aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, November 16, 2007
Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer
Via Boing Boing, Daily Show writer explains writers’ strike—if digital content isn’t worth anything, how come Viacom is suing YouTube for $1 billion?
In this youtube, Daily Show writer Jason Rothman delivers an hilarious monologue about the Writers’ Guild strike against the studios, who claim that they can’t compensate writers for digital media because no one knows how much this stuff is worth. The clip delivers a Daily Show-style montage of coverage from the $1 billion+ Viacom lawsuit against YouTube, including clips of Viacom’s CEO talking about how digital content is worth tons of money and getting paid is the name of the game. The clip includes a nice guest appearance from Daily Show correspondents, too.
In a related irony:
The WGA strike has put an end to TV Guide’s plans to air its first-ever Online Video Awards show on its cable channel. But no fear, the results in 18 categories will still be announced online on November 26th.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The Older Boyfriend
WSJ Online on the Older Boyfriend episode:
One early-episode joke was a crash course in dealing with viewer feedback and balancing the show’s tone with acceptable taste. In “The Older Boyfriend” episode, Ms. Hasler says, “If you’re in junior high and you’re dating someone who’s out of high school, he’s a pedophile. And pedophilia’s a disease. Would you date someone with cancer? No.”
The remark drew a torrent of angry responses on the program’s Web site, and in emails. But Ms. Hasler remains unapologetic. “We have no intention of changing our style or changing the type of humor we use,” she says. “We’re going to make the same jokes that cause the same amount of controversy.”
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
No TV a trend? (continued)
Still watching to see if no TV’s a trend I note this observation from Cory Bergman:
Peter Wilson, who heads up Google’s 400-person engineering office in Seattle, just wrapped up speaking before a group of business leaders here. “I haven’t watched TV since ‘99,” he said. When asked about the last show he watched, Wilson added, “I remember Seinfeld was very popular.” If that wasn’t enough to confound the TV folks in the crowd, Wilson went on to explain how “most innovations and product definitions (at Google) come from the bottom up.” They hire smart engineers, empower them, provide a little structure around the edges, and let the chaotic process feed innovation. A little different than media companies, eh?
By the way, Seattle’s technology scene is rapidly expanding. Besides Google’s aggressive ramp-up in the area (they’ve built offices in two neighborhoods here), Yahoo is building an office complex for as many as 700 employees and Microsoft has kicked off a massive campus expansion with a potential capacity for 12,000 new employees. Whew.
Seattle, here I come! Er, well, maybe one day…
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Russert is Bad for America
Angry Bear says, “Fire Tim Russert. Fire him now.”
Would that it were possible. No way until the TV era comes to a close. I’m hoping Bill Gates is right and it’s closer than we think.
In the meanwhile the Bear’s comment comes in agreement with Matthew Yglesias’ journalism as sadism observations:
The crux of the matter is this reputation for being a “tough questioner” and the notion that Russert’s brand of toughness is worthy of emulation. And it’s true that Russert is a tough questioner. Watch any Russert-moderated debate or a typical candidate appearance on Meet The Press and you’ll see that he goes way out of the way to put the politician in a tough corner—he’ll ask about some unimportant issue that’s politically awkward, he’ll drag up a quote from five years ago to try to trip you up, he’ll ask about stuff your husband said, he’ll harp on whatever recent story has most damaged your candidacy—he’s tough.
But while I wouldn’t want to say that “tough questioning” is a bad thing, making toughness the goal is perverse. The goal should be to inform the audience… Russert doesn’t care—at all—about whether or not his actions inform the American electorate. Rather, he cares about creating a “news-making” event—likely something embarrassing for the politician—and about burnishing his reputation for toughness. He attracts a circle of admirers who share his perverse and unethical lack of concern for whether or not his work helps produce an informed public, gobs of less-prominent television journalists seek to emulate his lack of concern with informing the public, print journalists eagerly court opportunities to appear on the non-informative shows hosted by Russert and his emulators, and down the rabbit hole we go.
I’ll just add two things. First, this is not a partisan issue. The gotcha routine, no matter who it comes from, is bad for everyone, both Republicans and Democrats. Second, Russert’s schtick perpetuates the idea that the worst possible sin in a politician is displaying even a hint of inconsistency. But you know what? It turns out there are worse things. Obviously politicians should be held accountable for their words, but Russert and his colleagues ought to focus a little more on what’s really important and a little less on what somebody said in 1998.
NOTE: The title of my post recalls Jon Stewart’s 2004 Crossfire appearance which came just 10 weeks before that show was canceled. We can only wish...
Friday, November 09, 2007
Redstone: ‘If Content Is King, Copyright Is Its Castle’
It’s a fun quote:
He may look his age when he’s not speaking, but when Sumner Redstone, the 84-year-old chairman of Viacom and CBS, starts talking about the shifting media landscape, you forget he was born when radio was a novelty.
Making the keynote speech at Dow Jones and Nielsen’s Media and Money conference in New York on Thursday, he dug at Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), championed the accomplishments of the media properties he owns and offered a vigorous defense of copyright. “If content is king, copyright is its castle,’’ he said. “Copyright compels creativity, it furnishes the incentive to innovate. If you limit the protection of copyright, you stifle the expression of self.”
I doubt anyone reminded the old man of how few kings in castles we have left today. Or how little of the globe they rule.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Rosie a no go
msnbc
one hour
live
following keith olbermannwe were close to a deal
almost done
i let it slip in miami
causing panic on the studio endwell
what can u do2day there is no deal
poof
my career as a pundit is over
b4 it began
The LATimes has the newsiness details:
The main sticking point, according to a person familiar with the discussions, was compensation. O’Donnell apparently requested a salary more suitable for a broadcast network than a cable news operation.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Tucker trundles on
Talk yesterday that Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show “is in real danger of being canceled” was followed quickly today by word from Big Head DC “that someone within MSNBC who doesn’t like Carlson floated the inaccurate rumors.”
Drat! 
Meanwhile on Monday he had Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal on the show. Jessica notices he sounds a lot like the anti-suffragists of old:
After Smeal remarked that we should be embarrassed that the U.S. is so far behind in terms of representation of women in politics, Carlson replied, “I’m actually not embarrassed by it at all.” He continued, and here’s the doozy, “I don’t know why that’s embarrassing. You could make the counter case that most women are so sensible, they don’t want to get involved in something as stupid as politics. ...They’ve got real things to do.” You know, like cook his dinner.
What’s hilarious is that this sentiment is actually very similar to the anti-suffragist arguments from back in the day: that women shouldn’t want to get involved in politics--they’re too good for it! There’s the famous quote, for example, from Rep. Thomas Girling who said that “women shouldn’t be dragged into the dirty pool of politics.”
Those were the good old days, right Tucker?
He’s earned his long slow ratings decline to oblivion.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Cannibalizing conservative books
Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.
In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”
Kevin Drum asks, “if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?”
MSNBC heading left?
From the media page of the NYTimes:
Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.
Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.
Via The Political Environment, “And if the moves include dumping Tucker Carlson - - great. He can move over to Fox where he belongs.”
There’s reason for optimism:
But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk - Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 - in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Obama on SNL: smart or not?
Conventional wisdom suggests it was a smart move.
But earlier in the week when he was dancing with Ellen I quoted Mark Halperin from a September speech at the University of Texas at Austin.
There, commenting on the Oprah factor, he said that Obama’s got plenty of celebrity cred; he need no more. What he needs is to be seen as substantive, a heavy-weight ready to step into the role of president right away. Oprah, and SNL, won’t help that:
I think in an odd way she’s not good for him, she may even be bad for him because she’s a pop cultural figure. Any coverage of Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey is going to be about celebrity and electability and treating him like a member of the book club. That is not his problem. He’s exciting and he’s a celebrity… She undermines what I think his problem is. He would be better off, I think, being endorsed by retired generals than by Oprah Winfrey.
Russert wrong on Clinton’s 2012 archives release letter
This one will probably go back and forth a time or two but I’m taking Clinton’s side over Russert’s:
Hillary Rodham Clinton was quizzed during this week’s Democratic presidential debate as to why correspondence between her and her husband from their White House years remained bottled up at the National Archives. Barack Obama said that was a problem for her as a candidate after “we have just gone through one of the most secretive administrations in our history.”
One issue is whether Bill Clinton had sent a letter to the Archives asking that the communications not be released until 2012, and whether Hillary Clinton would lift any ban, a question raised by debate moderator Tim Russert. [transcript]
“She was incidental to the letter, it was done five years ago, it was a letter to speed up presidential releases, not to slow them down,” the former president told reporters Friday. “And she didn’t even, didn’t know what he was talking about. And now that I’ve described to you what the letter said, you can readily understand why she didn’t know what he was talking about.”
Russert’s question “was breathtakingly misleading,” Bill Clinton said. [...]
Clinton said that under the presidential documents law, he is not required to release any material until 2012.
Via Steve Benen, “Let this be a reminder to all of us - Russert’s quest for “gotchas” is so great, his questions are often wrong.”
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Toodleloo Tucker? (update)
Nursing my grudge (I still want another lie detector test), I’ll be glad if the rumors of Tucker’s MSNBC cancellation come true. It looks like maybe he’s helped that along.
...as he was signing off, MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson closed by saying, “That does it for us. Thank you for watching as always, we mean that sincerely to all eight of you. We’ll be back Monday. Up next, “Hardball” with Chris Matthews. Have a great weekend.”
A TVNewser tipster tells us “MSNBC management [is] infuriated” at Tucker’s flippant sign-off.
And Tucker underestimates his viewership by a factor of 10,000. His 10-day average in the A25-54 demo is 80,000. He finished in third on seven of those days, and fourth, behind Headline News, on three days.
Friday, November 02, 2007
On Gore inventing the Internet
CNet’s Charles Cooper rates Al Gore’s tech cred much higher than many of his noisy readers. I’m with Chris!
Along the way he quotes Vanity Fair on Gore’s invention of the Internet:
On March 9, 1999, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer conducted an interview with Gore shortly before he officially announced his candidacy. In answer to a question about why Democrats should support him, Gore spoke about his record. “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative"—politico-speak for leadership—"in creating the Internet,” he said, before going on to describe other accomplishments. It was true. In the 1970s, the Internet was a limited tool used by the Pentagon and universities for research. As a senator in the 80s, Gore sponsored two bills that turned this government program into an “information superhighway,” a term Gore popularized, and made it accessible to all. Vinton Cerf, often called the father of the Internet, has claimed that the Internet would not be where it was without Gore’s leadership on the issue. Even former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich has said that “Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.”
The press didn’t object to Gore’s statement until Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey led the charge, saying, “If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system.” Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner released a statement with the headline, delusions of grandeur: vice president gore takes credit for creating the internet. CNN’s Lou Dobbs was soon calling Gore’s remark “a case study … in delusions of grandeur.” A few days later the word “invented” entered the narrative. On March 15, a USA Today headline about Gore read, inventing the internet; March 16 on Hardball, Chris Matthews derided Gore for his claim that he “invented the Internet.” Soon the distorted assertion was in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and on the A.P. wire service. By early June, the word “invented” was actually being put in quotation marks, as though that were Gore’s word of choice. Here’s how Mimi Hall put it in USA Today: “A couple of Gore gaffes, including his assertion that he ‘invented’ the Internet, didn’t help.” And Newsday’s Elaine Povich ridiculed “Gore’s widely mocked assertion that he ‘invented’ the Internet.” (Thanks to the Web site the Daily Howler, the creation of Bob Somerby, a college roommate of Gore’s, we have a chronicle of how the Internet story spiraled out of control.)
Belatedly attempting to defuse the situation, Gore joked about it on Imus in the Morning, saying that he “was up late the night before … inventing the camcorder.” But it was too late—the damage had been done.
Remember how Al and Tipper were the models for the Love Story movie couple after the jump.
Read the rest of "On Gore inventing the Internet" in the extended entry.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Cheney news management skills (reprise)
In honor of today’s incident, a rerun. I wonder will he do better this time...
Dan Bartlett is on the lecture circuit telling insider’s stories about Vice President Dick Cheney:
There was, for instance, the Cheney hunting incident in south Texas, when he accidentally blasted a buddy in the face with birdshot. Years before, Bartlett had faced another bad-news hunting incident when Gov. George W. Bush was photographed shooting a bird, which upon closer examination by the photographer, turned out to be a protected species.
As soon as he got that news, Bartlett sprang into action, and by the time newspaper presses ran that night with the photo, the incident had already been officially reported to state authorities, a fine was paid and Bush had issued an apology. The result: a one-day story that you, in fact, probably never heard before reading this.
The way Bartlett describes the Cheney incident, it took forever to reach anyone with Cheney, and the White House aide discovered to his horror that the hunting party had already been strategizing for 24 hours. They planned to give the story to a Corpus Christi reporter, except that, it being the weekend, no one could find him.
Bartlett finally reached the vice president and urgently presented another option: getting him on the phone with a national press pool to explain the entire incident in his own words ASAP. There was dead silence. Then, the vice president intoned he would handle it his way. Which Cheney did.
And, not coincidentally, his hunting story is still the subject of talk show jokes.
Absinthetinence
Colbert last night on the comeback of absinthe:
“I, state your name, do hereby pledge to practice absinth-tinence by remaining absinth-tinent from absinthe… since absinthe incidents in many instances induce incipient synesthetic inspiration and sinister synthetic insistence on sin, I sincerely insist I will be absent from instances of absinthe ingestion this instant.”
Monday, October 29, 2007
The great hoary myth of arson
You’ll remember that last week California officials said at least one fire was arson and a $70,000 reward was offered to find the arsonist.
Funny, we always hear about arsonists - this time around we even hear about al Qaeda - but never that fires are started by downed power lines. Makes you wonder if downed power lines just don’t make as interesting a television news story.
Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear:
Certainly there, you know, are arsonists, and anybody who sets a fire with the deliberate goal of killing people and destroying their homes should be in super-max in Pelican Bay.
But this is one of the great hoary myths of the American West. During the First World War, of course, you know, there were German arsonists everywhere; during the Second World War, the Japanese. And my fear today, because there’s an FBI arson investigation going on, is we’re going to find some convenient link to the war on terrorism or to the immigration issue.
What fire scientists will tell you is that the biggest single cause of big fires like this is probably power lines blowing down, as they always do, during big Santa Ana winds. And even if all the arsonists could be identified genetically and locked up, it probably wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the fire pattern.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Science news devolved into commercial puff nonsense
The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.
The “scientist” is a political scientist and the debunking is quite complete, but it’s the coda that caught my attention:
More and more, empty “science” stories are being generated by public relations companies, who team up with academics, and commission some spurious piece of “research” that will be attractive to the media, where the company is name-checked. The classic examples are the “equations for” stories. None of Dr Curry’s doubtless excellent scholarly work in political theory has ever generated media coverage like his silly futuristic essay. I spoke to friends on other newspapers (the Guardian didn’t cover the story, mercifully) who told me they had stand up rows with news desks, explaining that this was not a science news story. But the selective pressure on national newspapers is for journalists who compliantly write up this kind of commercial puff nonsense as “science news"ÂÂ�, while religious fundamentalism of all varieties is conquering the world. Bravo!
Via Boing Boing.
Colbert campaigns in South Carolina
COLUMBIA, South Carolina (CNN) - Comedian Stephen Colbert brought his mock presidential campaign to the capital of South Carolina Sunday, where he was declared “favorite son” by the mayor of Columbia and given the key to the city.
Colbert, a native of Charleston, told the raucous crowd of several hundred gathered on the University of South Carolina campus that, “I love South Carolina almost as much as South Carolina loves me.” [...]
Mayor Bob Coble also declared October 28th “Stephen Colbert Day.” Coble has endorsed another South Carolina native for President, the Democratic former Sen. John Edwards.
Asked about this apparent conflict, the Edwards campaign said that until Colbert wins the primary like Edwards did in 2004, he cannot claim to be a favorite son.
Edwards spokesperson Teresa Wells also ribbed Colbert for his ties to the snack food industry. Colbert has said his campaign will be sponsored by Doritos.
“What is more troubling than his quest for a status his own mother won’t grant him (favorite son) are his ties to the salty food industry,” Wells said. “As the candidate of Doritos, his hands are stained by corporate corruption and nacho cheese. John Edwards has never taken a dime from taco chip lobbyists and America deserves a President who isn’t in the pocket of the snack food special interests.”
Joshua Green gives a Colbert candidacy some serious consideration. The Colbert fan group on Facebook continues to soar like an eagle. (I was the 1,144,713th to join - it was created by a 16-year-old high school student; way to go Raj!)
A Rasmussen poll found:
In the match-up with Giuliani and Clinton, Colbert draws 28% of likely voters aged 18-29. He draws 31% of that cohort when his foes are Thompson and Clinton. In both match-ups, Colbert has more support with young voters than the GOP candidate.
Editor and Publisher comments, “If he keeps gaining over 10% a week, Colbert should be leading the field before November is out. “
So how about election law? Slate’s Explainer says Stephen’s breaking the law:
Yes. The Federal Election Commission prohibits corporations from making “any contribution or expenditure in connection with a federal election.” A “contribution” includes “anything of value,” including airtime. Thus each time Colbert promotes his candidacy on The Colbert Report, he’ll be accepting an illegal “in kind” contribution from Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom. The FEC does exempt news programs (including satires like the Report) from the “in kind” airtime ban, but not if a political party, political committee, or candidate (like Colbert) controls the show’s content.
Adam B at DailyKos much more, “Oh, sure, you thought it was all cute and funny that Stephen Colbert is planning a bid for the 2008 presidential nomination of both parties (at least in South Carolina). Then they called in us lawyers, and thanks to us (well, thanks to the law, which we’re trying to explain) it’s a mess.”
Comedy Central has lawyers looking into it too.
Oh, and, The Best of the Colbert Report is out on DVD. Here’s a review.
RELATED: The Washington Monthly’s Paul Glastris was on the show the night before the announcement. Here’s his Colbert Report report.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Jena questions
His aren’t the same as mine. (A sampling here, here, here and here.)
The biggest one for me is #4, as everything I’ve read suggested the DA mishandled the situation and inflamed passions. I was previously aware of 1, 2, 3, 8, 10 & 11.
So far it has not fundamentally changed my take. The media behaves the way the media behaves - the blogosphere, too - and eye-witness testimony is known to be prone to errors. We’re not ever going to know the whole truth.
I’ll say more later.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Mike Rogers on how Matt Lauer blew the interview
Via Pam Spaulding, “They cover Craig’s belief that he is not gay, because he associates “gay” not with the sex, but his perception of the “lifestyle”—meaning out of the closet in your everyday life. So it’s plausible deniability in Craig’s mind that he’s not living the lifestyle he disapproves of, he just has gay sex...”
LATER: Crooks and Liars has Pat Buchanan on the same show discussing whether or not Larry Craig should go.
Gays in bathrooms? Not so many. (Reprise)
Stephen H. Miller quotes Matt:
On Tuesday, NBC’s Matt Lauer, interviewing Sen. Larry Craig, said (as I took it down): "the report says that you followed a well known pattern of behavior by members of the gay community seeking sex in restrooms." Hmmm, I thought GLAAD had educated these guys?
Setting aside the snark, I use the occasion to reprise an old post…
Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate, quotes Laud Humphreys 1970 dissertation, Tea Room Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (available in its entirety through Google Book Search):
[Disgraced Senator Larry] Craig leaves as his political legacy the telling phrase “wide stance,” which may or may not join “big tent” and “broad church” as an attempt to make the Republican Party seem more “inclusive” than it really is.
But there’s actually a chance-a 38 percent chance, to be more precise-that the senator can cop a plea on the charge of hypocrisy. In his study of men who frequent public restrooms in search of sex, Laud Humphreys discovered that 54 percent were married and living with their wives, 38 percent did not consider themselves homosexual or bisexual, and only 14 percent identified themselves as openly gay. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Personal Places, a doctoral thesis which was published in 1970, detailed exactly the pattern-of foot-tapping in code, hand-gestures, and other tactics-which has lately been garishly publicized at a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport men’s room. The word tearoom seems to have become archaic, but in all other respects the fidelity to tradition is impressive.
The men interviewed by Humphreys wanted what many men want: a sexual encounter that was quick and easy and didn’t involve any wining and dining. Some of the heterosexuals among them had also evolved a tactic for dealing with the cognitive dissonance that was involved. They compensated for their conduct by adopting extreme conservative postures in public. Humphreys, a former Episcopalian priest, came up with the phrase “breastplate of righteousness” to describe this mixture of repression and denial. So, it is quite thinkable that when Sen. Craig claims not to be gay, he is telling what he honestly believes to be the truth.
I am interested to see that the number of men having sex in bathrooms who don’t identify as straight has apparently gone up! Major Darryl Tolleson of the Atlanta Police Department:
The majority of these men, they have families...You would think that it would be a gay issue but overhwhelmingly more and more, we’re seeing that these are people with families.
American University anthropology Professor William Leap has spent more than a decade researching male sex in public places. In 1999, he edited an academic compilation called Public Sex/Gay Space. His conclusion is that up to half of the men who seek this kind of sex are not gay.
If the goal is to get men out of bathrooms, it seems that reducing stigma - say by legalizing gay marriage - is the way to go. But then those straight-identified men would have to forgo their thrill:
In my youth, I was a friend of a man named Tom Driberg, a British politician who set the bar very high in these matters… What Driberg told me was this. The thrills were twofold. First came the exhilaration of danger: the permanent risk of being caught and exposed. Second was the sense of superiority that a double life could give. What bliss it was to enter the House of Commons, bow to the speaker, and take your seat amid the trappings of lawmaking, having five minutes earlier fellated a guardsman (and on one unforgettable occasion, a policeman) in the crapper in St. James’ Park. Assuming the story about the men’s room in Union Station to be true, Sen. Craig could have gone straight from that encounter to the Senate floor in about the same amount of time.
RELATED: New York Magazine’s Married Man Seeks Same for Discreet Play:
He has a loving wife, a small child-and sex with men on the side. How the Internet has made it easier than ever to lead a detection-proof double life.
He hooks up using Craigslist.
Get real people!!! These are not gay problems. These are problems caused by straights in denial and enabled by bad public policy that wastes resources on cops sitting in mens rooms when they might better be somewhere else!
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Um: how to use it less
Michael Erard wrote the book; on On The Media last week he tells the secret:
BOB GARFIELD: What about the public’s patience for vagaries of spoken language? Is there, in fact, an ebb and flow to the way we all handle other people’s speech errors?
MICHAEL ERARD: We typically don’t hear most of the “uhsâ€Â� or the “ums” that other people say. There was one interesting study that was done where people are given a speech to listen to and about half of them, natively, listen to the content, and about half of them, natively, without any instruction, listen to the style.
When the content, for whatever reason, becomes extremely boring, people who listen for content start listening for style, and that’s when they start to notice the “uhs” and the “ums.” So when people say to me, how do I reduce the “uhsâ€Â� and “ums,” I say, that’s easy; just be more interesting.
I think this is important, too… if the media set the standard, are they doing us a favor by cleaning up how we they speak?
BOB GARFIELD: Let me ask you one more thing. I myself can barely utter an English sentence without making some sort of egregious error right in the middle of it. We naturally edit all of this stuff out of the show, or most of it. Are, are we doing our listeners a service by editing out my mistakes, and yours as well, by the way?
MICHAEL ERARD: I think you might be doing them a disservice. We live in a media environment that is very glib, and the glib has become praised over what is substantial. You know, in journalism there’s a sort of understanding that you won’t make someone sound more stupid or low class or uneducated than they actually are.
Quoting verbatim can be used to smear someone. But I think there’s also a way to use it in a way that gives you a more authentic sense of who the person is.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Cheney news management skills
Dan Bartlett is on the lecture circuit telling insider’s stories about Vice President Dick Cheney:
There was, for instance, the Cheney hunting incident in south Texas, when he accidentally blasted a buddy in the face with birdshot. Years before, Bartlett had faced another bad-news hunting incident when Gov. George W. Bush was photographed shooting a bird, which upon closer examination by the photographer, turned out to be a protected species.
As soon as he got that news, Bartlett sprang into action, and by the time newspaper presses ran that night with the photo, the incident had already been officially reported to state authorities, a fine was paid and Bush had issued an apology. The result: a one-day story that you, in fact, probably never heard before reading this.
The way Bartlett describes the Cheney incident, it took forever to reach anyone with Cheney, and the White House aide discovered to his horror that the hunting party had already been strategizing for 24 hours. They planned to give the story to a Corpus Christi reporter, except that, it being the weekend, no one could find him.
Bartlett finally reached the vice president and urgently presented another option: getting him on the phone with a national press pool to explain the entire incident in his own words ASAP. There was dead silence. Then, the vice president intoned he would handle it his way. Which Cheney did.
And, not coincidentally, his hunting story is still the subject of talk show jokes.
Via Kevin Drum, “Ladies and gentlemen, the vice president of the United States.”
RELATED: I thought Lynne Cheney did a good job on The Daily Show this week.
Yes, yes, yes she’s an odious dragon lady who proudly spouted the Republican talking point that we haven’t been attacked since 9/11 (did Dick come up with that one, too? I wish more “journalists” would call all of them on it when they use that bogus argument). And yes she said that the Spanish and English bombings and all the bombs in Iraq were not “ about American interests.”
Boo to all that.
What I liked was that she faced the gay question much better, if not perfectly, than I’ve seen before. If she keeps saying that around, that’s good. It’s progress. And movement. Not enough, but progress.
And she brought a pie.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Damned when she do; damned when she don’t.
CBS News reports that:
...the former first lady chuckled...but she never unleashed the highly-scrutinized, overly-analyzed belly laugh known as “the cackle” that has been the focus of national media over the past few weeks. Which raises the question: Has the tightly-managed Clinton campaign put the kibosh on the cackle?
Greg Sargent calls out the anti-Hillary inanity:
I really don’t care if this is meant as a joke. It’s self-parody. We’ve come full circle: Damned if you do cackle; damned if you don’t.
Do Hillary’s advisers really tell her how and when to laugh? Here’s another explanation: Sometimes people laugh. Sometimes they don’t. It generally turns on whether they think something is funny or not or on what kind of mood they’re in. Could that possibly be what happened here, too?
Naah. Impossible.
In related news, Rudy Giuliani delivered a speech yesterday in which he didn’t answer his cell phone; Mitt Romney answered questions without abandoning a position he held five minutes prior; John McCain hosted a town-hall forum in which he did not refer to anyone as a “little jerk”; and Fred Thompson went the whole day without responding to a reporter’s question with, “I don’t know anything about that.”
Maybe through all of this we’ll learn that, yes, she has a sense of humor! Look what Hendrik Hertzberg dug up from Jackie O:
The just published “Journals: 1952-2000” of the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., may shed some light on the question of whether Hillary Clinton is the sort of person who is capable of genuine laughter and, by extension, of the humanness that laughter is taken to signify. With reservations, Schlesinger liked the Clintons. But you don’t have to take his word for it; you can take Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s. Schlesinger’s entry for February 4, 1993:
Last night we dined at the [McGeorge] Bundys’. Jackie was also there. I asked her about Hillary Clinton. She could not have been more enthusiastic—so intelligent, so pretty, so cozy, what a good sense of humor. This last item surprised me. I was ready to concede the first two adjectives and even the third, but I supposed her to be somewhat on the stern and humorless side.In later entries, Schlesinger writes of Hillary’s “charm and humor” and her “infectious joie de vivre.”
RELATED: Digby has a theory - not on the laugh, but on the gibberish the reports about it represent:
Bushian elementary school level argumentation has been around for some time on the right, but now it’s becoming common in the media as well… [U]nless the media do more than act as theater critics (he looked and sounded presidential!) and actually address the substance of what these people are saying, we could have another president whose communication style is so deliberately simple minded and opaque that we will spend the next four years trying to read between the lines to figure out what is really going on. (Come to think of it, that’s undoubtedly one reason they do it...)
Thursday, October 11, 2007
White media keeps Sharpton & Jackson powerful
Dayo Olopade writing in TNR says the peculiar cult of the black political celebrity--which may have outlived its usefulness to black America--remains weirdly potent among the white-dominated media:
At the September rally in Jena, Sharpton and his counterpart, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, were the marquee speakers, calling for the dismissal of all charges and railing against the prison “industry”. “Mychal Bell, we know you hear us. Hang on a little while longer,” Jackson thundered. But the real story was the crowd, assembled by a flood of black activism on the Internet and on black talk radio. Black blogs like AfroSpear, Mirror On America and Prometheus 6 have written reliably on the story for months. As a result, black churches, historically black colleges and universities, and student groups of all stripes were protesting the Jena case as early as March. This brand of organizing was faster to focus on Jena, and its effectiveness far outstripped that of established groups like the NAACP, Sharpton’s National Action Network, and Jackson’s Rainbow/P.U.S.H. Coalition. The Color of Change, an Internet advocacy group sprung from MoveOn in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, generated an online petition to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco that boasts over 300,000 signatures. In fact, Sharpton admitted to the Chicago Tribune last month that his own knowledge about Jena had come from the black netroots.
While the black community was galvanized to action through a multiplicity of new-media sources, Sharpton and Jackson retained their monopoly on major-media attention. The black blogosphere had been shouting about Jena for months, but the case gained traditional media momentum only after the anointed spokesmen stepped in. Sharpton first visited Jena in the beginning of August, turning the trickle of news on the incident into a firehose stream. Before then, only a spoonful of national outlets ran pieces on Jena. Since then, celebrities have jumped onboard the cause; and statements from Democratic presidential hopefuls followed--first from Barack Obama, then Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. The GOP had been reliably mute on the case, until President Bush curtly told reporters last month, “the events in Louisiana have saddened me.” And after ten months of dawdling, the swelling noise on Jena forced local District Attorney Reed Walters to account for his actions and, at the end of September, drop his appeal to the state supreme court and release Bell on bail.
Despite the effective e-organizing among blacks, it will be a long haul before the Internet generation makes Sharpton and Jackson’s methods totally obsolete. These famous figures present a unique connection to systems of publicity and power. Their loud harangues brought figures like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and President Bush into the debate, and brought mainstream media outlets to dutiful--if peripatetic--attention. During a recent O’Reilly Factor appearance, for example, Sharpton’s rehearsed statements about Jena quickly segued into chatty jibes about the many dinners he and O’Reilly have shared. While Jackson performed better the following night on O’Reilly, this piecemeal statesmanship proved the only means for a story like Jena to enter the national conversation. White liberals gasp at what seems like atavism when such standoffs spotlight racial tension in America--yet have made these elder statesmen the only canaries in the mine.
