama’s purported affinity for Jackie Kennedy–esque dress as proof that “Obama has a crush on Obama.” (Pity the women whose husbands run for president. Judith Steinberg Dean was too shy and dumpy; Michelle Obama is so stylish and attractive that she’s proof of Obama’s Kennedy complex.)

Head case

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:06:40 GMT

Media coverage of a State House sex scandal reveals the pitfalls of reporting on mental illness
Who is Jim Marzilli, exactly? Is he a predatory letch? Or is he a deeply troubled man who needs to be kept from harassing women — but also from hurting himself?

STOP THE INSANITY: Bipolar disorder could have something — or nothing — to do with State Senator Jim Marzilli’s sexual-harassment charges. But the press is making its own diagnoses.

Who is Jim Marzilli, exactly? Is he a predatory letch? Or is he a deeply troubled man who needs to be kept from harassing women — but also from hurting himself?

If you live in Massachusetts and follow the news, you’ve probably pondered this question at some point during the past few months. In April, Marzilli, a Democratic state senator from Arlington, was accused of sexual assault by a woman who claimed he’d inappropriately touched her in an early-morning incident at her home. A month later, Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone announced that his office was dropping that case due to insufficient evidence.

But then, on June 3, Marzilli was arrested in Lowell after allegedly harassing four different women over the span of several hours, bombarding them with inappropriate sexual overtures and attempting to grope one’s crotch. Approached by police, he gave a false name, then fled on foot; as officers subdued him with pepper spray inside a parking garage, he wept and said that his “life was over.” And this past week, two more women accused Marzilli of sexual harassment in a suit filed in Middlesex Superior Court.

While Marzilli has said that he won’t seek re-election, he hasn’t been found guilty of any crime. In the court of public opinion, however, he’s already been convicted and sentenced. Calls for his resignation have come from the Boston Herald, the Lowell Sun, the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, and Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. For its part, the Massachusetts Republican Party has launched a new Web site called Marzilli Watch — motto: “Taxpayers Working for a Senator That’s Not” — aimed at mustering up public outrage that Marzilli, who hasn’t done his job in more than a month, is still receiving a state paycheck.

Which brings us to the reason Marzilli hasn’t been at work. On June 5, the Associated Press reported that Marzilli had entered McLean Hospital, the famed psychiatric facility in Belmont. The Herald subsequently reported that Marzilli had taken a leave from the State Senate and was being treated for symptoms of hypomania, a condition linked to bipolar disorder. And on July 10, the Globe published a piece in which Marzilli’s attorney, Terrence Kennedy, confirmed that his client had received a bipolar diagnosis. Since then, Marzilli’s diagnosis and/or treatment at McLean have been cited in practically every story that’s been done on his situation.

Unkindest cut?

ADAM REILLY — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:03:13 GMT

How a proposed pay cut surprised the Globe newsroom — and why it might actually happen
There’s probably no good way to learn that your employer wants you to do the same amount of work for less money. But the manner in which the editorial staff of the Boston Globe made this discovery was especially awkward.

There’s probably no good way to learn that your employer wants you to do the same amount of work for less money. But the manner in which the editorial staff of the Boston Globe made this discovery was especially awkward.

On Monday, June 23, Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson — the chairman and president/CEO, respectively, of the New York Times Company, which has owned the Globe since 1993 — dropped by the paper’s Morrissey Boulevard headquarters. The impetus for their visit was a retirement party for Al Larkin, the Globe’s outgoing executive vice-president and spokesman; prior to Larkin’s shindig, they spoke with newsroom department heads and held a paper-wide “town meeting” in the Globe’s William O. Taylor Room. The latter session was strikingly well-attended — people were reportedly sitting in the aisles and standing in the doorways — and a number of subjects came up: the advertising department’s ongoing struggles selling boston.com; the possible closure of the Globe’s printing plant in Billerica; the question of whether the Times Company will keep the Globe or try to sell it.

Most notably, however, there was the awkward topic of a possible wage cut. How, asked Globe mailroom employee Dan Caplette, can you justify management’s proposal to slash union salaries by 10 percent? In response — and as the Globe’s editorial employees wondered what the hell the mailroom guy was talking about — Globe publisher Steve Ainsley, who was also present, stressed that the wage-cut request was part of a broader collective-bargaining process. Despite “significant financial pressure” on the paper, he added, nothing had been decided yet. Sulzberger’s reply, when it came, featured the dreaded catch phrase of 21st-century journalism. “We’re trying to do more with less,” he explained. “We have to redefine what the Boston Globe is in a new universe.”

All of which raises a couple questions: first, why did the mailroom guy know more about the state of the paper’s labor relations than its reporters did? And second, is the Globe really about to pluck a few thousand dollars out of each of its union employees’ pockets?

Holding on, moving forward
The answer to the first question is pretty simple: union representation. The Globe’s mailroom employees are represented by the Boston Mailers Union, Teamsters Local 1, Boston, which Caplette heads. The editorial staff, by contrast, is represented by the Boston Newspaper Guild (BNG), the largest union at the paper. And despite being informed of the wage-cut proposal in a June 18 letter from Globe senior V-P Gregory Thornton, BNG president Dan Totten still hadn’t informed his members one week later. Which meant that they finally learned about the prospective salary reduction either when Caplette brought it up, or when they saw a quote from Totten in the June 25 Boston Herald, or when Totten finally e-mailed his members the same day the Herald story ran.

Criminal intent

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:10:29 GMT

Ed Burns on writing Iraq
Ed Burns — former Baltimore homicide detective, Vietnam vet, and long-time writing partner with David Simon, both on the The Wire and on Generation Kill , spoke with the Phoenix about the new series.

GET YOUR WAR ON: The response Dave Simon (left) and Ed Burns (right) wanted from Iraqi vets was: “They got it.”

The wages of war: The creators of The Wire take on Iraq in Generation Kill. By Adam Reilly.

Ed Burns — former Baltimore homicide detective, Vietnam vet, and long-time writing partner with David Simon, both on the The Wire and on Generation Kill, spoke with the Phoenix about the new series. Here’s some of what he had to say.

What kind of response have you gotten from the Marine Corps? Because this is definitely a warts-and-all portrayal of the Corps and its members.
First of all, we viewed for the Bravo 2 and Bravo 3 guys from First Recon [the two platoons focused on in the film]. They loved it; they thought it was their story. At Camp Pendleton [the Marine Corps base in Southern California], a lot of the enlisted officers were at first reluctant to get involved. Then, when they saw it, they gave us the thumbs-up. That was a big test. We did this with that audience in mind, just the way we did The Wire with cops and drug people in our mind as the audience.

Watching the film, I was repeatedly reminded that for a lot of people — including me — this is an utterly alien world. Is that something you were cognizant of, and if so, how did it affect the creative process?
Well, this is an opportunity to go into a world that you don’t have access to. In that sense it’s very much like The Wire. If you invest in this, you’ll see the elite of the young men who’ve been committed to war. And the opportunity to present this was a challenge that David [Simon] and I really enjoyed. We were writing to get those Marines to look at each other knowingly and say, “They got it.”

That’s all we can do. Then it’s up to the audience, as they come to it, to make their own assessments of what they’ve seen. In The Wire, you can decide these people are getting a bum rap and something should be done — or you can decide that these people are lazy and they deserve what they get. Evan Wright’s book [Generation Kill, on which the HBO series is based] can be read, I think, as a sort of anti-war book. But the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation gave it an award. It’s what you bring to it. Our job — if you’re going to invest in the series — is that we want it to be as close to reality as possible, so your investment isn’t cheated.

The wages of war

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:04:39 GMT

The creators of The Wire take on Iraq in Generation Kill
The Iraq War poses a strange problem for the American public.

ON SITE: Generation Kill transforms Iraq from a theoretical problem into something you feel in your gut.

Criminal intent: Ed Burns on writing Iraq. By Adam Reilly

The Iraq War poses a strange problem for the American public. On the one hand, whether and how to exit Iraq — and what lessons to draw from the invasion and its aftermath — are crucial political, cultural, and moral questions. On the other, a broad swath of the citizenry has zero personal stake in what’s happening there. Most of us have never come close to fighting in Iraq; neither have our family members or our friends. We know that Iraq is a critical issue. But we also feel that it’s somebody else’s issue.

Generation Kill (HBO, premiering July 13 at 9 pm and running for seven consecutive Sundays) doesn’t change this reality. But the new Iraq War mini-series from writers/producers David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind The Wire, does destabilize it, by providing a vivid, troubling portrait of what the soldiers unlucky enough to serve in Iraq experienced at the war’s beginning. If, like me, you’re fortunate enough to have been insulated from the human costs of the invasion and occupation, you’ll find that watching Generation Kill transforms Iraq from a theoretical problem to something you feel in your gut.

At the outset, the Marines of the First Reconnaissance Battalion aren’t an overly sympathetic bunch. Waiting for the invasion to start, they trade homophobic barbs, jerk off to Hustler, and rhapsodize about how awesome it would have been to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. Early in the first episode, a batch of earnest letters from American schoolkids arrives, and there’s a hopeful one that floats the possibility of peace. Corporal Ray Person (James Ransone), the mouthiest of the Marines, orates an immediate and eloquently obscene response: “Dear Frederick: Thank you for your nice letter. But I am actually a U.S. Marine who was born to kill, whereas clearly you have mistaken me for some sort of wine-sipping, commie dick-suck. . . . Peace sucks a hairy asshole, Freddy. War is the motherfucking answer.”

Is anybody paying attention to McClatchy's powerful Guantánamo exposé?

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:31:34 GMT

An old-media triumph sheds new light on Bush’s terror policy
Even before its 2006 acquisition of Knight Ridder, California-based McClatchy had a reputation for putting out some of America’s best mid-level dailies.

Even before its 2006 acquisition of Knight Ridder, California-based McClatchy had a reputation for putting out some of America’s best mid-level dailies. The Knight Ridder purchase, when it occurred, didn’t just add powerhouses like the Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer to McClatchy’s stable; it also gave McClatchy access to Knight Ridder’s Washington, DC, bureau, which had distinguished itself with commendably skeptical coverage prior to the Iraq War.

Now with this past week’s publication of a series on the Kafka-esque detention of thousands of foreign nationals following 9/11, the hybrid McClatchy–Knight Ridder DC operation is enjoying its biggest achievement to date. The subject matter of “Guantánamo: Beyond the Law” wasn’t new, exactly — the abuse of prisoners, the questionable criteria used to put them behind bars, and the dubious legal framework crafted to justify their ongoing legal limbo have all been covered elsewhere. But the depth of McClatchy’s treatment was unprecedented, and its conclusions were startling. For one thing, most prisoners at Guantánamo had “no intelligence value in the war on terror.” For another, by radicalizing formerly apolitical detainees, Guantánamo may actually have made Americans less safe, not more.

In the course of their research, reporters Tom Lasseter and Matthew Schofield talked to 66 former detainees who’d been held at Guantánamo and elsewhere; the fruits of their eight-plus-month investigation were published, by design, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling that Guantánamo’s inmates can challenge their detentions in civilian court. (The series also appeared the same week that McClatchy announced its latest round of cutbacks; more on that in a bit.) The vast scope of Lasseter and Schofield’s reporting makes it more likely that their findings will hold up in the future. And, as an added bonus, it gives the public a vast trove of anecdotal evidence, which has been skillfully packaged online at mcclatchydc.com/detainees. There’s a photo gallery, video interviews with 10 former prisoners, and miniature profiles of every single detainee interviewed for the series. Sometimes the old saw about “journalism being the first draft of history” makes you feel sorry for the historians. Not here.

But is “Guantánamo: Beyond the Law” getting the attention that it should? That’s hard to say. As Editor & Publisher noted this past week, pickup and play inside the McClatchy chain itself has been outstanding. (McClatchy’s papers aren’t obligated to use material generated by the chain’s Washington bureau.) Several non-McClatchy papers, including the Oregonian and the Denver Post, have run part or all of the series, too. And according to Roy Gutman, McClatchy’s foreign editor, it’s been discussed on CNN (by Christiane Amanpour) and NPR (on Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and The Diane Rehm Show).

Bad sports

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:06:51 GMT

While old and new media are mending many fences, they’re still squaring off in jockland
When historians trace the rise of the blog as the dominant journalistic form of the 21st century, they’ll pay close attention to two recent developments.

When, sometime in the future, historians trace the rise of the blog as the dominant journalistic form of the 21st century, they’ll pay close attention to two recent developments:

1) In February 2008, Joshua Micah Marshall, founder of the left-leaning political blog Talking Points Memo, won a Polk Award for legal reporting. Previous Polk Award winners include such revered media luminaries as David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, Mary McGrory, and I.F. Stone.

2) Two months later, in a joint appearance on Bob Costas’s HBO show, Buzz Bissinger — who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Philadelphia court system, but is best-known for Friday Night Lights, his fantastic book on Texas high-school football — squared off with Will Leitch, founding editor of the irreverent sports blog Deadspin. In the ensuing one-sided exchange, Leitch was cast as a harbinger of the coming journalistic apocalypse. “I think you’re full of shit,” Bissinger told Leitch at the outset; things went downhill from there.

It’s a loaded juxtaposition, of course. In terms of winning mainstream recognition, Marshall’s Polk Award represents perhaps the blogosphere’s finest moment. And Bissinger’s screed against Leitch and sports blogs in general was unique in its ferocity.

But Marshall and Leitch’s disparate receptions from journalism’s old guard point to a bigger, somewhat bizarre phenomenon. For the most part, the pre-Web media establishment is slowly making its peace with the very technology that will either destroy journalism (if you’re pessimistic) or utterly reshape it. The Boston Globe editorial page prints a regular blog round-up; the mainstream media chase the dubiously obtained scoops of Huffington Post muckraker Mayhill Fowler; Riazat Butt, religious correspondent for the Guardian, reflects that “I thought online journalism wasn’t journalism because they would just read the wires and rewrite it. Now it means more to me to get stories onto the Web than in the paper.”

March to war

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:55:17 GMT

Why isn’t the press paying more attention to a possible attack on Iran?
During the course of two weeks in May, America’s top-ranking military officer went from warning that war with Iran could cripple the US military to rattling his saber at Tehran.

During the course of two weeks in May, America’s top-ranking military officer went from warning that war with Iran could cripple the US military to rattling his saber at Tehran.

That’s one interpretation, anyway. In an interview with Israeli TV that was broadcast on May 5, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, struck a glum note when asked about the possibility of preemptively striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. “I actually am very hopeful that we don’t get into a position where we have to get into a conflict,” Mullen responded, according to Reuters. “It would be a very significant challenge for the United States right now to get into a third conflict in that part of the world.”

But on May 20, testifying before the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Mullen sounded far more combative. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the US designated a terrorist organization in 2007, is “directly jeopardiz[ing]” peace in Iraq, said Mullen, according to the Associated Press (AP). And then: “Restraint in our response does not signal lack of resolve or capability to defend ourselves against threats.”

That seems like a major shift — but what did it mean? Did Mullen really rethink his assessment of whether the military could handle a new conflict? Did he backpedal after concluding that his earlier remarks could undercut diplomatic efforts to limit Iran’s budding nuclear program? Or might one of the Bush administration’s most hawkish members — someone from Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office, perhaps — have pointedly told Mullen that attacking Iran was still very much an option?

Oddly, there didn’t seem to be much interest from the media in finding out — or even in asking the question. The AP report on Mullen’s congressional testimony didn’t note his change in rhetoric. Neither did the New York Times, which made only passing reference to Mullen’s testimony. (The Times story, which focused on the Jerusalem Post’s claim that the US plans to attack Iran this year, was buried on A13.) And the May 21 Washington Post didn’t mention Mullen’s testimony at all.

To be fair, this dearth of coverage didn’t come on a slow news day. The Times’ front page, for example, featured stories about Barack Obama winning a majority of Democratic delegates, Ted Kennedy’s brain-cancer diagnosis, and a fragile peace in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood. The top story in the paper’s “International Report” section, meanwhile, was a follow-up on the Sichuan earthquake.

Open book?

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:37:25 GMT

Sal DiMasi is an embattled politician. His wife is an aspiring talk-show host. Welcome to New England Cable News’ ethics problem.
On any given day, New England Cable News features more smart, substantive politics coverage than any other Boston television station.

On any given day, New England Cable News (NECN) features more smart, substantive politics coverage than any other Boston television station. But right now, the station is facing a thorny little conflict-of-interest problem involving Massachusetts House Speaker Sal DiMasi, whose embattled status happens to be the story of the moment on Beacon Hill.

Some background: on May 1, the Boston Globe ran a front-page story on how legislative moves by DiMasi have benefited his friend, developer Jay Cashman. In 2006, DiMasi killed a bill that would have blocked a liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) construction project in Fall River, paving the way for a real-estate deal that netted Cashman more than $14 million. And in 2007, he backed legislation that could lead to the construction of a wind farm in Buzzards Bay — where, it turns out, Cashman hopes to build one.

As the Globe’s Frank Phillips noted, the DiMasi-Cashman connection isn’t limited to the two men; their spouses, Debbie DiMasi and Christy Scott Cashman, are currently collaborating on a TV program. Open Book Club, a sassy, half-hour literary confab, is produced by Saint Aire Productions LLC, a production company that Christy Scott Cashman runs. It’s taped in the Cashmans’ Back Bay manse. And as of May 4, it’s broadcast monthly on NECN.

Phillips’s story was about DiMasi’s ties to Cashman, not whether NECN’s link to the two men’s spouses is problematic. But that’s a natural follow-up question. On the one hand, NECN has to cover DiMasi and the turmoil threatening his Speakership, including the question of whether he’s used his position to benefit Cashman. On the other, NECN is involved in a business partnership with DiMasi’s and Cashman’s wives — and perhaps, depending on Saint Aire’s ownership structure, with Cashman himself. (Tom Kiley, the Cashmans’ attorney, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but both Jay and Christy Scott Cashman’s names appear on paperwork filed with the state.)

All this would be awkward enough. But on May 2 — one day after Phillips’s exposé was published — “Names,” the Globe’s gossip column, featured a big photo of NECN head Charles Kravetz at the Open Book Club launch party, which also took place in the Cashmans’ home. In the photo, Kravetz was flanked by Christy Scott Cashman and Debbie DiMasi. He looked delighted; so did they.

So much unknown
The question, obviously, is this: should NECN pull the plug on Open Book Club?