Category Archives: Media

Were any of these “members” female?

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Note how self-restrained I am. I held myself back from using as my headline, “I got your ‘member’ right here!” Even though that would have better expressed my exasperation.

Clint Eastwood and Rene Russo as Secret Service 'members' in 'In the Line of Fire.'

We used to have “servicemen” in our armed forces. Or, more broadly, military personnel. Now, we have this horrendous construction that drives me nuts every time I hear it: “military members.” That’s the best we seem to be able to come up with as a way of referring generically to soldiers, sailors, marines, and that least ideologically correct of all designations, airmen.

What are we saying? That the military is a club? Like belonging to Rotary, or the Elks? To me, it sounds vaguely insulting to those who serve us in uniform, to refer to them as “members.” Like fingers or toes, or perhaps some even less presentable member.

With the scandal over the weekend involving both Secret Service and military personnel, this linguistic absurdity has been taken to new depths.

To begin with, one assumes that all the agents sent home for consorting with prostitutes were male. And if you read non-American news sources such as Agence France-Presse or the Daily Mail, they go ahead and refer to them as male. That’s because in those countries, the fact that men tend to do certain things that women tend not to do (such as, bring hookers to their rooms) is confronted somewhat more directly, and not treated like a secret of which we must not speak. (Someone is inevitably going  to contradict me by pointing to U.S. sources that do mention gender. But the fact remains that, after having read U.S. sources that did not mention gender, the first ones I found that did were foreign. It’s a tendency thing, not an absolute rule.)

I haven’t yet found any stories that tell the gender of the five “military personnel” who were also implicated, but not sent home, supposedly because their skills were too much in demand in protecting the president (rooftop snipers, perhaps?). If anyone has seen such a reference, please share it, if only to satisfy my morbid curiosity.

But whether they are male or (against the odds) female, there are better ways to refer to them than as “military service members,” as the NYT does here in its own stilted fashion:

Five United States military service members who were working with the Secret Service and staying in the same hotel are also facing an investigation because they violated a curfew and may have participated in the misconduct.

The use of such a slightly off-sounding construction has a bad effect on journalists. They become jaded to awkwardness, and therefore their radar doesn’t go off when they inadvertently type something that is not just awkward, but downright nonsensical:

Mr. Obama’s comments came several hours after Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, suggested that more Secret Service personnel members may have been involved in the incident.

Did you catch that? “Secret Service personnel members”? Really? Not “Secret Service members,” which would sound awkward enough, or “Secret Service personnel,” which would have been fine, but the entirely redundant “Secret Service personnel members”!

Why not take it to another level, or two? Why not “Secret Service personnel members people employees,” while you’re at it?

Or… and excuse me for getting radical here… how about if the reporter covering this for you just went ahead and asked the question, “Are any of these people female?” Because if not, you don’t have to perform any of these acrobatics, and can just go ahead and refer to the “men.” And if they are, even an awkward construction like “servicemen and -women” would be less jarring than referring to them as “personnel members.”

Or how about just scraping your fingernails on a blackboard? That would probably get on my nerves less…

Cindi Scoppe’s long, lonely battle against legislator pensions

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Having brought your attention to the Coble endorsement in the paper today, I am reminded that I meant to point out Cindi Scoppe’s column yesterday. It’s one of the many she has written over the years trying to call attention to the ridiculously generous pensions that South Carolina legislators receive:

If you assume that it’s OK for our part-time legislators to receive a pension — and I don’t, but let’s make the assumption for the sake of simplicity — there still are three problems with the way the special legislative pension system operates:

•  Taxpayers subsidize legislative pensions at more than double the rate we subsidize regular employees’ pensions. For every dollar state legislators put into their system, taxpayers contribute $3.89; for every dollar most state employees contribute, the taxpayers contribute just $1.47.

The result is that, while no one is going to get rich off of a legislative pension, our part-time legislators can draw pensions that are actually larger than the ones received by the average full-time state employee who paid into the system for the same number of years.

•  Legislators are allowed to keep purchasing credit in the system at that same super-subsidized rate even after they leave office — even if voters kicked them out of office.

This is not the same as the program that allows regular state employees to purchase credit for years they worked for other entities in the past, at high rates that will (appropriately) get higher under this legislation. That program also is open to legislators, whose rates likewise will go up — but rarely would legislators want to purchase prior credit, since they get that super deal on future credit.

•  Legislators can elect to stop receiving their salaries and instead collect their pensions while they continue to serve — a benefit that because of that super-subsidy means they can collect a pension of as much as $33,000 instead of a salary of $10,400.

Those first two provisions are unique to the legislative pension system, and they are by far the most generous and most difficult to justify…

Cindi’s been at this for years. Lawmakers give lip service to wanting to do something about it, but somehow that never happens.

Here’s what a Coble endorsement looks like

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Some readers seemed confused earlier as to what an “endorsement” of a candidate looked like. It looks like this, in The State today:

COLUMBIA City Council District 3 runoff opponents Moe Baddourah and Daniel Coble are solid candidates who share common priorities, from focusing on district needs to improving public safety and providing long-term funding for the public bus system.

They also share a common drawback: We fear their strong focus on constituent and district needs could lead them to put those interests ahead of more important citywide issues.

While the two men are pretty even in many ways, Mr. Coble does distinguish himself as the better candidate. His knowledge and understanding of city issues and how government works stood out among all candidates in the just-concluded council races….

Now I can’t say it’s a ringing, unequivocal endorsement. Daniel is The State‘s second choice for the seat. My old colleagues initially endorsed Jenny Isgett, who did not make it into the runoff.

Now if I did endorse someone, it would be Daniel. It so happens that the candidate ADCO is doing work for is the one I would choose were I endorsing. But wait, you say! Isn’t my saying that an endorsement?

Not to me. I’ve spent many years of my life doing endorsements, and I have a very clear idea of what one is. To me, an endorsement involves setting forth a series of arguments as to why someone is the better candidate. As I’ve said thousands of times over the years, the value in an endorsement is the reasons why, not the mere who.

That goes to the core of why newspapers do endorsements (and should do endorsements). It doesn’t matter whether a reader ultimately agrees with the endorsement or not. It is valuable to have considered the arguments, whether you accept them in the end or not. For having spent that time reading a carefully constructed case for a candidate, your own ultimate decision will have been better-considered.

The endorsement in The State today is pretty good. It’s not exactly what I would have written, and were I still the editor I’d have made some changes in the piece, but I generally agree with the points made.

And where would they be without ME, I’d like to know

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Well, I was deeply shocked when I received this mere moments ago:

Members of the elite media establishment –

Next Wednesday, April 18, marks a big milestone for Pub Politics – Episode 100.

What started as just me, Phil, a few beers and a camera, has turned into a weekly must-attend event viewed by thousands online.

We’re going to throw down and we want you to be there to cover our big day.

WHEN: Wednesday, April 18, 6:00 pm

WHERE: Jake’s in 5 Points, Columbia, SC

WHO: Attorney General Alan Wilson with more guests to be named later this week. ‘The Project,’ a band led by State Representative James Smith, will perform.

I would really appreciate you coming out to celebrate with us.

Sincerely,

Wesley Donehue

Can you imagine it? They’re having their big 100-show bash, and they haven’t asked me, their one-and-only seven-timer, to be a featured guest! Would they have come this far without me? Where would “Laugh-In” have been without Tiny Tim, or Charo? That’s what I’m on about. (“Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”)

Sure, they called me a member of the elite media establishment, but that’s old hat to me. I want to be treated like the star that I am.

Be sure to write to the network (after all, it worked so well in saving “Firefly”), or whomever, and express your shock and outrage.

Something you should know: I’m helping Coble

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The Melrose event Monday night.

Last night I went to a debate between Daniel Coble and Moe Baddourah sponsored by the Melrose Neighborhood Association. But I’m not going to tell you what I think about what was said there because I wasn’t there as a blogger. This is complicated by the fact that various people who saw me there, including Moe, probably think I was there as a blogger. So this is to set the record straight.

I’ll start at the beginning.

Lately, a large part of my job with ADCO has been business development. In connection with that, I went to breakfast one morning several weeks ago (Feb. 23) with my old friend Bud Ferillo, and I urged him that if he ever finds himself in a situation where he’s representing a client who needs some of the services that ADCO provides, he should give me a call.

Sometime later (I’m not exactly sure when, but my first email on the subject was on the Ides of March), he gave me a buzz and said he needed some help with the production of some last-minute mailings for the Daniel Coble campaign. Fine. I put him in contact with colleagues here at ADCO with expertise in that area, and they helped him out.

At that point, I wasn’t directly involved, beyond getting people together. (I didn’t even see the mailings until after they were done and gone.) Nevertheless, when I interviewed Moe for this post, and when I interviewed Mike Miller for this one, I mentioned what my company was doing to help out Bud on Daniel’s behalf. Neither of them expressed any concern. (I meant to tell Jenny Isgett when I interviewed her, but later realized I had forgotten. And given the reactions of the other candidates, it didn’t seem worth a separate call. I’ll let you be the judge whether I was right about that.)

Then, over the next couple of weeks, I got slightly more involved, but only in the sense of being a conduit for communications between the campaign and folks at ADCO.

Last Thursday, my status changed. On that day, Bud asked whether ADCO could shoot video at a debate Monday night, and provide YouTube clips contrasting the candidates. I checked, and our usual in-house people couldn’t do it that night. There wasn’t time for handling things the usual way. I went ahead and personally lined up a free-lancer, Brett Flashnick, who readily agreed to help out.

So I was there last night in case he had questions, and also so I could witness the whole debate, and be able to help him in editing the video. This afternoon, Brett and Bud and I spent between two and three hours going through video and choosing some clips of good YouTube length. Brett has left now and will send Bud and Daniel the finished product to see if they approve.

So basically, I’ve been heavily involved now in making editorial judgments about campaign materials. I wasn’t involved in that way at all before, but I am now.

Even before things got to this point, I was worried about what, if anything, I should write about the campaign. When I wrote about all those endorsements that Daniel got on March 29, the news was so helpful (in my opinion) to the Coble campaign that I worried that I wasn’t reporting anything of similar impact from the other campaigns, and that it could look like I was favoring him. But I couldn’t figure out how to balance things out. Neither Moe nor Jenny were generating news like that; I wasn’t seeing anything new to react to.

Now that I write that, I realize that as indirect as my involvement was before, I should have told y’all about it. The fact that it was entering my head, that I was worrying about whether I was being 100 percent fair or not, even a little bit, means I should have told y’all so you could judge for yourselves. But I didn’t. I thought about it, but I decided that I was overthinking things, and that all I would accomplish would be to make the connection sound like a bigger deal than it was. Which is a case of over-overthinking, now that I think further (over-over-overthink) about it.

Also, I thought this: The fact that Daniel was the only candidate advertising on my blog (and I assure you, the other candidates had the same opportunities to do so that he did) was a greater apparent conflict than my indirect involvement with those mailings. And y’all knew about that — you could see the ad — and were therefore forewarned and armed to make any judgments you chose to make as to whether I was being fair.

Regardless of decisions I made in the past, there’s no question now: Y’all should know that I am involved at this point. So, anything else I say about this runoff (which probably won’t be much) must be considered in light of the fact that I’ve definitely, directly, done work to help the Coble campaign. I fact, I invite you to go back and read everything else I’ve written up to now (just use the search feature to look for the candidates’ names), and decide for yourself.

Of course, this is an opinion blog. I never make any pretense to news-style “objectivity.” But what I invite you to do is see whether you think any subjective judgments I’ve made were ones I would have made anyway, without any involvement in the campaign. Actually, what I see when I look back is that I held back from expressing any strong opinions or preferences. Which means that what I wrote was affected. Because that’s not normal for me.

All of this is making my head hurt. This, of course, is why people who make their livings as reporters and editors just don’t get involved, period. Or at least, that’s the way it used to be when there were good, full-time jobs to be had in that field.

Now, increasingly, news (or at least commentary) is brought to you by people who make their livings some other way. Which is something you have long known about me.

Life is confusing here in the New Normal, and all I can figure out to do about it is to tell y’all what I’m doing. Which I just did.

‘There goes that Obama, undermining initiative…’

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Twitter drew me to this picture (which I’m not actually placing on the blog because I can’t afford to pay what AP demands for rights to pictures), which had this caption:

President Barack Obama helps a little boy roll his egg to the finish line during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, Monday, April 9, 2012, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. In the background, at left are Malia Obama and Sasha Obama. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

As soon as I read that, even before I saw the picture itself, I could imagine what the GOP commentary on the image would be like: Obama undermines individual initiative, picks winners in state-run event.

In the next wave, we’d hear, And look at how the media made that little boy look so precious and harmless! Why didn’t they wait until he was 17, and get him in a hoodie with facial hair?

Do you think I’m exaggerating?

Could future journalists uncover a Watergate?

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I was intrigued by this question that The Washington Post posed on Twitter today: “Could the Web generation uncover a Watergate-type scandal?”

I followed the link and saw that the piece was based on a panel discussion featuring Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They had their doubts:

“One of the colleges asked students in a journalism class to write a one-page paper on how Watergate would be covered now,” said Bob Woodward, “and the professor — ”

“Why don’t you say what school it was,” suggested Carl Bernstein, sitting to Woodward’s left in a session titled “Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age?”

“Yale,” Woodward said. “He sent the one-page papers that these bright students had written and asked that I’d talk to the class on a speakerphone afterward. So I got them on a Sunday, and I came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm, because the students wrote that, ‘Oh, you would just use the Internet and you’d go to “Nixon’s secret fund” and it would be there.’ ”

“This is Yale,” Bernstein said gravely.

“That somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events,” Woodward said. “And they went on to say the political environment would be so different that Nixon wouldn’t be believed, and bloggers and tweeters would be in a lather and Nixon would resign in a week or two weeks after Watergate.”

A small ballroom of journalists — which included The Washington Post’s top brass, past and present — chuckled or scoffed at the scenario…

I also enjoyed the way the piece, written by Dan Zak, characterized the Woodstein legacy:

Tuesday’s panel briefly reunited the pair, whose untangling of the Nixon administration inspired a generation of journalists who have since been laid off or bought out in large numbers. Woodward and Bernstein’s main point was evocative of a previous, plentiful era: Editors gave them the time and encouragement to pursue an intricate, elusive story, they said, and then the rest of the American system (Congress, the judiciary) took over and worked. It was a shining act of democratic teamwork that neither man believes is wholly replicable today — either because news outlets are strapped or gutted, or because the American people have a reduced appetite for ponderous coverage of a not-yet-scandal, or because the current Congress would never act as decisively to investigate a president.

For the record, while I may indeed be one of those “who have since been laid off or bought out in large numbers,” I didn’t get the idea to go into journalism from these two guy — however much their example may have encouraged me. I was already working as a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal when I first heard of them…

Happy to be a resource for a colleague

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I see that one of my episodes of “The Brad Show” (a feature I really must get around to reviving one of these days) provided some grist for Kevin Fisher’s mill, in a piece headlined, “Harpo, Homophobia and Hypocrisy:”

Harpo characterized McConnell as “prancing” in Civil War reenactments rather than “marching” or “participating” or “performing” in those events for a reason, the same reason for similar comments he made in a video interview with local blogger Brad Warthen in April 2011.

In a discussion of McConnell’s high-profile involvement in Civil War history, Warthen noted that the then-senator reportedly owns “17 Confederate costumes,” to which Harpo replied, “And one of them has hoops.” To make his point crystal clear, Harpootlian gestured around his waist to indicate a hoop skirt…

Finally, what about you, Cindi Ross Scoppe and Warren Bolton, editorial writers for The State — does Harpo get a free pass that you wouldn’t give anyone else of his prominence who was making such remarks?

Speaking of which, Harpootlian also told Warthen that “the girly boy thing didn’t work” for Democrats. For Harpo, it’s all macho, no homo, no doubt.

If you’d like to go back and view the full episode, here it is.

Oh, and as for Kevin’s challenge to my former teammates…  well, I suggest he’d be hard-pressed to find when Cindi or Warren ever took anyone to task for their perceived “homophobia.” So, no, they’re not giving him a “pass” that they wouldn’t give anyone else. I think Kevin is falling into a trap here, one I see folks fall into a lot: Cindi and Warren work for the MSM. That means they must be doctrinaire liberals. Therefore they’re probably always going on about “homophobia.” So they must be hyprocrites for not castigating their fellow “liberal.”

Fine theory for the ideologically inclined, except that it can’t be supported.

As for my own part — I showed you what Dick had to say. You decide what you think about it. I’m just glad I was able to provide Kevin with some original material. Makes me feel authoritative…

Talking blogs, reaching no particular conclusions

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The seminar from the panelists' point of view.

Late yesterday, I was one of three bloggers — the others being Will Folks and Logan Smith — who spoke to a seminar journalism class taught by Charles Bierbauer at USC.

It went fine, although I can’t tell you with any certainty that the students learned anything useful. They didn’t learn, for instance, how blogging will lead to a business model that will pay for real journalism in the future, because none of us know the answer to that. It’s sort of the Northwest Passage of our day — people keep looking for it, generally in the wrong places.

The unanswerable question is, and has been for some time: How, going forward, are media that report news and share commentary going to pay the bills — most particularly, the salaries and expenses of those who do the reporting, writing, editing and presentation of the content? Mind you, I’m talking about doing so on the state and local levels. One can still make money reporting national and international news and commenting on it, which is why we are inundated to the point of suffocation with news and opinions about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. But it’s almost impossible for the average voter to be fully informed about state and local government or issues, and increasingly, too few even try. Which does not bode well for the health of our federalist system.

Will blogs be part of the solution to creating an informed electorate on levels below the national? I don’t know. As I joked to one of the students who asked something related to that, obviously The State didn’t think so, because I was the only active blogger at the paper, and they canned me. (Lest the students get the impression that I’m portraying my former employers as Luddites, I quickly added the truth, which is that I was canned for making too much money.)

Among the three of us, Will has made the most progress on the making-it-a-business front. He repeated what Nancy Mace told me months ago, which is that his blog brings in “several thousand” a month. I, so far, am more in the several thousand a year category. Logan is just starting out.

That points to the wide difference between the three of us. Back when I was a newspaperman, you could assemble a panel consisting of me and editors from other papers, and we would have a lot in common. A general-circulation newspaper was a definite thing, and working at one implied certain things that were predictable. Assemble a panel of bloggers, and you’ve got a group of people who are doing entirely different things, and for different reasons. It’s as though you had put together a panel consisting of one newspaper city editor, a photo editor from a magazine, and a newsletter writer.

For instance, among the three of us:

  • Logan started the Palmetto Public Record because he thought the “progressive” outlook was sort of thin on the ground in the SC blogosphere, and he probably has a point, with Tim Kelly and Laurin Manning currently out of the game. He’s trying to build it up from nothing, and learning as he goes.
  • Will started his blog by accident. He wanted to leave a comment on another blog that was criticizing him (he now says that the criticism was justified), and he clicked on the wrong things, and got a page inviting him to start his own blog. Which he did, and used it to push his Sanfordesque political views. But he tried to do more than that, becoming a news source, and breaking stories whenever he could (which, if you ask me, is why he has more traffic than I do — I reject the idea that it’s because of the cheesecake pictures). He devotes himself totally to the editorial content — which you have to do to post as often as he does. His wife handles the money, and Nancy Mace handles the technical side.
  • The roots of my blogging are in the 1980s, when I was governmental affairs editor of The State. I had about 10 reporters working for me in those days, and I was always frustrated by something: Reporters would come into the newsroom and share some interesting incident or exchange with sources that didn’t really rise to the point of being news, and wouldn’t fit logically into the news stories they were writing that day (even then, the finite nature of available space was highly restrictive), but which added color and life and context to my perception of what was happening out there in state government. I wanted readers to have that same benefit, so I started a column made up of such tidbits, which ran on Sunday and was called “Earsay.” (Something roughly like that still exists in the paper, I think.) Later, when I was editorial page editor, I was likewise frustrated by the fact that I had SO many things I wanted to say about the day’s news that I had no room for on the editorial pages. So I started the blog for all that other stuff — things I felt motivated to say beyond what got into print, things that interested me and might interest someone else, but probably not the vast majority of newspaper readers. That’s still what my blog is. I don’t even pretend or try to “report the news.” Having once commanded platoons of reporters, I know how impossible it would be to presume to do that well alone, even if I didn’t have a day job. So it remains a medium consisting of stuff I want to comment on, period. And I still never manage to get to all of that.

A couple of other quick points…

One of the students wanted to know when blogs would command the respect that mainstream media still do. He said he covers prep sports for The State, and when he arrives at an event and tells people that, he gets respect and cooperation that he wouldn’t get otherwise. I told him he had a long wait on that; the blogosphere is still the Wild West and will take some time to settle down and be respectable.

A corollary to that… Logan complained that he can’t get credentials to get onto the Senate or House floor over at the State House. When someone noticed me shaking my head I elaborated… I told Logan it doesn’t matter. Nothing much happens in the chambers anyway. Debate is dead in this country; the days of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay are long gone. To know what really happened on a key vote, you’ll have to talk to people outside afterward anyway. And all the members have cell phones if you want to ask them to come out for a chat.

I’ll close with this postscript that I enjoyed, posted by Logan Smith on Twitter:

Highlight of tonight’s Q&A: @BradWarthen talking about being a reporter in 1980, @FITSNews turns to me and asks “were you born then?” (No)

The funny part is that 1980 was when I stopped being a reporter. I was an editor from then on…

Let’s all be Fascist Anarchists. Or whatever. Doesn’t really matter, as long as everybody’s in.

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Ferris wouldn't care if we were fascist anarchists. It still wouldn't change the fact that he doesn't own a car.

Corey Hutchins sends out a link to his ‘splainer on Ken Ard. In a nod to the cultural references of us old people, the headline begins, “An Ard Rain’s Gonna Fall…”

Corey and the Free Times are of course feeling validated by how this story came out. Or if they aren’t, they at least have reason to, as The New York Times notes:

A grand jury had been investigating Mr. Ard since July. He has already paid more than $72,000 in fines and other costs after an ethics commission found he improperly spent funds after winning election. His violation of campaign laws was first reported by The Free Times in Columbia.

But I had to take exception to a sidenote that Corey included in the email in which he shared the link. He wrote, “This story details the rise and fall of South Carolina’s first-term GOP lieutenant governor, Ken Ard, who resigned today amid a campaign finance scandal. It might serve as a caution for the idea of a one-party state…”

I responded:

Oh, I think a one-party state would be wonderful. Everyone just go ahead and say they’re Republicans, or Democrats, or Federalists, or Fascist Anarchists. It doesn’t matter what we call it (the names usually end up being meaningless as soon as parties grow large enough to win elections, anyway), as long as everybody’s in.

Then the voters will have to choose candidates based on their individual characters and qualifications, rather than according to which letter they have after their names.

One-party means NO party. Because you have to have two for the idiocy of partisanship.

Saving Private Obama

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The thing that grabbed me was that this campaign video is narrated by Tom Hanks. Hence the headline.

Beyond that, this video is interesting on two levels:

  • It gives us a taste of how the president is going to sell his record for re-election purposes.
  • It’s a new wrinkle to me — a trailer for a campaign ad. Sort of like the trailer for the Ferris Bueller ad ahead of the Super Bowl. It goes (I think) where no candidate marketing has gone before…

More info, from Politico:

The Obama campaign has released the trailer to director Davis Guggenheim’s 17 minute film about President Obama’s first term in office.

The film is narrated by Tom Hanks and the trailer includes interview clips of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Austan Goolsbee, and Elizabeth Warren among others.

According to the campaign, the film will be released next week at support events around the country.

    This blog is read by people who think, period.

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    If you’re like me, you’ve run across this gag a number of times before, but it still brings a smile. This was sent to me today by a longtime colleague, who like me is probably nostalgic for the days when newspapers mattered in the ways implied by the joke.

    This particular iteration no doubt comes out of Memphis judging by No. 12. The final line tends to vary. For instance, here’s one in which No. 12 reads, “None of these is read by the guy who is running the country into the ground.” I think I saw a version once in which the punchline was about The State, but I forget how it goes. Anyway, here’s this version:

    1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

    2. The Washington Post is read by the people who think they run the country.

    3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country, and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

    4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country, but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

    5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time  — and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do  it.

    6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.

    7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

    8. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

    9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

    10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped, minority, feminist, atheist dwarfs who also  happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of  course, that they are not Republicans.

    11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

    12. The Memphis Commercial Appeal is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.

    Not a particularly imaginative version, since it was always taken as a truism, even a point of pride, by newspapermen and -women that yesterday’s news is used to wrap fish. Perhaps the author of this one didn’t know that.

    Mercifully, I had forgotten this incident

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    Talking to Kara Gormley Meador yesterday, I momentarily drew a blank when she mentioned her run-in with John Graham Altman some years ago. She reminded me of the details, which made me go, “Oh, yeah.” Here’s a summary of the incident:

    Excerpts from the exchange between WIS-TV reporter Kara Gormley and Rep. John Graham Altman, R-Charleston, over a S.C. House committee’s vote to make cockfighting a felony while tabling a bill that would toughen criminal domestic violence laws

    Gormley: “Does that show that we are valuing a gamecock’s life over a woman’s life?”

    Altman: “You’re really not very bright, and I realize you are not accustomed to this, but I’m accustomed to reporters having a better sense of depth of things, and your asking this question to me would indicate you can’t understand the answer. To ask the question is to demonstrate an enormous amount of ignorance. I’m not trying to be rude or hostile, I’m telling you.”

    Gormley: “It’s rude when you tell someone they are not very bright.”

    Altman: “You’re not very bright, and you’ll just have to live with that.”

    So basically, when she talks about the lack of civility in politics, she’s speaking from personal experience.

    Let’s hear it for the flip-floppers — compared to the rigid ideologues, they are a breath of fresh air

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    My friend Bill Day in Memphis sent out this cartoon, which depicts the main rap on Mitt Romney — that he changes his mind.

    To me, that’s the man’s saving grace, to the extent that he has one. It’s what made me able to settle for him after Jon Huntsman dropped out of the SC primary — I believe he’s free of slavish devotion to any man’s ideology. That makes him anathema to the extremists in his party, but that’s not the only think I like about this trait.

    Whatever else you can say about a man who changes his mind, at least it proves that he’s thinking. Even if all he’s thinking is, “I need to change on this to get elected,” he’s at least thinking.

    Here’s my take on Romney: He simply doesn’t care deeply about the kinds of things that left and right tend to get angriest about, such as the Kulturkampf issues that I wish would stay out of our elections. Basically, he sees himself as a manager — he wants to run the United States as he has run other enterprises in the past, no matter what burning issues happen to be at the fore when he’s in office. He believes his executive experience makes him better able to run the country than Barack Obama.

    Set aside whether I believe he’s right, I appreciate that that’s the way he seems to approach this.

    To some extent, this is akin to what appealed to me about “No-Drama Obama.” I saw him as essentially a pragmatist, particularly on the thing that matters most in picking a Commander in Chief — international affairs and security. His adoring supporters heard something that they liked in what he said on the stump about war and peace and international relations, but I listened a bit more closely than many of them did — it was (as always) the first thing I asked him about when he was sitting next to me in the editorial board room, and I was satisfied with his answers. And I was not surprised when he embraced continuity once in office (although I was surprised when he became even more aggressive than George Bush in prosecuting the War on Terror).

    I get a certain amount of that same vibe from Romney, and that’s what reassures me when I think of the possibility (not a very strong possibility at this point, but still a possibility) that he could replace Obama. I don’t think we’d see any dangerous shifts in the policies that matter. And when faced with an unforeseen crisis, I think he’d approach it with sober deliberation.

    I am not, however, convinced at this point that he would do a better job than the incumbent. But I’m still watching.

    The stunning news about Tom Sponseller

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    Last week, I had been set to have lunch with my friend Bob McAlister, but he suddenly had to cancel because of a new client — he was representing the S.C. Hospitality Association in dealing with the media with regard to the disappearance of its CEO, Tom Sponseller.

    Today was the day that we’d set for the rain check. We had just sat down with our food from the buffet at the Capital City Club when another diner came over, smartphone in hand, to tell Bob: “They’ve found Tom’s body.” In the parking garage. And Bob had to run out.

    Later, on the way back to the office, I saw The State‘s John Monk and Noelle Phillips outside the building on Lady Street that houses the Hospitality Association’s offices. Chief Randy Scott had just given reporters the barest of details, and now the Association’s employees were being told what was known.

    I asked John and Noelle the most obvious question: How do you not find a body for 11 days in a parking garage? The reporters told me they had searched the place themselves last week, and that there were several doors opening off the garage that they were unable to enter.

    This is what little has been released so far:

    The body of missing lobbyist Tom Sponseller has been found, according to Columbia police.

    Sponseller killed himself, said Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott. His body was found in a lower level of the parking garage at 1122 Lady Street just before 11 a.m., said Jennifer Timmons, a Columbia Police Department spokeswoman. The S.C. Hospitality Association where Sponseller was chief executive officer has its headquarters at the building.

    “It’s very devestating,” said Rick Patel, the vice chairman of the S.C. Hospitality Association.

    Investigators found the body in a double enclosed room as they were conducting a follow up check of the building, she said.

    Police have searched the building multiple times, including a search with dogs trained to find cadavers, Timmons said.

    A 2 p.m. at Columbia police headquarters is planned, Timmons said.

    As John and Noelle headed over to the police department for that presser, I left them. I’m sure they will have more to share soon.

    One reason I found the reporters out on the street is that they were barred from entering the building where the SC Hospitality Association has its offices.

    Congratulations, Robert, on the Verner Award!

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    Today, regular contributor Bart sent me a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, which I enjoyed, since that was the best comic strip in the history of cartooning, by far. Neither Peanuts nor Doonesbury nor Bloom County nor Overboard ever came close to Watterson‘s brilliant strip, which combined unbelievably deft and communicative artwork with brilliant, unique ideas and perfect dialogue. Every line he drew was essential, and alive. It was amazing.

    This reminds me of Robert Ariail, who would say the same. In fact, one big reason why he and I didn’t follow through on the comic strip we planned for years to do was that Robert didn’t want to do it unless it was going to be as good as Calvin and Hobbes — which I thought a ridiculously high standard.

    But perfectionism can pay off, as it has yet again for Robert — he is the 2012 Individual Artist winner of the S.C. Arts Commission’s Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award:

    Robert Ariail is a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist based in Camden, S.C. From 1984 to 2009, Ariail wielded pen and ink to capture the mood and viewpoint of the day as the editorial cartoonist for The Statenewspaper. With his entertaining and recognizable style, Ariail provoked thought, fueled controversy and poked a little fun as a satirist, storyteller and critic. He had the knack for channeling the spirit of the state, be it pride or frustration. His art and his satire continue to be available to readers through his work at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal and in more than 600 newspapers across the nation. Ariail has also published three collections of his cartoons.

    A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1995 and 2000, Ariail was the first American to win the prestigious United Nations Ranan Lurie Political Cartoon Award, triumphing over a field of more than 1,500 cartoonists from around the world in 2009. A sample of other awards include:

    • The National Headliner Award (1990)
    • The National Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award (1992)
    • The Overseas Press Club’s Thomas Nast Award (1997)
    • The Society of Professional Journalists Green Eyeshade Award (an eleven-state Southeastern regional competition, 1991, 1997, 2001, 2004, 2007)
    • The South Carolina Press Association Award for Cartooning (2007, 2010)

    Says Ariail of his work: “I try to give my readers a chuckle, perhaps even a guffaw on occasion. I’d even settle for a raised eyebrow,” says Ariail. “I don’t take cheap shots, but I like to make a point. I want my cartoons to say something, or at least to show the irony of a situation.”

    Full disclosure — I nominated Robert for this. He did all the rest. As always, I am proud to know him, and thankful to have had all those years to work with him.

    Don’t forget where the “Southern” comes from

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    When I started reading the story on the front page of The State this morning about a proposal to change the name of the denomination from “Southern Baptist,” I assumed that the reason would be the convention’s roots in the pro-slavery cause.

    So I was taken aback when the reason given in the AP story was concerns “that their name is too regional and impedes the evangelistic faith’s efforts to spread the Gospel worldwide.” That seemed an awfully vanilla way to put it.

    I read on, expecting to find the part that dealt with the convention’s founding in 1845… and it wasn’t there at all. No mention of why Southern Baptists had split from other Baptists.

    Then, when I went to find the story online to link to it in this post, I found the missing passage:

    The Southern Baptist Convention formed in 1845 when it split with northern Baptists over the question of whether slave owners could be missionaries. Draper said that history has left some people to have negative associations with the name.

    Well, yeah.

    AP stories are generally written in the “inverted pyramid” style, to make it easy for copy editors to cut from the bottom in making a story fit on a print page. But sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes a copy editor needs to read the whole story and think about what parts the reader can’t do without if he or she is to understand what’s going on. This is one of those cases.

    The omission is more startling since someone thought to add a paragraph at the end telling how many Southern Baptists there are in South Carolina.

    Of course, the blame doesn’t accrue entirely to the editor or page designer. This was a badly written AP story. The origins of the “Southern” identity should have been up top, rather than in the 14th graf. It was essential to understanding what the story was about.

    Now, let me add that I don’t say any of this to condemn the convention, or the independent churches that belong to it. I do not mean to besmirch today’s Southern Baptists. My parents are Southern Baptists; I was baptized in Thomas Memorial Baptist Church.

    But to fail to mention where the convention’s name came from in a story about a discussion of changing the name is like writing a history of Spanish Catholicism without mentioning the Inquisition, or the persecution of Jews and Muslims under Their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabela. Actually, you could even say it’s worse than that in terms of relevance, since the story was specifically about the name.

    Given The State‘s usual interest in the history of slavery and Jim Crow (particularly during Black History Month), I was surprised by this omission.

    Kara says she’s out for good, may run in Dist. 18

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    This just came in from Kara Gormley Meador, as a comment on the previous post about her:

    Good morning folks. I checked with an attorney who is working on the redistricting suit. It sounds as if I am out of 23 for good. The suit underway is based on race. The attorney told me that gerrymandering is not illegal, unless there is a racial component. It is another sad truth about our elected officials; they can draw the lines in a way that helps keep them in office. Just one more reason I am for term limits for our legislators. I still have some decisions to make, like whether or not to run in District 18. It’s something that I am strongly considering.

    If she runs in 18, that would mean opposing Ronnie Cromer. I can’t offer much of a read on her chances. She could have been a real threat to Jake Knotts, I think. Anyone have a read on 18?

    And she’s right — the courts have long held that incumbency protection is allowed in redistricting. No, that doesn’t seem right, but that’s what the courts have said.

    A new business model for journalism?

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    Romenesko brought my attention to this idea today. It’s intriguing, because the holy grail in journalism today is to find a new way to pay for it, now that the old business model that sustained newspaper journalism for generations has collapsed so spectacularly.

    Interest in news and commentary is as great as always, but in the past, those who demanded such commodities were not the ones who paid for it — it was advertisers, who came to the newspaper for completely different motives. Now that marketing has changed so radically, turning from mass media to targeting messaging, how do you pay people to come up with the professional-quality content that the public still desires?

    Here’s one way:

    I call it the eBay of investigative journalism, and here’s how I envision it:

    • Bring donors and investigators together in an exclusive online network, creating a forum where they could pitch ideas to each other.
    • Donors in the network who want specific topics covered would propose stories and agree to fund the investigations. Journalists in the network would bid on the projects, outlining how much money they need. Multiple donors could contribute to each project.
    • Project pitches would work the opposite direction, too, with investigative journalists outlining their own ideas and donors “buying in” by providing the funds. Donors could contribute the full amount to fund projects they really like or fund parts of multiple projects. Journalists also could pitch ideas as teams or recruit teams within the network.
    • The network would have a team of editorial directors whose job would be to vet the donors, journalists and ideas. Only the best would make the cut, just like applying for media jobs.

    Of course that only applies to investigative journalism — or more, broadly, what we referred to as “enterprise” stories: Someone (traditionally an editor) says “go out and look into this.” Traditionally, the journalist did so because he was paid a salary. Now that the revenue source that paid that salary has collapsed, this is an interesting idea for paying for a journalist’s time and expertise to pursue a subject.

    Of course, there are real problems with it. Not every worthwhile story, not everything that citizens need to know, is marketable. That’s why it worked better to pay journalists salaries so that their scope of investigation was unlimited by what attracted a paying customer.

    Then, there’s the fact that it does little good for the area of opinion journalism, which has been my specialty since 1994.

    But perhaps most critically, it does nothing for the most fundamental, basic, bread-and-butter kind of journalism: simply covering everything in a community — crime, public safety, courts, politics, business. If you try to cover news according to whether someone wants to pay to see that particular story, it becomes PR.

    But it’s still an intriguing idea.

    My loss of innocence, in the bicentennial year

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    On my last post, I said something about how insulting I find it when someone says that my opinions would be different if my personal circumstances were different. Such as when people say, “A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged,” or “if your daughter were pregnant, you wouldn’t be opposed to abortion,” or whatever.

    I was insufficiently clear, as I learned when one commenter thought I mean people shouldn’t change their minds. I’m all for mind-changing based upon new information. (And indeed, sometimes that new information is conveyed by changed personal circumstances.) What I object to is the suggestion that, if it were in your self-interest to change your mind, you would.

    Part of the reason why I find this so offensive is the puritanism of the journalist. News journalists aren’t even supposed to have opinions, which I’ve always understood to be absurd, of course. But when journos are allowed to have opinions, and even paid to express them publicly, as I was for more than 15 years of my career, it’s such a special gift that the responsibility is huge to formulate political opinions according to the greater good of the community, limited only by your ability to discern the greater good. Anything that smacks of abusing that privilege for self-interest is appalling to me.

    I’m a bit more wordly today than I was in the early stages of my journalism career, but the ideals are intact.

    This led me to share an anecdote from the days when I realized that not everyone, not even all journalists, looked at the world as I did…

    In 1976, I was pretty excited about Jimmy Carter’s candidacy. I saw him as what the country needed after Watergate, etc. One day close to the election, I had a conversation with another editor in the newsroom. She said she favored Gerald Ford. That sounded fine to me; I liked Ford, too — I just preferred Carter.

    What floored me, flabbergasted me, shocked me, was that she said the REASON she supported Ford was that she and her husband had sat down and looked at the candidates’ proposals, and had computed (who knows how, given the variables) that if Carter were elected, their taxes would go up by $1,000 a year.

    My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it, because of the following:

    • I couldn’t believe that ANYONE would actually make a decision based on who should lead the free world based on their personal finances. (I really couldn’t; I was that innocent.)
    • I thought that if there WERE such greedy jerks in the world, you would not find them among the ranks of newspaper journalists, who had deliberately chosen careers that would guarantee them lower salaries than their peers from college. If you care that much about money, this would be about the last line of work a college graduate would choose.
    • If there WERE a journalist whose priorities were so seriously out of whack, surely, surely, she’d never admit it to another journalist.

    But I was wrong on all counts.

    For a time I regarded her as an outlier, as an exception that proved the rule. But that delusion wore off, too, as I had more such conversations with many, many other people. (Although she still stands out as the must unabashedly selfish journalist I think I’ve ever met. Others may be as self-interested, but they’re more circumspect.)

    Today, I have a much more realistic notion of how many people vote on the basis of self-interest. But I have never come to accept it as excusable.