Category Archives: Media

The State roundly rejects Kara for the Senate

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Yes, the endorsement of Ronnie Cromer today in The State discussed him and the other two people challenging him as well, but I take interest in what was said about Kara Gormley Meador in particular because I’ve written about her here.

Here’s what the editors said:

Kara Gormley Meador promises to shake up the status quo without the anger that often accompanies such pledges. Yet despite the fact that our state has some of the lowest taxes in the nation and our Legislature has a fixation on tax cuts, “tax reform” in her mind must include cutting taxes. Even after years of budget cuts, she’s convinced we need spending caps. And while she makes a point of saying she wants to strengthen the public schools, every time we asked her for specifics, she turned the conversation back to home schooling and private schools, and the need to excuse parents from paying their taxes if they take their kids out of public schools.

Dang, I really can’t argue with any of that. Right down the line, she advocates some really ill-considered ideas. And I was sort of vaguely aware of that when I wrote about her.

But it’s interesting to me to be reminded how differently I would have seen her if I had been talking with her for the purpose of deciding whether to endorse her — and the words in that editorial seem consistent with what I would have concluded, given the same evidence. But since I hadn’t been trying to judge Kara — since I was writing about her within the context of it just being interesting that this local personality had tried to vote in one district, then had to run in another — the picture didn’t gel in my mind. I even encouraged her to run.

Not that I was blind to her faults. Here’s part of what I wrote before:

Those of you who know me can see some significant disconnects with my own positions on issues. For instance, as an ardent believer in representative democracy, I would neither unduly limit the voters’ ability to elect whom they like (term limits) nor use a mathematical formula to supersede the representative’s powers to write a budget (“cap government growth”).

Further, I see inconsistencies in her vision. Today, she indicated that she believed enough waste could be found in state spending to both fully fund the essential functions of state government (which she correctly describes as currently underfunded) and return enough money to taxpayers to stimulate our economy.

In a state as tax-averse as this one, there’s just not enough money there to have your cake and eat it, too, barring a loaves-and-fishes miracle. (OK, enough with the clashing metaphors.)

But she’s smart, she’s energetic, and she seems to have no axes to grind. I think she’d quickly see that you can’t do it all, and make realistic assessments of what can and should be done. Her disgust with the pointless conflicts of modern politics, and the way they militate against a better future for South Carolina’s people.

Ohmygosh, do you see what I just said? “I think she’d quickly see that you can’t do it all, and make realistic assessments of what can and should be done.” And then later, I wrote, “My impression is that Kara has the character to be a positive force in politics, whatever her current notions of specific policy proposals.” Wow. Those are the same excuses I used to make about a certain other attractive young woman with a lot of energy and a nice smile. You know, the one who never really learned much of anything, and takes pride in the unchanging nature of her mind. The one who is now our governor, if you need me to get specific.

Once again, I’m reminded of the value of the endorsement process, properly done (and my regret that newspapers do so few of them now). Its value to the journalist, and to the reader. In that process, you get past vague impressions and force yourself to ask the questions that help you evaluate your initial impressions more systematically. Which The State did today.

I still like Kara personally, but that has little to do with whether she’d be a better senator than Ronnie Cromer.

What was so interesting here on May 25?

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Traffic continues to ratchet up here on the blog. I had thought May was sort of run-of-the-mill, in terms of interesting news and lively discussions. I thought we’d be doing well to break 200,000 page views, which for the blog has been the absolute floor per month for a year now. That’s where we seemed to be headed about mid-month.

Then, I didn’t look at my stats until June had arrived, and I saw that we just broke a quarter of a million (253,331) for the fifth time. A happy surprise.

Apparently, this happened in large part because of three big days — big days by bradwarthen.com standards, that is, not by Drudge Report standards, or even Will Folks’. They were:

Basically, it was just a big finish to the month, since May 30 saw 9,859 page views, just falling short of five figures.

What’s the norm? Well, in May, the daily average (somewhat pulled up by those days) was 8,171. Over the past year, the lowest daily average was 6,768 in December, and the highest was 8,787 in January — the month of the SC presidential primary.

It’s gratifying to see things ratcheting up, but I remain puzzled sometimes by the spikes. I’m pretty sure that May 25 was my largest number of page views in one day ever. But when I go back and look what I posted that day, it seems unremarkable.

Do y’all have any idea what it was that drew all that traffic? This inquiring mind wants to know.

Adam uncovers a blast from the past

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Adam Beam of The State Tweeted this over the weekend:

Adam Beam
Adam Beam‏
@adambeam

@BradWarthen Look what I foundpic.twitter.com/7V5M1vlr

Adam must have been spending Saturday at the office going through old drawers in the newsroom. There are a number of these scattered about here and there.

This is the special reprint we did early in 1992 of the Power Failure series that I had spent most of the previous year directing.

Power Failure was something I dreamed up in 1990. As governmental affairs editor that summer, I had been going nuts keeping up with an unbelievable string of scandals in and around state government, the most memorable of which was the Lost Trust investigation, which led to indictments against a tenth of the Legislature.

In the midst of it all, then-executive editor Gil Thelen stopped by my desk one day to wonder, What could we do to give our readers a positive way to respond? What could be done to make state government better, rather than just wallowing in the bad news day after day?

The answer I came up with was a project highlighting all of the deep, structural flaws in South Carolina’s system of government — flaws that set South Carolina apart from every other state. Flaws that made our system particularly resistant to change.

These flaws are difficult to summarize briefly, but all of the problems — the weak executive, weak local governments, centralization of authority, fragmentation of that central authority, almost complete lack of accountability (in terms of anyone being able to hire and fire key officials), and on and on — were vestiges of a constitutional system originally designed to put all authority in the hands of the landed, slaveholding antebellum gentry, and to fragment that power across that whole class of people, so that no one person could make important decisions. For instance, not only did departments that in other states reported to the governor (an official elected by all of the state’s people) report to a separately elected official, or to a board or commission appointed by the Legislature, but even decades after the passage of Home Rule, lawmakers still retained a surprising degree of control over local government services.

As I said, it’s difficult to summarize briefly, although we tried with the tagline, “The Government that Answers to No One.” To explain it, I conceived of a 17-installment series, each installment filling several full pages of newsprint (back in the day when pages were much bigger than they are now), totaling well over 100 articles. Gil and Paula Ellis, then the managing editor, essentially laid the resources of the newsroom at my disposal for most of 1991. Reporters came and went from the project, depending on which subject area we were dealing with at the time.

Were there results? Yes, but nowhere near what we were seeking. A partial restructuring of state government in 1993 put about a third of the executive branch under the governor. That third of a loaf, though, was great success when you consider that huge areas that were just as important — Home Rule, education governance, reducing the number of statewide elected officials — were pretty much ignored.

As for me — I was ruined as a governmental affairs editor, since the project was an unprecedented sort of news/editorial hybrid — for instance, I had written opinion columns advocating all of these changes throughout the series. I spent a couple of years supervising this or that non-political team (although I retained control of the Washington Bureau) until I made the move to editorial at the start of 1994 — where I spent the next 15 years continuing to advocate these reforms. Most of the items I listed in my last column for The State, “South Carolina’s unfinished business,” was to a great extent a recap of Power Failure.

Recently, we saw one tiny piece of the reform picture fall into place, with the legislation putting the governor and lieutenant governor on the same ticket advancing. Hoorah for small victories.

It’s been frustrating, but hey, this system had been in place in one form or another for 300 years — and the one great characteristic that it possessed all that time was a profound resistance to change. That is still the hallmark of government in South Carolina.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jeff Wilkinson

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So I was at this presser at midday today, at which Lindsey Graham and Joe Wilson and Steve Benjamin and others had gathered to defend the Pentagon’s budget (more on that when I’ve had a chance to write it) and I was aiming my iPhone around doing what I always do at news events these days — looking for interesting, extremely horizontal images that I could use as a new header image. And as you see at the top of this page, I succeeded. At least, it’s extremely horizontal.

At which point Jeff Wilkinson, who still has a job writing for The State, stuck his face in to say, “What are you doing?”

I showed him, and he said, “You have my permission not to use that on your blog.” Or maybe he said, “You have my permission not to publish that.” Whatever. I’m only sure about the first few words.

Which, I want you to attest, is not the same as saying, “You do not have my permission to use that on your blog.”

And I’m a literal kind of guy.

I’m trying to be very careful with this sort of thing. I don’t want to get into the kind of trouble my fellow blogger is in.

Sorry about the focus, Jeff. But I wasn’t aiming at you…

Bad news, good news about newspapers

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I learned yesterday that one of America’s great cities will no longer have a daily newspaper in the unkindest way, courtesy of my favorite celebrity Twitter follower, Adam Baldwin:

Adam Baldwin Adam Baldwin‏
@adamsbaldwin

Buggy-Whipped?! | RT @carr2n “Times-Picayune facing deep layoffs, may cut back from daily publication.” – http://nyti.ms/Jsib87

He jests at scars that never felt a wound. How would ol’ Jayne Cobb feel if the financial underpinnings of movies and TV suddenly collapsed? (Hey, don’t say it could never happen. Have you heard about Autohop? Remember, newspapers didn’t start dying because people didn’t want news; it was the ads drying up.)

That newspapers are having to cut back isn’t new (especially not to me), although nothing quite like this has happened before in a major city, so it’s a milestone (and the same company is doing the same with its papers in several other cities, including Birmingham). But my sadness is for the city as well. I lived in New Orleans almost as long as anywhere else growing up — I went to school there for two years (7th and 8th grades) instead of the usual one — and news like this makes it feel like the city itself is dying, with a vital spark fading:

The latest to go to three days a week: The storied New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of America’s oldest papers, which announced Thursday that it plans to limit its print schedule — beginning this fall — to Wednesday, Friday and Sunday editions. It will maintain 24/7 online reporting via its site, Nola.com.

This is a tactical trend for New York-based Advance Publications, which owns the Times-Picayune, as it pushes toward a limited print-digital model. Advance said Thursday that in addition to the Times-Picayune, it will also cut back the print frequency of its three papers in Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville, Ala., to three days….

First Katrina, now this.

But enough bad news. We have some startlingly good news from closer to home: Warren Buffett is investing in newspapers. Including in South Carolina.

You may have seen that news last week. I was sufficiently surprised that I didn’t know what to make of it, and haven’t commented yet. But I have a new news peg: Buffett has written a letter to his editors and publishers, communicating his thinking in making this move. It’s a bracingly confident message:

Until recently, Berkshire has owned only one daily newspaper, The Buffalo News, purchased in 1977. In a month or so, we will own 26 dailies.

I’ve loved newspapers all of my life — and always will. My dad, when attending the University of Nebraska, was editor of The Daily Nebraskan. (I have copies of the papers he edited in 1924.) He met my mother when she applied for a job as a reporter at the paper. Her father owned a small paper in West Point, Nebraska and my mother worked at various jobs at the paper in her teens, even mastering the operation of a linotype machine. From as early as I can remember, my two sisters and I devoured the contents of the World-Herald that my father brought home every night.

In Washington, DC, I delivered about 500,000 papers over a four-year period for the Post, Times-Herald and Evening Star. While in college at Lincoln, I worked fifteen hours a week in country circulation for the Lincoln Journal (earning all of 75? an hour). Today, I read five newspapers daily. Call me an addict.

Berkshire buys for keeps. Our only exception to permanent ownership is when a business faces unending losses, a remote prospect for virtually all of our dailies. So let me express a few thoughts about what lies ahead as we join forces.

Though the economics of the business have drastically changed since our purchase of The Buffalo News, I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future. It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town.

That will mean both maintaining your news hole — a newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce its readership as well and thoroughly covering all aspects of area life, particularly local sports. No one has ever stopped reading when half-way through a story that was about them or their neighbors…

So… if we are to take Mr. Buffett at his word, this isn’t some bid to rack up losses for tax reasons, or any other convoluted strategy. He actually believes this is a good investment. And he’s not known for being wrong about such things.

Back when I was first laid off, the executive editor position at the Florence paper was open. But I didn’t apply for the job — a combination of wanting to stay where my grandchildren are, and a reluctance to jump back into a dying industry, having done more than my share of laying-off and cutting back in the last few years.

But had the opening occurred under these circumstances — with new ownership, and that owner being Warren Buffett, and he bullish on newspapers — I might have looked at it differently.

The upside is that you NEVER lose an argument

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video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

Or if you do, you have a whole other set of problems…

Anderson Cooper brings our attention (blast him) to the following:

Daytime Exclusive: Woman Marries Herself in Ceremony

Nadine, 36, joins Anderson to explain why she married herself after getting a divorce. Nadine had a ceremony to celebrate the event and invited 40 guests. She even received wedding gifts.

Her unusual event made headlines, but Nadine says she wasn’t in it for the publicity. She says she decided to go through with the self-marriage because “it was about really committing to changing my life. I feel very empowered, very happy, very joyous. I want to share that with people, and also the people that were in attendance, it’s a form of accountability.”

Nadine experienced a painful divorce and says it was rough after learning her two kids wanted to live with their father. “Six years ago I would’ve handled a problem by going out and drinking. I smoked, I was 50 pounds overweight… this is just celebrating how far I’ve come in my life.”

Since the split, Nadine enjoys spending time with herself, going out on date nights, buying treats and gifts for herself, and says she’s no longer waiting for “someone to complete her.”

What are we going to call this? “Same-self marriage?” Will it catch on?

I hope not. The whole thing worries me. It’s just so easy for self-love to turn to self-abuse…

Cindi cites Her Alleged Majesty for contempt

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As was anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the rule of law, Cindi Scoppe was aghast at our governor’s behavior last week, both when she goaded the state GOP to defy the law in order to help rid her of a troublesome senator, and when her office responded childishly to the State Election Commission’s refusal to play along.

But Cindi wasn’t struck speechless. From her column Sunday:

If the governor had been the one speaking, she might have added, L’etat, c’est moi.

At least when Louis XIV said it, he had a legal basis to do so. He was, after all, an absolute monarch.

When our founding fathers created this nation, they didn’t just reject the British monarch. They rejected the idea of a monarchy. They rejected imperial rule. And nowhere in the fledgling nation was that concept more thoroughly rejected than here in South Carolina.

The governor of South Carolina isn’t even a real governor. Yet this one fancies herself royalty. An autocrat. With the divine right of queens. L’etat, c’est moi.

She had already demonstrated that she was hypocritical. And careless with the truth. And imperious. Now add lawless. And contemptuous.

Actually, it’s the court that needs to add that last one.

Although the Election Commission blocked the party’s effort to defy a court order, that doesn’t change the fact that the party, at the urging of our governor, acted in a way that was “calculated to obstruct, degrade, and undermine the administration of justice.” That’s the definition of contempt of court, which our Supreme Court has said judges should punish in order to “preserve the authority and dignity of their courts.”

The court cannot ignore such blatant disregard for its orders. It needs to find the governor in contempt. And while it’s at it, it should do the same to the state Republican Party, and the Florence County Republican Party. This is about far more than the candidates who have been mistreated by our state. It’s about the authority of the court itself.

But Nikki Haley wouldn’t know anything about that.

The duel that wasn’t (so far as we know)

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It looked like the sort of facetious thing that people say on Twitter and which are quickly forgotten. Yet Katrina Shealy seems to be pinning her hopes for unseating Jake Knotts on the substance of Tweet sent in 2010.

The Tweet in question is reproduced above.

Perhaps there’s more to it, but one couldn’t find it in either the story in The State this morning, or the post by Will Folks that apparently prompted it. (The story in The State seemed to be of that new variety we’re becoming accustomed to — one that the MSM would never have reported in the past without having nailed down all the facts first, but publishes now so as not to appear out of the loop. Neither Jake nor Ms. Shealy was reached before publishing the story, which speaks of a sense of hurry.)

Here are some of the questions that the story raises in my mind:

  • Did Knotts ever say anything to Haddon?
  • Did he actually challenge him to a duel? (Duels, of course, properly constituted, require that both parties be gentlemen. I don’t know Haddon, but Jake has never seemed the dueling sort to me. He’s more of the pick-you-up-and-throw-you-across-the-room kind of guy. Ask Dick Harpootlian.)
  • Is that Tweet Mr. Haddon’s response to the challenge? If so, it is both unclear, and doesn’t seem to follow the accepted forms. It takes more the form of barroom bluster than a formal reply. Perhaps if he would identify his seconds, we could ask them.
  • Has either Mr. Knotts or Mr. Haddon been “out” before (which in the age of dueling meant something different from what it means today)? Who would have the upper hand?
  • If there’s any substance to this, will Jake be barred in the future from conducting classes for those who wish to carry concealed weapons? He has taught such classes in the past. One hopes those classes have not involved standing back-to-back, or pacing off distances.
  • Does Ms. Shealy in any way have standing to be taking legal action in this matter? She thinks she does, because her aim is to bar Sen. Knotts from office. But how does that give her any more standing than any other constituent? It seems that only parties to the alleged duel would have standing. And of course, the Code would (I assume) bar a challenged gentleman from resorting to the courts in order to avoid the Field of Honor.

I, along with you, await answers to all of the above.

Of COURSE state primaries should be in August

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Exaggerating as so many readers do, Rusty DePass (who probably agrees with editors far more often than he thinks) expressed shocked pleasure that he actually agreed with something in an editorial in The State on Sunday.

He was referring to this passage in an edit about the issue of all those candidates disqualified from running in the June primaries:

The Legislature has to fix this problem.

That won’t be easy, but it must be done. And with the primaries just five weeks away, it must be done immediately. It would be difficult to keep the elections on schedule even if every member of the Legislature agreed to a solution. That won’t happen, so part of the solution needs to be delaying the primaries, which we shouldn’t hold until August to begin with…

I assured Rusty that advocating August primaries is a long-standing position of the editorial board. It certainly is of mine.

And it is of Rusty’s. Rusty takes credit for the one time state primaries were held at a rational time in all the years since I moved home to South Carolina — 1992, when a lawsuit over reapportionment delayed the vote.

Rusty tells the story this way: As head of the state election commission (or was the past chairman at this point? I forget now), he wrote to the judge in the remap case asking that the primaries be delayed on account of the legal action. He recalls with satisfaction that all the lawyers he knew were shocked and appalled that he would so address such a view to the judge in the midst of a lawsuit. But the judge read the letter aloud from the bench and said, that’s just what we’ll do.

I had forgotten that part of the story, but I remember how gratifying it was to have the primaries thus separated from the legislative session for once.

Even back when we had loads of reporters and other resources, June primaries were extremely difficult for the newspaper — and other news organizations — to cover adequately. The people who covered legislative and other state elections were the very same people who covered the Legislature. The legislative session didn’t end until the first week in June, and didn’t really, really end until the sine die return session a couple of weeks later.

That lack of coverage, of course, benefited incumbents enormously, because there were fewer opportunities for lesser-known challengers to get their names in the paper. And name recognition is a huge part of the battle.

But the timing benefits incumbents in other, more direct, ways. The reason reporters are so extremely busy in those last weeks of the legislative session is because that’s when almost everything of consequence in the session happens. And those weeks happen to be after the filing deadline for the primaries.

So it is impossible for anyone to decide to run against an incumbent (except as that long shot of long shots, a write-in) on the basis of how that incumbent votes on the most important votes of the session. Aside from the fact that even if the challenger had already filed, he or she will get little coverage.

It’s an absolutely ridiculous problem, which would be completely fixed by always holding the primaries in August, as some other states do (including Tennessee, the “other state” whose politics I have the most experience with).

Politico promises “The Draperization of Romney,” but totally dodges the subject

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The Politico piece (which ran last month, but Nu Wexler just called my attention to) started out with an intriguing premise:

The Draperizing of Mitt Romney is under way.

He may not drink or cheat, and he lacks the fictional ad-maker’s charisma, but Democrats, despite the potential perils of such a strategy, remain determined to paint Romney as a throwback to the “Mad Men” era — a hopelessly retro figure who, on policy and in his personal life, is living in the past…

But it really sort of fell flat.

I thought it was going to go deeper. For instance, the central conflict regarding Don Draper (at least in the early seasons) is that he’s not who he says he is. Now that would be a pretty meaty thing to throw at the famously mutable Romney. You can easily see Don Draper donning any political mantle required to get his way with a client, or a woman, or anyone — because he just doesn’t care about that stuff. Ditto with Mitt. He just wants to be president; he doesn’t give a rat’s posterior about the stuff that the True Believers in his party get all cranked up about.

But the Politico piece completely dodged the subject, instead citing some tired chestnuts about how the 50s and early 60s were awful because moms stayed home with the kids. (Although I admit I’d rather hear that oldie than more of the tiresome “war on women” meme.)

And then… it goes into this interminable discussion of that stupid flap over what some Democrat said about Ann Romney several weeks ago. It goes on and on. I guess that was fresh when it was written, but what does that have to do with the advertised subject? Not much.

Hello!?!?! This is supposed to be about how Mitt Romney is like Don Draper! Neither of them is a woman! Can we stick to the subject? Don’t make me think you’re going to talk about guy stuff and then not even touch on that area… It’s enough to make a guy want to go off with those idiots who get together in sweat lodges and beat tom-toms and talk about how tough it is to be a guy. Almost. OK, not even close. But don’t bill something as being about guy stuff when it’s going to be yet another rehash of chick stuff.

As for Don… I’m worried about the guy. This week’s episode ended with him putting “Revolver” on the turntable (is it 1966 already?) at the behest of his young wife, who’s trying to clue him in on what the late ’60s will be about. He briefly listens alone (his wife is off taking acting lessons, leaving him behind in more ways than one) in his Hugh Hefner dream pad, and the contrast between him and “Tomorrow Never Knows” could not possibly be more stark.

The early 60s — say, round about 1962, which Gene Sculatti‘s brilliant Catalog of Cool termed “The Last Good Year” — was his time, the time he was created for, and which was created for him. He is going to be so lost going forward.

‘Thriving’ isn’t the word that comes to mind

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Some people yell at the TV. I yell at press releases. Today I got this one, from a guy named Justin Lehmann:

It’s no secret that newspapers are having their clocks cleaned by digital, and now mobile, media in the past several years. But one form of newspaper content has not only survived, it’s thriving, and tomorrow is its anniversary: the editorial cartoon. On May 9, 1754, John Adams published the first editorial cartoon in the US in his Pennsylvania Gazette, the now infamous ‘Join or Die’ graphic. John Adam’s cartoon editorialized a political revolution. I would like to share with you a crop of cartoons that editorialize an IT revolution — the consumerization of IT — which has made managing a datacenter more ridiculous than ever. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3405IoeanmfODM5ZGY4ZWMtMThjMy00OTA3LWFlOTItNDRjMWU2ZWNkMDA5 Feel free to use the cartoons if you choose to write anything about the anniversary. They’re royalty free with this CC license: CA Technologies’ CHIEF & CHUCK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://www.ca.com/cdit. Thanks!

As soon as I saw it, I shot back,

Thriving? You’re kidding, right? Every friend I have who was an editorial cartoonist has been laid off in recent years — Robert Ariail of The State (I, the editorial page editor, was laid off the same day). Richard Crowson of The Wichita Eagle. Bill Day of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.

Yeah, I realize there are a few who still have jobs, but since every one that I knew personally is gone, it’s a bit hard to accept your “thriving” characterization…

Then, glancing at the release again, I added,

Oh, and by the way. It was Benjamin Franklin, not John Adams…

You know, the founder who was actually a newspaperman. As opposed to the lawyer. I have to say that Mr. Lehmann took it well, responding:

Damn. Game, set, and match.

Happy V-E Day, and can you keep a secret?

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The P.M. flashes his famous V-for-Victory sign. We can't tell, from this photograph, whether he was flashing an "E" sign with the other hand.

After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration’s claims about the Iraqi threat. The question we start with as journalists is not “why publish?” but “why would we withhold information of significance?” We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so.

— Bill Keller, then-executive editor
The New York Times
June 2006

Germany surrendered to the Allies 67 years ago today. A few days ago, we saw a little footnote to that milestone. The Associated Press apologized for firing correspondent Ed Kennedy in 1945 over one of the biggest scoops in AP history. Kennedy reported the unconditional surrender a full day ahead of the competition, defying military censors to do so. The AP publicly rebuked him, and quietly canned him.

The apology came a bit late for Kennedy, who died in a traffic accident in 1963.

This is not to confuse him with another Kennedy who also died in 1963, and had earlier persuaded The New York Times to back off the Bay of Pigs story for national security reasons. (See Keller quote above.)

The icing on this tale came today, when we learned that the AP knew last week that the United States was closing in on Underwear Bomber II in Yemen — but withheld the news at the request of the government. That’s what the WSJ reported this morning, anyway:

U.S. officials had known about the plot for about a month, and President Barack Obama was briefed on the plot in April. White House officials had persuaded the Associated Press, which had an account of the plot in hand as early as last week, to hold off on publishing because the intelligence operation was still under way.

This is fascinating. It was one thing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with government censors in 1945, when the entire country was united in the all-out effort to win WWII, and cooperation with the censors was reflexive.

But today? When it is fashionable to call the War on Terror the “so-called War on Terror”? When, as Keller mentions above, the leftward side of the political spectrum persists in excoriating the media for not being skeptical enough prior to the Iraq invasion? For a major media entity to respond with a snappy salute to a government request to be discrete is decidedly remarkable.

This will no doubt spark dark rumblings — and probably already has; I’m not bothering to look — among Republicans about whether the AP would have agreed to this request if it had come from the Bush administration.

Interesting question.

What do you think about all of this? Oh, you want to know what I think. Well, I don’t know enough to have an opinion yet. I’d like to know what the AP knew, and what it was told before it made the decision to hold back on the story. The default position for a journalist is to report a story when you know it’s true, as Keller reported. But this sounds like it’s one of those rare cases in which lives may have been saved by holding back — which would justify the decision to wait.

How are Newt Gingrich and John Edwards alike?

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When The Washington Post posed this question this morning on Twitter:

What do John Edwards and Newt Gingrich have in common?

I thought the answer was obvious, and shared it:

Ummm… Both won SC, but not much else?

Of course, that’s not exactly what the Post had in mind. This is what they were thinking:

Don’t be surprised if you hear the names of John Edwards and Newt Gingrich mentioned on the Senate floor this week.

Senate Democrats plan to consider a measure Tuesday that would extend lower interest rates for some federally subsidized college loans and pay for the extension by ending tax breaks for firms with three or fewer shareholders — commonly referred to as “S-corporations.”

Democrats call these types of tax breaks the “Newt Gingrich/John Edwards loophole,” because both former politicians took advantage of a federal tax law that allows those with high incomes to avoid paying Medicare payroll taxes on earnings by establishing S-corporations and treating only a portion of their total earnings as taxable wages…

Later, Cindi Scoppe (my mind is blown by the fact that Cindi is now on Twitter) weighed in with another answer, from the NYT’s Frank Bruni:

Gingrich and Edwards belong to different parties but are beholden to similar demons, and they have a whole lot more in common than a bounty of hair — white in the Republican’s case, brown in the Democrat’s. They’re the salt and pepper of outsize egos in presidential politics.

And to look at the two of them together, which their recent convergence in the news and on the map encouraged, is to confront some unsettling truths about a kind of person too frequently drawn to high-level office and about traits that often abet his rise and then seal his fall.

Beware the extreme narcissist. Although he may radiate a seductive confidence, he can justify and forgive himself for just about anything, given his belief in his own exalted purpose. He’ll lose sense of the line between boldness and recklessness. And he’ll quit the stage reluctantly, because he can’t bear not to occupy the very center of it…

So I guess the bottom line is that they have a lot in common.

Great to see my old friend Michael Mercer!

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An old friend sent me the above video. When I got home last night, I asked my wife to watch it without telling her why. She looked at it only a second before saying “Michael!”

Yep. The guy playing the “English teacher” at the beginning is Michael Mercer. Michael and I started out as copy editors together at The Jackson (TN) Sun in 1975, soon after I graduated from Memphis State. Michael got out of the business long before I did, taking a teaching gig at Auburn. Now he’s at another college in San Antonio, as he explained when I asked about the video:

The young lady featured in the film is one of my student-advisees at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. She’s a communication arts major concentrating in journalism — although broadcast like most of them do today. She asked me at the last minute to be in the video that she and the filmmaker — her boyfriend from another school in San Antonio — were doing for a video contest promoting San Antonio park recreation.

They didn’t win the contest but I thought they, too, did an excellent job. I was only familiar with the classroom scene where they asked me to  mouth a few words as an “English teacher.” Those other students in the video in the classroom are UIW students but not any of mine. We spent about an hour shooting various takes, angles, short bites. I was told it would only take about five minutes. Then a week later, my student asked me to wear the same shirt and pants for a scene they wanted to shoot minus the class in that same classroom showing me walking out the door after that “chill” comment.

No, most of my South Carolina readers won’t know Michael, but some of our former colleagues will see this, which is why I share it here. The fact that I can do so so easily — the fact that a student could even produce something like this — is testament to how the world has changed since Michael and I started out.

In those days, the copy desk was still a big horseshoe (or “elephant’s commode,” as one of my Tennessee colleagues referred to it), with the slot man (or woman) sitting in the center, distributing copy to those on the rim who would edit it and write headlines as assigned by the slot. The copy and headlines would then be passed back to the slot for checking before being sent to the composing room. Except that the editing wasn’t done on paper at this point. The text had been scanned and output onto a paper punchtape, which was clipped to the hard copy with a clothespin (without clothespins, we couldn’t have gotten the paper out). After an editor received the copy with attached tape from the slot, he or she would take it over to a Harris 1100 editing machine, and feed the punch tape into it. The copy would appear on a CRT screen, and the editor would use a keyboard to edit it. When done, the edited text would be output to another punch tape of a different color, which the editor would roll up the tape (using a little electrical device that was sort of like one of those handheld, flashlight-sized fans) and clip it back to the copy. That bundle is what the editor would pass back to the slot, along with a headline written in pencil on a hand-torn strip of paper.

A couple of months after I joined The Sun, I was pulling shifts in the slot, and I found I liked it so much that by the time I moved on from the desk, I was doing it most days. The job entailed what would have been three to five jobs at a paper the size of The State in those days. The slot not only supervised the editing process, but laid out the entire A section, monitored the wires and selected all wire copy, and oversaw the production process in the composing room. If a page was late, it was the slot’s fault. And in those days, things were so loose and informal at The Sun that an assertive slot (which, I confess, I was) could pretty much decide how all of the news in the paper was played, including local copy.

The day started at 5:30 a.m., and the whole first edition (which was more pages than you find today in The State) had to be out at 11. Then we’d grab a quick lunch before having the city edition out by 1:30.

Doing that job at the age of 22 gave me a lot of confidence that stood me in good stead in the years to come. And it gave me a taste for calling the shots. Which is why after that gig, I only spent a couple of years as a reporter before becoming a supervising editor. You can learn a lot by starting out in a small pond.

Michael followed a similar path, without being quite as power-mad as I was (you can probably tell in his brief appearance that Michael is a nicer guy than I am — which I’m betting is why he was cast in this film; I’m sure he’s the sort of teacher who might be students’ favorite). He was one of my assistant editors over the news reporters at The Sun in later years.

And now there he is, playing the “English teacher.”

Cindi keeps pushing that ol’ Truth Rock up the hill

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Anyone who would like a refreshing change from the utter nonsense we hear so often from the majority over at the State House should read Cindi Scoppe’s column today.

In it she reiterates irrefutable truths that fly completely in the face of the way so many of our pols describe reality.

Over and over again, we hear the people who call themselves “conservatives” railing against all those awful people who keep wanting to raise your taxes. When of course, raising taxes is the least likely thing one could expect from the General Assembly.

Such folks, in arguing that we should adopt their latest pet plan for doing what SC lawmakers love most to do — cut taxes — frequently make like the choice is between their plan and tax increases. Which is laughable.

Excerpts:

I moved to South Carolina in the fall of 1987, a few months after the Legislature raised the gas tax by 3 cents per gallon. It didn’t raise taxes again the next year. Or the next. Or the next 17 after that.

The Legislature didn’t raise taxes again until 2006, and then only as part of a swap that reduced taxes even more, increasing the sales tax by a penny in order to eliminate homeowner property taxes for school operations. And the extra penny hasn’t generated as much money as lawmakers projected, so next year they’ll have to send an extra $118 million in general tax revenues to the schools to make up for the shortfall. That is, they’ll divert $118 million from other spending in order to pay for the tax cut that was supposed to have been offset by a tax increase.

Lawmakers also have increased various fees and raised court fines — all of which take more money out of taxpayers’ pockets but can be avoided by not breaking the law or using fee-based services.

In 2010, the Legislature increased unemployment-insurance assessments by $150 million a year, to support a program that is by law supposed to be self-sustaining. It wasn’t self-sustaining — the state had borrowed nearly $1 billion to pay out unemployment claims — in large part because the Legislature had slashed businesses’ assessments before the recession. (In 2011, the Legislature appropriated $146 million to essentially pay the businesses’ higher assessments for them; this year the House has appropriated $77 million for the same purpose.)…

Also in 2010, the Legislature increased the cigarette tax from 7 cents to 57 cents per pack. This $115 million tax increase came after a decade-long campaign by public-health advocates such as myself who wanted to decrease teen smoking. Even with the increase, the tax remains the ninth-lowest in the nation. Still, this was a real, honest-to-goodness, raise-more-money tax increase.

The only one our Legislature has passed in the past quarter century.

Over those same 25 years, the Legislature has eliminated the sales tax on groceries, a $400 million-a-year tax cut.

It has eliminated homeowners’ school property taxes. That’s worth about $970 million per year, but the sales tax brings in $550 million a year, so the net tax cut is $420 million per year.

It has increased the homestead exemption for senior citizens’ local government property taxes from $20,000 to $50,000. Another $100 million per year.

It has indexed income tax brackets to inflation, saving taxpayers $390 million per year.

It has eliminated the bottom income tax bracket, reducing individual income taxes for everyone and eliminating them for many. That’s worth $90 million per year.

It has reduced the top income tax rate for most small businesses from 7 percent to 5 percent, saving $130 million per year.

And it has handed out at least 39 more sales tax exemptions — ranging in size from $4,000 to $47 million. And more income tax breaks.

According to the Board of Economic Advisors, the tax cuts enacted just since 1991 were worth $2.3 billion in 2009. The tax increases over that same period totaled either $665 million or $815 million, depending on whether you count the unemployment-insurance increase that businesses haven’t had to pay. That’s a net tax cut of at least $1.5 billion per year.

As a result of all these changes, the portion of our income that South Carolinians pay in sales taxes has dropped from about 2.8 percent when I moved here in 1987 to 2.2 percent today. Even as the sales tax rate was increased from 5 percent to 6 percent. Going from 2.8 percent to 2.2 percent might not sound like much, but it’s a 21 percent reduction…

Actually, you should just go read the whole piece. It’s chock-full of simple, obvious facts of which the people who run our state seem to be completely unaware.

Of three political rules broken, two involved SC

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National media may get South Carolina wrong, but on the whole, I find the British press more readable. So it was that I enjoyed this piece in The Guardian, which took a hard-eyed look at political precedent.

You know how analysts over here like to say things like “If Obama wins/loses re-election, it will be the first time that a Democrat ever did so in a year ending in the numeral 2,” or some other such meaningless nonsense — as if every election weren’t distinct, and decided on the basis of millions of reasons scattered across the electorate.

It’s political analysis on the level of sports color commentary — Well, Tim, if he swings at this and misses, it will be the first time that an American League right-hander, facing a left-handed reliever in the bottom of the seventh with men on first and third, has ever, yadda yadda.

In this piece, Harry Enten demonstrates that this election, however it comes out, is destined to break all sorts of records — as does every election.

You should go read it.

But the part that jumped out at me, and that I want to share with you today, is this passage:

At least one of these rules, and likely more, are going to be broken in 2012. The conventional wisdom will be turned on its head: 2012 will indeed be a “unique year”. Believers of this idea can also point to the primary season for the uniqueness that is 2012.

Here are three of them that have since gone the way of the Linotype.

1. No Republican candidate had ever won the South Carolina Republican primary without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire – until Newt Gingrich.

2. No Republican had ever won the nomination without winning South Carolina – until Mitt Romney.

3. No non-Protestant candidate had ever won the Republican nomination – until Mitt Romney.

Yep, of the three unprecedented things that happened in the GOP primary season in 2012 involved South Carolina.

Sometimes, we even shock ourselves.

Going Vogue

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The piece about Nikki Haley in Vogue, like most national media coverage we’ve seen of her, reliably hits all the wrong notes — and hits them hard. One wonders how the piece was typed, since the writer seems to be constantly hugging himself with delight to be in her presence. (A woman! An Indian-American Woman! A young, Indian American Woman, governor of backward South Carolina! Oh, the rapture!) The cognitive vacuum created by the utter lack of perspective and skepticism is deeply disturbing. But we’ve grown accustomed to that.

Some of the more gag-inducing bits:

  • “On a warm morning in early March, governor Nikki Haley calls three members of the South Carolina state legislature into her office. They look like truants sent in to see the principal: Haley is earnest and stern, smartly turned out in a black-and-white ruffled jacket, black pencil skirt, and platform stilettos, while the legislators, in baggy suits and cowboy boots, fidget and make excuses.”
  • “Since then, she’s routinely been called a rising star in the party, which, when you’re talking about a governor, is code for White House–bound.”
  • “But still, she continues, leaning forward confidingly, ‘it’s different for the guys upstairs. This is the first time they’ve had a female governor; it’s the first time they’ve had a minority governor.'”

In other words, she plays Mr. Christopher Cox like a tin whistle.

But bits of clarity do slip in. My favorite:

  • “Haley in person looks even younger than her age: fit and attractive, with a face free of worry lines.”

Indeed. That has long been one of Nikki’s most notable traits. She believes that everything she believes is true, and doesn’t doubt. And as I remember from years past when I would grumpily try to disabuse her of one of those bumper-sticker principles — say, “I want to see government run like a business” — she is impervious to reason, perspective or argument.

If I were like that, my face would be pretty free of lines, too.

As the NYT Magazine noted, “Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, doesn’t care what you think.”

Sometimes, the national media get it just right, in spite of themselves.

I’m a lumberjack, and I’m OK (or not)…

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A friend points out to me that “newspaper reporter” is now listed as one of the five worst jobs to have. Right down there with lumberjack. Here’s the CNN Headline News report:

On the heels of a report indicating good job prospects for the college class of 2012, career guidance website CareerCast released its list of the best and worst jobs of the year, and after reviewing 200 professions across a wide range of industries.

The five “best” jobs are software engineer, actuary, human resources manager, dental hygienist and financial planner. The top five “worst” jobs are lumberjack, dairy farmer, enlisted military soldier, oil rig worker and newspaper reporter.

So what makes a job among the best or the worst? CareerCast based the rankings on a methodology that rated each profession’s work environment by assessing both the physical and emotional demands, including: necessary energy, physical demands (crawling, stooping), work conditions (toxic fumes, noise), degree of competitiveness, degree of hazards personally faced and degree of contact with the public. Each category was broken into elements and then each element was given points. In the end, a higher point total made a job less desirable, while a lower total indicated a job was more desirable….

I’m not sure whether that was supposed to make me feel good or bad. Actually, it’s sort of irrelevant, since I haven’t been a reporter since the early months of 1980. But I can tell you that being a newspaper editor is not what it once was, if you can even find such a job.

Which of course is the problem. The main thing wrong with being a newspaper anything is that if that’s what you do, it probably won’t be long before you join the ranks of those who used to do it.

Beyond that, I’m suspicious of the criteria used in compiling this list. Lumberjack? Obviously they’re not taking into account such factors as leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia… the giant redwood, the larch, the fir, the mighty Scotch pine… the smell of fresh-cut timber… the crash of mighty trees… with my best girly by my side…

A song from the deepest early memories

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I had an unexpected bit of pleasure this morning. In a desperate bid to get away from the ETV Radio pledge drive, I accidentally pressed button 3 on my radio, forgetting that the format had changed a while back to country.

And I heard “Singin’ the Blues,” which struck deep chords of early-childhood memory for me. I couldn’t have told you the words, and I mistakenly assumed it was a Hank Williams song — it seemed to have that sort of universal appeal. But the tune was as familiar, as wired into every cell in my brain, as if it had been sung to me as a lullaby.

All I knew about the song was that I really, really liked it. As though I was MADE to like it; it was part of my early formation.

Unfortunately, the radio didn’t tell me who was singing it (which should be a violation of FCC regulations). Fortunately, there’s Google and Wikipedia.

I quickly learned that the song was written by one Melvin Endsley, and first recorded successfully by Guy Mitchell. But I’m pretty sure that what I heard this morning was the Marty Robbins version.

Whichever, I loved hearing it. Next thing you know, I’ll hear “Volare” on the radio one morning (to cite another song that made a deep impression on me before I was old enough to worry about what was cool and what wasn’t, and able to just respond to music on its own terms)…