That AP Apology

For what is AP apologizing?

For firing a guy who broke his word, 67 years and one week ago.

This is an odd (and old) story, but it is also an intriguing footnote to a great historic event, V-E Day.

When Hitler was dead, and the remnants of his inner circle were at last ready to surrender, the Allies decided on two distinct surrender ceremonies -- one involving the western allies, the other involving Russia.

The AP won what some call the biggest scoop in its history -- it was the first organization to report the end of the war in Europe. Even the NY Times ran the AP story that day -- and the mighty Times almost never deigns to use wire services reports, or admit to it. Anyway, you can see the copy here:

MAY 4 1945

But ... it then fired the reporter who had done so.

That was Edward Kennedy. He agreed, as did the other reporters 'embedded' (they didn't use that tern then) with the US Armed Forces and in a position to know about this, that they wouldn't report the story until they got the okay.

Why not? Diplomacy. The Russian surrender ceremony took longer to arrange than the western one, and the Russians wanted Germany's surrender to them to be announced to the world at the same time as Germany's surrender to the US and UK.

But Kennedy decided (in his own words, in a memoir): "Once the war is over, you can't hold back information like that. The world needed to know."

Kennedy has passed away. The AP has apologized to his daughter. CEO Tom Curley says, "It was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way."

Well ... maybe. The AP ran with the scoop and then fired him. Maybe a better idea would have been NOT to run with the scoop, and to fire him quietly for trying to pass it off as a news story? Or (if they agreed with him that the world's need to know exceeded the imperative of keeping one's word) run the scoop and keep him on payroll. Either it was wrong or it wasn't. Getting the benefit and dumping the liability -- is that what they're apologizing for?

The story is getting international play. Here's the Jakarta Post. (In their part of the world, of course, the war wasn't over in May. That was part of the reason the western powers had to make nice with Stalin as per surrender ceremonies and such.) Of course the Jakarta Post isn't publishing its own account of the AP apology. It is one of many papers around the world running ... the AP account of same.



Or taking unfair advantage of their competition, whose reporters did keep their word?

Here is another take.  Written by the son of another 1940s-era journalist, one of those who didn't break that particular story but who could have, and who in fact knew about this before Kennedy did.

Agawam, Mass.

In recent weeks I have been making regular contributions to a western Massachusetts community newspaper known as the Agawam Advertiser News.

I have long been perplexed and saddened by the fact that when one travels in the US, and picks up different papers along the way, one reads largely the same stories. The various 'local' papers fill most of their papers, and certainly all the ones near the front, with stories from Reuters and AP. Thus, such newspapers find themselves in serious economic difficulties. Anyone with access to the internet can go to Reuters' website. When not cut out the middleman?

I mention that only in order to acknowledge that the Agawam Advertiser doesn't have that problem. Nobody disintermediates it. First, it has no online presence. Unless you are willing to pay the dollar for the dead tree version, you won't read the stories it offers.

Second, and related, there are no wire stories. The stories are local in both topic and conception. The front page of this week's issue includes a story headlined "Council nixes zone change," written by Gregory Scibelli. The lede? "Resident concern and perceived lack of benefit to the community led the Agawam City Council this week to rule against a zone change at the corner of Maple and Spencer Streets."

If you don't know or care about the corner of Maple and Spencer in Agawam, Mass. -- well, you are presumably not the audience for that particular story. You'd rather read about who is going to be the next chair of various important committees of Congress in Washington? Go for it -- but the Agawam Advertiser carries no wares in that overcrowded marketplace. That is the better part of its charm.

What about the back pages? You won't find here reviews of the latest books on the New York Times best seller list. When there are book reviews, they involve local publishers, local authors, and local issues. One of my own recent contributions was a review of a book by an Amherst College professor on slavery in the Connecticut River in Massachusetts in colonial days.

So: the Agawam Advertiser News is an institution for which I believe the people of Agawam and environs have reason to give thanks on this thanksgiving day weekend.

Pulitzer Prize

One of the Pulitzer Prizes given out earlier this week went to what I consider a very deserving recipient -- that Pro Publica piece on the life-or-death choices that had to be made at a New Orleans hospital in the post-Katrina environment.

Just contemplating the situation makes me sick, and I have nothing but respect for the professionals who had to live through it and deal with it. Prosecutors sought to criminalize their decisions, but a grand jury refused to indict. That is a remarkable story in itself, given the old rule about the indictment of a ham sandwich.

On some of the political sites in this internet thingy, though, there seems to be some unhappiness that the National Enquirer didn't get that award, especially for the investigation that led to the disclosure of John Edwards' dalliance with his campaign videographer, and the child that resulted from same.

One columnist has proposed a special new prize for such stories. Inquiring minds want to know about future prizes!

Anyway: congrats to Sheri Fink and the others involved for their story reviewing the whole matter carefully. Even if it does allow some to yell, "The Pulitzer is for Finks!"

Rest in Peace

Irvine R. Levine, who covered economics for NBC News for 24 years, passed away of prostate cancer yesterday: a member of what is nowadays called the "Greatest Generation," leaving us as mortality requires.

His career had its adventurous episodes. He was an officer in the Army Signal Corps in World War II, and after VJ Day he landed with the early occupation forces in Japan.

He was working as a freelance reporter during the Korean War, and began getting gigs from NBC in that context.

He was on their payroll by 1960, when he covered the uprising in the Belgian Congo.

But he really made his mark starting in 1971. That was the year Nixon brought an end to what remained of gold convertibility and introduced wage-price controls. NBC decided they needed a regular economics correspondent in their news department, so Levine got the job. He was the first correspondent for any of the network news departments with that particular responsibility, and he kept at it until 1995. His bow tie, the rather slow pace of his delivery, and even his insistence upon the "R" (no, I don't know what it stands for) became famous. Legend has it that an editor once suggested that he sign off as "Irvine Levine" to save a second of tape. He allegedly replied, "I could sign off as 'Irvine Levine of NC News' and save two seconds."

The middle initial stayed.

Rest in peace, Irving R. Levine. Go meet the Final Editor at the big Citydesk in the sky and submit your copy.

Fourth Estate

One sometimes hears the phrase "Fourth Estate" employed casually as a synonym for "the press."

Or,sometimes not. In one of the bulletin boards where I go to vent, a conservative fellow expressed his unhappiness that the "Third Estate" had sided with Obama. Evidently he, too, meant "the press," tried to seem elegant, and ended up saying something very much at odds with what he meant.

Both terms derive their continued significance from 18th century French history. When Louis XVI called the "Estates General" together to address the budget crisis in May 1789, his expectation was that they would meet and deliberate separately. The first estate was the clergy, the second the nobility, the third the lower classes (in practice, the most well-off of the non-nobles, the bourgeoisie).

Once convened, though, things went badly awry for Louis, within two months the Third Estate was calling itself the Constituent Assembly and deliberately ignoring the other two -- and a mob supportive of that revolutionary decision was heading for the Bastille.

Presumably he didn't mean to concede that the "3d estate" is on Obama's side. But that would mean that Obama is playing the part of who ... Marat? Who is Louis XVI this time around?

As to the 4th estate, the usual story is that years after the French Revolution, British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, giving a speech in the House of Commons, looked up at the gallery and saw reporters busy scribbling down his words. he said: "Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than the other three."

In our own day of blogger and citizen journalist, the "Fourth," to the extent it ever had a distinctive social/institutional identity, may be sinking back into the generality of the 3d. We can say "yippee!" or we can say "alas," since the two reactions are equally futile given the fact.

"We have the technology"

Rob Spence is a Canadian filmmaker/reporter whose work has appeared on CBC, Vision, and Space TV.

Speaking at a conference in Brussels yesterday, he said that he lost an eye when young, and has long thought about using camera technology to replace it.

The BBC has run a resulting rather cutesy piece about the "bionic reporter." Surely there are likely to be advantages to an implant. It won't simply replicate the work that the second natural eye would have done for him -- restoring the parallax that he has presumably learned to live without. It will record and transmit its images.

Indeed, this is what raises ethical concerns. The "internal camera" will allow him to get into places where anybody holding an "external camera" would have been stopped at the door. But heck, nowadays if you want to be tricky in such situations you can slip a cell phone into your pocket and walk through one of those doors.

Will the camera-eye end up being so advantageous that perfectly healthy reporters with two good eyes will want one of them removed and a techno-substitute installed?

We'll know that world when we see it.

In the meantime, here's the BBC story.


And here is the homepage of the DNA 2009 conference ("Digital News Affairs") at which Spence made this revelation about his plans.

The nine stories

Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, likes to say that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written.

Every once in awhile I like to check the newspaper with his list in mind, to see if he is right. I'll start withhis wording unmodified by examples.

1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE

2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE

3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL

4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX

5. EXPERTS WARN OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY

6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY

7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING

8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS

9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL

---

This week, selecting nine actual headlines to fill this template is almost too easy.


1. Winter storms have covered (or "battered") most of the eastern US, the President has joked about his daughters' school closing, his family's Chicago toughness, etc.

2. Idiots kill the innocent? ALWAYS too easy. Phil Spector is the idiot in question this time, his (second) murder trial in the death of Lana Clarkson is underway. Then there is Casey Anthony, the darling mother of Caylee, who is still apparently blaming Caylee's disappearance on a mystery babysitter.

3. Political corruption? The Illinois Senate just voted to remove that state's Governor from office for trying to sell a seat in the US Senate, apparently to the highest bidder.


4. Inappropriate sex? Ted Haggard is back in the news all of a sudden.

5. Financial calamity? Since calamities continue to unfold around us, no one needs to "warn" us about them. But the grave experts gather in Switzerland this week, the annual Davos conference, again to confer, converse, and hobnob like wizards.

6. Even in the present credit-starved climate, some big companies are still busily engaged buying other big companies, so there is this headline with Pfizer buying Wyeth.

7. The seventh headline is the excuse for the mandatory specimen of celebrity news.

8. Scientific discoveries of dubious practical significance are always fun -- we may take as example a story about a new (purely theoretical) design for a nuclear reactor that would combine fusion with fission somewhere someday.

9. Government "fails to achieve a goal"? Heck, according to today's newspapers you can't even rely on government as a tester of peanuts.

Only Nine Headlines

Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, likes to say that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written.

Let's see if he's right. I'll give his wording of one of the template headlines, then look for the nearest and most recent equivalent.

1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE

This is too easy. Pick the Gustav headline of your choice or this one.

2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE

Always too easy. But this time, the idiocy in question is bizaare. "Ohio jury convicts Mom in microwaved baby case."

3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL

It seems that a member of the city council in Seattle Washington was recently fined in connection with awarding a no-bid contract. Then he got in further trouble by trying to use CITY funds to pay HIS fine. An old story about a murderer/orphan pleading for mercy comes to mind.


4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX

The primate in question would be the X-Files star David Duchony, who has just checked himself into a clinic for sex addiction. Presumably there must have been some precipitating event, which somebody would have regarded as inappropriate, to bringh this about.

If you insist on a non-human primate, one wonders what that frozen "Bigfoot" in the news of late was really up to just before his unfortunate demise.

5. EXPERTS WARN OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY

Almost the exact wording of a story I encountered earlier this month.

"Experts Warn of Unrest over Food Prices."


6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY

Innotek and Micron.


7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING

Its a good thing a did an idle google search to find a good fit for this template, or I would never have known of the existence of the following headline: "Demi squirts milk at lesbians." About a hot night out for famous person Demi Moore, while she was lactating. I don't think you want me to provide you with a link to that. Interesting, in a bizaare sort of way.


8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS

Cows naturally point north. Sort of making each bovine a redneck GPS.

9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL

Hence this: "Bid to break state budget impasse falls short" from California, shockingly.

Yes, Scott, maybe there are only nine headlines. Except that you left out the sports section.

10. "One Team Defeats Another."

One gutsy lady

Apparently this is a reporter of Georgian nationality, reporting on Georgian state TV regarding the Russian invasion of her country, a couple of weeks ago.

As you'll see, she's hit by small arms fire ... and continues doing her job unfazed.

Awesome. Watch for yourself.

Her name is Tamara Urushadze.

The name and the incident have both become a blogosphere sensation. Says TMZ: "Don't let your boss see this video, you'll never be allowed to call in sick again."

Why Didn't Liu Run

I've been enjoying the Olympics. I hope you have, as well, dear reader.

There was something of a disappointment for aficionados of track and field events around the world, and especially in the host country, early this week. Liu Xiang withdrew from the men's 110 meter hurdles.

At the last Olympics, in Athens, Liu won the gold in that event. It was a stereotype-shattering event, too. He became the first athlete not of African descent to complete that event in less than 13 seconds. The stereotype of Asian men, of course, is "brainy, not athletic."

Liu has expressed himself in terms that acknowledge the stereotypes. "I want to prove to the world that Asians can run very fast."

Consider it proven. Indeed, in 2006, at an event in Lausanne, Liu set a new world's record in this event at 12.88 seconds.

But while his home country is hosting the Olympic games, the reigning king of the sport has withdrawn! And the gold went this week to a Cuban athlete who -- if I may say so without giving offense -- does look like the stereotypical track-and-field star. That winner, Dayron Robles by name, ran the course in 12.93 seconds. Intriguingly, then, Robles ran slower than Liu's best (but a bit more quickly than Liu had run when winning in Athens).

Why did Liu pull out? There seems to be some confusion about that point. The Epoch Times, claims there's a cover up.

Epoch Times has its own political agenda here. It's a China-themed periodical printed in New York City, in both Chinese and English editions, specifically for the purpose of tracking human rights violations by the PRC, and it is sometimes seen as a mouthpiece for the Falun Gong. Some scholars have reportedly been impressed by the network of sources the paper appears to have cultivated within the country.

So coverage of an injury to an Achilles tendon would seem rather trivial for The Epoch Times, wouldn't it? Ah, but they've run an article suggesting that Liu had some sort of "leg injury" even before the games, and that authorities knew that he wouldn't repeat at the gold, but hid this from the public until the last possible moment, staging the pull-out to minimize the popular discontent it was expected to create.

Do I care when precisely Liu was injured? No, but if the paper is at all right, then it is on to a broader point: the kind of extensive information control the State there seeks to exercise over everything does seem chilling.

Personally, I'd just like some day to see Liu and his very best and Robles at his very best running down the same track at the same time, taking the hurdles. With the same wind at their backs.

Four months ago ... a death

The photo is of Fadel Shana, a photographer working for Reuters who died four months ago in the Gaza strip.

Israeli authorities have decided that the tank crew that killed him was acting properly, because they couldn't tell whether what he was holding was a camera or a weapon.

I'm not bringing this up in order to complain about that decision or criticize the tank crew. They did as they deemed they had to do, and war is a nasty business. I doubt Mr. Shana was unaware of that.

Still, I regret his passing, and hope that there will always be others like him, willing to risk the fate he met, in order to bring the rest of us the news about such places as the Gaza Strip.

Peace, Fadel.

Oswald's son

Okay Max, please sue me.

Max Mosley is trying to let the world know that although, yes, he did have an orgy with prostitutes, Nazism was not involved in any way.

He's won a lawsuit against a Murdoch run operation, "News of the World," which apparently claimed that the orgy involved Nazi costumes and role playing. Judge David Eady says that the tabloid must pay Mosley 60,000 pounds.

The accounts I've seen, which are admittedly second hand, indicate that he didn't win on the basis of libel, but rather on that of invasion of privacy.

So here are some questions for anyone who knows the law in the UK. Isn't the solicitation of prostitutes illegal? And if it is illegal, and a very public person engages in it (Mosley is the president of the agency that governs Formula One racing): what sense does it make to say that it is protected by a right to privacy? Is this ruling a precedent that will effectively legalize prostitution, and/or the solicitation thereof? Or is it just another lamentable example of the muzzling of the press?

And, for those who don't recognize the family name, there is a reason why it might be especially interesting to the public in the UK to learn (if it is true) that that Max Mosley has a Nazism fetish.

Max is the son of Oswald Mosley, the man who founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932.

Oswald married Diana Mitford, Max's mother, in 1936. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were guests at that wedding.

The fact that Max is in a position of some prominence himself, combined with the family connection, may make some wonder how far from the tree this particular apple has fallen.

In other words, I think the court was misguided in ruling in his favor, though I'm open to further relevant facts and considerations. And please, Mr. Mosley, sue me.

Hack Heaven and aesthetics

Tomorrow will be the tenth anniversary of the publication of a story in The New Republic, under the byline of Stephen Glass, titled "Hack Heaven."

To be technical, I don't know when the relevant issue of TNR actually hit newsstands or went out in the mail to subscribers, but the date it had on it was "May 18, 1998". So we'll take tomorrow as the anniversary.

This was the beginning of the end for Glass' spectacular career of fabrications.

Here's a link to a piece by Adam Penenberg that unravelled it and spoke to the issue of how such things can be unravelled, how difficult it can be to prove a negative. That of course is the difficulty upon which the Glass' of the world play for as long as they can manage.

There had been incidents, earlier in Glass' brief career, that might have served as red flags. But the Penenberg riposte proved effective, and Glass was soon unemployed and in disgrace. That September, his rise and fall was the subject of a lengthy profile in Vanity Fair "Shattered Glass" which referred to Hack Heaven in particular as "the most sustained fraud in modern journalism."

Glass is periodically the subject of "where are they now" stories which tell us -- last I knew -- that he is a paralegal somewhere, and/or a member of a comedy troup.

There are some psychologically intriguing aspects to the story. More so, IMHO, that there are to certain other journalistic scandals. Most fraud in this area comes from the unfortunate but not-at-all-mysterious combination of ambition and sloth. It's easier to make stuff up than to do the work, collect the facts, and then write up a story that stays true to them.

And it's a LOT easier to end up with a compelling end product if one makes it up. The problem with doing the spadework is that it doesn't necessarily uncover hidden treasure at all. You can dig a deep hole where your metal detector went off, sweating all the way, and end up with nothing more than a rusty old metal pipe.

If you combine ambition with sloth then, you want the big story and ... you make it up. Or maybe you've got a legitimate story but you feel compelled to make stuff up to fill in compelling details. Such were the relatively uninteresting -- though high-profile -- fabrications of a Jayson Blair.

But in Glass' case the vice of "sloth" makes no appearance. In creating back-up for Hack Heaven, he created a shell website and a voice-mail account for a company he had invented. He had fake business cards printed up for that company's supposed executives. He created "interview" notes. A more slothful person might have actually preferred researching and writing a true story to doing all this work for a phony one.

The lesson: maybe sloth has its upside? Nay ... there has to be a better lesson in there than that. On Thursday I wrote about the movie "Hoop Dreams," and the aesthetics of the documentary film -- the challenge of creating structure and preserving focus without straying from the facts -- and the challenge of accepting the loose ends that inevitably arise in such works.

What is true of film is true in print as well. The art of veracity is inherently tricky. There is always the danger that the product won't be artful enough, that it will end up dry-as-dust and/or derivative. The extreme of this danger is plagiarism. On the other hand, there is also the danger that the product will be too artful, that it wil fly off into fantasy. The extreme of this danger is ... Stephen Glass.

McCain story: Keating Five Again

A story on the front page of the New York Times yesterday attracted a lot of attention. This is surprising because it is oddly structured, as if the editors and/or reporters involved wanted to delay a casual reader's recognition of their point. The headline doesn't really tip anyone off to the explosive nature of the contents. It says, "For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses its Own Risk."

There's the implication in that wording that people who are too self-confident are those most likely to fall into an ethical trap or lapse, that "pride goeth before a fall." Still, its a roundabout bit of wording, and subtlety isn't what headlines are for.

The lead paragraph might also be a soporific. "Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers."

So events of 2000 are getting front-page attention just now? and they concern anxiety? about what? Ah, that would be the point.

The second graf finally gets us to the gist. Or does it? "A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity."

It sounds a bit like the story's going to be about adultery here. But it veers from that soon thereafter. The story leaves the "anxieties" of staff members unconfirmed. There is no reason to think McCain was having a "romantic" liaison.

But the woman who made the staffers anxious was a "lobbyist," and that moves the story forward a bit. The lobbyist, Ms Isenman, represented telecommunications companies for whom the work of Mr. McCain's Senate Committee, Commerce, was critical. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his "campaigns" (by which I take it the team of reporters mean both his campaign for re-election to the Senate in 1998 [he won his third term that year] and that 2000 campaign for President.)

So the story is saying that McCain became very chummy (however 'platonically'!) with a lobbyist who helped him raise money for his campaigns and it is at least suggesting that she did this for the interest of her telecommunications clients -- there was an implicit quid pro quo.

The McCain camp has unsurprisingly denied that there was any impropriety involving Ms Isenman. The Democrats are too immersed in their continuing nomination struggle to pay much attention to it, although surely they're storing the clippings and will keep an eye on anything that might give one of them ammunition for the autumn.

In the meantime, we might consider the question of the quality of the journalism involved. As I'v already indicated, the story seems oddly structured. The traditional structure for a news story is the "inverted pyramid," so called because the structure rests on a single point. The lead paragraph should state exactly what it is that makes this story worthy of the reader's time. Everything else opens out, perhaps in various directions, but rests on that point.

Aside from that, there are both auspicious and inauspicious things about this story, and it will be interesting to see how it shakes out over time.

On the positive side, some of this jives with McCain's most tarnished hour as a public servant. I mean the "Keating Five" business. If it turns out to be creditable -- and I suspect we'll discover this as other news organizations chase the same rabbit now -- then it could mean real trouble for McCain. And he'd deserve that sort of trouble.

On the one hand, there's a lot of anonymous sourcing, which is always a bad sign in terms of reliability. Not every anonymous source is a public-spirited Mark Felt. Not every, not most, not many. They generally have their own agenda and "letting the public know important truths" need not be high on that list.

Indeed, the end of the second graf of this story is: "...several people involved in the campaign said on condition of anonymity."

So, as you can see, I'm on the fence.

Anarcho-capitalism: catch the fever!

Money in Fiction

I've e-mailed a publisher, Continuum, and asked for a copy of a new book, MONEY, SPECULATION AND FINANCE IN RECENT BRITISH FICTION, by Nicky Marsh.

It's a great subject for a book. When you encounter a character in a work of fiction who is identified as a banker, or as the CEO of a company, the identification often serves merely as a lazy tag, a slightly more specific way of saying "rich guy."

Some occupations just seem to naturally give themselves to literary or dramatic treatment better than others. Trial lawyers (barristers, not office-bound solicitors) are an obvious example. They win or they lose. Their client gets the jackpot or is left destitute. On the criminal side, the client walks free, or is locked up.

Journalism, too, lends itself to literature. The 1928 Broadway comedy The Front Page continues to be re-incarnated. All The President's Men doesn't work very well as an explanation of what was going on in the Nixon administration, but it does make for a good yarn about two reporters' efforts to find out what was going on -- a different theme altogether.

Then there's the occupation of soldiering, which is rather too easily dramatized. It has famously been described as days of tedium punctuated by moments of horror. The temptation, in writing about it, is to leave out the days of tedium and write about the moments of horror. The really great authors in this field can make fine prose out of the days-of-tedium aspect of the situation as well.

What about finance? speculation? fictionalizing the nitty-gritty of it while preserving the drama is a challenge, and this I presume is what drew Marsh: the meta-challenge of describing that challenge.

Just a Guess

A young friend of mine recently told me that about 90% of the people he meets in his "Journalism and Mass Communication" major in college are liberal, and asked me whether that was the case back in the prehistoric days when I attended college.

I didn't have intimate knowledge of our Communications Dept. at Marist, since I was a poli-sci major with a pre-law focus. But I did know some of them, and I had to tell my young friend that, yes, they were probably to the left of the campus average, however exactly one would go about measuring or defining the scale.

He asked whether I had any thoughts on why this is so. The best I could do was this:

I suspect that the characteristics that go by the label "liberal" in the US are, largely, characteristics psychologically associated with the love of words, word-play, compositional skill, etc.

I also suspect that "conservatism" tends to be psychologically associated with the love of numbers, calculation, and and keen sense of spatial relations.

I have no real good evidence for any of that, its just a hunch based on personal experience.

If there's anything to it, one would expect budding journalists to be "liberals," except possibly those who wanted to specialize in financial and/or science journalism, who might be numbers-people, and thus "conservatives."

This sort of psychological (neurological) clustering may, indeed, be at the bottom of what the words mean.

Condé Nast: Portfolio

Yesterday I purchased the second issue of the new Condé Nast business periodical, Portfolio.

I used the term "periodical" in the preceding sentence, although I'm not sure what "period" is supposed to be involved. According to the hype surrounding its lauch this spring, it was supposed to be a monthly. I reported my own (negative) impressions of that first issue in my April 21 entry in this very blog. Yet I am, in early September, reading only the second issue of this "monthly".

Is something wrong there or is it just me?

Well, they still have to work some kinks out of the mechanics of production, I suppose.

Staying within the "four corners" of the text of the new issue, though: I have to say that this one is an improvement over the last. There is nothing so show-offish as the Tom Wolfe star turn that last time out. And there is a wonderful piece by Kurt Eichenwald about a cemetery trust-fund scam.

Funeral homes sell pre-needs contracts. You might pay now for your burial costs in the expectation that this will remove a financial burden from your spouse or kin when you die. It might include not just the immediate costs but the maintenance of the grave sites in perpetuity. Obviosuly, the only prudent way for an ongoing business to spend the money received from customers on a pre-needs contract is to put it into a conservatively managed trust fund, designed to earn enough money to take care of those contracted-for liability.

Human nature is a nasty business, though, and some people aren't above looting those trust funds.

Eichenwald gives the corporate board-room intrigue as well as the ordinary-folk consequence. On July 1, 2006, a 99 year old woman in Memphis named Vesta Foshee died. Her son Donald called the local cemetery that day. He was grieving, but confident at least that his mother's funeral was paid for.

Sorry, the funeral home told him. The trust fund doesn't have enough money in it to pay. The family Foshee family had to pony up an additional $3,100 to bury Vesta. Donald called the local TV news, which ran a story that evening.

Ghastly stuff. And the Foshee family heartbreak wasn't just an isolated case, as Eichewald shows. Tens of thousands of people -- the sort of frail, elderly folk who make arrangements for their own death -- were cheated, collectively, out of $80 million.

This issue of Portfolio also includes a story on Mark Swartz' new life in prison, as inmate 05A04823 in New York State's penal system. Mark Swartz is the former chief financial officer of Tyco and by all creditable accounts (including those the jurors heard and believed) he illegally pocketed $50 million of Tyco's funds, while helping the CEO of the company do even better.

Swartz is in protective custody in Oneida. Portfolio's reporter, Katrina Brooker, extends him some sympathy, but not a lot. I believe she gets the balance about right.

So the Eichenwald and the Brooker stories share a common theme, white-collar crime. This is not to say that the whole issue shares that theme, but I do hope Portfolio moves further in that direction. If it wants to find a niche -- a type of story whence Forbes and Fortune shy -- this may be it.

On Not Pressing the Question

As the disclaimer on this blog makes plain, I speak here for myself, not in any way for my employer. That said, I'd like to share a story relating to that employment.

On Friday, August 3, two committees of the Senate, having jointly investigated a scandal at the Securities and Exchange Commission, issued their report. I won't go into the particulars -- it would bore some of you, and those of you whom it would interest already know of at least the general outlines. For now, just take it as a given that there was a scandal, and that the New York Times ran a very prominent story on the Senate report Saturday morning.

I was supposed to play catch up or (better) leapfrog with the Times. So over the weekend I read the report, (700 pages) and on Monday I started making some phone calls to flesh out my story. From my reading, I knew that the Senate staffers had taken a rather negative view of the Inspector General (I-G) of the SEC, Walter Stachnik. So, playing the journalistic game according to Hoyle, I called the I-G's office.

I expected a standard responsive comment. You know the type. "I believe all my actions were appropriate and any implication to the contrary by the investigators is misguided," or words to that effect. Regular news readers encounter quotes like that all the time.

I didn't get that sort of statement, though. Instead, the secretary at the I-G's office told me that Stachnik no longer worked there. This was news to me, though I rather assumed at this point that it had been properly announced perhaps weeks before and I had simply missed it. I asked whether he had left forwarding contact information. The secretary said, "No, he's retired." So I now had a mental image of Mr. Stachnik on a Florida beach.

If I had the proper bloodhound instincts, I would no doubt have pressed to learn how LONG he's been retired. I might then have discovered the real buried scoop in this situation ... that Stachnik "retired" on the previous Friday ... the day the Senate committees put out their report. As Ned Flanders, from The Simpsons, might have put it: "What an amazing coincidinkalidink."

But I didn't think to press the nice lady on the other end of the phone for a day of departure. I just asked whether a successor had been appointed. "No, not yet."

This, then, is in the story I wrote on the underlying SEC scandal for our website and news service. "Mr. Stachnik has since retired from his post as inspector general, and that office said on Monday ... that there has been no new appointee."

Rather lame, but it's there. Even before we posted that story, I had written a comment on Greg Newton's blog, informing him that Stachnik was retired. But there were other things to do, and I didn't pursue the particulars.

They've come out since. An anti-naked-short-selling activist, David Patch, probably tipped off by either my comment on Greg's blog or by my story proper, called Stachnik's office the next morning and did the pressing I hadn't done. Then Greg did so himself.

The SEC hadn't announced Stachnik's retirement, there was none of the usual "thank you for your years of dedicated service" stuff. I didn't know this, either, until it started popping up in the blogosphere, because I had simply assumed I had just MISSED the official announcement and that with a little surfing I could find it.

"Never assume anything, the word divides into three parts" as Felix Unger once explained. Well, new proof of that principle. I couldn't find it because uit had never been issued.

For those of you who read Newton's follow-up Wednesday morning, I'm the "Mr. F" he references.

[Mental note: when you hear something unexpected, press it.]

Dow Jones & Murdoch

Since I last mentioned the subject, Rupert Murdoch has taken a big step further toward control of Dow Jones, and with that control of one of my favorite newspapers, the Wall Street Journal.

On July 17, the board of directors of Dow Jones voted to approve a merger at the amount Murdoch has been, $5 billion.

Much of that money would go to the members of the Bancroft family, but some of them still seem hesitant to take it. Perhaps because they feel that by holding out they can get more. Or, just perhaps, due to a sort of status anxiety. When they sell, they'll be just another wealthy family. Until they sell, they're the family with a controlling stake in Dow Jones, which sounds cooler.

Apparently, Burkle (a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton who appeared for a time willing to compete with Murdoch in an auction) has withdrawn from the picture. But Brad Greenspan still has aspirations.

Or, insead of aspirations, one might want to say "delusions of grandeur." There's little that indicates that he could pull off a coup here. Murdoch will get the prize, though he might yet have to increase the price a bit.

Recently, the WSJ has made cutbacks that I thought ill advised, even a curtailment in the literal size of the papers used for each page. They're in trouble, and it seems clear they're not in a position to remain independent.

Life is tough, and in an internet-dominated world, consolidation among the pulp-and-ink papers that remain is a fact. As the kids say: Deal.

Dow Jones

So what's going on with this Dow Jones story, anyway? I'm a faithful reader of the Wall Street Journal, which DJ publishes, and a variety of other publications (and blogs) that discuss financial news, but I'm having a tough time keeping up here.

Rupert Murdoch wants to buy the WSJ. A lot of people are unhappy with that, for a lot of different reasons. Its been two and a half months now since the original offer (May 1) and there's no signed-and-sealed deal yet, so the forces of resistance to the feared Fox-ification of the WSJ are evidently having some impact. A retardant but likely not a brake.

My guess, in other words, is that the deal will go through. One odd recent twist was the report four days ago that Brad Greenspan and Ron Burkle are posing as white knights, talking about putting together an alternative offer. Burkle, a California-based supermarket magnate with ties to the Clinton family, may be interested in foiling a new growth spurt for the Murdoch/Fox empire. Or he may see the Dow Jones as a prize for himself. Or he may just be toying with the idea because he's a megalomanaic. Who knows these days?

Here's something I wrote about the Burkle-Clinton connection more than a year ago, on another incarnation of this blog.

http://cfaille.blog-city.com/a_pat_on_the_back_to_mickey_kaus.htm

So ... what's my point? Personally, I long for the days (though perhaps I view them through rose-tinted glasses) when newspapers were the property of men with distinctive outsized personalities, men who had perhaps memories of childhood toys named Rosebud. I long for those days not because those men were perfect (surely not!), but because the products of colorless homogenized bureaucratic corporations seem necessarily ... what's the word I want here ... bland.

I don't like bland with my news. Let's have a few more Hearsts, Pulitzers, and Colonel McCormicks in the world. Women as well as men next time around of course. The Wall Street Journal's recent business problems, the problems that have led it into "play" in the first place, are a part of that blandness. They need a personality at the helm.

Murdoch isn't the solution. He's manuveuring behind Fox here. Greenspan and Burkle? Ah, we might have something. Odd though they may be, and unlikely though their success here surely is, I think I've acquired a rooting interest in this fight.