Category: Blog Post

If you missed us on MPR this morning, you could probably catch us in their audio archives.

One thing we wanted to talk about, when we were on the topic of media credibility, was this: This morning, the Strib broke the news early that undercover officer Gerald Vick was legally drunk (well, he was loaded, actually) when he was murdered last week. Naturally, an undercover cop can’t sit around drinking O’Doul’s if he’s trying to establish credibility. The terrible irony here is that, as any beat cop will be glad to tell you, around 90 percent of the people they deal with on a regular basis as a part of doing their jobs have serious alcohol issues. The vast majority of street-level crimes are committed by people under the influence of one intoxicant or another.

But what we wanted to dwell on for a few moments was the almost certain backlash that will come at the Strib for publishing this nasty bit of posthumous dirt. Our point of view is that it is most certainly legitimate news, and touches on broader issues of interest to the general public. But it can’t make the Strib or its reporters look very good, aspersing the good name of an honored cop so immediately in the wake of Vick’s, er, wake.

And we are reminded, again, of Ombud Kate Parry’s somewhat pandering approach to the idea of better serving readers–that is, “building trust” among new readerships. The fact is that the truth is very frequently an unpopular commodity, and one of the reasons the public assumes journalists are unethical cretins, whereas the truth is just the opposite, generally speaking. We think reporting hard truths is valuable to the community–it’s what newspapers are supposed to do. But we wonder what Kate Parry will make of the inevitable flood of mail accusing the Strib of urinating on the grave of a public hero. Will she read this as successfully “building trust” and “servicing” the Strib’s beloved readership? We think this is what is normally referred to as a “good teaching moment,” and we’re sure she’ll rise to the occasion.

Tim McGuire, ever the genteel former editor of the Star Tribune, weighs in today from the chitlins circuit of academic punditry with yet another defense of the newspaper industry’s prospects for the future. (Yes, officially everyone now has had his or her say; no, newspapers will not die. They have survived TV, radio, telephones, palm pilots, fax machines, XY-Write, sliced bread, the internal combustion engine, homebrewing, and even the internet. We expect they’ll survive a while longer. For the record, we think Tim is basically right about one salient fact–newspapers still enjoy massive profit margins, and they should stop whining about doing what any other industry would do–reinvest some of that margin into evolving the product. Our approach would be to hire more and better reporters and expand the breadth and depth of–ready for this?–the reporting.) We only met McGuire once, and merely noticed that he is a snappy dresser. We also noticed that he spent much of his career trying to evolve the newspaper to his own somewhat quirky specss–if we recall correctly, wasn’t he the guy who reorganized the newsroom into “teams,” installed mood-enhancing medititative bubblers, and implemented a pro-active plan to stop using Native American names for professional sports teams? These sorts of “investments” in the future of newspapering seemed alike a good idea at the time, but most would say they are now safely obsoleted in the past.

If we needed more evidence that the religious right’s nincompoops are profoundly dangerous, here you go.

It seems they are right here in Minnesota, intimidating weak-kneed school administrators into preventing the introduction of the idea of evolution in Montecello.

St. Paul author Lisa Westberg Peters has written a book for children called “Our Family Tree” which explains evolution in a juvenile, yet scientific, sort of way. Although she was scheduled to speak at a Montecello elementary school about writing, rather than evolution, the school administrators asked her to make sure she stuck just to writing and leave off mention of evolution. When she refused, Peters’ visit to the school was cancelled.

Brad Sanderson, principal at the elementary school, was quoted in the Strib as saying, “It’s a cute book. There’s nothing wrong with it. We just don’t need that kind of debate.” Yup, the last thing we’d want in a school is a debate, especially when there’s religious clap trap to be crammed down the throats of our children.

Now, in fairness to Principal Skinner–I mean Sanderson–he’s probably afraid of the pitchfork and torch crowd that could undoubtedly be whipped up in Montecello if a public school were to actually teach science instead of dogma and were actually to stand up for the American values of free speech and enlightened education instead of the censorious crap dished out in the name of God.

In other religious news, as if the Catholics needed more problems, Pope Ratzinger has opened up a can of Inquisition whup-ass on the intellectual organ of the American church, the Jesuit magazine America. The editor of America, Father Thomas Reese, S.J. was fired on the orders of Ratzinger because the magazine provided a forum for discussion of church positions on controversial issues such as denying communion to John Kerry or use of condoms in AIDS-riddled Africa.

I was told recently by a man who knows that Ratzinger’s election was greeted with less than wild enthusiasm by the Benedictine monks at St. Johns. It must have been particulary galling to them when the head of the Inquisition took the name of the founder of their order–the order which over the centuries has taken primary responsibility for the preservation of western intellectual history.

Alongside this formidable Benedictine tradition stand the Jesuits, who are the church’s foremost educators and intellectuals today, and who run Boston College, Georgetown, Fordham, Creighton and many other first rate universities throughout America and the world. Both orders are steeped in their vows of obedience, but to the Benedictines and Jesuits I know (and I’ve known a lot of Jesuits in particular) that obedience usually takes the form of obedience to their own tradition of intellectual inquiry and open mindedness. It was a sad day for a lot of Catholics when Ratzinger was elected Pope. I’m afraid it will be even sadder for the many thoughful men of God whose intellectual lives will be proscribed by this maledictory Benedict.

John Tierney’s op-ed earlier this week suggested that news organizations are playing into the hands of terrorists by reporting, or at least overreporting and sensationalizing, their terrorist acts. We’ve been saying the same thing for months now. It’s not a comfortable thing to say—that too much information is a bad thing—but we must acknowledge that terror is the only weapon terrorists have, and the modern mass media is the only delivery vehicle they have, in their efforts to affect real change (or chaos).

More important, Tierney touches very briefly on the real problem with reporting these sorts of things. It is one thing to help cultivate the fear that is the goal of these murderers, it is another to help them in the process of recruiting even more to their ranks.

By way of example, Tierney mentions how Rudy Giuliani manipulated the press during his tenure as mayor—Giuliani ordered police officials to stop meeting news deadlines in press conferences and press releases. This had the palliative effect of helping New Yorkers believe their city was not quite as dangerous as the local news seemed to be portraying it every night. In some senses, one could argue that he was helping the public “get real” about the negligable odds of being victimized on the mean streets of Manhattan. Needless to say, New York actually became a safer place during that time, and crime decreased dramatically (or at least it was displaced to the borroughs—that’s the standard, mandatory line for liberal Rudy-hating city-dwellers, anyway).

This all connects opaquely but directly with Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” Recall that Gladwell discussed the “broken window” theory of crime under Giuliani (which has since been adapted in almost every major city in the nation); he also discussed suicide cults in Southeast Asia. Suicide, as extreme as it is, can be a fad just as virulent as Hushpuppies or Urban Vinyls.

The point is that media coverage of terrorist acts, particularly suicide bombings, helps sustain the cult of suicide among Islamic fundamentalists. One thing non-Islamic westerners cannot understand is this apparent erosion of the most fundamental human value we all assume is inherent to the species—the sanctity of human life itself, and the universal compulsion to protect our children. Islamic fundamentalists, with the help of modern media, have managed to break through that barrier, and their children are lining up to kill themselves (and anyone else they can get close to) in the service of God and dogma.

It is probably the most frightening development in the history of human consciousness, and the media is the machine that is planting its seeds.

In this populist age, it is always assumed that scientific polls of the public should automatically gainsay the wonks and policy-makers. The poll is the modern media’s Torah—the numbers are scripture, and everything else is commentary. The implication of today’s “Minnesota Poll” at the Star Tribune seems to be that, since most Minnesotans do not favor same-sex unions, those who do support them should stop trying to push them through.

That is an easy assumption to make, particularly if you feel strongly about representative government’s accountability to the majority public that elected it. It is a special trick, and a great public disservice, to constantly poll people in order to record their discomfort with homosexuality. We wonder how many polls in the antebellum South (hell, the New South) would have showed a clear majority’s discomfort with the idea of free slaves.

On the other hand, isn’t it interesting that no one around the Twin Cities dares to mention the words “stadium” and “referendum” in the same breath anymore? That’s because every poll that has ever been conducted suggests that a powerful majority of Minnesotans rejects the idea of a public contribution to a new professional sports stadium.

It is normally called leadership, and it is how positive social change takes place over time. Despite appearances, it’s not just for billionaires.