Are You Gonna Believe Your Lying Eyes?

September 4, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Internet, News media, Technology | Leave a Comment 

The three photographs above all achieved widespread distribution in print and, especially, on the internet. They also have something else in common. Is it:

(a) they are all in color,

(b) they all involve politics,

(c) they are all stone phonies?

The answer, of course, is (b).

Just kidding. If you guessed (c) you’re a winner — and you can see seventeen other examples of creative photoshopping in a Telegraph (London) feature on “Doctored photos: 20 memorable picture fakes”.

President Bush’s book was rightside up before the photoshoppers went to work.

John Kerry and Jane Fonda have been pictured sharing the same platform separated by several feet, but they never achieved this kind of propinquity with any cameras present.

And any doubts about the shark attack under the Golden Gate Bridge, should be dispelled by the following:

Going Too Far

August 31, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, Internet, News media | 3 Comments 

Catching out the pompous in their pretension and ridiculing the hypocrisy of the sanctimonious are among life’s pleasures.   Howard Stern has managed to turn it a $100-million-a-year career.  Sasha Baron Cohen is developing his own cottage industry based on the formula.  Here in Washington we have Wonkette.  And, as far as I’m concerned, more power to all of them.

But there’s a surreptitious recording of an embarrassing conversation now racing its way around the internet that strikes me as something else entirely.  

Don Fowler was the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1995 to 1997.  Five-term congressman John Spratt is the Dean of the South Carolina delegation and Chairman of the Budget Committee.  They sat across the aisle from each other on a flight back home from the Democratic Convention in Denver and chatted in the idle and offhand way that old friends are wont to do.

For example, they made fun of Sarah Palin for several minutes, Fowler calling her “Dan Quayle” on steroids and Spratt creatively describing her as “just terrible.” They both agreed that, “Other than the simple fact that she’s a female,” she has nothing to offer.

Mr. Fowler, while doing some paperwork, observes that Hurricane Gustav is projected to hit New Orleans just as the Republican National Convention will be opening in the Twin Cities. In Mr. Fowler’s own now-infamousl words:

“The hurricane’s going to hit New Orleans about the time they start. [Chuckle] The timing is — at least it appears now that it’ll be there Monday. That just demonstrates that God’s on our side. [Laughter] Everything’s cool.”

 

Is it just me or does anyone else find this deeply disturbing?   Am I alone in being troubled by the notion that some creep in the next row, pretending to be puzzling over his Suduko, is actually Cecil B. DeMille with a cellphone?

Fun’s fun but fair’s fair and there is such a thing as going too far.

I wouldn’t have so much trouble with a report that began “Overheard speaking on a plane were…..”.   Like it or not, these days if you’re a public figure and you say or do something in public, you should either be mindful of your surroundings or consider it to be on the record.  It may not be nice and it may not be fair but if you can’t stand that kind of heat you shouldn’t be in this kind of kitchen.

At one point while we were working on the research for the President’s memoirs, John Mitchell came to San Clemente to visit with RN.  He brought his young daughter Martha (“Marty”) with him. That night Diane Sawyer and I joined the Mitchells at dinner at El Adobe in San Juan Capistrano, the Nixon family’s favorite restaurant.  

On Friday morning, a detailed account of portions of our dinner table conversation appeared in the political news column on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.  Only then did I realize that I had noticed —if only peripherally— that two men seated at an adjacent table had engaged in no conversation throughout their meal.  I had assumed it was either because they had nothing to say to each other or because they were struck by the unexpected proximity of General Mitchell; he had been out of the public eye for a couple of years, but the “Great Stone Face” was still very recognizable and very striking.  

I considered that conduct then —as I do now— unethical and lousy.  But realistically, I suppose it was just another example of Nixonians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk; we have few illusions about the media but we’re still surprised when they turn out to act the way we always said they would.  

But this in-air stealth cellphone video seems to me to ratchet things up to an entirely new and distasteful and maybe even dangerous level.

To come even close to justifying this kind of intrusion on individual privacy, the subject matter and the stakes would have to be very serious indeed.  If this conversation had involved something illegal, or if it had exposed really gross duplicity involving serious issues, there might be some justification for uploading it.

But the idea that either Mr. Fowler or Mr. Spratt are careless of, or cavalier about, the danger or suffering that might engulf New Orleans is ludicrous.  They are taking perfectly natural and understandable partisan pleasure in the notion that the Republican Convention might be thrown a bit off its stride; and I suspect there’s a subtext of relief because, had their own convention been a week later, they would have been facing the same problem.

To those whose response to all this is: morality schmorality……and to those who say it’s just Frank wearing his wimpy hat because it fits him so well……I say: some shoes fit both feet.  Today’s goose is tomorrow’s gander.  Turnabout is fair play.  Be careful what you wish for.  Because as far a tasteless joke can raise serious questions about a man’s judgment, anybody fashioning a dunce cap for Mr. Fowler better start sewing a hairshirt for Senator McCain.

RIP Anne L. Armstrong And Clay T. Whitehead

July 31, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Entertainment, In Memoriam, Internet, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, Technology, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

The last week saw the passing of a man and a woman who were both not only important figures at the Nixon White House, but by any measure significant in twentieth-century American history.  On July 23, Clay T. Whitehead, director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy between 1970 and 1974, died in Washington at age 69.  During his time in that office, he gained fame among journalists for his vigorous defenses of Nixon Administration policy in his press briefings.  But it was what he did (with the help of his assistant Brian Lamb, later to found C-SPAN) to create and further the Open Skies policy that made history.  This policy permitted telecommunications companies to send up their own satellites and establish the networks that made both nationwide cable TV and competing, low-price long-distance phone services possible.  This in turn opened the way for the Internet and cellular technology as we know it.  (Indeed, had President Nixon been able to serve out his second term, Whitehead’s vision of a wired America could have brought something akin to the World Wide Web into being a decade before it happened.) In the 1980s, Whitehead played a central role in bringing cable TV and cellular communications to Europe.  Ironically, he does not have his own Wikipedia entry and is barely mentioned elsewhere at the site.

And yesterday Anne Legendre Armstrong died in Houston at age 80.  She was raised in an old Creole family in New Orleans and, after graduating from Vassar and briefly working in the New York magazine world, married a rancher and moved to Texas, where she switched from the Democratic to the Republican party and became active in GOP politics.  From 1970 until 1973, she was co-chair of the Republican National Committee and played an important role in generating support for Nixon’s re-election among women and Democrats.  In 1973 she became the first woman to serve as counselor to the President, and was one of the White House’s strongest defenders during the Watergate era.  During the Ford Administration she became the first female Ambassador to Great Britain, and in the Reagan era she headed the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987.  Both of these far-sighted Americans of high achievement will be much missed.

Trevino On Jerry Hughes’s Straight Talk

April 24, 2008 by Joshua Treviño | Filed Under Internet, Technology | Leave a Comment 

Cross Posted from Joshua Trevino.

In this edition of the Treviño podcast, I appear on Jerry Hughes’s Straight Talk radio show in my capacity as Senior Editor of the Heartland Institute’s Information Technology and Telecom Newsletter. We discuss the future of the internet, why government at all levels is yearning to tax it, and how net neutrality and municipal wi-fi are bad for internet freedom.

The feed for the Treviño podcast is here; and the link to the iTunes Treviño podcast page is here. You may also listen here –

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