Category Archives: Media

NOW I will start reading my Boston Globe every day

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Recently, I’ve been meaning to write a post about how sad I was to have dropped my subscription to The Boston Globe.

I started the subscription in the easiest possible way. When we were in Boston last summer, I wanted access to local news, particularly to what the Red Sox were doing, since we were going to go see them play the Yankees (and beat them!) one night while we were there.

When the algorithm saw that I was perusing the Globe‘s website, it made me an offer I could not refuse: A subscription lasting six months, for one dollar. I jumped at it. Actually, I did pause for a moment, knowing how bad I am at remembering to cancel “free trial” subscriptions before they start costing me. For a moment. Then I jumped at it.

And I found that I enjoyed it beyond all expectation. I enjoyed it for the Red Sox coverage, to be sure, but it went far beyond that. And it’s a bit hard to explain to you why, unless you have my newspaper background. I saw it with the eyes of one who has spent several decades, decades of days filled with long hours agonizing over every word, and over every aspect of putting those words together with other elements and presenting them thoughtfully to the public. I appreciated:

  • The news judgment. Remember that post I wrote when I launched my Virtual Front Pages? I talked about how hard we thought, back when I was the front-page editor in Wichita, about how to present news in a way that quickly provided readers, in overview and depth, the information that was most important for citizens to possess and ingest. That was already fading as an art back in the ’80s when I was immersed in it. In the unlamented 21st century, I only saw it at The New York Times and a few other elite papers across the country. And I immediately saw that the Globe was definitely one of those papers.
  • The esthetics. What good is it to provide good content if people don’t want to look at it? And this paper was beautiful, in a number of ways more so than the NYT, which remains more firmly wedded to tradition. Of course, there are things I prefer about the NYT — the Globe, for instance, makes too much use of white space, unlike the blessed Gray Lady. But there is no doubt it looks good, each page being a pleasure to my eyes even before I start reading. Consequently, when I open the app, I immediately click on the “print edition” option — otherwise I’d be missing out on a thing made the paper enjoyable.
  • All sorts of other, minor things. Sports, for instance. I’ve mentioned this before. About how this is a paper that understands that “sports” means far more than football, and most of all that it gives proper due to the national pastime. Rare is the day that the Red Sox aren’t given prominence, even out of season — but prominence within a context that clearly recognizes there are more important things in the world than sports. There are other small things, such as the comics. Most comics pages across the country are just embarrassing, they are so lacking in wit. There’s nothing they can do to bring back the glory days of “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side,” but the Globe‘s editors take the trouble to offer a better selection from among the slim pickings that remain. (OK, it’s only a little better — there’s not much to work with these days. But it’s better.)

Basically, everything shows the work of an ample crowd of very talented people who work hard to present readers with the best paper possible. In a world in which most of the remaining newspapers across the country lie in ruins, very dim shadows of what they were, it means a lot to me to take a deep, refreshing drink at this well. Of course, we’re talking about a full-sized grownup major city, with everything from subways to professional teams in all major sports — so you’d expect them to have more to work with. But the Globe doesn’t take those resources for granted. It makes the most of them.

But then, my $1 deal ran out. And by the time it did, my Boston trip was well behind me. Worse, I wasn’t looking through the paper more than once a week or so. Not that I didn’t enjoy it when I did, but there were just too many other papers I was subscribing to — the NYT, The Washington Post, The Post and Courier, The State — and as a South Carolinian and a blogger, I felt obliged to read those first. Plus such magazines as The New Yorker and America. And there’s only so much time in a day.

And when the deal ran out, I started getting charged more than I was paying for any other paper. I still kept the subscription for awhile, figuring I sort of owed it to the folks up there, after that amazingly generous trial deal. And a paper this good deserved financial support. But when my wife pointed out this summer what a drain it was, I admitted it was time to drop it.

I wasn’t happy about it, though. And I still got multiple emails a day telling me about good stories I was missing.

Then, yesterday, I got a phone call. As my device rang, I saw the words BOSTON GLOBE under the unfamiliar number. So I answered — I figured I still sort of owed these folks that much. I knew what the call was about, and I was prepared to explain that yes, I love your paper, but I just can’t afford it.

I didn’t get that far.

I found myself listening not to an artificial voice, and not to someone named “Steve” from an overworked Indian call center. Instead, I was having an actual conversation with a very pleasant young woman with no sort of accent (to an American ear) at all. (Actually, I would have liked it better if she’d had a Boston accent, but you can’t have everything.) She was nice. She cared. And she was offering me another deal.

She was offering 26 weeks for a total of $12. Uneasily glancing toward my dear wife in the next room, I jumped at it. Then, when the call ended, I confessed what I had done, and my bride grimaced a bit. But she didn’t make me cancel it.

Then the phone rang again. It was my new friend, telling me that she hadn’t been able to charge the $12 to my debit card. Oh, yeah… That’s because my old card is expiring this month, and the credit union sent me a new one and I activated it, so the old one didn’t work. So I told her that my new one had the same number, and here was the new expiration date and secret code from the back, so run it again.

But she didn’t have the old number — just the last four digits. And at this critical moment, I did what I have so many times advised my mother (and my father, in his last years) not to do: I gave her the whole number.

My wife overheard, and when the call was over, expressed shall we say incredulity at what I had just done. I expressed my firm intuitive belief that in this case, I was not dealing with a scam. I said this as confidently as I could. But I immediately called up my account online, and was hugely relieved to see that I had just paid $12 to The Boston Globe.

And this morning, I was able to read the print edition on my iPad app. And it was beautiful…

I’m glad I found these pictures I didn’t know I had…

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Before I actually get back to work after finally posting Paul’s column, a few words as to why I haven’t been posting.

Mainly, it’s been three things, although there’s plenty of other stuff going on:

  • I’ve been trying to rearrange my home office, which mainly has consisted of building new bookshelves of my own rather unusual, rustic design (made mostly with treated wood left over from the revamp of our deck a couple of years ago, which my wife has been eager to see me use or take to the dump). That, and cleaning out the big closet in the same room, space that could be much better used. This project alone, which is still in progress, would have been enough to keep any normal person from blogging.
  • In the middle of all that, we had new windows installed in our house. So I had to rearrange the wreckage in the office so the workmen could get to the windows, and do the same in varying degrees with furniture all over the house. The biggest part was taking down all the louvered wooden shutter-type blinds in most of the windows. The windows are in, and since that happened last Wednesday, we’ve been installing curtains to replace the blinds, which went to the Habitat ReStore.
  • And in the middle of those things, after a week in which hours were wasted in struggling to reconnect to our wifi, we switched internet providers. This has been fubar in most respects since the start. We’re on I think our fourth new router. The second was FedExed to us to replace the faulty first one. When that one didn’t work (something Spectrum was able to confirm, again, remotely), an increasingly frustrated repair guy spending a couple of hours installing a third one, and, when that didn’t work either, a fourth one. Since then, part of every day has been spent reestablishing contact with one or more of the dozen or so devices in our home that depend on wifi. I’m down to one that still isn’t working, and I’m trying to get in touch with the device’s manufacturer.

And lots of other stuff. For instance, this morning we were on the phone with our old internet service provider to make sure we knew how to send back their equipment so we don’t have to pay some outrageous sum for it.

Of course, there have been good things about all this. One was that, when I was moving some books onto one of those new bookcases, an envelope fell out of one of the books, and I opened it and found these two pictures, above and below.

Well, y’all know how much I liked John McCain, so I was glad to find them. I didn’t know any pictures of him and me together existed, much less that I had a couple of prints of them.

Obviously, because of the setting — The State‘s editorial boardroom — this is before or after an interview with the board. Probably an endorsement interview, given some of the people I see in the room. The question was, 2000 or 2008?

Then, in looking closely at the one below, I saw it was 2000, just before South Carolina’s Republican primary. You may notice that in both pictures, you can barely see that there are people standing directly behind both McCain and me, like shadows, making it look like our heads and shoulders are kind of doubled around the edges. But in the one below, the figure behind McCain is emerging slightly from full eclipse, and I can see that it’s Fred Mott — who was my publisher in 2000, but long gone in 2008.

Ironically, Fred is the reason Sen. McCain didn’t get our endorsement that year. Fred wanted to back George W. Bush. The fateful decision was made in a board meeting immediately after this interview. We normally worked by consensus, but this time, being so divided, we actually took a counted vote. It was something of a mess, since some in the room (my good friend Robert Ariail, for instance) weren’t technically members of the board under normal circumstances. But anyway, it was a 50-50 split. And I could see no graceful way to dispute the idea that in a 50-split, the publisher’s side wins.

Let me be clear — Fred is a great guy, for whom I have great respect. He was just wrong this time. If you want to know the reasons why, I’ll let you know if I also find the 4,000-word memo I sent him several days before this meeting. Anyway, I lost that one, but we endorsed McCain in 2008.

Anyway, I’m glad to have these pictures. Now, back to work…

A nice read about a nice guy who gave a nice speech…

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Well, here I go again — urging you all to read something that you probably can’t see because you don’t subscribe. But I don’t know what else to do.

Once communities across the country were tied together by common narratives. It was cheap to subscribe to the local newspaper (because the cost of producing the paper was born by advertisers, not readers — and that’s gone away). Their local journalists generally weren’t necessarily oracles of wisdom (I just said “generally,” mind you), but they had little trouble agreeing on basic facts of what had happened, and report it. And a calmer reading public accepted that plain reality, and worked from that as citizens.

But then several things happened. First, starting sometime in the 1980s, politics started getting really, really nasty, and partisan divisions started festering to a degree previously unseen in post-1945 America. Meanwhile, local media’s advertising base disappeared, and press and electronic media were reduced to skeleton staffs, increasingly finding it hard to cover anything adequately. Finally, people started more and more being deluged by media that had nothing to do with journalism, and cared more about advancing the fantasies of their respective bitter factions than about dispassionately informing the public. Tsunamis of it.

Even the best journals in the country, the ones that still had adequate, talented staffs, started focusing more and more on the bitter divisions, the things that separated us more than what we held in common as Americans. Why? Because that’s what the world looked like now. They were describing reality, although painfully superficially.

But sometimes, those journals still something thoughtful, something that offers a little hope for sanity, something that might even make you feel OK about the human race, sort of. In recent years, I’ve focused as a reader mostly on that stuff, not the latest shouting over the debt limit or whatever. Unfortunately, those things appeared in the still-healthy journals to which I subscribe. So I write about those things, and try to share them when possible.

To get to my point…

Today, there was a nice piece about a nice guy giving a nice speech. It was headlined, “At Harvard, Tom Hanks offered an increasingly rare moment of grace.” A long excerpt, which I hope the Post‘s legal department will allow me:

The language of the academy is increasingly centered on who or what is centered — what voices, what values — and there wasn’t the least doubt, on a day that also honored a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, a magisterial historian, a groundbreaking biochemist, a media pioneer and a four-star admiral, that Dr. Hanks was the center of attention. It takes an astute understanding of human physics to redirect all those energies and center the students. Over and over, he found ways to send the focus back to them, rising from his seat to kneel in awe before Latin orator Josiah Meadows, hugging Vic Hogg — who recounted a harrowing recovery from gunshot wounds suffered during a carjacking — grace notes and gestures aimed at the musicians and speakers whose names he wove into his own remarks, and at the parents whose pride pulsed across the sea of caps and gowns.

Our public square suffers an acute shortage of such acts of grace. Leaders find power and profit in crassness and cruelty, and signal that virtue is for suckers. It’s a cliché that Tom Hanks is “the nicest guy in Hollywood,” that he and his wife of 35 years, Rita Wilson, somehow manage to represent decency at a time when the country is so divided we can’t even agree on who is worth admiring. On a brisk spring day, watching the radioactive level of attention on him, and his ability to refract it into pure joy and shared humanity, was a healing energy in a sorry time. You can imagine that normal comes naturally to some people; but how often do people who are treated as being bigger, better, more special than everyone else resist the temptation to believe it?

And when it was time for Hanks to deliver his formal message, the script, while occasionally overwritten, rhymed with the mission. Flapping banners exalted the university motto, “Veritas,” and Hanks took up the battle cry. “The truth, to some, is no longer empirical. It’s no longer based on data nor common sense nor even common decency,” he said. “Truth is now considered malleable by opinion and by zero-sum endgames. Imagery is manufactured with audacity and with purpose to achieve the primal task of marring the truth with mock logic, to achieve with fake expertise, with false sincerity, with phrases like, ‘I’m just saying. Well, I’m just asking. I’m just wondering.’”

The opposite of love is not hate, Elie Wiesel said, but indifference, and Hanks put the challenge before his audience of rising leaders and explorers, artists and environmentalists, teachers and technologists. “Every day, every year, and for every graduating class, there is a choice to be made. It’s the same option for all grown-ups, who have to decide to be one of three types of Americans,” Hanks said. “Those who embrace liberty and freedom for all, those who won’t, or those who are indifferent.” Bracing as the words were, the actions spoke louder. For those of us in the truth business — which is to say, all of us — it was an actor who never finished college who set a standard we can work to live up to.

This is not a big-deal story. Just a writer — Nancy Gibbs, a former editor in chief of Time magazine — witnessing an incident in which a famous person was given a forum and used it to show respect to other people and to say a few words that made some sense. I thank her for sharing that, and the Post for running it, and I wanted to share it with you to the best of my ability…

April Fool to all you dweebs out there!

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My mention of “subsidiarity” last night reminded me of the most elaborate April Fool’s joke every played on me, which I told about here a few years back:

In the years after I first read about it, I was enough of a bore about the concept in the editorial suite of The State that one April 1st, at the instigation of then-Publisher Ann Caulkins, my colleagues played a truly elaborate April Fool’s prank on me that was entirely based on some supposed new research debunking subsidiarity. It was probably the most esoteric, nerdy prank ever played on anyone in South Carolina history. The sort of thing the geeks on “The Big Bang” might play on each other, only with them it would be about physics instead of political philosophy — some knee-slapper having to do with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, perhaps….

In the end, the joke didn’t work out, because I was too impatient to play along. It went like this: We gathered for our morning (or perhaps it was the weekly, since the publisher was there, eager to participate in the gag) editorial board meeting, a session in which all sorts of issues were thrown onto the table for discussion so we could discuss and arrive at positions for editorials.

As we started, Cindi Scoppe produced a long, dry-looking document, bound in the kind of folder we used in school for term papers, that she said contained some important new findings that completely debunked the validity of subsidiarity. She said they were all sure I’d be interested. She urged me to read it immediately.

I got irritated instead of interested. We had a lot of issues to talk about, things we needed to write about. And they wanted to sit there and watch me read something and have my mind magically changed on something this complex? It was absurd anyway; there was no way this could, in a few minutes’ reading, disprove something like that.

But they urged me, “Just look over it!” and “Just scan it briefly!” Which was even more ridiculous, because a mere scan would never convince me of such a thing. I kept putting it down and trying to move on, but finally Cindi said something like, “Just look at the last page!”

So, in order to end it, I did. And of course, it said, “April Fool’s.”

Yeah, OK. Ha, and also ha.

I feel a bit bad for ruining my friends’ fun, but there it was. It had probably been funny when they first thought of it. And it was nice that it was so personalized, so esoteric, so very much something that would appeal only to the kind of dweeb who is on an editorial board. It was, in its way, thoughtful towards me and who I was.

Which reminds me of an old poster I found in my closet while cleaning up the other day. I didn’t go to the conference, but I liked the poster. I’ll see if I can roll it out and take a picture of it…

 

 

 

 

Cool it on trying to start a run on banks, people

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Like most days lately, I don’t foresee a lot of time today for blogging. So I’m just going to offer this, which I tweeted yesterday, as a topic for discussion:

About the time I posted that, I was somewhat comforted by the fact that the hourly NPR news summary started with this, far more consequential, story. Of course, the second story was further yammering about the banks.

Then, this morning, I was really dismayed to see the first screen of my Washington Post app covered with additional headlines about the banks.

We’re not having a general run and a national economic collapse yet, but keep pushing, everybody. Maybe if you keep trying, you can make the average person nervous enough…

A place to comment about Murdaugh

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As y’all know, I’m one of maybe five people in South Carolina — and increasingly toward the end, the whole country (and even across the pond) — who were not totally absorbed in the Murdaugh trial.

But plenty of my friends — especially the ones who are lawyers — were, as were members of my family. Some watched the trial on telly from their law offices. Others actually went and sat there and watched it in person. (If you did that enough, they would let you get up and question a witness — I refer, of course, to Alan Wilson.) Most of them commented, many times, via social media.

As you see above, The Washington Post led with it this morning. So did The New York Times, at one point last night.

Even I was inspired to Tweet about it this morning:

O.J. said “One thing the jury must’ve seen is the guy’s a liar.” Yeah, O.J., I think a lot of people said that about a certain other trial back in the ’90s. (To be fair, I didn’t avidly follow that one, either, but as with this one, it was impossible not to know about it.)

Anyway, I thought I should provide a place for y’all to comment on this extended horror show. Have at it. Maybe I’ll join in…

Well, there goes the last funny comic strip

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The last time I screenshot a Dilbert strip was on Nov. 23. This one spoke to me. Now, the cartoonist has spoken to us…

Y’all probably don’t remember, but about three years ago — having seen that The State was about to revamp its comics page — I posted something about the best and worst comics in the paper.

I did so in the sad context of lamenting that the heyday of actually funny, clever comics being long over. There’s been nothing on the page to get excited about since the very best went away in the mid-90s. But I said there were still two that were amusing — “Dilbert,” and “Overboard.”

Not that either was great, mind you. “Overboard” had been great, but had lost a lot of ground. Still, it was enjoyable. I had never been particularly a fan of “Dilbert,” but I recognized its strengths — and it had maintained those strengths over the years. I also put in a caveat about the creator’s problem of mixing in politics in ways that made you doubt his sanity.

That has now come to the fore, big time. But to finish my anecdote… I had intended to follow up that post with an assessment of the new strips once The State unveiled them, but I found it too depressing. They were uniformly awful. Not only that, but they killed “Overboard.” I’ve still looked at the comics page in the paper regularly, but only at “Zits,” “Peanuts” (which just posts strips created many decades ago by a long-deceased cartoonist, which shows you how desperate I am, and how sad the situation is), and “Dilbert.” Yeah, I make myself glance over the rest frequently, hoping something will surprise me with cleverness or originality, but that doesn’t happen. Ever.

And now this. I suppose Scott Adams’ self-destructive streak just wasn’t satisfied, and he felt the need to take it to a new level. I can’t begin to guess what prompted him to do that. No, I don’t think this is a case in which a closet racist has inadvertently exposed himself. This is a guy who has a history of saying and doing things in the political sphere that cause a WTF? response in other people. And I guess he hadn’t gotten enough attention lately to suit him. Or maybe he was sick of drawing strips and wanted to go out in a spectacularly awful way. In any case, it seems clear he knew what he was doing.

So, you know, goodbye, Scott Adams. And if you doubt that he has completed lost it, this might convince you: Elon Musk is defending him.

Oh, did you think I was going to defend Adams, going by that headline? No.

But as someone who used to go to the comics page with some enthusiasm, back when there was “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side,” I’m sorry there isn’t anything with a funny edge to it left. Bill Watterson and Gary Larson chose to go out with great dignity. Adams chose the opposite route…

A matter of perspective and proportion…

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I really need to go through the notifications on my iPad and turn some of them off. Or turn most of them off.

I would start with that irritating app called “Apple News,” except… occasionally, it offers me something interesting from The Wall Street Journal. I recently dropped the WSJ from my subscriptions, because I wasn’t using it enough to justify paying for it – and the cost is high, compared to my other subscriptions. When Apple News scoops one up to offer me for free, I can read it. And I like to check in with the WSJ – which has probably the strictest paywall in the business – occasionally. That app lets me do it.

So I like getting notifications when they have one – because I’m not going to be looking there on a regular basis. I need the heads-up.

Unfortunately, that means I get a lot of junk from it as well.

As you can see above.

But as you can also see above, they’re not the only ones hassling me. You’ll see notes from The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post. None of which I would want to turn off, because there are no entities in the world more likely to alert me to actual news, which is, you know, what I subscribe to five newspapers to get. (Well, that, and commentary.)

The problem comes when we get to deciding what “news” is.

As you can see, for awhile there last night, the most important in the universe was that Beyoncé has won a heap of Grammys. Which I suppose is important to her, at least. Personally, I have never cared for a moment about who has or has not won a Grammy, much less who has won the most of them. There was a time when I cared about who won this or that Oscar. But I quit caring about that a quarter-century ago. And now I’m not sure I can tell you clearly why I ever did care. It mystifies me.

But a lot of people care about things I don’t care about. For instance, I’ve noticed that some people – perhaps even some of you – take an interest in football.

So never mind me.

We have all these news organizations in consensus about the fact that Beyoncé winning all these music awards is the most important thing happening, so they must be right – right? In fact, it makes you wonder what’s wrong with The Washington Post, wasting time telling me about some dumb ol’ earthquake that has now killed – let me go check – 3,800 human beings.

But wait – that was a few minutes earlier than the really earth-shaking news at the Grammys. So surely the Post got on the stick later. Well, actually, I don’t think they did. I never got a notification from them about it, last night or today.

Which makes those slackers, well, my kind of newshounds, I suppose.

Now, you will protest that those notifications are merely a snapshot of a few minutes in time, and that those other organizations no doubt turned to actual, hard news later. Especially the NYT. And you’d be right – at least in the case of the NYT.

But you’d be putting your finger on something that still worries me.

You see, back in the olden days, when newspapers still roamed the Earth and I spend a great deal of time each day agonizing over what to put on the front page and how prominently to play it, editors saw it as their job to present news all at once, and in a hierarchy of importance. We assumed people had a finite amount of time in their lives, and didn’t want to waste any of it. So we told them the biggest news right up top, but gave them the other stuff, too, in case they had time for it. That was up to them.

We were able to spend time weighing how to present things, and in what order, because we only presented it once a day – or two or three times if we had that many editions. So we had some time to think before deadline arrived.

No more. Mind you, I think it’s awesome that it is now possible to provide news to readers right now, without having to spend the day using 19th-century technology to physically get a paper product to them. I used to fantasize about that back in the early ’80s – at that point, there were no more typewriters, and all writing was done on computers (a mainframe system), and I kept thinking, What if when I hit the button to send this to the copy desk, it just went straight to the reader?

And when that became possible, I rejoiced. But then something else happened. We went from being able to send stories out immediately to having to send them out immediately. No time to stop and think, How does this compare to all the other things going on?

No. Whatever was happening now became the most important thing in the world, the way things had always been on TV news – which was something I didn’t like about TV news. You could only see one thing at a time, so at that moment, there was nothing else.

Suppose you – like so many – didn’t agree with what the editors said was the most important news. That didn’t matter. You could decide for yourself. It was all presented to you at the same time, instead of this stream-of-unconsciousness madness that we have now: Now, it’s THIS is the most important thing. No, THIS is. No, THIS is…

And for awhile last night, that most important thing was that Beyoncé had won those awards – so I received a tsunami of notices about it.

Of course, newspaper readers can STILL see all the news presented on a paper’s app. Which is great. And it’s all freshly updated. And better yet, now the TV stations have websites where you can see a bunch of stuff being offered – not in any thoughtful hierarchy, but at least there’s a selection.

So that’s good – as long as you go looking for your news that deliberately, and consider it more or less holistically.

But I fear that not enough people do. I worry that too many let it wash over them the way the Grammys were washing over me last night. And I think it causes them to lose all perspective. And it causes the journalists to lose it, too, since decisions of what to cover and how to play it and what to send notifications about are now so driven by clicks.

At this point, many of you are rolling your eyes and thinking (as many of you habitually do), there goes that has-been newspaperman, reminiscing about how great things were in the old days. Which means you’re missing the point entirely.

It’s not about me. I actually love my iPad and the incredibly wide access to dependable news sources it gives me. In the unlamented old days, I wouldn’t have been able to subscribe to all these papers and received them while the news was still hot. And this is of great value.

But I worry very much about the effect these “news” tsunamis I’m speaking of have on society as a whole. It’s not just a matter of people being overly concerned with silly pop culture stuff. Hey, I love pop culture, as any reader of this blog knows. But the problem is, serious things – such as politics – get covered this way as well. It’s gotten to be all about the outrage of the day, the stupidest things that were said or done, the things most likely to drive us farther apart from each other. And yeah, it helps explain – not entirely, but in part – how Donald Trump got elected in 2016.

As I’ve said so many times, nothing like that ever came close to happening before that election. And I keep trying to figure out why it did happen. And this is one of the things I see contributing to it – this utter lack of perspective and proportion with regard to news…

Enjoying and appreciating the work of David Von Drehle

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Here I go doing that thing that journalists avoid, because nothing is more sure to draw a tidal wave of dissension and contempt from the world:

I’m going to say something nice about somebody.

The somebody is David Von Drehle, deputy opinion editor and columnist for The Washington Post. He’s written some really good columns lately, and I’ve recently added him to the fairly short list of people whose stuff I will make a point of reading simply based on the byline, whatever the headline might say.

Von Drehle

It’s the first time in while I’ve added anyone to that list. Probably the most recent newcomers were Frank Bruni and Ezra Klein in the NYT — and with Klein, it was probably his podcasts that got me started, not his columns. Those who have been on the list a longer time include E.J. Dionne, David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, Bret Stephens, Jennifer Rubin, and South Carolina’s own Kathleen Parker. And going back even farther — Tom Friedman and George Will. And I really miss David Broder and Charles Krauthammer.

Some of them I agree with. Others add depth that help me amend my views. Some of them, I simply enjoy the way they write.

And now there’s a new one. When I started reading him, I wondered where he had been that I hadn’t noticed him before. He’s 61 years old — which is still quite young, mind you, but it seems I would have noticed him in the past. Had his duties as deputy opinion editor kept him from writing columns, or what?

The answer is that he’d jumped around in his career, developing a diversity of experience that shows up well in his columns:

David Von Drehle is a deputy opinion editor and columnist for The Post, where he writes about national affairs and politics from a home base in the Midwest. He joined The Post in 2017 after a decade at Time magazine, where he wrote more than 60 cover stories as editor-at-large. During a previous stint at The Post, Von Drehle served as a writer and editor on the National staff, in Style, and at the magazine. He is the author of a number of books, including the award-winning bestseller “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.” He lives in Kansas City with his wife, journalist Karen Ball, and their four children.

You can read more about his diverse career on Wikipedia.

So he’s done a lot, and you can tell that by reading him. And the fact that he writes from WAY outside the Beltway Bubble probably doesn’t hurt, either. He possesses the rare perspective of actually having the experience to know what he’s talking about, but in a position to do so from arm’s length. This is the combination that modern technology should provide, but too seldom does.

Here’s his latest column, headlined “If the Mar-a-Lago case collapses? Disaster dodged, America.” Basically, he’s saying that the emergence of Joe Biden’s documents problem “should spell the end of any realistic prospect of criminal charges against former president Donald Trump over his Mar-a-Lago portfolio of pilferage.”

And that’s a good thing. Of course, the cases are light-years apart. One involves criminal defiance of the law — a raid necessitated by Trump’s refusal to simply hand over the documents the government was seeking, versus a problem we’d only know about because Biden’s people found the documents, reported it and turned them over — and then kept looking. Not to mention Garland’s appointment of a special prosecutor. The Biden example is one of going all-out to obey the law and correct a problem. The Trump case is the opposite.

Nevertheless, the steam is leaking out of any likelihood that Trump will pay for what he did. And the columnist explains that that’s a good thing:

Before continuing, let me be clear: I believe Trump is a bad person of low character, selfish and dishonest, intellectually lazy, childish and shameless, and that his presidency has been a terrible thing for the country I love. For this reason, I’m relieved by the likely collapse of the classified documents case against him. Because it was the strongest case against Trump, in terms of trial strategy, it was the most likely to produce an indictment — and indicting Trump is a terrible idea for those who genuinely hope to be rid of him.

Politically, Trump is a dead man walking. He has lost the ability to drive the news cycle. His outlandish social media posts fall as silently as unheard forest trees. His declaration of his next campaign produced a yawn worthy of another run by Ralph Nader. As drum major of a wackadoodle parade, he marched through the Republican primaries last year, delivering candidates who bombed in the general election. Now no one marches to his tune. When he tried to influence the election of a House speaker, even the surviving zealots ignored his instructions….

To be indicted and hauled into court for history’s most heavily publicized trial would invigorate Trump, and the spectacle would galvanize his dwindling base of support….

And we know what that would lead to.

In short, von Drehle is a perceptive observer who knows how to think about an issue — rather than get in line behind a partisan talking point of the day — and has the skill to effectively express his thoughts.

I appreciate that. I hope the Post will forgive me for the long quote above. I also hope that if you’re not a subscriber (and I recommend that you become one), you can at least read all of this column before the pay wall stops you.

And if you can go even beyond that, here are some other recent columns to check out:

I loved that last one. And the one before it, about the lasting effects of Pat Buchanan’s campaign in 1992, is about something I alluded to back in this comment.

Anyway, I’m glad to have discovered his work, and look forward to being enlightened further in the days to come…

Can we still let Shoeless Joe into the Hall of Fame? If so, let’s.

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Soon, I need to write the post I’ve been meaning to about how I’ve been enjoying The Boston Globe since they let me subscribe for six months for next to nothing.

I need to do it soon, because the deal’s about to run out, and I’m pretty sure I can’t handle paying for yet another newspaper at full price.

In the meantime, though, I think I’ve said before how much I appreciate that at least their sports department acknowledges that baseball is worthy of attention and respect. I want to say it again.

Whatever the time of year, you can usually see something about the Red Sox on the front of the section — if only a little teaser to content inside. Of course, this is a town that actually has a storied major-league team (and possibly the best ballpark in baseball). But they have teams in those other sports, too, and they still don’t slight baseball at any time of year. Meanwhile, how did the National Pastime fare in my own hometown paper? Today’s Sports front has football… and football… and basketball… and football. As per usual.

Yesterday, I got an email from The Globe calling me to read this story, about how sportswriters have voted this year for entrants to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The piece complains about the writers being stingy by only naming one entrant. Of course, I don’t know what Boston has to complain about — the last one was Big Papi.

But being a South Carolinian, bereft of baseball, I have my own complaint, and I know it’s a bit of a trite one around here: They should forgive Joe Jackson and let him in. I’m no expert on either him or the Hall, but everything I’ve seen indicates Shoeless Joe was at worst a reluctant dupe in the Black Sox deal. I mean, the guy batted .375 in the series. How is that trying to throw it?

As for his worthiness for admission to the Hall, Joe had the fourth-highest career batting average in history — .3558. (And mind you, this was all before the scandal of the lively ball.) Ty Cobb had the best, and he got in — and Cobb was a major a-hole. But boy, could he play.

Yeah, it’s been said a thousand times. I just thought I’d say it again…

There might be some kind of statute of limitations keeping players from being admitted so long after their careers ended. I tried looking it up, but didn’t find it. But maybe there is. Still, I’d change the rule just to let Joe in…

Cobb and Jackson.

Just FYI, SC’s Ralph Norman is one of the main clowns in the speaker-election circus

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I don’t have a lot of time for commenting on it, but I wanted to make sure you knew this — because until today, I did not.

That’s because my main source of South Carolina news, and SC angles on national news, is The State. And while you can go thestate.com looking for the information and find it, I still look at the paper through the lens of the print edition. No, I don’t read the dead-tree version literally — I dropped that years ago. I read all the newspapers to which I subscribe on my iPad. But some apps are better organized than others, and while I find the NYT‘s very helpful, I’m not pleased with the way The State‘s is organized. So I look at the e-edition each morning, before moving on to NYT and The Washington Post and the Boston Globe for national and international news and commentary.

And as near as I can tell, the fact that Ralph Norman is one of the 20 or so GOP crazies repeatedly sabotaging Kevin McCarthy’s bid for U.S. House speaker has not appeared in those reproductions of the print edition. (Maybe it’s been in those “Extra” pages that the app provides, but I don’t read those pages, because I read other papers for more timely news on those topics.)

I learned that this morning from The New York Times. You might always want to peruse this item, which breaks down every vote in the nine ballots.

By the way, in case you wondered, he’s the ONLY member of the SC delegation doing this. The other Republicans are dutifully lining up behind the guy who they think will win. Which doesn’t make them profiles in courage or anything, but it does make Norman alone.

Now, let’s get something straight: I’m no fan of Kevin McCarthy. I not only don’t want him to be speaker, I am embarrassed that such a person is in position to be seriously considered.

He is unsuitable for the position, to say the least.

But these Republicans who keep voting against him are doing so because they don’t think he’s unsuitable enough. So I wanted to make sure you knew Ralph Norman was one of them.

I suppose I should enjoy the situation. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic (in a piece headlined “No Tears for Kevin McCarthy“):

Because the people attempting to inflict that defeat upon McCarthy include some of the most nihilistic and destructive characters in U.S. politics, McCarthy is collecting misplaced sympathy from people who want a more responsible Congress. But the House will function better under another speaker than it would under McCarthy—even if that other speaker is much more of an ideological extremist than McCarthy himself.

The defeat of Kevin McCarthy in his bid for the speakership of the House would be good for Congress. The defeat of Kevin McCarthy would be good for the United States. It might even be good for his own Republican Party.

McCarthy is not in political trouble for the reasons he deserves to be in political trouble. Justice is seldom served so exactly. But he does deserve to be in trouble, so justice must be satisfied with the trouble that he’s in….

We could talk about this back and forth all day, but I just wanted to make sure that as we watch this, my fellow South Carolinians know that Ralph Norman is one of those “most nihilistic and destructive characters in U.S. politics”…

 

 

 

2022: The Year in Obits

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That headline may seem odd, but I was just trying to think of something that sort of addressed my topic, but wouldn’t sound as nekulturny as “Top Five Dead People of 2022.” Which would have reflected the post more honestly.

Anyway…

This is a time of year when newspapers and other outlets crank out “Best _____ of the Year” lists. I’m not sure why they still do it. In the dead-tree days, we had a reason: It was the time of year when you had the greatest amount of space (on account of all the Christmas-shopping ads) and the least amount of real news. But I guess the beast still has to be fed. We also did it because at that time when content was badly needed, a lot of people were taking end-of-year vacations, before things got busy in January. And this didn’t require reporting — someone just needed the patience to dig through the year’s pages.

Such non-news stories generally mean little to me. “Best Books of 2022” means nothing to me, because I’ve never been interested in the hot books of the moment. When I read, I’m going to choose from the best (or at least, most engaging to me) of that which has been published since (and frequently before) Gutenberg, knowing that I’ll never live long enough to read everything I’d like to read from the best of the 19th century, not to mention other eras. Why waste time on the latest tattle, or the hottest young novelist?

And as I’ve grown older — and especially since COVID — I’ve gotten the same way about current movies. Why go see the “Avatar” sequel when I didn’t much like the original, and I can stream something like “The Grapes of Wrath” or “His Girl Friday,” or “Is Paris Burning?” far more cheaply and conveniently, and without some popcorn-munching kid kicking the back of my seat? (By the way, those three aren’t my three fave films. They just popped into my head, for different reasons. They are: the film I won’t let myself watch until I finally finish reading Steinbeck’s original, which I have steadily failed to do; my actual fave comedy; and a film I’d always meant to see, but didn’t see until recently, and I was more impressed than I thought I would be.)

But you know what does interest me, aside from Dave Barry’s always-entertaining review of the year? The annual list of who died. I like to be reminded of the passing of people who have left a significant mark on our world — not so much because it tells me something about the past year, but because it provides a fascinating, personal perspective on the entire time in which they lived. It’s an interesting, fresh way of being reminded why the world I live in is the way it is, told through the lives of people who played memorable roles in making it that way. These deaths bring history to life, you might say.

And occasionally I’m surprised by the deaths I have missed. I was particularly surprised to learn that Bette Davis had left our presence in 2022, when she would have been 114. (She actually died at a more reasonable age in 1989.) It took me a moment to realize why The State had placed her picture with this story, and initially the search function was unhelpful. But then I searched on “Davis” instead of “Bette,” and found that someone associated with publishing the “Extra” pages of The State‘s e-edition didn’t recognize that the screen legend was not Miles Davis’ wife, Betty. So it was worse than simply misspelling “Bette” in the cutline.

But we all make mistakes — you’ll probably spot some below — so let’s move on from that before I get embarrassed, too.

Looking back, here are the Top Five People Who Actually Died this year, in my view…

Dang it! I don’t have time to whittle it down that far! With apologies to Nick Hornby, here are the Top 25. Of course, I’m putting them in order, so you can see what would have been my Top Five. But I thought those would all be boringly obvious, and it was more interesting to keep going:

  1. Elizabeth II — I doubt I need to explain this, except to say that I had to think for a moment before putting her ahead of the first pope to abdicate in 700 years. But still, she was such a part of our lives for SO long. She set too many records to get bumped to second place. And Pope Benedict only held on for less than eight years before, you know, quitting. Lilibet wasn’t one to quit. And she was a good queen.
  2. Pope Benedict XVI — Oh, and since stories I read this morning failed to name him, to my frustration, the last pope to quit, without external pressure (unlike Gregory XII), before this one was Celestine V, in 1294. He only lasted five months. I suppose I could write a book about the more recent ex-pontiff, but since I’m just getting started on my list and need to move on, I’ll just say nothing against him, but note that I’m glad our pope is now Francis.
  3. Mikhail Gorbachev — On another day (that is, a day on which Benedict had not just died) I might have put Gorby in second place, and debated whether to put him in first. He had more effect on the world than any Soviet leader since Stalin, only in a good way. Don’t try telling Putin that, though.
  4. Pelé — As you know, I’m constantly trying to throw in a little something for sports fans out there, conscious that most of y’all care more about athletics than I do. But I didn’t have to strain myself on this one. This guy was a superhero, and his superpower was football. (Real football, the kind where you use your feet.) Not having been a big fan of this sport, the first thing I usually think of when Pelé’s name comes up is that scene from “Vision Quest” when Elmo the cook talks about seeing him on TV. That was great…
  5. Jerry Lee Lewis — He wasn’t the King, but he knew the King. There are a lot of things to remember about The Killer — hammering the piano with his feet, marrying his 13-year-old cousin. Great balls of fire. But you know what I always think of? The time when he was arrested trying to break his way into Graceland. He had come to show E who the real king was. Well, he wasn’t the King, but he knew the King, you see.
  6. Sidney Poitier — I wrote about his passing earlier, and thinking back, it hits me that I still haven’t seen “A Raisin in the Sun” or “Lilies of the Field.” But I’ll tell you this: I definitely intend to see them well before I shell out money to see that “Avatar” sequel. In fact, I’d much rather sit and watch “To Sir With Love” another five times, back-to-back, than see that CGI nonsense.
  7. Madeleine Albright — She and Dick Riley were my two favorite members of Clinton’s Cabinet. Hers, of course, was the weightier position. She came along at the time when Democrats were going on about the “peace dividend,” and reminded us that in keeping with the liberal notion of America’s postwar role, we were still “the indispensable nation.” That ticks some of y’all off, I know, but not me. I appreciated it.
  8. Loretta Lynn — I was never a big fan myself, but I’m fully cognizant of her impact on our culture. I also enjoyed the movie. My favorite part was the way Levon Helm (see Ronnie Hawkins, below) absolutely embodied the Coal Miner himself.
  9. Wolfgang Petersen — My favorite Clint Eastwood movie wasn’t directed by Clint Eastwood. It’s Petersen’s “In the Line of Fire.” He also gave us “Air Force One,” and before that, “Das Boot.”
  10. Ray Liotta — One of the people who are here because they were “so young,” not so long ago. And he had a distinctive quality on screen. The first time I saw him was in Jonathan Demme’s action-comedy “Something Wild.” Jeff Daniels was funny, Melanie Griffith was sexy, and Ray Liotta was scary. Of course, he expanded on that in later roles, especially “Goodfellas.”
  11. James Caan — From Sonny in “The Godfather” to the Dad on the “naughty list” in “Elf,” he made his distinctive mark on the Hollywood of his times.
  12. Tony Dow — Yeah, I know Wally was older than the Beave and me, but it’s still a shock for him to be gone.
  13. Dwayne Hickman — Again, youth personified when we knew him. Oh, and for you clueless kids out there — we’re talking Dobie Gillis here. You don’t know who that was? Next, you’ll say you don’t remember Maynard G. Krebs.
  14. Ivan Reitman — Not one of the great filmmakers of his time, but he certainly had an impact, via  Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), Ghostbusters II (1989), Twins (1988), Kindergarten Cop (1990), and Dave (1993). My fave might be “Dave.”
  15. Hilary Mantel — An unusual character, but an impressive writer. And while I read and enjoyed Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, I can congratulate myself that while she is gone, I still have the experience of reading The Mirror and the Light in my future.
  16. David McCullough — He not only told us, compellingly, the stories of Harry S. Truman, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, and the Wright brothers. He also narrated Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.” Dude got a lot done in his 89 years.
  17. Meat Loaf — In drafting a list of notable names, how could I leave out this one?
  18. P.J. O’Rourke — A gifted commenter on our times, even if he was a libertarian. And don’t forget, he also was a frequent panelist on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”
  19. Ronnie Hawkins — I don’t put him here because of his own music, about which I know little. I put him here because The Band’s first job of note was backing him up — before they did the same for Dylan. So nice work, Ronnie, because I do love those guys.
  20. Mark Shields — I enjoyed his commentary on PBS, and when he was spoken of upon his death as a decent man and a man of faith, that was no surprise. I attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York for the first time in 2004, when I was there for the Republican National Convention. At one point I looked around me, and saw someone familiar: It was Shields, sitting there alone. I suspect he was much in demand on the Sunday morning network political talk shows, but there he was at Mass. Not a big thing, maybe, but it made a favorable impression on me.
  21. Bill Russell — He may not have been as big as Pelé, but he was a giant in professional basketball (and not just because he was 6’10”). He was “the centerpiece of the Celtics dynasty that won 11 NBA championships during his 13-year career.” Red Auerbach called him “the single most devastating force in the history of the game.”
  22. Ronnie Spector — With the Ronettes, she gave us “Be My Baby.” And you can’t beat that, can you?
  23. Dirck Halstead — Another celebrity journalist. Don’t know him? Well, you’ve seen this picture, haven’t you? And this one? Does this guy look familiar?
  24. Nichelle Nichols — Better known to you as Lt. Uhura. I wasn’t a huge Trek fan, and I can’t say I knew her, but my old friend Burl Burlingame could. So I’m including her, as much as anything, as a way of remembering Burl.
  25. Sonny Barger — The only member of the Hell’s Angels I would have been able to name if you had asked me (you can thank Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson for that). Not that that’s a good thing, but he was a significant figure in the culture — and the nightmares — of the ’60s.

That’s enough for me. Who makes the top of your list?

Stop trying to predict elections. Just stop it. Right now.

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I’m speaking to journalists here.

I thought I’d make that clear because a few days ago, in reaction to a headline that said, “Why early-voting data is an awful election predictor,” I tweeted, “Which is fine, because no one needs such a thing. No one needs to ‘predict’ elections. Discuss the relative merits of the candidates, let the voters vote, then report what HAPPENED…”

When someone who has commented on this blog off and on for years responded, “…A lot of us, for some reason, think that who wins this election may be kind of important,” I had to add, “You do understand that I’m speaking to journalists here, right?”

Well, maybe he didn’t, and maybe that’s my fault. So here, I’m making it clear up front.

You want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow (or rather, in the process that ends tomorrow, since so many of us vote early now)?

Well, I can’t tell you. I can tell you that generally, the party of the president of the United States loses ground in the elections that occur in years when the president isn’t running. Although not always. And even that generality should probably be set aside, since the careful balance between two rational, roughly centrist parties came to an end in 2016. One of the parties basically doesn’t exist any more, and the other is in some disarray.

That’s as far as I’ll go with predictions.

Now, let’s talk about how stupid it is to try to predict these things that are widely and erroneously called “midterm elections.” (Not one position being considered is in the middle of a term. They’re all at the ends of their terms, which is why we’re having elections. The person for whom this is “midterm” is the current POTUS, and in case you haven’t noticed, he isn’t running.)

These prediction stories you see are pretty much always written from a national perspective — as is most of the news you read, since papers that covered — I mean really covered — state and local elections are gone or moribund, and nothing has taken their places. By “national perspective,” I mean they are trying to predict which of those two parties will hold a majority in each of the two chambers of Congress when the elections are over.

Which is insane. That cannot be reliably predicted. Some elections can be reliably predicted. I can predict that Joe Wilson will win re-election. (I would, of course, be thrilled to be proven wrong on that.) I can with even greater confidence predict that Jim Clyburn will be re-elected. But that’s because voters’ choices have been removed from the equation, through the process of gerrymandering.

What you cannot do is reliably, dependably predict what will happen with control of Congress. First of all, you’ll notice I keep saying “elections,” not “election.” There is not one person in America who is voting for one party or the other to have control of Congress. Oh, they might think they are, and tell you they are, thanks to the fact that so many Americans have been trained (largely by what remains of the media) to think that way, in ones-and-zeroes partisan terms.

But they aren’t, because they can’t. Not one person in America can vote for more than one member of the House of Representatives, or more than two (and usually, just one at a time) senator. The rest of the equation — the extremely, mind-blowingly complex equation — depends on what millions of other people do. Each contest for each seat depends on thousands, if not millions, of such separate decisions. And the end result, in terms of which party has control? That depends on an exponentially greater number of separate decisions.

Not only that, but I remain unconvinced that most people can coherently explain, even to themselves, exactly what caused them to vote as they did. It’s complicated. Despite all the progress the ones-and-zeroes folks have had in training people to vote like robots, it remains complicated.

But enough about voters and what they do. Back to the journalists.

Y’all have all heard grandpa tell stories about how he covered elections, back when the country was young and men were men, yadda-yadda. I’m not going to do that in this post. But I am going to complain about the “coverage” we do see in elections.

Practically every story written, every question asked by a journalist of a source, seems in large part to be an attempt to answer the question, “Who is going to win?’ I can practically see those words stamped onto the foreheads of the reporters.

What do the polls say? How much money have you raised? How many more times will that TV ad be aired by Election Day? How are you connecting with this or that demographic group? How strong is your campaign organization? Can you avoid uttering “gaffes” in the upcoming “debate,” and when you almost inevitably fail in that task, can you recover from them?

Folks, the reason we have a First Amendment is so that we will have a free press to, among other things, help voters decide which candidates will represent them. To do that, your job is to report on what each candidate offers to voters, and how well he or she is likely to perform if elected. You start with two things: the candidates’ observable records, and what the candidates say about themselves and the kinds of officeholders they intend to be.

Your goal should NOT be to tell the voters who WILL win. You should give them information that will help them, the voters, make that decision. If you try to tell them who WILL win, the most likely result is that you will convince some supporters of the other candidate not to vote. (Which to many of you might sound like a GOOD thing, because it means your stupid predictions are slightly more likely to come true — but it isn’t.)

Oh, and if you’re an opinion writer, your goal is to present rational arguments as to who SHOULD win. It is not to predict who will win. So, you know, I should not be seeing “opinion” headlines like some of the ones below…

It would be great to see some coverage of 2nd District

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“Well this has, without a doubt, been the friendliest debate I’ve ever experienced,” said moderator Avery Wilks just before closing arguments in the 2nd Congressional District debate Monday night. “We didn’t use a single rebuttal to address a personal insult, so I appreciate that from both candidates.”

Avery got that right. Of course, it was to be expected. Most of the country thinks of Joe Wilson as the “You lie!” guy, but that was very much out of character for him (at least, before he learned to pull in money from it). Sure, he’s a steady fountain of the kind of mindless partisanship that was already destroying our country before the unbelievable happened in 2016: “Republicans good; Democrats bad,” on and on.

Judd Larkins has none of those negative characteristics — neither the insults nor the partisanship. He’s a guy who wants to make a positive difference in the lives of the people of the 2nd District, and he doesn’t care about the party affiliation of the people he’d have to work with to get it done.

Which is why I have that sign for him in my yard, with all my neighbors’ Republican signs running down the opposite side of the street.

Of course, I missed a lot of the first half of the debate, but the parts I saw reflect Avery’s characterization. You can judge for yourself by watching it. Click on the picture at the top of the post, and it will take you to the video on YouTube.

Judd was polite and deferential — as he always is — and Joe was polite and mild-mannered, although at times a bit condescending to the young man so hopelessly running against him. As for his partisan stuff — there’s no visible malice in him when he says those things. He sees those as things people naturally say. Blaming Biden or Obama for all the world’s troubles is, to him, like saying “hello” to the people he meets. He lives in a community where it is expected, thanks to line-drawers in the Republican Legislature.

But those statements offer a stark contrast between the campaigns. We were cash-hungry in our campaign in 2018, what with me doing the work of five or six people (according to our campaign manager — I wouldn’t know what the norm is). But while I talked to the press and wrote the releases and the brochures and (during one awful, brief period) the fund-raising emails and about 90 percent of the social media (and would have written the speeches if James hadn’t preferred loose talking points, bless him), I was at least on hand to pump out a few tweets during debates.

Judd didn’t have anything like that. I watched for it during the debate. Joe Wilson, of course, did. And the nonsense was on full display:

I answered a couple of them. To that one, I said, “Which is exactly what he would have said had, God help us, Trump won, in which case the U.S. would have skedaddled out of Afghanistan much earlier, and much more recklessly…” I didn’t bother with the offensive nonsense about immigration. It would have required being as superficial as Joe’s campaign to stay within the 280 limit.

And I couldn’t hold back again when they put out this prize-winner: ““It’s shameless what the democrats have done with defunding the police. It’s putting the American people at risk”

My response: “What, precisely, have congressional Democrats done that could credibly be described as ‘defunding the police?’ And which Democrats in actual elected, national leadership positions would even WANT to? Nothing, and none. But does that matter to Joe? Of course not…”

I should have said, “does that matter to Joe’s campaign,” since he was personally busy on stage at the time, but I was irritated. Which is why social media are a poor way to engage in political argument.

Anyway, I’m not commenting much on this dispiriting election, but I’m writing again about this one foregone conclusion of a “contest” because you’re not reading about it elsewhere.

Avery, to his great credit, was there as moderator, but neither his newspaper (the Post & Courier) nor his former newspaper (The State) covered the event. Of course, I didn’t write about it until two days later, so maybe something is still coming. But it seems doubtful, since neither has taken an interest so far. Search for Judd’s name under Google’s “news” category, and you’ll see what I mean.

And I certainly understand. It was hard for an editor to devote resources to noncompetitive “contests” even back when “major metropolitan” newspapers were vital and fully staffed. Now, I’d be shocked to see it. (Yeah, there’s some coverage of the hopeless election for governor, but editors are much less likely to see that as optional.)

If you do that search, though you’ll see that again the Lexington County Chronicle stepped up and covered it, so good for them. I can’t say much for that ones-and-zeroes headline, but at least they made the effort.

I sent a couple of congratulatory messages after the debate. One was to Avery, about the good job he and the high school students did. (And let me also congratulate Lexington One for putting on the event, and providing the video.) The next day, I congratulated Judd as well. He said two things in response:

  • Thanks! Some of the Dems wanted more blood, but I think we won over the folks we needed to. Just gotta get it in (front) of more folks.
  • Lack of coverage last night really hurt. We executed our plan perfectly. Just gotta get more eyes to see it.

Of course, as I indicated above, I couldn’t agree more on the second thing. On the first, I hope he continues to ignore the people who want “more blood.” People like that, across the spectrum — the “fight fire with fire” people — are tearing our country apart. Stepping outside of his comfort zone to provide more gladiatorial spectacle won’t win the election for him. I want to see him get through this, and go on to the rest of his life — in or out of politics — knowing he did what he could the right way.

Stick with the same headline, people!

1 Reply

Twitter is preparing to add an edit feature, and I think that’s great. Sure, there’s potential for abuse, but I think the precautions they’re taking are good ones, and I think it should be tried.

No more posting a Tweet, seeing the error the instant it appears, and then having to delete it and start over. Good.

Oh, and here are the precautions:

Twitter said it will add a label to edited tweets that will allow users to click in and see the history of the tweet and its changes.

The feature has other limitations. Tweets can only be edited during the first 30 minutes after they are posted, and they will be labeled with an icon to let others know the tweet has been changed….

Sounds good.

Now, I want another innovation — except Twitter can’t do this for me. It’s something I need the editors putting out the content to do. If they will. Which they probably won’t, from what I’ve seen.

Usually, I catch this before it happens. But yesterday, I failed, and didn’t notice until I saw this morning that someone had liked the tweet.

Remember the Tolkien post? It was inspired by a couple of stories I’d read earlier in the day, primarily by this one from The Washington Post, headlined, “‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ is beautiful, banal boredom.”

The headline of my post, “Maybe it would help to have a POINT to the story,” was in reaction to that headline. So much so that when I posted the link to my post to Twitter, I decided to do so in a retweet of the WashPost‘s tweet — so people could see what it was in reaction to.

And here’s how the frickin’ thing appeared:

Which really ticks me off. Sure, if the reader clicks on the link of the Post‘s original tweet, they get to see the original headline. But is that clear communication? It is not.

But that doesn’t bother me as much as this, which happens more often…

I’m reading one of my newspaper apps — the Post, the NYT, whatever. And I see a headline on the main, or “Top Stories,” page, and immediately think of a good response to that, and then call up the story — and it has an entirely different headline! Something boring, that doesn’t inspire a good tweet. And if you try to tweet it, that blah headline is the one that goes the Twitter.

Sometimes, I don’t notice this until I’ve read the stupid story, and clicked to tweet it, and am actually writing my reaction. At which point I see the problem, and ditch the whole enterprise.

I hate this. And it’s not in the interest of the original publisher of the content — since I’m trying to bring further attention to that content!

So please, don’t write multiple heds. Just come up with one good one, and stick with it.

Thanks…

I suggest we follow the Wally Schirra approach

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If we must exercise, let’s do it Wally’s way.

First, a complaint that’s unrelated to the subject: For some time, I’ve been meaning to write something about the sudden death of the newspaper headline. I’m still going to write it, but I’ll just touch on it here.

Back when there were real newspapers everywhere, journalists had an important ethic — to tell their readers everything they needed (or might want) to know about the subject at hand as quickly as possible. Do it in the headline if possible. Then, if you couldn’t do it in the hed, you did it in the lede. People should be able to read nothing but the hed and the lede and move on, and know the most important facts about what the story was about. If the story was a tad too complicated for that, certainly you finished telling the basics in the next couple of grafs — then, assuming you were writing in the classic inverted-pyramid form, the importance of the information you related diminished with each paragraph.

You did this for two reasons. First, those rabid lunatics on the copy desk (no offense to copy editors; I’m just describing them the way a reporter would) were likely to end your story randomly wherever they felt like ending it, in order to cram it into inadequate space, so you needed to get the best stuff up top. Second, you saw it as your sacred duty to inform the busy reader as well as you could. A reader who didn’t have the time to sit down and read the stories should be able to glance over the headlines on the front page and at least have a rough, overall idea of the important news of the day. A reader with a little more time should be able to get a somewhat deeper understanding just by reading the front, without having to follow the stories to the jump pages. And so forth.

But no more. Now, the point is to get readers to click on the story. So you get “headlines” that say things like, and I am not making this up, “What you need to know about X.” When there was room in the headline to just tell you what you needed to know. Or they make it clear that the story is about a particular person, but don’t name the person. The idea being that if you aren’t willing to click, then you can just take a flying leap. (There’s another, even more absurd, reason why the person is often not named, but I’ll get into that another time.)

Different ethic — if you want to call it that.

But you see what I just did? I wrote 414 words without getting to the point of this post. See what writing for an online audience, without the discipline enforced by the limited space of a dead-tree newspaper, can do to you?

I went on that tangent, though, because I was irritated by a story headlined, “What Types of Exercise Reduce Dementia Risk?” That grabbed me on account of knowing someone — a good friend, you see — who will soon be 69. And he might care to know. But did the story tell me? No. At least, not in the first 666 words. After that, it finally gave me a subhed that said, “Start by doing what you like best.”

Which meant we were getting somewhere, but not exactly. Still, I forgive this writer and her editors, because she had an excuse: She doesn’t know the answer. Nobody knows the answer. At least not an answer that would satisfy me — or rather, my friend.

So, in a way, my long digression about bad headlines was even less relevant than it seemed. Oh, well. At least I got some of that out of my system. But I’ll return to the subject in another post, with examples.

Back to the exercise thing — while there are no answers, there are… indications, such as those from three recently-published “major long-term studies” that “confirm that regular physical activity, in many forms, plays a substantial role in decreasing the risk of developing dementia,” and further tell us that “Vigorous exercise seems to be best, but even non-traditional exercise, such as doing household chores, can offer a significant benefit.”

That’s good. But I went into this hoping — that is, my friend went into it hoping — that the stories would endorse the Wally Schirra approach.

Did you read The Right Stuff? Well, you should have, and if you haven’t, go read it right now, and return to this point in the post when you’re done…

Did you enjoy it? It’s awesome, isn’t it? Well, I always liked the part where Wolfe is telling about how the people in charge of the Mercury program encouraged our nation’s first seven astronauts to engage in frequent exercise. And John Glenn, demonstrating what a Harry Hairshirt he was, would go out and run laps around the parking lot of the BOQ. But most of the guys agreed with Wally Schirra “who felt that any form of exercise that wasn’t fun, such as waterskiing or handball, was bad for your nervous system:”

Nothing against John Glenn. He’s a hero of mine, as for most Americans alive in that time. I was really disappointed that he didn’t do better in his bid for the presidency in 1984. I was definitely ready to vote for him.

But I like Wally’s approach to exercise. And while the data may not all be in on precisely the best exercise for keeping one’s nervous system functioning properly, it seems a good idea to “Start by doing what you like best.”

At least that way, maybe you’ll keep doing it…

The nonreading public, and the media that serve it

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George Will had a good piece yesterday. It offered multiple levels upon which you could enjoy it.

There was the headline, of course: “Josh Hawley, senator-as-symptom of a broken news business.” But it’s not really about that insufferable little twerp — although you may enjoy the link Will provides toward the end (rendered above in gif form), showing him skedaddling away from his good friends in the Jan. 6 mob. (Frank Bruni had some fun with that as well, in light of Hawley’s new book, which is, hilariously, about being a man.)

It was more about… well, here’s the most appropriate excerpt:

… (T)oday’s journalism has a supply-side problem — that is, supplying synthetic controversies:

“What did Trump say? What did Nancy Pelosi say about what Trump said? What did Kevin McCarthy say about what Pelosi said about what Trump said? What did Sean Hannity say about what Rachel Maddow said about what McCarthy said about what Pelosi said about what Trump said?”

But journalism also has a demand-side problem: Time was, journalists assumed that news consumers demanded “more information, faster and better.” Now, instantaneous communication via passive media — video and television — supplies what indolent consumers demand.

More than half of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below the sixth-grade level. Video, however, requires only eyes on screens. But such passive media cannot communicate a civilization defined by ideas. Our creedal nation, Stirewalt says, “requires written words and a common culture in which to understand them.”…

The first part of that provides a certain understanding of what is wrong with today’s political journalism, and we can talk about that all day. Will employs the analogy I’ve used a gazillion time in recent decades about how reporters cover politics the way they would sports — there are only two sides to anything, and all we care about is which of the two wins, to the extent that we care.

Of course, that’s an insult to sports, the more I think about it. Actual sports contain far more nuance, variety, color and humanity than the ones-and-zeroes coverage we get of politics these days.

But the thing that really grabbed me was this one sentence:

More than half of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below the sixth-grade level.

It grabbed me not simply because such low levels of literacy are distressing in themselves. It’s because of the larger point Will is making, which is that in an atmosphere of such plunging intellectual engagement, we’ve seen political journalism change “from reporting what had happened to reporting what was happening, and now to giving passive news consumers the emotional experience of having their political beliefs ratified.”

And that’s the essential problem, or at least one of the essential problems. To engage with politics meaningfully and constructively requires the active mental process of reading. The passive mob, engaged only to the extent of its members’ sense of identity with one of the two sides (and there can only be two, under the current rules of the stupid game), cannot possibly maintain a healthy, vital republic of the sort our Founders established.

To be a citizen, you can’t just twitch. Nor can you merely go about feeling strongly about this or that. You have to think. And of course, we don’t see very much of that anymore…

 

THIS is what a Sports section front should look like

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From my iPad this morning…

Just thought I’d share this, since some of you younger people may not have ever seen the like.

THIS is what the front of Sports section should look like, in the middle of baseball season.

This is from today’s Boston Globe. I subscribed to the Globe when we were in Boston, mainly so I could read about the Red Sox. And on that score, the Globe definitely delivers. They don’t bore me with stuff about the Celtics or the Bruins or that football team way down in Foxborough — not in the middle of July.

This is a sports department that actually understands that in America, this is the time of year when you write about baseball. Period.

Oh, you can throw in some tidbits about other sports for those who are interested. For instance, you’ll see mentions of golf and car racing down at the bottom of this page (see screenshot below). That’s fine, as long as you don’t mention football — which, as you see, they did not (not even in the refers at the bottom, bless them). Football has its own season, and it’s too long already.

The sports editors at this paper know what they’re doing. I half expected to find a column from Ring Lardner. (See how I included an explanatory link for you youngsters out there?) But hey, Shaughnessy’s not too bad, from what I’ve seen.

Of course, I’d like it better if they had some GOOD news to report about the Sox. But hey, you report what you’ve got…

It’s OK to mention other sports, down at the bottom of the page, as long as you first do justice to BASEBALL.

Form over substance: When a big story gets buried

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I see this happen a lot these days, but I ran across a couple of fairly dramatic examples yesterday in The Washington Post — or rather, on the Post’s iPad app, which is the only way I read the several newspapers to which I subscribe. So I thought I’d say something.

It’s particularly startling to an old newspaperman who once spent hours each day agonizing over the precise way to play each story — particularly on the front page, that premium real estate where you had only about six possible positions (some days five, and some days you’d cram on seven, but the goal for a diversified presentation of the biggest news of the day was six). Those of you who still look at the dead-tree version will think that sounds high, and you’re right. Over the last quarter century newspaper pages have shrunk and shrunk again, so it’s hard to get more than three or four stories on that page.

But online — even in a well-designed app that makes an effort to prioritize news and present it in a non-jumbled manner — you don’t see the same kind of agonizing over position, for a couple of reasons. First, there’s no time for it when deadline is always, always right NOW. Second, there’s no need when the space is unlimited. As with my blog — one reason I started blogging in 2005 was to shrug off the limitations. I can post as much as I can find time to post.

This is glorious in many ways. But in other ways, perspective and proportion fly out the window. One problem is that the most important news of the day — or the one deemed most interesting to readers (those are two different things, that we had ways of distinguishing between in the old days) — tends to spread out and dominate your first screen or maybe your first two. This happens for three reasons that I can spot:

  1. You can have as many different stories on this interesting thing as you have people to write. In the past, you’d have a main story and maybe a sidebar or two, and the sidebars were often played inside with the jump of the main copy.
  2. If you’re The Washington Post, and backed by Jeff Bezos’ wealth, you have plenty of people.
  3. Editors usually try to group related material together. But the only place to do that — the way most apps and browser sites are organized — is up front with the main story. While there are different “pages” you can reach by clicking on a category link (“Opinion,” “National,” “Sports,” etc.), containing additional content, there are no inside jump pages that the story on the “front” leads you to.

Anyway, on the Post’s app Wednesday morning, two big stories — one that would be big news any time, while the other would at least have been considered huge within recent memory — essentially got buried, to the extent that can happen when there is, for most practical purposes, just one gigantic page. They were:

  1. Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell sentenced to 20 years in prison — Remember when the charges against her were huge? It was a while ago — before COVID, I think — but the coverage of Epstein and Ms. Maxwell just went on and on. But here was the climax, the ultimate chapter, and… it was played way, way down, many screens down, more than halfway to the bottom of the available content on my app. In the subcategory of “National,” it was the fifth story listed — and of the four stories above it, only one was a breaking development: someone being attacked by a bison in Yellowstone Park. The others were “trend” stories, rather than breaking news.
  2. NATO summit developments — Maybe the Maxwell story was something in which the nation had only been momentarily interested — the scandal of the moment. But this is monumental stuff that at most times would have led a national newspaper. Actually, it was two ledes in one. One headline would be, “U.S. to increase military presence in Europe” (which is the headline you see on the link). The other would have been, “Sweden, Finland to be asked to join NATO.” Both in response, of course, to the biggest story in the world — Russia’s war on Ukraine, which everyone worries could be the opening of World War III.

Here’s the way the Maxwell story was played. I couldn’t get the headline onto this screenshot of the National block, but it’s the item where you see the courtroom artist’s drawing, bottom right:

As for the NATO story — at this point I must confess that I started writing this post yesterday (which is when I saved the screengrabs you see), then got pulled away. Of course, the app content is radically different now, so I can’t go back and see just how far down the NATO story was. But it was well past the first two or three screens, so fairly far down. The defense would be that it was packaged with other Ukraine war news, which you had to scroll down for, but that’s really not a great excuse.

What was played above these stories? Other important stories, I freely admit: The rather explosive Jan. 6 hearing from Tuesday (the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson), and the ongoing aftershocks of the Roe ruling on Friday. Some Tuesday-night elections across the country as well.

But again, the problem is what I mentioned earlier. The Post now writes so many stories on the same subject, and packages them all together, so that other big news gets pushed far, far down. But it gets rather weird. For instance, Miss Hutchinson is a striking subject for a photograph, but the app showed me five such photos of her — all sitting at the table testifying, in her white suit, with pretty much the same serious expression — before I got down to the two “buried” stories I mention above.

On the screen displaying top stories from the Opinion section, there were three of those pictures. That’s because four of the eight columns or editorials on display were about the hearing. Three were about abortion. One was about something else. It was visually striking, to an eye seeking variety:

No, I’m not saying there should have been op-ed columns about the breaking stories on NATO and Ms. Maxwell. It was a bit soon for that. I am saying that in a medium in which you can provide an unlimited amount of content, it seems the screen promoting the most interesting opinion pieces of the moment should provide a tad more diversity.

Why am I boring you with this stuff that would only matter to an editor in the news trade? Well, because this is yet another thing contributing to our nation’s political schizophrenia. It’s not just people consuming social media instead of professionally presented mainstream media. It’s that the credible organizations, as hard as they try, present their well-crafted content in a way that leads to disproportionate responses among the reading public.

Once, news was presented to the readers in a way that carefully sought to give them — especially on the front page — a range of important news of the day, and to do so in a way that communicated relative importance of those stories.

While the new way of presenting content is wonderful — if you offered me dead-tree versions of all the papers I subscribe to, I still wouldn’t read them; this is much preferable — this way of presenting all that content is an invitation to obsession. Give me eight or ten stories about the same thing on the only screen I can see without scrolling, and you invite me to develop the impression that THIS IS THE ONLY THING WORTH THINKING ABOUT. Which I think helps explain some of the overly excited responses you see these days to news.

Anyway, editors are still trying — and I can see them trying hard — to sort all this out. Maybe they will work out ways to restore a sense of proportion, while still presenting all this added content. I hope so.

And in fact, the editors at The New York Times seem to be a bit farther along toward achieving that. Shortly after seeing what I described above, I opened my NYT app and saw the NATO  developments clearly leading the paper. See below. I thought, “It’s been a little while. Maybe the Post has done the same now.” But I looked, and it had not….

 

 

 

 

I was struck by that in two