Reason To Believe

September 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Comedy, Entertainment, Humor, Internet, Lifestyle, Sports | Leave a Comment 

Dude Perfect is a collective of six roommates at Texas A+M who have developed what you might call a G-rated family-friendly frat boy version of Jackass.

In their expanding cottage industry, there are no visible tattoos, and nothing is stapled to anything else.  But they manage to retain  a sufficient quota of don’t-try-this-at-home stone craziness to keep the parents worried and the kids engaged.

The question on some of the more than 3 million minds that have viewed the group’s videos —including “the world’s longest basketball shot”—  is whether these dudes are, well, maybe just a tad too perfect.  And the dudes consider it the greatest compliment that their doings are so derring that people aren’t sure they can believe their own eyes.

Here’s the view from the third deck of Kyle Field at College Station:

And here’s the feat viewed from the field:

Based on their other videos, there’s no reason to believe that this one is doctored. (Nor, of course, is there any reason to believe that this one didn’t follow seventeen thousand four hundred and seventy-nine prior unsuccessful attempts at this particular stunt — and what difference would that make if this one is legit?)

The name derives from the moment when Sean, setting up the camera on the railing of Tyler’s backyard deck,  looked thorough the lens and saw his buddy in the center of the frame. “Dude perfect” was his response and the rest is history.

On their impressive website, they introduce themselves this way:

Ultimately, Dude Perfect is a group of college guys that follows Jesus. We didn’t plan on this type of interest in our videos and we’re incredibly grateful. We want to use this platform for something bigger than us.

Right now, that something bigger is the sponsorship of children in Africa through the organization Compassion International.

They started out betting lunches on trick shots in the backyard.  Eventually (“after quite a few free lunches went the bearded guy’s direction”) they decided to make a video and upload it to YouTube.  In the last several months, they’ve broken out with appearances on Good Morning, America (whose computer analysts couldn’t guarantee that the videos are unedited but couldn’t find any edits or figure out how any might have been made) and in Sports Illustrated.

Although they each have definite personalities that emerge in the videos, the ID caption on their website photo reads: “from left to right: this guy, that guy, the bearded one, the tall guy, the next tallest guy, the guy who looks just like the other guy.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Sleuths

July 10, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Internet, Iran | Leave a Comment 

The regime is catching on to social networking and their tactics aren’t pretty:

A scary anecdote from Iran. A trusted colleague – who is married to an Iranian-American and would thus prefer to stay anonymous – has told me of a very disturbing episode that happened to her friend, another Iranian-American, as she was flying to Iran last week. On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said “no”, the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.

This is very disturbing. For once, it means that the Iranian authorities are paying very close attention to what’s going on Facebook and Twitter (which, in my opinion, also explains why they decided not to take those web-sites down entirely – they are useful tools of intelligence gathering).

Second, it means, as far as authorities are concerned, our online and offline identities are closely tied and we have to be fully prepared to be quizzed about any online trace that we have left (I can easily see us being asked our Facebook and Twitter handles in immigration forms; one of the forms I regularly fill flying back to the US has recently added a field for email address).

Third, this reveals that some of the spontaneous online activism we witnessed in the last few weeks – with Americans re-tweeting the posts published by those in Tehran – may eventually have very dire consequences, as Iranians would need to explain how exactly they are connected to foreigners that follow them on Twitter (believe me, I’ve observed enough bureaucratic stupidity in Eastern Europe to know that even some of the officials who follow Twitter activity on a daily basis may not know how it works).

I am curious if there have been other reports of foreigners being asked about their social media activity on traveling to authoritarian states. Any ideas?

The Gray Folks At The Gray Lady

June 11, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Comedy, Internet, News media | Leave a Comment 

The poobahs at One Times Square were understandably wary when the Daily Show’s Jason Jones came a-calling.

But even taking that into account they seem every bit as bland, bleached, and beached, as their daily product.

Is The President Suddenly Too Uncool For School?

March 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, Internet, News media, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

A recently popular internet meme has been that President Obama has lost his oratorical mojo.  The formerly golden tongued candidate’s way with words has all of a sudden worn thin, and the fallout among his erstwhile admirers has been fierce.

After bubbling under for several days, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen finally moved it  mainstream last Thursday on Politico:

Of all the pitfalls Barack Obama might face in the presidency, here is one not many people predicted: He is struggling as a public communicator. 

The sluggish and unsteady response to the uproar over AIG bonuses highlights a larger problem of his White House: Obama’s surprisingly uneven campaign to educate people about the economic crisis and convince Washington and the broader public that he is in command of circumstances. 

It was brilliant communications skills that carried Obama to the presidency, with a national campaign built on the strength of his personal story and the clarity of his promise to transform politics. On the rare occasions when he was thrown on the defensive, he quickly turned problems into opportunities and regained control of his public image. 

What’s different now? The polished phrases and unflappable delivery haven’t gone away. His prime-time news conference and speech to Congress drew the usual praise. 

But the discipline and strategic focus of the campaign have yet to move into the White House. The story of the day often catches the president flat-footed or on the defensive — and regularly undercut by fellow Democrats. 

To Obama’s dismay, he is learning that successful presidential communications is only in part — often a fairly small part — about personal eloquence. It requires harnessing his words to a consistent strategy of public education. Obama needs lawmakers and voters alike to view the world through his prism, and to accept his analysis of what’s wrong and his priorities about how to make it right.

Then over the weekend, two things happened that suddenly moved this story even further front and center.  

On Saturday, the President stiffed the Washington journalistic establishment by choosing to spend the weekend at Camp David rather than attending the Gridiron Dinner.  

Hell hath no fury like a journo scorned.  So maybe it really was a big mistake to sit out this year’s dinner and stand up  all those Powers That Be.  They may have laughed when Governor Schwarzenegger tweaked them about it, but it was gallows humor.  As Dan Zak noted in his excellent article in today’s WaPo:

By 9:30 Schwarzenegger is at the podium, resurrecting the crowd with his speech. “You did such lovely work for [Obama],” he tells the media elite. “You put your lives on hold to put him in the White House. Now you get all dressed up, the champagne’s on ice, and you find out he’s just not that into you.”  

And then, on Sunday night, the President laughed on 60 Minutes.  ”Garbo Talks” generated no more headlines than “Obama Laughs.”  

This weekend double whammy moved the “loss of mojo” meme to critical mass.  By Monday morning, the Drudge Report had the President on the ropes with Steve Kroft asking him if he was “punch drunk.”   Suddenly the story had traction and was growing legs.

Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and most recently the biographer of Rupert Murdoch, is a man who knows his way around the news and around the internet.  Now he finds Mr. Obama deficient in the very qualities that got him elected and makes a truly invidious comparison: “Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter.”

 On his newser.com website, under the headline “Barack Obama Is A Terrible Bore,” Wolff writes:

The guy just doesn’t know what to say. He can’t connect. Emotions are here, he’s over there. He can’t get the words to match the situation.

This began, I’d argue, from the first moment. He punted on the inaugural. Everybody ran around like crazy trying to praise it because if Barack Obama couldn’t give a speech then what?

But now, at week 11, we’re face-to-face with the reality, the man can’t talk worth a damn. 

You can see the fundamental mistake he’s making. Having been so successfully elected, he’s acting like people actually want to hear what he thinks. He’s the great earnest bore at the dinner party. Instead of singing for his supper, he’s just talking—and going on at length. The real job of making people part of the story you’re telling, of having them hang on your every word, of getting the tone and detail right, the hard job of holding a conversation, he ain’t doing.

He’s cold; he’s prickly; he’s uncomfortable; he’s not funny; and he’s getting awfully tedious. 

He thinks it’s all about him. That we want him for himself—that he doesn’t have to seduce, charm, surprise, show some skin.

So Jimmy.

It’s instructive and humorous to remember that Carter ran a brilliant campaign that succeeded largely because his voice was new. Simple, direct, basic, human. And then, of course, he turned into a sad-sack twit.

Pat Oliphant’s recent cartoon captures the apparently widespread —and growing— disenchanted with President Obama’s hitherto admired oratorical abilities.

Personally, I’m not buying it.  Partly because the evidence simply isn’t there — the President has carried himself so well so far.  And partly because all these smart and savvy people couldn’t really be so disillusioned so soon even if he had been doing very badly and making all kinds of mistakes.  The man is only three months and five days into his first term, for heaven’s sake.

I think Gawker is on to something in its analysis of this story which has, so far, mainly served to fill space by generating stories about itself.

Politico is in the business of writing stories that Matt Drudge “NEEDS and WANTS” and that their reporters’ mothers would read. Today they turned a couple of chuckles on 60 Minutes into a “developing…” story.

Politico’s stated aim is to “explain how Washington really works.” This is how Washington really works: Find something, anything, that can be packaged into fodder to serve the interests of somebody with a megaphone. Obama just laughed on TV! The laughter, on its own terms, wouldn’t really cut it with Drudge or the evening cable news chatter.

So Obama didn’t just laugh: He laughed in a way that could be seen as amplifying the sense that he is cool and detached. Which fits into a narrative! That Matt Drudge wants to advance! And which Politico has been gathering string on going back to the campaign! And also which, because Matt Drudge wants to advance it, cable new producers will create segments about tonight. After the 2010 mid-term elections, exit pollsters will ask voters whether Obama is too cool and detached, and this is why.

Obama laughed a couple times last night in Steve Kroft’s interview, prompting Kroft to ask the president if he is “punch drunk.” Drudge promoted the exchange late last night, but he didn’t point readers to the 60 Minutes web site, where readers could find an account of the interview and watch the actual video. He linked to a Politico story warning that the “awkward laughter highlighted an issue Obama has faced dating back to the campaign, a sense that he sometimes is too ‘cool’ and detached to fully grasp the public anxiety over mounting job losses and economic worries.”

Coolness and detachment are a potentially serious political problem for Obama, according to Politico: In January they reported that “the cool and detached Obama enters the White House at a time of considerable economic anxiety,” and back during the campaign they noted that he was “known for a cool and occasionally detached delivery.”

None of this has anything even remotely to do with what, if anything, it means that Obama laughed during his 60 Minutes interview. Obama himself chalked it up to gallows humor. It’s about finding a way to feed a huge constituency of media franchises who—either because they have partisan agendas or because they desperately need things to talk about on TV—are looking for prepackaged narratives that will “pop.” Politico is basically doing the same thing that writers for Ellen do—scanning headlines for stories that DeGeneres can riff on. It’s just that their doing it for Drudge and Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly and Wolf Blitzer, and they’re doing it for free.

Which is why you get stories about Barack Obama’s secret code language for black people, his crippling teleprompter addiction, his barely restrained rage for Politico reporters who ask him questions during a friendly visit to the White House press corps’ offices, and how he’s in thrall to fat-cat academics. Politico’s crack political team simply has their antennae set to “things Drudge could conceivably link to” and they keep coming up with hits. Good for them. We all need hits these days.

John McCain All Atwitter

March 10, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Internet, Technology | Leave a Comment 

On today’s Daily Beast, Ana Marie Cox contemplates perhaps Twitter’s most unlikely early adaptor: John McCain.  

How did the notoriously untech Senior Senator sign on to this cutting edge capability that has become so popular with the young uns?  Well, his communications staff set it up for him. But he has taken to it with all the energy and enthusiasm of the highly-motivated convert — posting 173 times in the less than two months since his account was established).

McCain’s ready adoption of Twitter seems incongruous only if you don’t know McCain. He has an omnivorous and hyper intellect, and a quick wit—and is easily bored. During the campaign, critics compared McCain’s off-line life unfavorably with the email-addicted Obama, but frankly, I wonder if email is too slow for him.

I did ask a staffer why the campaign didn’t take advantage of McCain’s apparent ease with rapid-fire texting during the campaign. Wouldn’t it have helped counter the allegation that he was old and out of touch? “Think of the difference it might have made,” I said. The staffer replied quickly and sourly: “No, it wouldn’t have made a difference at all.”

It’s true that McCain’s adventures on Twitter haven’t changed my own opinion of him. Covering his presidential bid, I found him to be tough, sarcastic, funny, opinionated, impatient, and righteous. Twitter’s 140-character format exacerbates of all those traits. His asides about those “porky” projects have the flavor of someone mouthing off in class: “#6. $100,000 for the regional robotics training center in Union, SC—Does R2D2 or CP30 know about this?” and “#8. $200,000 ‘tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past’ REALLY?”

Perhaps it’s that tone of wise-assery that’s made McCain’s pork tweets such catnip to liberal bloggers (and liberal Tweeters), who have made a cottage industry of defending many of the projects McCain mocks. They remind him that “pig odor research” is a real need in Iowa and contend that even the Kansas City Jazz Museum would create jobs.

And A Little Child (Or A Teen) Shall Lead Them

March 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Bush Administration, Internet, Political Philosophy | 1 Comment 

Before addressing the phenomenon that has come out of the Atlanta suburbs to startle C-SPAN viewers and then the nation in the last week, going by the name of Jonathan Krohn, it seems fitting to mention a conversation I had a few weeks ago with my friend Chris Lehmann, an editor at CQ and occasional Washington correspondent for the New York Observer.

I told Chris about a chat I had some years ago with a secondhand bookseller in Louisville whom I knew to be a man disinclined to tell tall tales. The bookseller had attended middle school in that city with the future Senator Mitch McConnell. He told me that one day, he, the Senate Minority Leader-to-be, and some friends were sitting on the curb talking. The question came up: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The answers, according to the bookseller’s recollection, were what you’d expect from some 14-year-olds: “I wanna be a cop.” “I’m going to be a fireman.” “I’m going to play for the Reds.” “Aw, to heck with the Reds – I’m gonna play for the White Sox.”

Then it was McConnell’s turn. He said: “I want to graduate from college and then law school. After that I want to be elected Jefferson County [Kentucky] judge, and then I want to be elected to the Senate and become Republican Whip and then Republican Leader.” And later, this all happened just as he’d described it.

Chris gave me an expression that made it clear that he thought the bookseller might have been stretching things a little. I pointed out to him that McConnell had undergone a bout with polio between the ages of two and four, and that such a trauma forces a maturity on many of its victims that healthy people are allowed to postpone to a later age. But I had the feeling Chris still wasn’t buying the idea someone so young could have that kind of political consciousness, much less those kind of ambitions.

Chris, meet Jonathan Krohn.

Until the very end of February, Jonathan (who celebrated his fourteenth birthday last Monday) was simply a normal child, homeschooled by middle-class parents in Duluth, Georgia, who, last summer, took the money he’d earned as a child actor to self-publish his 80-page book, Define Conservatism. Jonathan had been interested in politics since the age of eight, when he tuned into C-SPAN and watched Democrats on Capitol Hill filibustering the Bush Administration’s judicial nominations.

The book was dedicated to Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr., and argued the case for why conservatives should support Sen. John McCain as the Republican presidential nominee. It garnered some attention in the local media, partly thanks to the youthfulness of its author.

After meeting with some GOP elders in Georgia who were impressed by his articulation and poise, Jonathan was emboldened to contact the organizers of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference and request to speak at the event. Though initially skeptical of the notion, CPAC’s honchos finally gave him a three-minute spot for Friday, February 27. On that day, Jonathan took the podium and, as can be seen in this clip, made the most of it, to borrow a phrase from his fellow orator Patrick Henry.

The CPAC attendees (and C-SPAN viewers) were amazed, to say the least. I caught part of the appearance during a rebroadcast. At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Was this something akin to the appearances of “Li’l Bill O’Reilly” on Fox’s Talkshow With Spike Feresten?

But it was for real. Jonathan displayed an aplomb and rhetorical skill that would do credit to speakers three or four times his age and twice his height. And I was not alone in being amazed.

Within the last seven days, the number of listings for Jonathan on Google has skyrocketed from a few hundred to over half a million. Nearly a hundred more Youtube clips of him have popped up. Last night he showed up on former Governor Mike Huckabee’s Fox News show, this morning the New York Times featured him, and this evening he appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight.

Jonathan informed ABC’s reporter that he’s made up his mind not to seek the Presidency, but instead to devote himself to revitalizing the conservative movement as his hero did over a half-century ago by founding National Review. But Bill Buckley didn’t get started on this task until he published God And Man At Yale at the age of 25 in 1950 – a veritable greybeard compared to the lad from the Peach State. One has to wonder if Jonathan will stick with this resolve. What does he know yet about girls? Or cars? Or any of the other things that generally grab the attention of an adolescent as he goes on to college?

But then again, Mitch McConnell had a similar dream when he was that age, and he stuck with it. So let that be a lesson to those ready to pronounce the Right dead and buried.

The Veep Asks: “Do You Know The Website’s Number?”

February 25, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, Internet, Technology | Leave a Comment 

Vice President Biden has apparently failed to master a fundamental difference between two popular and quite widespread modern technologies: the internet and the telephone.  (The fact that the url/phone number in question was for the administration’s new transparency portal —which he was appearing to promote— raises entirely different questions.)

It’s too bad his former colleague Ted Stevens of Alaska is no longer there to educate him —as he famously did his fellow Senators back in the day. Senator Stevens (who was the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over the internet and was explaining a 200-page telecommunications bill he had written), explained to his stupefied colleagues that the web was neither a phone, nor “a big truck,” but, rather, “a series of tubes.”  If the Vice President keeps that clearly in mind,  he’s unlikely to make the same mistake again.

It appears that at least one of the reasons Senator Stevens isn’t in Washington to further enlighten his colleagues is because of some serious prosecutorial misconduct.

 A federal judge held Justice Department attorneys in contempt Friday for failing to deliver documents to former Sen. Ted Stevens’s legal team.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said it was outrageous that government attorneys would ignore his deadline for turning over documents.

Last month, Judge Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to turn over all the agency’s internal communications regarding a whistleblower complaint against the FBI agent leading the investigation into the former Alaska senator.

The agent, Chad Joy, bitterly complained about some Justice Department tactics during the trial, including not turning over evidence and an “inappropriate relationship” between another agent working the case and the prosecutor’s star witness.

The abovementioned inappropriate relationship, incidentally, was of the horizontal variety.  

The Wall Street Journal editoralized about the injustice and its consequences:

So what we seem to have here are young lawyers eager to make their reputations by bagging a big-name Senator. Justice rules forbid issuing indictments too close to elections. These columns were tough on Mr. Stevens at the time, but the facts that have since come to light cast real doubt on the case. Though Mr. Stevens was a champion earmarker, the government never alleged much less proved that Veco got anything in return from the Senator. The formal charges are a low-grade felony — in essence, lying on forms. This is not like the charges against William Jefferson or Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

Mr. Stevens will try to overturn the verdict and rebuild his reputation. He is unlikely to get his Senate seat back, even if he wins on appeal or at retrial. But the evidence of prosecutorial malpractice is serious enough to warrant an internal Justice probe, and perhaps judicial sanctions.

Washington Is Somewhat, If Not Yet All, Atwitter

February 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Internet | Leave a Comment 

Politico’s Patrick Gavin writes about the inroads being made in the nation’s capital by a potentially-addictive new technology:

When you talk about Twitter, you might as well be talking about the Snuggie: People around you swear that it’s actually useful, but you can’t help thinking it silly and declaring, “I just don’t get what all the buzz is about.” 

But in Washington, the social networking and microblogging service is quickly becoming part of the daily media diet — and a powerful tool in the hands of those who are adept at making their points in 140 characters or fewer. 

Mr. Gavin then proceeds to name the Top 10 Most Influential DC Hands in which that powerful tool is now being wielded, and the first name on the list is….Karl Rove.  Newt Gingrich is Number Five.

Number Nine —Patrick Ruffini (www.twitter.com/patrickruffini)  — sounds worth checking out:

Not yet a household name, Ruffini boasts an impressive résumé: webmaster for the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign and e-campaign adviser to Rudy Giuliani in 2008. He’s part of a new generation of Republicans hoping to use technology as a way to steer the party away from its more rusty roots. 

Ruffini’s tweets are sharp, blunt and aggressive when it comes to the Democrats’ flaws and the Republicans’ promise. 

Ruffini’s 4,200 followers digest such nuggets as “The rise of the right online is / should be about connecting people NOT computers. It’s about building a grassroots movement not technology” and “Ultimately, I think the whole debate over the NYT is silly. Op-ed pages are meaningless in the 21st century. We need to focus on raw info.” 

Dumb And Dumber

January 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, Entertainment, Internet | 3 Comments 

The various viral videos that enlivened the recent campaign had at least the charm of originality and sincerity.  But the latest post-election edition —the ”Presidential Pledge”— is a monstrosity of smug self-satisfaction and grandiose cluelessness.  

The brainchild of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, in cahoots with MySpace, it features a number of celebrities, sub-celebrities, and sub-sub-celebrities who are really pleased with themselves as they pledge to be considerate people and conscientious citizens — pledges that, for some reason, they were either unable or unwilling (or uninterested) to make before Barack Obama became President.  

The 4-plus minute video is directed by Ms. Moore and produced by Mr. Kutcher’s company Katalyst Films.  It was to be presented to the President Elect in the days before his Inauguration.  They discussed it with Oprah Winfrey on her first show broadcast from Washington.  Whether or not that handover actually occurred is unrecorded.  

The pledges range from underwhelming to megalomanical.  Thus the multi-millionaire P. Diddy pledges to turn off the lights when he leaves a room, while the whatever-happened-to-him actor Michael Krause pledges “to make sure that senior citizens have access to healthcare.”

Co-foundress Demi Moore makes three pledges: (a) to smile more, (b) to free one million people from slavery in the next five years, and  (c) to be “a servant to our President.”   

Her husband, Ashton Kutcher, who has starred in Dude, Where’s My Car?  and created the MTV show Punk’d, will presumably be renouncing his career in order to keep his pledge “to always represent my country with pride, dignity, and honesty.”

Eva Mendes, who made news last year by entering rehab and announcing that she didn’t want to start a family because “there are just so many things I want to do” pledges “to volunteer more of my time to help children battling serious illnesses”   Director Joel Schumacher undertakes “To never give anyone the finger while I’m driving.”   Jason Bateman’s pledge involves his alimentary canal.

Amidst the pledges to help find cures for autism and mental disease and extend stem cell research, Cameron Diaz pledges to start smiling at her neighbors.

I could go on, but it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.  They’re all so serious, so well-intentioned, and so gosh darned smug.

Of course, it’s easy to be snarky, and if the video actually inspires anyone to go to www.usaservice.org and sign up  for volunteer work, some good could result.

In the five days that the “Presidential Pledge” video has been on MySpace, it has received more than a million hits.  It is also posted in various incarnations on YouTube.

For Time magazine’s links to the Top 10 Viral Videos of 2008, go here.

“Ask Not, You Know, What Your Country, You Know…”

December 28, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Featured Articles, Internet, News media, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

The interview conducted by David Halbfinger and Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times with Caroline Kennedy (who seems to have dropped the name Schlossberg permanently), as linked below in today’s Featured Articles, did not have the headline “As A Candidate, Kennedy Is Forceful Yet Elusive” when it first appeared on the newspaper’s site yesterday morning. Instead, it originally read “As A Candidate, Kennedy Is Eloquent Yet Elusive,” and is still identified in those words at the Times’s own website Blogrunner, despite the fact that the quotes attributed to the candidate, as they appeared in the published article, had little of the rhetorical art for which Ms. Kennedy’s father gained renown (with some help from Ted Sorensen).

The interview was one of Ms. Kennedy’s first attempts at a sit-down conversation with the press, following several weeks during which she preferred to deal with the Fourth Estate by giving them written replies to written questions.  Within a few hours after its appearance, the irreverent website Gawker pointed out that in one of the audio clips attached to the interview, the would-be successor to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat managed to use the words “you know” (as a “discourse marker” as the linguists say, rather than in any intelligent grammatical context) a dozen times in 49 seconds.  Almost within minutes after that observation was posted, the Times changed the headline to what it is now.

Last night, the Times also put up what is seemingly a word-for-word transcript of Ms. Kennedy’s conversation with Halbfinger and Confessore.  In what must have been a conversation lasting about 40 or 45 minutes, she uses “you know” no less than 138 times.  Especially impressive are two occasions where she uses the words five different times in one sentence – or what would be a sentence, if it were not, in both cases, a chain of clauses with no grammatical conclusion.

Indeed, throughout the transcript, Ms. Kennedy proves to be nearly as unable to articulate a proper sentence as was the case when she appeared on Meet The Press last spring to endorse Barack Obama for the presidency.  As I listened to the clips at the Times’s site and read the transcript, I had to conclude to send her to be America’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom would make this country the object of ridicule in that isle where Shakespeare’s unmoved bones rest.

And while it is true that quite a few Senators, past and present, have been as inarticulate as Ms. Kennedy, very few among them have used what facility of speech they had to assert, as Ms Kennedy more or less does in this interview, that they should be in the United States Senate, well, because they want to be there, whether or not there are more qualified candidates for the job.  As Gawker’s Gabriel Sherman pointed out today, Ms. Kennedy’s supply of hauteur, manifested more than a few times toward Halbfinger and Confessore (as the transcript shows), may be her biggest problem of all as she seeks this office.

(Also noteworthy is an entry at the Language Log blog which discusses editing of the audio clips featured with the Times article, and not acknowledged at the site.)

Watergate Revisionism CREEPs Into Washington Post?

December 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, Frost/Nixon, Internet, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

It’s hard to resist capitalizing that that word when writing on this subject and this newspaper. That said, the reaction of Washington Post writers to the death of W. Mark Felt, who unveiled himself in 2005 as “Deep Throat,” has been, a little surprisingly, not completely a series of panegyrics.

It is true that the Post’s obit of Felt (the latest, much-expanded version, with Bob Woodward re-credited as a contributor rather than co-author, appears here) simply stuck to the basics of the DT story as Woodward has described it over the years.  And it’s true that the Post’s editorial on Felt’s passing stressed that, though his career was “ambiguous” when considered as a whole, where Watergate was concerned he had performed “an invaluable service” when he surreptitiously fed information from a criminal investigation to a reporter in an effort to undercut the position of FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray.

But yesterday, in Slate.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) Tim Noah, while arguing that Felt had done his nation good by leaking to Woodward, also said that the G-man’s motives in doing so were comparable to those of “Scooter” Libby when he was involved in the events that led to the leaking of Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation, which is hardly seen as a patriotic act down at the Post building.

But Noah’s column might well have been topped for irreverence in the Post’s own pages this morning.  Hank Stuever, a reporter known for his insights into pop culture and his forays into questioning the conventional wisdom, devoted a column, somewhat deceptively headed “Appreciation,” to Felt and Deep Throat’s significance to what (Stuever hinted) may well be a dying era of investigative journalism.

In his column, Stuever quotes Carl Bernstein’s pious claim on CNN yesterday (but which he’s repeated, in one form or another, to hundreds or thousands of journalism students for a quarter-century) that Felt “had the guts to say: ‘Wait. The Constitution is more important in this situation than a president of the United States who breaks the law.’”  Stuever follows that with: “Cue trumpet solo,” and goes on to speak of the “swagger” of Woodward and Bernstein’s era of newspaper work.

He concludes by alluding to words Felt, famously, never spoke:

There is, in the end, plenty of money begging to be followed, the money we don’t know about and the money we do: stimulus money ($850 billion!); Madoff money ($50 billion!), automaker bailout money ($17 billion!).  The best way to appreciate Mark Felt is to work the phones, take notes and figure out how to get that which is off the record, on.

Am I wrong or is there just a hint that Stuever is aware that after January 20, there may well be as many questions about the direction of money as there were in the Clinton administration (especially its last years), and the Washington Times might just be a bit likelier than the Post to examine where it goes?

And in tomorrow’s Post the paper’s former executive editor Len Downie, who seems to have been the last person to be told the secret of DT’s identity before Felt’s family and John O’Connor approached Vanity Fair, has a long meditation about the question so often asked in recent years: Could there be another Deep Throat in the atmosphere of today’s Washington?

Downie says the big difference between 1972 and 2008 is that in those faraway days, the Post had the story to itself for many months; he argues that now, a similar scandal, if written about in one place, would instantly be taken up by bloggers, websites, and maybe even newspapers around the country within a matter of hours. “Of course,” he continues, “an administration under siege would also have more sophisticated resources for investigating leaks and marshaling counter-attacks in the news media and the blogosphere.”

But Downie also poses two other questions at the end of his article (and very significant ones, as TNN commenter Maarja Krusten observes):

In today’s cacophonous media world, in which news, rumor, opinion and infotainment from every kind of source are jumbled together and often presented indiscriminately, how would such an improbable-sounding story ever get verified?

As newsrooms rapidly shrink, will they still have the resources, steadily amassed by newspapers since Watergate, for investigative reporting that takes months and even years of sustained work?

Downie leaves these unanswered, signing off instead by describing the pride he felt when he watched Frank Langella (as RN in Frost/Nixon) calling reporters “sons of whores.”  But the questions are certainly worth thinking about while the Fourth Estate indulges itself in nostalgia about the good old days of underground garages and shifting flowerpots.

(And having mentioned John O’Connor I should also note that in today’s issue of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, he solemnly compares Felt to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye.)

Yet Another Watergate Mystery

December 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Internet, News media, Nixon in the News, Watergate | 1 Comment 

In the wee small hours of this morning, the Washington Post’s website posted (and the newspaper itself printed) an obituary for W. Mark Felt, the former FBI associate director who, in 2005, was identified by himself and the Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as “Deep Throat.”  The article, online and on paper, was initially credited to Patricia Sullivan, one of the Post’s obit writers since 2003, and Woodward, with additional contributions from staffers Clarence Williams and Anita Kumar.

These credits remain at the obit as it appears at mobile.washingtonpost.com (and as cut-and pasted at some other sites, as Googling “Patricia Sullivan and Bob Woodward” shows) but at washingtonpost.com itself the obit’s authorship was changed this morning to omit Woodward’s byline.  Can Howard Kurtz, the man on the Post’s press beat, or the paper’s ombudsman Deborah Howell shed any light on this? Some of us Watergate junkies want to know.

Fish Wrap Would Be A Step Up

December 15, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Internet, Media, News media, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Russ Smith is a Baltimore resident and occasional contributor to the Wall Street Journal. But once upon a time he was quite a potent figure in the world of “alt-weeklies,” founding the Baltimore City Paper in 1977 and a Washington counterpart four years later.  Upon selling these journals later in the 1980s for $4 million, he founded the New York Press in 1988.  It took the Press a while to effectively mount a conservative challenge to the Village Voice – complete with an insert edited by legendary right-leaning playboy Taki – but when it hit its stride, it forced the Voice, in 1996, to switch to free distribution to compete.

But by the early days of the millenium, Smith had a good inkling of what was to come, and sold the Press in 2002.  Six years later he set up a website, Splice Today, where this month he formally pronounces the death of the American newspaper.

Smith’s column – or post, to use the new-media term – is quite worth reading.  He begins by summoning up a scene from the recesses of memory: he and his parents and brothers, assembled around the breakfast table in the early 1960s, plowing through one New York and Long Island daily after another.  The Times, Post, Herald Tribune, News, World-Telegram & Sun, Journal-American, Newsday, even the Mirror – all were there for the reading.  Smith lovingly describes his father’s periodic observation that one need read no more than the opening and closing paragraphs of James Reston’s Times column to know what he had to say.

(in fact, as one who sometimes read Reston’s column can attest, often the opening and closing sentences sufficed for that.  This did not stop President Lyndon B. Johnson from agonizing, day in and day out, over every single word of the column where it concerned his administration.  For a modern-day equivalent, younger readers should try to picture President Obama fretting over the morning’s dailykos.com.)

Smith goes on to describe the family pawing over the sports news, the funnies, the editorial and entertainment pages, until it was time to go to school or work.  And then he notes that his businessmen brothers, lifelong newspaper readers, no longer bother to even glance at the Wall Street Journal more often than a couple of days a week.

Tellingly, he observes that when Celia Farber, noted for her 25-year crusade against HIV as the cause of AIDS, learned that her writing on the subject had been ridiculed in a New York Times article, she complained to a friend who worked for the paper, who replied that he saw no reason for her to fret because the Times was “just fish wrap.”  But Smith is kind enough, when quoting Ms. Farber’s statement that her father let his subscription to the Times lapse a few years ago, not to identify the gentleman by name.  To realize that Barry Farber – one of the most famous figures in talk radio in the ’70s and ’80s (and still on the air today) and occasional candidate for Mayor of New York and the House of Representatives – no longer bothers with the Times is to realize how far the paper’s fallen.

Smith concludes by recounting a $5 bet he recently made that the Times will be sold by the end of next year, if some billionaire has the wit to offer the stockholders a share price well above the $7 or so it trades for now. He thinks $30 a share could wrest the paper from the Sulzburger clan; I would guess that as little as $22 would suffice.  But would anybody in New York want to bother?  In Los Angeles, where Tinseltown moguls still believe with childlike faith that to own a newspaper is to control a city’s or state’s political life, rumors are again circulating that David Geffen may buy the LA Times from its bankrupt owners.  But a more realistic view probably prevails at the other end of the country.

Revving Search Engines Worldwide Since 2008

December 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Culture, History, Internet | 14 Comments 

Google has announced that the most searched word(s) in the world in 2008 were……drum roll please……

NUMBER ONE WORLDWIDE: “SARAH PALIN.”

Second was: “Beijing Olympics 2008″.

Third was: “Facebook login”.

In fourth place we have: “Heath Ledger”.

And in fifth place: one word says it all — “Obama.”

Lest anybody get too big a head, the Number Eight most searched was the “Jonas Brothers.”

Meanwhile, here at home in the USA, the number one searched word was…….drum roll please……

USA NUMBER ONE: “OBAMA.”

Number Two: “Facebook.” Number Three: “ATT.” Number Four: “iPhone.” Number Five: “YouTube.” Number Six: “Fox News.” And Number Seven: “Sarah Palin.”

(Above: NEXT YEAR #7 OR BUST: The Jonas Brothers — as if you didn’t know.)

Always Think Twice Before You Upload

December 5, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Humor, Internet, Obama administration | 3 Comments 

Jon Favreau, the wunderkind POTUSE’s even wunderkindier speech writer (and no relation to the other Jon Favreau), has been painfully reminded of one of the few essential truths of modern life: always think twice, and maybe even get a second opinion from someone not having as good a time as you are at that particular moment, regarding whether to press “enter” and upload yourself onto My Space or Facebook.

The latest case in point is a jolly photo from a party in which the twenty-seven year old wordsmith poses with a friend and a cardboard cutout of the Junior Senator from New York.

Mr. Favreau, who will head the speechwriting shop in the Obama White House, joined John Kerry’s campaign shortly after delivering the valedictory address at his Holy Cross commencement in 2003, and segued over to the Obama Senate office in ‘05, from which he joined the campaign.

Although the picture was quickly retrieved —it apparently only spent a couple of hours on its original site— it will live forever in cyper space thanks to Al Kamen in today’s Washington Post.

This kind of story almost begs for easy jokes and cheap humor. But this is TNN and I have, and shall continue, to resist the temptation.

A transition official said that Mr. Favreau had “reached out to Senator Clinton to offer an apology.” Reaching out to Senator Clinton was what got him in trouble in the first place, so perhaps he would have been better off just sending her the apology. After all, Jon Favreau isn’t a man who has to grope for words.

Brenda Starr, 2008 Edition

October 31, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Internet, Media, News media | Leave a Comment 

Ana Marie Cox is a journalist in Washington who first gained notice in 2004 when Nick Denton, the Englishman who oversees the Gawker.com family of blogs, hired her to write the politically-themed Wonkette.com.  After two years offering her sassy style of reporting to innumerable readers online, she moved on to co-write Time.com’s “Swampland” blog.  This work was initially full-time but earlier this year Time recontracted with Cox on a strictly freelance basis, so she joined Maer Roshan’s magazine Radar as Washington correspondent.

Radar, a magazine founded in 2003 (with funding from friends and family of Roshan, formerly of Tina Brown’s Talk) died after two issues that year, was revived in 2005 with backing from Mort Zuckerman, died again after three issues, and, in 2007, was relaunched yet again with funding from Jesse Jackson’s son Yusef and (reportedly) supermarket mogul/Clinton crony Ron Burkle.  In this incarnation Radar lasted, very remarkably in an increasingly unfavorable climate for print media of any kind, for a year and a half as a bimonthly, although the magazine’s website attracted more comment than what appeared on paper.  Cox’s articles and posts at both the magazine and site kept her in the public eye; last week she appeared on Larry King Live.

And, last Friday, Radar abruptly gave up the ghost; its backers dismissed the staff and sold the name to American Media, publishers of the Star and various other magazines, which promptly remade the Radar.com site as an imitator of TMZ.com.  Cox, who had been planning an article for the magazine about the last days of Sen. John McCain’s campaign, was left with a wish to cover the story for whoever would buy such an article, but no way to pay her expenses and no time to pitch to an editor.

Presumably inspired by the example of Sen. Barack Obama’s and Sen. Howard Dean’s online fundraising, she hit upon the idea of appealing to her readers in cyberspace, via her personal blog (and its PayPal feature), to send her whatever they felt like contributing to help her cover the last of the campaign, specifying that her expenses would come to $1000 for each of four days and $1500 for Election Day.

Her appeal was posted on Saturday morning.  Within 24 hours she reported receiving $2000 in contributions, and by Tuesday morning she said she had gotten $7000, enough to secure a seat in Gov. Sarah Palin’s press section and go back on the road.  Today she is to board McCain’s plane and finish covering the race for the Washington Independent.

What do Cox’s readers who contributed receive in return? Well, for a $1000 contribution she promises a one-on-one dinner and in-depth postmortem of the campaign; for $500, a phone call from McCain HQ on election night; for $250, an MP3 of her asking a “senior McCain staffer” the question of one’s choice and the reply; and so on down to a thank-you email for a ten-dollar contribution.  (However, today she asked permission to add $10 contributors to her Facebook page instead of emailing them.)

Time will tell if other journalists, left out in the cold by abrupt magazine closures (and they’re going under left and right now), will attempt similar strategies to keep going.  But anyway, it’s another indication that media is entering a whole different era.

Featured Articles — October 16, 2008

October 16, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under History, Internet | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes from Home and Abroad:

Obama Hasn’t Closed the Sale By Karl Rove
Both candidates continue to tinker with their strategies.

McCain fails, Obama is not rattled By Roger Simon
Debates should not be confused with trips to Lourdes: Few miracles are dispensed.

A Gift on Hallowed Ground By George Will
In 1863, eleven major roads converged on this town. Which is why history did, too.

The freedom of historical debate is under attack by the memory police By Timothy Garton Ash Well-intentioned laws that prescribe how we remember terrible events are foolish, unworkable and counter-productive.

Beware an October surprise from bin Laden By Joseph Nye
Americans are transfixed by the aftermath of the September surprise in financial markets. Could there be a very different surprise coming in October?

Searching for the Antidote to Ahmadinejad By Dieter Bednarz
In Tehran, reformers and conservatives are preparing to fight for the Iranian presidency in 2009. The opposition is pinning its hopes, once again, on former President Mohammad Khatami. But will he run?

Mac’s Shot at a Late-Game Win By Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
The short term impact of the third debate will be to help Barack Obama. But the long term implications may give John McCain a needed boost. Obama looked good, but McCain opened the tax-and-spend issue in a way that might prevail.

The Financial Crisis Is McCain’s Katrina By Daniel Henninger
If John McCain fails in the next 19 days to catch Barack Obama, his slow response to the financial hurricane of 2008 will be Exhibit A.

Courting the religious right Father Raymond J. De Souza
With the final presidential debate over, it now appears that Senator Barack Obama will simply run out the clock on Senator John McCain and win the presidential election. His appearance tonight here at the Al Smith Dinner may indicate how he intends to handle conservative religious voters in consolidating his support.

Joe the plumber is real hero of the debate By Anne Barrowclough
They clashed on the economy and scored points off each other on negative campaigning.

Endorsements

October 14, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008, Internet, Media, News media | Leave a Comment 

With typical decisiveness and style, Christopher Hitchens pinned his colors to the Obama mast on yesterday’s Huffington Post.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that “issue” I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the “experience” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke.

And Christopher Buckley, whose enlistment in (or defection to, depending on how you look at it) the Obama ranks was noted here recently, has now parted company with National Review in a piece on The Daily Beast that was originally headlined “Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired” before that was changed to “Buckley Bows Out of National Review“.

The circumstances of that split have stirred some controversy.  Mr. Buckley, more in sorrow than in anger (but with at least a hint anger in his tone) wrote that his decision was precipitated by the several hundred hate-filled emails his decision elicited.  

NR Editor Rich Lowry’s account is more measured.  He says that there were only about 100 unhappy emails and that Mr. Buckley’s association —he recently started writing a column to fill in for Mark Steyn who was on hiatus— was essentially a part time gig that ran its course.

 

The POTUS And The Puter

October 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Internet, Lifestyle, Technology | Leave a Comment 

James Rosen —Fox News’ Washington correspondent and John Mitchell biographer— wrote an interesting op-ed for Thursday’s USA Today  —“Need A Tech Savvy President?”—in which he considered whether computer proficiency has become a criterion for being elected POTUS.

Historically, Democrats prefer exceptionalism in their leaders, Republicans populism.  JFK, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Obama, though all products of the old-fashioned political “machines” in their states, have presented themselves as cutting-edge types, solicitous of new technologies. Even the down-home LBJ, surveying his Texas-sized mistakes in Vietnam, navigated three TV sets at once.

By contrast, Republican leaders Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bush 41 and W. —  all thoughtful men frequently underestimated by their opponents — have willfully cultivated anti-intellectual, Luddite personas. At times, of course, artifice give way to reality: Nixon’s mechanical abilities were so deficient he reportedly had difficulty opening the boxes of cuff links he presented to Oval Office visitors (and thus could be forgiven for forgetting that his voice-activated taping machines were running even at moments when he later wished they hadn’t been).

Ultimately, the numbers could be on McCain’s side, even if the zeroes and ones are not. Census figures show that 64% of American voters cast ballots but that 72% of senior citizens do — and only a quarter of them use the Internet. 

HuffPo Preaches To Katie’s Choir

October 3, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Internet, News media, Republican Party | Leave a Comment 

“Huffington Post” headlines that Gov. Palin found CBS News anchor Katie Couric annoying. I’m trying to figure out the semiotics of this. The purpose of an HP headline is to advance Sen. Obama’s interests. So is the idea that undecided voters will be offended on Couric’s behalf? Not much potential there. Since only about six million people watch her newscast (compared to 70 million who tuned in to see Palin and Sen. Biden last night), that means that 299 million Americans are at best indifferent to Katie Couric. Or does HP think Palin looks bad to undecided voters by complaining about a journalist who is thought to have bested her?

Actually, I doubt that many undecided voters visit HP — just people who agree with HP already and so enjoy laughing up their sleeves at Sarah Palin. That’s the new media for you. Thank goodness for the New York Times.

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