ADAM REILLY

Fair is foul

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:45:12 GMT

What's the fuss over the Fairness Doctrine really about?
These are scary times for far-right conservatives.

These are scary times for far-right conservatives. Everywhere they look, there's another doomsday scenario to ponder: President-elect Barack Obama is a closet Communist! Another Hitler! A race warrior who's going to ban guns, kill newborn babies, and just might be the Antichrist!

Most of these dark anxieties simmer on the right's outermost fringes. But one — the conviction that Obama's win and Democratic gains in Congress mean the impending resurrection of Fairness Doctrine, a defunct policy aimed at creating a balance in broadcasting — is tormenting both the wing nuts and conservatism's grownups.

Consider: Jay Severin, a host on Boston's WTKK-FM (96.9), recently accused Fairness Doctrine supporters of "standing by watching while fascists come to my house, burn it down, and kill my family." Yikes. Meanwhile, back in September, Washington Post columnist George Will warned that "Liberals, not satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood, and most of the mainstream media, want to kill talk radio" — by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine, natch.

Why all the fuss? For one thing, despite all the hyperbole, talk of a Fairness Doctrine comeback isn't as loony as it seems, judging from recent remarks by some prominent Dems. But there may be another reason. Outrage over the Fairness Doctrine is becoming a pawn in the fight over Net Neutrality, the principle of all Web content moving freely and equally without discrimination from ISPs — which, given the stakes, should make Democrats drop the former subject altogether.

An outdated solution
For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asserted that the right to broadcast — on scarce, publicly owned frequencies — came with civic responsibility. Broadcasters, the FCC held, should devote some of their programming to controversial matters of public interest. They should also allow divergent points of view to be presented on their stations. That's the Fairness Doctrine in a nutshell. (In one famous case, the Supreme Court ruled that the author of a critical biography of Barry Goldwater had the right to respond to a torrent of criticism directed at him from a Christian broadcaster in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.)

The doctrine's intentions were commendable. But it was vague, and spottily applied, and co-existed uneasily with the First Amendment's right to free speech. And in 1987 — at the height of Reagan-era deregulation — it was voluntarily abolished by the FCC. The FCC's decision was upheld on appeal to the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1989, and subsequent congressional efforts to restore it have failed.

Racial healing

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:09:43 GMT

Former mayoral opponents Ray Flynn and Mel King discuss how far their city’s come, and how far it hasn’t, since 1983
To be sure, racism still exists. But the distance our culture has come in 50 years — from blacks fighting for basic civil rights to a black man running for the White House — is remarkable.

OLD RIVALS: Mel King (left) and Ray Flynn (right) had more in common than voters acknowledged. Today, they can look back on their role as a joint accomplishment.

Outtakes from the Phoenix's interview with Mel King and Ray Flynn. By Adam Reilly.

Barack Obama's presidential candidacy was a seminal event in American race relations. To be sure, racism still exists. But the distance our culture has come in 50 years — from blacks fighting for basic civil rights to a black man running for the White House — is remarkable.

Twenty-five years ago, Boston had its own politico-racial catharsis. In 1983, a mayoral battle pitting black against white seemed like the last thing Boston needed, but that's what it got. Following Judge Arthur Garrity's 1974 court order to integrate Boston's public schools, the city teetered on the brink of all-out race war for years. In truth, few people liked the busing solution or the logistical disruptions that came with it, but anti-busing sentiment quickly turned so ugly — epitomized by the infamous 1976 attack on black lawyer Ted Landsmark by a flag-wielding protester — that most African-Americans and liberals felt compelled to defend Garrity's ruling.

By the time four-term incumbent mayor Kevin White decided not to seek re-election, the tension surrounding busing had been toned down, but the issue remained on everybody's mind. That year's mayoral contest — between candidates too easily adopted as symbols of the warring community factions — could have pushed simmering racial antagonisms over the edge. Ray Flynn, a populist from South Boston, the epicenter of anti-busing sentiment and working-class Irish anger, who'd once publicly opposed busing, faced Mel King, the imposing, charismatic, African-American progressive from the South End.

In the end, though, the potentially volatile contest proved to be a good thing. To say it healed race relations in Boston would be an overstatement. It did, however, facilitate the healing process. Flynn and King had their differences, but they also had significant affinities, including an intense interest in public education and a penchant for grassroots politicking. And rather than playing dirty — or getting incendiary — they waged a professional, mutually respectful campaign.

These things alone would make the '83 mayor's race noteworthy. But factor in the slate of high-power candidates — including Boston City Council President Larry DiCara and former Boston School Committee president David Finnegan — whose names appeared on the preliminary election ballot, and the huge level of public participation (nearly 70 percent of Boston voters came to the polls on Election Day that year, the most since 1949), and a strong case can be made that that election marked a high point in Boston's storied political history.

Night of the living dead

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:47:08 GMT

What if the election doesn’t end on Election Day?
It’s almost over. This is welcome news.

It’s almost over. This is welcome news, because we’ve reached a point now where the 2008 presidential campaign and its sundry subplots (Hillary Clinton’s tears, Mitt Romney’s fibbing, Jeremiah Wright’s America-damning, Sarah Palin’s cheery xenophobia-mongering, etc.) feel like an affliction without beginning or end. In less than a week, though, the polling places will close, the votes will be tallied, and we’ll know, finally, who’s going to become the next president of the United States.

Or maybe we won’t. Right now, most polls seem to augur well for Barack Obama: with precious few exceptions, they suggest that he’ll rout John McCain in the Electoral College and become the first Democrat to win the presidency with a majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter.

Then again, Ohio is still in play. So is Florida, and North Carolina, and Colorado, and (judging from the McCain camp’s ongoing efforts there) Pennsylvania. If a last-minute twist or two (Joe Biden talking, Osama Bin Laden doing YouTube) nudges a few of these swing states into the McCain column, the putative rout could instead end up being painfully close.

And what then? In a recent sit-down with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, McCain suggested that, if he loses, he’ll gracefully retreat to his pre-campaign existence. “I have to go back and live in Arizona,” he said. “Be in the United States Senate representing them, a wonderful family, daughters and sons that I’m so proud of, and a life that’s been blessed.”

But a radically different picture emerged in an interview that former Missouri senator John Danforth, the co-chair of McCain’s “Honest and Open Election Committee,” did with National Public Radio. Judging from Danforth’s comments, the ongoing GOP fuss over the low-income advocacy group ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) isn’t just a way to whip up the conservative base and dissuade newly registered Democratic voters. It’s also a possible prelude to post-election litigation aimed at reversing an Obama victory. As Danforth told NPR, “If there are a number of states where the election is close — and there have been many, many people registered by this organization ACORN — and where there are numerous cases of fraudulent registration, then the contest could go on for a very long time.”

So if you’re anticipating an Obama victory — or simply ready for the nonstop torrent of political white noise to finally end — you’d better hope that the outcome on November 4 is emphatic and unambiguous. Because if it’s not, we could be in for a battle that makes the 2000 Florida recount look tame.

Bull disclosure

ADAM REILLY — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:48:25 GMT

As the candidates prep for the final debate, it’s a fitting time to ask: why do some journalistic conflicts of interest become scandals, while others get almost no attention at all?
As the presidential candidates prep for the final debate of 2008 — which will take place on October 15 in Hempstead, New York, with CBS’s Bob Schieffer moderating — it’s a fitting time to ask: why do some journalistic conflicts of interest become semi-scandals, while others get almost no attention at all?

As the presidential candidates prep for the final debate of 2008 — which will take place on October 15 in Hempstead, New York, with CBS’s Bob Schieffer moderating — it’s a fitting time to ask: why do some journalistic conflicts of interest become semi-scandals, while others get almost no attention at all?

Just this past week, Gwen Ifill’s (allegedly) problematic role as moderator of the vice-presidential debate was the big story. The problem, according to conservatives, was that — as author of the upcoming The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (Doubleday) — Ifill simply couldn’t be fair to Republican V-P nominee Sarah Palin, since an Obama victory will be a boon to her book. Even some of Ifill’s defenders were critical, such as PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, who said Ifill and/or the debate organizers should have drawn attention to her book far earlier.

So why didn’t they? Here’s one possible answer: Schieffer, who in 2004 also moderated the third presidential debate. Like PBS’s Jim Lehrer and ABC’s Charlie Gibson, who moderated the first two debates four years ago, and like Ifill herself, Schieffer is a respected veteran journalist. He also, however, has close ties to the president. Schieffer’s brother Tom had, with George W. Bush, been a part owner of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers franchise; after Bush’s 2000 win over Al Gore, the president named Tom Schieffer ambassador to Australia. (He’s now our ambassador to Japan.) What’s more, Bob Schieffer and the president had, according to a 2003 piece by Washington Post media writer Howie Kurtz, previously golfed, watched baseball games, and visited spring training together.

Schieffer’s links to Bush didn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t moderate effectively in ’04, but they did raise questions. Scratch that: they should have raised questions. Instead, save for a few exceptions — including a debate-day post from Daily Howler blogger Bob Somerby — the issue of Schieffer’s conflict went largely undiscussed.

Consequently, it would be understandable if Ifill considered launching a defense of herself and her book — but then thought: Screw it. Schieffer didn’t have to stick up for his integrity. Why should I?

Above conflict?
In retrospect, it’s easy to see why the Ifill story took off and the Schieffer story fizzled. For one thing, nowadays stories move into the mainstream from the partisan periphery (e.g., worldnetdaily.com, which triggered the Ifill stampede this past week) way faster than they used to. For another, while media unfairness has gone from a right-wing talking point to a bipartisan preoccupation, John McCain has made the charge of liberal bias especially incendiary this year. What’s more, the 2004 Schieffer-moderated debate came just one month after Dan Rather’s controversial story on George W. Bush’s years in the Texas Air National Guard, which focused attention on charges that CBS was biased against Bush, not for him.

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.”