Republican Mouthpieces, Eh?

An interesting article appeared last week in the FWWeekly basically accusing the Texas A&M Press of becoming a Republican Party mouthpiece. I myself being a knee-jerk liberal and true Orangeblood, the story made me go, "Yeah ... and so ...?"

However, one piece of evidence that Cynthia Shear used to support her thesis was this: "This fall, A&M Press will bring out a biography of Clayton Williams, paid for by Clayton Williams, an A&M alum who lost a gubernatorial race to Ann Richards in part because he said Texas weather is like rape: If it’s inevitable, relax and enjoy it."

Now say anything you want about Williams. It matters not to me. But I think Shear was a little off base by submitting the Williams bio as evidence of a vast Right Wing Aggie Conspiracy. This book, of course, has two Fort Worth connections: it's written by Mike Cochran with an editing assist from wordsmith Mike Blackman. Cochran is best known as the author of Texas vs. Davis, the story of the Cullen Davis murder trial, and as one of the pallbearers at the funeral of Arlington Heights alum (and alleged presidential assassin) Lee Harvey Oswald. Blackman is the former executive editor of the Star-Telegram and currently a journalism professor at Sam Houston State. These guys ... Republican mouthpieces? Seems pretty damn unlikely to me.

So I asked them both: was the Williams book a vanity project?

"When Claytie sat down with me and asked me to do this project, I told him I wasn't going to do a fluff book," Cochran said. "Claytie told me, 'I don't want no damn fluff book.'"

Blackman echoed that. "Cochran -- he's nobody's mouthpiece, and certainly not for Clayton Williams. Not once in our many hours of interviews did Williams ever say 'no comment.' Sometimes he and Cochran butted heads big time. Sometimes I became the referee, separating these two pugnacious rascals."

Cochran remembered one time when he and Williams got into it.

"I told him that Bush -- now this is fact -- Bush would never have run for governor in '94 if Williams had beat Ann Richards. And if that doesn't happen, Bush doesn't have a springboard to run for president. And we're not in Iraq right now. So we're not just talking about Williams changing the history of Texas. He changed the history of the world."

To put it mildly, Williams didn't agree with Cochran's reasoning. And that's sort of how it went. Sometimes they got along. Sometimes not. But they always managed to make up over tequila shots. So bottom line: was this a vanity project?

"Not at all," Cochran said. "Claytie wanted a book with humor in it. And I think that's what he got. If anything, Claytie's lovely wife, Modesta, thought he was too candid."

And that's pretty much what I thought I'd find -- two guys with decades of journalism experience between them just trying to tell a damn good story. "If Williams had wanted a book painting him in glowing colors, some heroic portrait, then he screwed up bad, because Cochran's book reveals flaws and shortcomings galore," Blackman said. "Besides, I ask you: What's the percentage in whoring at our age? We're not that fetching."

Again ... Slow News Day?

Previously, this effort to blow the lid off towel theft in the Mid-Cities was my favorite Startlegram story. Well, move over towels because there's a new king of lame news in town -- UNDERWEAR THEFT!

What really makes this story is the locator map. Not only did someone take the time to report and write this story, someone filled out a request with the art department, a designer put together the locator map and a copy editor checked it, all to tell you -- YOU! Because it's all about YOU THE READER! -- about a $17 underwear theft from a Dollar General. Now that's the kind of commitment to news that I want from my daily newspaper.

Can We Get a Do-Over?

I was rocking the Google the other day when I got to thinking about my old boss from my Star-Telegram days, Mac Tully (pictured). Actually, he wasn't my boss, he was the boss of my boss during the big, bad Arlington newspaper war of the late 1990s. Anyway, I knew he had gone to Knight Ridder corporate, and I wondered what happened to him after McClatchy bought the Knight Ridder chain. Turns out he is now the publisher of the Kansas City Star. Well done, Mac. He's a great guy and great newspaper guy. KC is lucky to have him.

Anyway, I found this interview he did with Karen Brown Dunlap, president of the Poynter Institute, back in 2004 before he took the KR corporate job. The most interesting part for me:

Dunlap: What's one thing you wish you could call back?

Tully: Gosh. Biggest mistake I've made. I've made a few big mistakes. I think I would have tried to work with the Dallas papers, instead of being such a competitor of the Dallas papers, because in the end we have got to start growing our share of advertising dollars. If we don't ... then we're going to continue to have the kind of cost pressures that we have now. We should be working together to solve problems as opposed to fighting each other. It became so competitive and such an adversarial fight that there was no way ... for either paper to back out gracefully. So in the end, we said one paper had to walk away the winner. I do feel as though newspapers have so many enemies — not other newspapers. We should be working together to take out ADVO and we should be working together to fight TV and radio. We would be stronger if we were working together rather than trying to compete with each other.

It was crazy to hear him say that because I remember thinking that same thing at the time. But that was a long time ago and newspapers have earned a lot of hard lessons since then. And it looks like there may be more to come, especially with McClatchy reporting yesterday that its stock is down 31 percent since the close off last year's acquisition of Knight Ridder.

Is There A Blue Texas in the Future?

When I attended the Breakfast With Burnham event last month, Lon said something that I dismissed at the time at partisan-speak. Lon believes that the Democrats have a chance to capture the State House in the next election cycle. I've more or less resigned myself to living in a Red State for the foreseeable future, so I really just wrote off the comment. That is until I read this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Royal Masset, a political consultant and longtime political director for the Republican Party of Texas--who played a key role in organizing the grassroots support that took the GOP from marginality to an overwhelming majority--has been predicting a reversal for years.

"There's a certain inevitability in demographics," he told the WSJ. "We knew that if we could win 40% of the Hispanic vote," as Mr. Bush did in 2004, "we'd control Texas until 2030." But in 2006, the number of Texas Hispanics who voted Republican fell to between 30% and 35% (depending on the poll).

This shift alone spells trouble for Republicans. Many conservatives may not want to hear it, but Mr. Masset puts the blame on talk radio and cable TV reaction to immigration reform. He says an uncompromising attitude toward comprehensive reform and appeals to fear sometimes carry a whiff of racism that alienates Hispanics.

And if the demographic shift continues to gain momentum, there's a real possibility that Democrats could achieve a majority in the Texas House by 2010. In 2003, Tom DeLay helped redraw the state's congressional districts to give Republicans six new seats in Congress. In just a few years, Democrats could turn the tables. Mr. Masset sums it up this way: "This thing with the Latino vote is deadly serious."

Wow. Could this be true, or is this some doom-and-gloom prediction designed to whip up the Republican base? I haven't been able to imagine a Democrat who could win in a run for a statewide office until I saw this guy -- State Rep. Rick Noriega (pictured above). He'll announce today the formation of an exploratory committee leading up to a U.S. Senate campaign.

Noriega, a five-term House member from Houston and a lieutenant colonel in the National Guard, is a 26-year veteran of the U.S. armed forces, who spent most of 2005 running training facilities in Afghanistan as part of the Texas National Guard. Noriega also ran a National Guard border-security operation in Laredo, and Houston Mayor Bill White had him manage the housing of Hurricane Katrina evacuees at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

"As Americans, it is our duty to stand up and speak when things have gone off the rails," Noriega, 49, said in an Independence Day posting on several Democratic-leaning Internet blogs. "It is in our very fabric, our soul; it is God's requirement of us as heirs to the legacy of this country, to exercise the right to speak out as our forefathers taught us."

This guy looks like a world-beater, or at least a Cornyn-beater. And it looks like he'll be in town Thursday to help Lon Burnham celebrate his birthday at the Botanic Gardens. I think I'll try to drop by and check that out. For more information on Rick Noriega, check out the Draft Rick Noriega blog.

D(a)MN, That Hurts!

Seems like I can't go anywhere these days without running into a former Startlegram colleague. And that's mostly a good thing, because I think that there are a number of very dedicated and talented people who work their butts off to cover Cowtown. I'm flattered that most of these people still remember and want to take a few minutes to talk to me. Guess I wasn't too big an asshole.

That said, in case you haven't noticed, there is a malaise in media circles these days about the impending death of newspapers. The chatter this past week has mostly regarded a recent Columbia Journalism Review piece on the aftermath of the layoffs at the Dallas Morning News. Not surprisingly, there's more more than a few sour grapes from people who got a pink slip and unease from the people left behind. From the article: "Reese Dunklin, who received a 2004 Livingston Award for Young Journalists, chose not to take the buyout. At thirty-three, Dunklin wants to remain at the Morning News but concedes he is worried about the paper’s future. 'At times you wonder where it’s all headed,' he says, 'because you sense this air of desperation.' ”

I met Reese once and I thought he was a pretty neat guy, and certainly the Livingston Award certifies him as a rising young reporting talent. While I wouldn't have wanted to be Reese last week -- "Uh, Reese, this is Bob Mong. Have you lost your FREAKING mind?!" -- he nailed the mood in Metroplex newsrooms right now. Most don't feel very confident about the direction of their profession generally and the management decisions of the local papers specifically.

While it isn't hard to get someone who was pink-slipped to say something bad about the company who cut them loose, I've always had a more compassionate view of the situation. But one of my former S-T friends I saw on Friday, who is also a former D(a)MNer, had an interesting take on the whole situation.

"I don't feel bad for most of those Morning News people," he said. "What happened there was way overdue. They were overpaid, underworked, arrogant assholes. They would cruise in at 9:30, shoot the breeze, make a few phone calls, then take a long lunch. Maybe -- MAYBE -- do an interview in the afternoon, then leave at 4. They had no idea what it was like other places."

I have to say I was a little taken aback by this, but then again, there is a particular brand of schadenfreude that comes from former D(a)MNers. It's not just that they feel bitter about shabby treatment they endure there, it's like they feel angry because the Big Bad Belo stole part of their soul, too. But my friend was right about one thing, the folks at the D(a)MN had it easier than most for longer than most. Welcome to reality.

While the CJR story paints a rosy picture of life for the RIF-fed 30 percent of the newsroom, I have a hard time believing things are quite so good. Sure, Ed Bark’s blog gets lots of (deserved) praise, but he’s still going to be freelancing for the S-T. If blogging paid the bills – and I assure you, it does not – I don’t think Uncle Barky would be taking that on. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he just wants to get back into the local market.

But if you want the ultimate contrarian POV, read Matt Pulle’s take at Unfair Park. I think this perspective has some merit. The D(a)MN is going through a painful re-focusing process. They are no longer trying to be a national newspaper that sees itself as a peer to the LA Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune or the Washington Post. The paper, like the city of Dallas itself, always thought that the eyes of the country were on it. In truth, they weren’t. The D(a)MN never was the paper it thought it was.

Nonetheless, it is doing some things right. They did man up and basically admit their Web site re-design was a disaster. Now they are trying to fix it. When the Startlegram’s redesign eventually implodes, will the same thing happen in FW? And the only reason I'm implying that the redesign isn't working is a little reporters' mutiny that the S-T sherrifs are trying to keep a lid on. And the fact that everyone I talk who works at or reads the paper hates it. Other than that, it's just my hunch.

So as fashionable as it is to bag on Belo, there is still some quality journalism going on there. Pulle is right about that. And not all the former D(a)MNers are spending their time sticking it to their former employer -- Manny Mendoza is working on an interesting looking film that gets to the root problem: what’s wrong with American newspapers.

I don't know how to solve the problem with American newspapers, but I know what I think would make the Metromess's papers a little more compelling: focus on quality over quantity. By being the best at covering the news in their communities, they will make their papers indespensible to their readers and the community. Don't waste your time with "News You Can Use" infotainment. Give me meaningful local news and put it in context. That's what you do. Do it well.

Facing The Nation

Ken isn't the only old Fort Worth guy getting headlines for his musical ability, turns out Bob Schieffer has a sort-of country music band called Honky Tonk Confidential that The New York Times described as "Johnny Cash meets Rex Harrison." And though Ken likes the wifebeater, Bob is sporting a TCU football jersey and shades. Not bad for a 70-year-old. Something new to shoot for Ken.

The Golden Age of Newspapers

It's not local, but it kind of brings a tear to my eye. They just don't make front pages like this anymore. (sniff) It makes me want to retract my comments about the MySpace prosecutor. Maybe a little prurience isn't so bad.

Thoughts on "Decline of News"

There’s a thought-provoking column by Neil Henry in the San Francisco Chronicle called “The decline of news” that calls out Google and Yahoo for generating handsome profits at the expense of the newspaper business:

It is no longer acceptable for Google corporate executives to say that they don't practice journalism, they only work to provide links to "content providers." Journalism is not just a matter of jobs, and dollars and cents lost. It is a public trust vital to a free society. It stands to reason that Google and corporations like it, who indirectly benefit so enormously from the expensive labor of journalists, should begin to take on greater civic responsibility for journalism's plight. Is it possible for Google to somehow engage and support the traditional news industry and important local newspapers more fully, for example, to become a vital part of possible solutions to this crisis instead of a part of the problem?

While I agree with the assertion that the news business is suffering right now and a healthy media is a key ingredient in a healthy democracy, Henry is glossing over a few key points:

The news business is still enormously profitable. The news is not a non-profit industry – in fact, it is still quite lucrative with margins near 20 percent (or better) expected by shareholders. Compare that with, say, the grocery industry, where profit margins are in the 2-3 percent range. Part of the problem is with news orgs themselves -- they are large, publicly-traded companies that must beat The Street quarter after quarter. They would probably fare better if they went smaller and private. But you can't say that at the shareholders' meeting.

There’s not so much news in the news: When journalism is done right, it is time and labor-intensive and valuable part of living in a community. News orgs have the deep pockets to pay someone to spend weeks or months digging, researching and interviewing before ever publishing a word. The public benefits from this work. Henry’s right: newspapers have it all over most blogs (but certainly not all) in terms of hard news. But hard-hitting exposes don’t exactly fill the paper or generate readers these days. As newspapers scramble to stop circulation declines, more and more of what fills a paper is soft news that is barely discernable from marketing or advertorial. This is better than the blogosphere how? The key demographic seems to be 25- to 45-year-old women who seem to be reading the newspaper for lifestyle pieces rather than hard news content anyway. There’s a reason it only takes me a couple of minutes to get through the paper each day – there’s just not much in there I want to read. I spend a lot more time checking out the work of those links to your right.

This is Google’s problem? No, it is the newspaper industry’s problem. Google isn't in business to help you make money. Don’t want Google or Yahoo linking to your site? Have your lawyers craft cease and desist orders. The music and the film industry have fought vigorously to protect their intellectual property and you are free to do the same. But you know that would be a stupid, stupid thing to do. It’s a new world. Learn how to live in it.

I’m very sorry these people are losing their jobs. Some of them are my friends. But if you want to get mad at someone, get mad at the suits running your newspapers into the ground – yeah, I’m talking to you Tony Ridder. It’s their lack of vision that got you into this mess.

BTW, thanks to Romenesko for the tip!

UPDATE: More on this topic in Romenesko''s letters.

What's So Bad About An E-mail Interview?

Is the interview as we know it dead?

That’s what The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz is asking.

It is a transaction that clearly favors the person asking the questions. A print reporter writes down someone's answers, then picks and chooses how much, if any, to use, how to frame the quotes and where to put any contrary information. Television correspondents slice and dice taped interviews in similar fashion. But in the digital age, some executives and commentators are saying they will respond only by e-mail, which allows them to post the entire exchange if they feel they have been misrepresented, truncated or otherwise disrespected. And some go further, saying, You want to know what I think? Read my blog.

Kurtz’s point is the balance of power between reporter and subject has shifted. Kurtz quotes Jason Calcanis, chief executive of Weblogs Inc., on his blog saying that "journalists have been burning subjects for so long with paraphrased quotes, half quotes, and misquotes that I think a lot of folks (especially ones who don't need the press) are taking an email only interview policy."

Now, when a story breaks claiming that Curt Schilling’s bloody sock from the 2004 ALCS was actually red paint, Schilling responds on his personal blog.

So, what? Is it a bad thing that individuals have more channels to express a point of view? No. Certainly e-mail exchanges allow for more thoughtful answers and are much more time efficient. But, as Kurtz points out, there is nuance lost in a digital interview, and it is much easier to self-edit -- which is why interview subjects love it. If our president could conduct all of his interviews by e-mail, he could look positively Churchill-esque. Instead, anyone who has watched a televised news conference with him realizes that when he strays too far from his talking points, he is completely out of his depth. That’s what you can lose with an e-mail interview -- what you get may be less insightful and more like a press release. If we expect journalists to be government watchdogs, that’s not a good thing. But reporters are going to need to find a way to deal with it -- and make it work for them.

And this actually is a nice segue into my other point, Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson had an interesting take on “The News Business.” He points out what journalists hate to think about: news is a business, but the people who gather the news see it as a craft, a calling, a profession. What pisses off journalists the most is “lost autonomy and power. We're angry that, like everyone else, we're subject to business and financial pressures. Editorial independence has subtly eroded. Decisions about what topics to cover (health, technology) are increasingly tailored to appeal to advertisers. Splintering media markets have weakened the economic base for newsgathering.”

So Big Media aren’t the only game in town anymore, does that mean they are dinosaurs headed to extinction. As Samuelson points out, the skills that are rewarded are shifting from diligent, curious and clear, to tech-savvy, quick and edgy. But Big Media orgs are in the best position to provide both depth AND immediacy. Case in point: Unfair Park. The Observer does a great job of using this vehicle to be timely and snarky, but they use it as an entry point for great in-depth reporting. Sure, the Startlegram and the D(a)MN have loads of local blogs, but none do the job as well as this one. THAT is the challenge that Big Media faces -- things are changing, deal with it.

Newspaper Navel Gazing and Self-Serving Blogspeak

A couple of interesting items from Romenesko. Note to newspapers: evolve or die:

Representing "evolve": Departing Philadelphia Inquirer managing editor Anne Gordon sez newspapers are suffering the pain of their failure to innovate. She believes that there has been a shift in the role of newspapers. "I see print journalists playing an active role less in the breaking of news and more in the analytical side-explaining it." She is also a big believer in breaking down the barriers between reporter and reader, with more "give and take between provider and consumer." Also, she sees a future with handful of high-price superstar journalists and whole legion of low-priced spares. A reporter's deep knowledge of one subject will drive that value.

Representing "die": Retired Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Doug Clifton believes newspapers need to make money from online content distribution. He says he hears at least once a day someone saying: "I don't need the newspaper; I get my news from the Internet." He reminds readers that the Internet doesn't produce the content, it merely distributes it. "Newspapers will survive if readers pay them for their web content or if advertisers flock to newspaper websites in sufficient numbers to offset the revenue lost to the ink-on-paper enterprise. One or both of those options is likely to happen. If they don't, newspapers - and the journalism they produce - could die."

Coming Soon To A Newspaper Near You?

You wouldn't think that you could cover local news in say, Pasadena, Calif., from India, but evidently you can ... or at least PasadenaNow.com thinks so. Unfortunately, I think we will see more moves like this very soon. Do you think someone in Bangalore can cover news in Fort Worth better than someone here can? I don't think so, and I hope no one else in Fort Worth does either.

Redesigning News

Well the big Startlegram redesign came out, and in all fairness, I must say it looks nice. But that wasn't the only point now, was it?

The goal was re-imagining the newspaper. The result: As George W would say, mission accomplished.

The paper I read wasn't really transformed. For one thing, how do they respond to the needs of time-challenged readers who don't have time to read the paper -- they ADD MORE CONTENT! Really?! For all of the talk of radical transformation, the newspaper looked pretty much the same. With the exception of the reader's guide, I pretty much read the same old stuff I always read.

What Did I Read?

A section: Apart from Jan Jarvis' story on the nurse who adopted the two abandoned girls -- there wasn't anything in the A-section worth reading. Does anyone still get national and international news in the newspaper anymore? I get all this online. TIME SPENT: 20 seconds.

Fort Worth: I read this section pretty thoroughly, but didn't get much out of it this Sunday. We had a little bit of Pastor sleaze, but not much else other than the obits. Oh, yeah, Bud Kennedy's mugshot has me concerned for his health. TIME SPENT: Three minutes, tops.

Business: Selling stories on home values to yuppies is like selling nihlism to teenagers -- it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You had me at "Price Per Square Foot." Nice graphic with the story. Why no flash version on the Web site or a database of home values. ANY kind of a tool. And Mitch Schnurman, let's just say Mitch owns this town, bitch! He's always money. TIME SPENT: 10 minutes

Sports: Sports kinda sucked. NFL draft coverage failed to meet expectations. Jennifer Floyd looks like she got a makeover for her mugshot and the haircolor looks kinda creepy. TIME SPENT: 120 seconds in and out.

A&E: Got my hopes up on the Denton Rock City story, but I thought it was kind of a fizzle. TIME SPENT:Five minutes.

Opinions: I read it. I retained nothing. Didn't seem there was anything important there. TIME SPENT:20 seconds.

Life: Really wanted to read the Oakhurst neighborhood story because I think this is a great little part of FW, but that story was like watching paint dry. TIME SPENT: 90 seconds.

Other sections: I always hit the Classified for estate sales and Sunday homes. I read the Circuit City and Best Buy inserts. And the inside cover of Parade Magazine. TIME SPENT: Five minutes.

So What?
So, where does that leave us? Nothing really changed. Everyone in the newspaper industry knows that change is inevitable. This redesign was supposed to put the Startlegram ahead of the game. When I look at the Sunday paper, I just see more of the same. Is there no real willingness to change on the part of the editors and reporters who put out the paper? Or do they just not know how? I suspect a little of both. And the worst part is -- the Web site still sucks.

Ideas, anyone?
If you have any thoughts on how the paper should be fixed, drop a comment below. Here are my ideas. They aren't comprehensive, just a little scattershooting:

Local news first: This is the real value of the paper. It is what the paper does well. Make the most of it. National and International news? Keep it minimal.

Alternative storytelling This is a S-T term, not mine. They have been trying to find new ways to tell stories, but I didn't see any of it in the Sunday paper. A missed opportunity: The Oakhurst story. How do you tell stories about a neighborhood? What we got was feature writing 101. How about getting the people who live there to write about it, then put together a Rashomon like narrative with audio, video and photos? An epic poem? What about asking everyone in the neighborhood to tell their life story in 50 words or less. ANYTHING different. Take some chances. Don't be afraid to fail.

Make the paper smaller: Be respectful of readers time. You aren't just competing against other news sources, you are competing against the Mavericks game, YouTube, IM, 30 Rock, dinner, sleep ... just about everything. You are the filter. Make it more efficient to go through you than gathering news on your own.

Fix the damn Web site: The Web site and the paper work together. They needed to be redesigned together.

Be interactive: Encourage dialogue between your readers and reporters. Your reporters' time is better spent exchanging ideas with readers rather that running down a bullshit story no one is going to read.

MORE MEDIA GEEKERY: The circulation numbers are in and they do indeed suck: The Startlegram is down on weekdays 3.6% to 210,990, Sunday decreased 5.7% to 304,200. At the D(a)MN ... well, does the word Gotterdammerung mean anything to you? Lessee, they lost 14.2% of daily circ to 411,919. Sunday fell 13.3% to 563,079. The Houston Chronicle lost some daily and Sunday circ down 2% to 503,114 and 2.1% to 677,425, respectively.

David Halberstam, R.I.P.

David Halberstam, a guy who knew what it meant to be a journalist, died yesterday from injuries sustained in a car accident south of San Francisco. He was 73.

He made his reputation reporting from Vietnam in the early 60s. His reporting there won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1964.

Sez the Times: "His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground."

If you could find a point where scotch-drinking, red-meat eating, SUV driving Republicans really started hating the so-called Mainstream Media, this was it.

But for Halberstam, this was just the beginning of a brilliant career. His book on the 1949 pennant race is maybe the best book on baseball I've ever read. “The Fifties” is another one of my favorites, a look at a decade that he argued was more monumental than many believed.

“A writer should be like a playwright — putting people on stage, putting ideas on stage, making the reader become the audience,” he recently told an interviewer for NY1 News.

In the end, he was still reporting. When he was killed yesterday, he was on his way to an interview with Y. A. Tittle, the former New York Giants quarterback, for a book about the 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts, considered by many to be the greatest football game ever played.

Godspeed, David. You will be missed.

Fair and Balanced

Her are some radical word from Gian P. Gentile in the Army Times:

From my foxhole-view as a tactical battalion commander in western Baghdad in 2006, the American press, although not perfect, has reported the reality of the Iraq war.

Contrary to what most believe in the American military, as well as some conservative columnists and a few politicians, the American press does give a reasonably full, fair and balanced picture of what is happening in Iraq. ...

It is my opinion that the American military’s ongoing condemnation of the American press’s reporting of the Iraq war has more to do with its own mistaken belief that the American media lost the Vietnam War and has less to do with the current reporting on Iraq. I also believe that because the American military fears so deeply the loss of support of the American people over Iraq as an outgrowth of Vietnam it tends, wrongly, to allay these fears by blaming the American press for not reporting enough of its successes in Iraq.

I am probably in a minority for saying this, but the so-called "culture wars" make me weary. A bunch of people still fighting about the 60s isn't helpful or relevant today -- I just see ideologues using worn-out themes and storylines while trying to mobilize their "base" to go to the polls or open their wallets. All of this is tearing the country apart and it isn't helping us find constructive solutions to very real 21st Century problems.

Hell Freezes Over

The D(a)MN calls for a death penalty moratorium! "In Texas, state lawmakers have introduced measures ranging from repeal of the death penalty to the imposition of a moratorium so lawmakers can appoint a study commission. We think repeal is morally right; a moratorium is a positive step in that direction. Short of a willingness to support either, lawmakers must at least find the political courage to create a commission to thoroughly analyze our system of capital punishment and the causes of the growing list of wrongful convictions."

Amen.

Who Judged The Katies? NO ONE KNOWS!

How is this possible?! "Five months after the Press Club of Dallas handed out 179 awards for the best journalism and mass communications in the Southwest, the group's leaders said they can't name a single judge involved in picking those winners." Read the rest from the Dallas Business Journal.

Feeling the Love from the NYT

The East Coast Media Conspiracy loves them some Cowtown. Now, all I ask is this: how long did they have to wait to get a guy to walk a horse past the Paris Coffee Shop? For those too lazy to click through, here the Cliff's Notes: If you visit Dallas, and don't go to Fort Worth, you're an idiot. Kimbell, Amon Carter, Modern, Worthington, Paris Coffee Shop, Billy Bob's, The End. See how much time I just saved you?

Check Out CultureFeast

I discovered a cool blog called Culture Feast today. I knew I would like it because it called out Dale Hansen for pretty much being Dale Hansen. OK, so maybe Dale ain't father of the year material, but he did get fired for throwing Clarice Tinsley in a swimming pool, and that's got to be worth some points, right?[Nope, that was Kevin McCarthy who threw Clarice in the pool. Guess that makes Dale pretty much irredeemable.]

A Little Schadenfreude

Back in my newspaper days, we would console ourselves after a really bad night by saying, "Well, it wasn't like the paper didn't go out." Well, evidently yesterday at the Dallas Morning News, the paper almost didn't go out.

Heh.

Fighting Words

Have you ever been offended by a comment you read on the Internet? If not, do you know of this thing called the Internet?

Pretty much, if you read, you've been offended. Here an interesting column from Howard Kurtz on racist comments on the Washington Post Web site and how their paper is struggling with it:

Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says he does not have the resources to screen the roughly 2,000 daily comments in advance. He has one staffer deleting offensive comments after the fact, and banning the authors from further feedback, based on complaints from readers. Brady plans to devote more staff to the process and to use new filtering technology. ...

Post reporter Darryl Fears is among those in the newsroom who believe the comments should be junked if offensive postings can't be filtered out in advance. "If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he says. "You're starting to see some of the language you see on neo-Nazi sites, and that's not good for The Washington Post or for the subjects in those stories."

I bring this up because of a conversation I had several weeks ago with a reporter friend discussing this very thing. She had written an article about an education initiative at Carter-Riverside High School, a school that is 73 percent Hispanic. What she found when she looked online at the comments shocked her. Most of the comments didn't have anything to do with the specific education initiative. Most of the comments were the vile, racist comments that you'd expect from the people who believe that building a wall at the border will solve American immigration problems.

"If I am a young Hispanic kid," she asked. "Do I look at this newspaper and think it has anything for me? No I don't. I'm thinking that this is for white people." That's a pretty powerful argument. Newspapers need all the reader they can get.

Kurtz's solution: "What is spreading this Web pollution is the widespread practice of allowing posters to spew their venom anonymously. If people's full names were required -- even though some might resort to aliases -- it would go a long way toward cleaning up the neighborhood."

That's right on target. People are bound to say anything anonymously. If you make them back it up with even an e-mail address, that's something.