Fight the Press

This is terrible:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

(via Andrew Sullivan)

person no more

In the synopsis for the headline "Michelle Obama, Reluctant No More" the New York Times employs a terrible neologistic phrase (italics added):

Michelle Obama is at the center of what may be the most closely managed spousal rollout in history.

the BBC has great headlines sometimes

"Clumsy young 'face obesity risk'"

Clumsy and poorly coordinated children could be at higher risk of obesity in later life, a study says.

critique of violence

According to witnesses, the BBC reports, on September 4, 2005, seven New Orleans policemen shot at a group of unarmed* civilians trying to cross the Danziger Bridge in an attempt to get food from a grocery store. Two of the civilians, including "Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, and James Brissette, 19, were shot and killed, and four other people were wounded." The police officers were facing charges ranging from attempted second-degree murder to first-degree murder until the other day when District Judge Raymond Bigelow threw out the charges because "prosecutors had violated state law by divulging secret grand jury testimony to a witness" and that "prosecutors had wrongly instructed the grand jury, and that grand jury testimony by three of the officers was used against them improperly."

Though it seems like The New York Times should have mentioned something about this, searches for "katrina shooting," "katrina police" and other possible terms turn up no relevant results. The misapplication of police violence during a catastrophic natural disaster is no small thing. In his excellent essay "Critique of Violence," Walter Benjamin argues that it is exactly this kind of use of police power that threatens democracy and the rule of law. Yet: nothing.

*Though the officers claimed that they opened fire only after being shot at, "Investigators later revealed that at least some of the shooting was by residents trapped by floodwater trying to attract the attention of rescue parties."

idealist

Ted Sorensen is eighty years old. He worked for John F. Kennedy as an adviser beginning in 1953, when Kennedy was still a senator. Sorensen continued to work for Kennedy until his assassination and then Sorensen worked briefly for Lyndon Johnson. He never held any official position of influence, but he was apparently extremely influential in Kennedy's administration. He also wrote the majority of Kennedy's Pulitzer-prize winning book, Profiles in Courage. Despite his age and lawyerly manner of speaking with excruciating precision (you can see Charlie Rose's exasperation at this habit a couple of times during the interview), he gives an unexpectedly compelling interview.
(Link to video on Charlie Rose's site)

"less about the famous concert and yoga in the mud"

Something about this picture from the New York Times article about the opening of the Woodstock museum, dedicated to preserving the memory of the concert and increasing revenue for Sullivan County, suggests that the reporting therein won't be of the highest caliber. For instance:

So about 60 percent of the museum is about the politics and culture and music of the ’60s: pillbox hats, Elvis, the Bay of Pigs, the Beatles, civil rights, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. And the rest is a quite vivid re-creation of the chaotic and unlikely process that led to 500,000 people shouting, “No rain, no rain, no rain,” during the summer downpours, Jimi Hendrix’s legendary performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and all the rest.

(Link)

really?

The 2008 Columbia Journalism Award was presented to Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, today.

This is the highest honor bestowed by the Journalism School. It is given to a person whose body of work over a sustained period of time has made a significant contribution to journalism.

Perhaps 2008 was a thin year for significant contributions to journalism.
(Link)