This week saw the second hearing for David Aptaker for justice of the family and probate court.
What wasn't covered by the media was majority of the subsequent questions asked him by the...
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Dan Kennedy
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Biography
A regular panelist on "Beat the Press" since 1998, Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a nationally recognized media critic. Author of the popular blog Media Nation, Dan won the National Press Club's Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism in 2001 and was a finalist for a Syracuse University Mirror Award in media commentary in 2008. When he's not blogging, Dan is a contributing writer for The Guardian, CommonWealth magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. Dan is also the author of "Little People: A Father Reflects on his Daughter's Dwarfism - and What It Means to Be Different" and is currently researching a book on the intersection of journalism, technology, and community participation.
Dan's Posts
Making sense of the WikiLeaks documents
posted by Dan Kennedy on July 26, 2010
Like just about everyone else in the media world, I'm trying to make sense today of the WikiLeaks documents, the Pentagon Papers of our time. The documents — reported by the New York Times, the Guardian* and Der Spiegel — show that the war in Afghanistan has been undermined by untrustworthy "friends" in the Pakistani intelligence service, chaos and duplicity in Afghanistan, and mistakes by American and allied forces leading to civilian casualties.
In a sense, it's nothing we didn't know, and the White House argues that the situation has been improving since President Obama charted his own course. (The most recent documents in the cache are from December 2009.) Still, like the Pentagon Papers, the documents offer official confirmation that things are (or at least were) as bad as we feared, if not worse.
I think WikiLeaks' strategy of giving the three Western news organizations a month to go over the documents before making them public was brilliant. Earlier this year, WikiLeaks and its founder, Julien Assange, got a lot of attention over a video it had obtained of an American helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters freelancers. Ultimately, though, it proved to be the wrong kind of attention — the heavy-handed editing made it appear more like an anti-American propaganda film than documentary evidence. (WikiLeaks also released a longer, unedited version.)
By contrast, in providing the latest documents to news organizations, Assange was able to get out of the way and let credible journalists tell the story. Jay Rosen, in a characteristically thoughtful post about WikiLeaks ("the world's first stateless news organization"), thinks Assange did it because he knew the story wouldn't get the attention it deserved unless the traditional media could break it.
I don't disagree, but I think a more important reason is that the public will take it more seriously.
Also: At the Nation, Greg Mitchell has been rounding up links about the WikiLeaks story here and here.
*Disclosure: I write a weekly online column for the Guardian about media and politics.
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Joe Sciacca to succeed Convey as Herald editor
posted by Dan Kennedy on July 20, 2010
Boston Herald media reporter Jessica Heslam has the story: managing editor Joe Sciacca, a panelist on "Beat the Press," will succeed departing editor-in-chief Kevin Convey, thus ending any speculation that publisher Pat Purcell might make an outside pick. Sciacca speaks:
"I can’t think of a more exciting time for the Herald as we launch new initiatives for print and online. We will continue to deliver the ambitious reporting and unique perspective that Herald readers have come to rely on."
Congratulations to Joe on a big promotion.
Kevin Convey leaves Herald for N.Y.'s Daily News
posted by Dan Kennedy on July 20, 2010
Big news today at One Herald Square: Kevin Convey, a longtime Herald veteran who's been editor-in-chief for the past three-plus years, is leaving to become editor of New York's Daily News. He replaces Martin Dunn, whose departure was reportedly prompted by his wife's battle with cancer.
I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, but Dunn was editor of the Herald for a very brief period in the early 1990s.
Convey's new job entails a switch of tabloid loyalties. In Boston, the Herald is allied with its former owner, Rupert Murdoch. Herald publisher Pat Purcell, who bought the paper from his old boss in 1994, helps Murdoch run regional properties such as the Standard-Times of New Bedford and the Cape Cod Times.
In New York, the Daily News — owned by real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, who also has significant Boston ties — has been entangled for years in a steel-cage death match with the New York Post, whose owner, of course, is Murdoch. Here is the Daily News' press release, along with Convey's reaction:
I am looking forward to the challenge of editing the Daily News, which has some of the most talented people in the newspaper business and the web anywhere in the world. It is a great privilege.
Convey's a smart guy who took over the Herald at a time when the paper, and the news business in general, was shrinking drastically. During the 1990s, he was part of the triumvirate that ran the paper, serving as managing editor for features along with editor Andy Costello and managing editor for news Andrew Gully.
Convey became editor-in-chief of Community Newspaper Co., which published about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, when Purcell added it to his holdings in the early 2000s. After Purcell sold CNC to GateHouse Media a few years later, Convey returned to the Herald, serving as the paper's number-two while editorial director Ken Chandler, tarted it up and made it more gossipy — more of a tabloid, if you like. After Chander moved on, Convey took over.
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote about Convey's Herald in 2008.
Best of luck to Convey, who's a good guy, and whom I generally found to be helpful and accessible back when I was covering the local media for the Boston Phoenix.
Needless to say, it will be fascinating to see who ends up succeeding Convey at the Herald.
Update: Well, that didn't take long.
Correction: Ken Chandler's name now fixed, thanks to an alert reader.
Elena Kagan's First Amendment moment of truth
posted by Dan Kennedy on July 14, 2010
Radio and television stations have long been considered the poor step-cousins of the First Amendment.
Whereas newspapers and magazines can publish virtually any content that's not obscene, an incitement to violence or a serious breach of national security, broadcasters have been subject to regulations by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restricting so-called indecent content to hours when children are presumably in bed.
Now the door has been opened to doing away with these censorious and technologically outmoded rules. On Tuesday, a federal appeals court in New York ruled that the FCC's six-year-old ban on "fleeting expletives," passed following live, televised F-bombs by the likes of Bono and Cher, are "unconstitutionally vague."
If the FCC decides to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, a regulatory regime dating back to the 1920s may, at long last, come crashing down. And the court's newest member, soon-to-be Justice Elena Kagan (photo), will be forced to choose between freedom of speech, on the one hand, and her expansive view of executive power, on the other.
The FCC's authority is based on the notion that the airwaves are a scarce, publicly owned resource that must be regulated for the public good. But in a world of hundreds of cable channels, not to mention the virtual infinity of the Internet, the scarcity rationale no longer makes any sense.
As the appeals court noted, the FCC's naughty-word police have so spooked broadcasters that such worthy programs as "Saving Private Ryan" and a CBS documentary on 9/11 were pushed off to 10 p.m., a time when the indecency provisions aren't in effect.
In 2006, Vermont Public Radio went so far as to ban a minor-party U.S. Senate candidate from a debate lest he go off (as he had previously), putting the operation at risk of a hefty fine.
Will the FCC appeal? Will Kagan and the Supremes do the right thing? Stay tuned.
I have a longer commentary on what all this means in the Guardian, and I invite you to take a look.
Time enters Apple's reality-distortion zone
posted by Dan Kennedy on July 12, 2010
Back in February, we paid $20 for an 18-month subscription to the print edition of Time magazine. All right, it was a "professional" rate, available to us because I'm a journalism professor. But no one pays the full $4.95-per-issue cover price. If you sign up for a subscription online, for instance, you'll be charged just $19.95 for six months.
So count Time Warner executives among those who have been sucked into Steve Jobs' famed "reality-distortion zone." Because they are groping their way toward a paid-content strategy for Time that makes little or no sense. As explained by the Nieman Journalism Lab here and here, it includes these elements:
- The magazine is now available as an iPad app costing a flat $4.99 per issue — no discounts, thank you very much. The same folks who understand fully that you won't pay some $250 a year for the print edition think you'll gladly fork over the money so that you'll have something to read on your new toy.
- The full content of the print edition has been pulled from Time.com, the magazine's excellent website. There is still a lot of Web-only content available, much of it more, uh, timely and relevant than what appears in print. But when you try to access most articles from the print product, you get a summary and a plea to buy the magazine or the app.
(Click "continue" to keep reading.)
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Dan's Whiteboard
@P.G. Fox: Yeah, just the guy holding the club was sanctioned. If I gave the impression that I thought the other guy (who was not doing anything wrong, by the way), was punished, then I misspoke. Last I checked, it was legal for unarmed men to stand in front of polling stations.
Dan, couldn't help but notice on Friday that once again you don't know what your talking about! With regard to the Fox News/ New Black Panther coverage you repeatedly bemoaned the lack or inaccuracy of the Fox reporting while simultaneously falsifying your own fact set! A single New Black Panther was sanctioned being enjoined from particular polling places for a few years, the second perpetrator was not only not sanctioned in any form or fashion but actually acted as a poll watcher in at least one subsequent election there in Philly. You can easily find all the facts in the expansive public record at the US Commission on Civil Rights website where they have the entire record (minus the documentation still being withheld by Eric Holder Justice Department) available for anyone even the professional prognosticators like yourself to peruse. I can only hope that your students ultimately are capable of learning something valuble from your own professional shortcomings displayed again this evening for all to see!
Mary: Lucy Dalglish really is the gold standard in such matters. Perhaps you missed it, but I did note in an update that Dalglish had apparently changed her mind after she learned more about your daughter's case. See the bottom of this item:
http://bit.ly/bPrh5O
Thank you for writing, and best of luck.
Dan, thank you for your insightful comments on "Beat the Press". Since I am a fan, I was surprised at your take on the Claire O'Brien/Kansas/Gatehouse story. Full disclosure, I am Claire's mother. But it was upsetting to see that you simply accepted the RCFP's Lucy Daglish version without question. (she has since changed her position). The Kansas Free Press Assn. has been celebrating the new shield law, passed after Claire's principled refusal to disclose her source cost her her job and almost her freedom. She needs support now, so please re-examine the issue and see if you can help.
Liz — Thank you so much for your kind words, and for remembering my father. He'll be gone 25 years this November. It seems hard to believe.
Bill: What can I say? I guess I've just got a thing for people who've won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Does that make him and me elitists?
Not surprised by Dan's admiration for Paul Krugman. Dan seems to worship "Limousine Lliberals'. Krigman and Wells choose to live in high end places (Princeton, NJ, St. Croix, expensive New York City section. Is this because they need to avoid interacting with a cross section of people on a racial or economic basis? My guess is like their peers Gore, Biden, Obama, etc. they give very little of their large earnings to charity - it's all about them. Heaven forbid they mix with someone who liked Elvis.
Dan, your father, Dan Sr. would be very proud. I worked with him at the Brockton VA in HR and have watched you on Greater Boston for many yrs.
Dan,
I understood Sen. Reid's comment as a description of what IS, not an advocacy of what SHOULD BE. That distinction is apparently lost on many people. He simply said that he thought a black person who was light-skinned and spoke with a standard American accent would be more electable than one who had neither of these attributes. What did he say that was incorrect or improper? Lots of black people have voiced their agreement. The only thing that troubles me is that he caved in and issued an apology.
Dan, while the anti-idling law is not that "sexy" of a story, I believe it is a good story to "get the word out" where environmental agencies are not for some reason. We have had a this law on the books for over 25 years, and I know of no better thing that we can do is know that 1) there is a law that limits idling of vehicles to 5 minutes, and 2) and peer pressure alone will help accomplish compliance.
We just have to look at the "no smoking" regulation on the MBTA platforms to see how quickly we can get something done.
My complaint is that the public does not even know such a law exists. Why this is so begs the question...if we can do something about it that simply, then why aren't we doing it?
We could all do our part! But this is where you folks come in in getting the word out.
Hello, Wendy: In some respects, print remains an ideal medium. But I find that GlobeReader allows for such fast flipping that I can at least eyeball every story in the paper, much as I would with print. I certainly can't do that with BostonGlobe.com — it's just too slow.
Dan, I agree that the Globe Reader is great. I travel a lot for business and love to be able to log in when I'm on the road and missing my printed paper.
My biggest problem is this: with the print edition I can scan an article to see its content. With the Globe Reader, which shows just the headline, sometimes I don't have a clue about the content of the article and I just skip over it. But definitely an added-value from my standpoint.
John C: I used it as shorthand, but you're right about the background of the term. No offense intended.
Vinnie: Your objections to the health-care bills are reasonable. Obviously it is possible to oppose the bills without being racist. At the same time, the over-the-top protests at town meetings, invoking Nazis, non-existent "death panels," and the like, are an outgrowth of the right-wing tea-bag/birther movement, which in turn springs from the racist hatemongering encouraged by Sarah Palin at her rallies last year. John McCain, to his credit, spoke out against that sentiment toward the end of the campaign. But it's still there.
As you probably know, at this point there is no "Obama bill" with respect to health care -- he's decided to let Congress do it, which I think is a mistake. And I've criticized him on two consecutive "Beat the Press" programs for failing to articulate a clear vision of what health reform would look like. (Based on my understanding of the various proposals, your concerns are unfounded. But I don't think it's your fault that you hold those concerns given the poor communication job Obama has done.)
Lord knows it's possible to criticize Obama and to oppose his policies without being a racist. But unarticulated (or, in some cases, articulated) racial fears are playing into the more extreme elements of opposition to the president, goaded on by the likes of Glenn Beck, who tells his viewers that Obama hates white people. Let's not kid ourselves as to what's going on.
Dan, recently on Beat the Press you made a comment insinuating that those opposed to the so-called “death Panels” are “racist”. Dan, please understand that race has nothing to do with this fiasco called a national healthcare bill that is being foisted on the American people.
We cannot pay for social security. We cannot pay for Medicare. We cannot afford the state and municipal pensions that are being given out. Government over the years has proven time and time again that it does NOT manage big spending programs very well. I would rather take my chances paying for my own healthcare than letting the government do this for me.
You must have seen Emily’s interview with Niki Tsongas. Emily asked point blank why we the American people cannot have the same health insurance plan that Congress and other government officials have? Niki Tsongas walked right around the question and would not give a clear Yes or No answer. The Congress has no intention of giving up its healthcare plan, so why should we the taxpayers have to give up ours?
Dan, recently on Beat the Press you made a comment insinuating that those opposed to the so-called “death Panels” are “racist”. Dan, please understand that race has nothing to do with this fiasco called a national healthcare bill that is being foisted on the American people.
We cannot pay for social security. We cannot pay for Medicare. We cannot afford the state and municipal pensions that are being given out. Government over the years has proven time and time again that it does NOT manage big spending programs very well. I would rather take my chances paying for my own healthcare than letting the government do this for me.
You must have seen Emily’s interview with Niki Tsongas. Emily asked point blank why we the American people cannot have the same health insurance plan that Congress and other government officials have? Niki Tsongas walked right around the question and would not give a clear Yes or No answer. The Congress has no intention of giving up its healthcare plan, so why should we the taxpayers have to give up ours?
Dear Mr. Kennedy,
I recently watched last week's episode of BEAT THE PRESS and must say that I was a bit disappointed in your using the term "Tea baggers" in the segment of Health care Protests. I am sure that you understand the background of the term so I do not need to go through the meaning with you and I believe that it does not belong in a such a television show.
Hi DanK
ST: Different Dan's: B-t-P Dan, Blog Dan
I have watched you for a long time on TV and I can't figure out why I like you more in blog land than on TV land yet I DO.
I know you are reserved on TV almost to the timid point which is a bit odd considering your knowledge.
Adding: Again I can't figure out why You on TV become a wash for me. I know the gals usually do that gal head shake that calls attention to the watcher. Maybe it is your voice and a downward spiral. Again I can't figure out why your voice doesn't carry more attention. Since you are at NorthEastern you might want to have some of your students do a criticism of your TV presence with video.
Dan,
I understand, to the point, the newsworthiness of the Crowley/Gates affair. But this got me---our Boston news stations sending reporters to Washington to report on a picnic table beer meeting that couldn't be on camera. (I'm a channel 5 guy, to be honest.) The stations are wasting money on sending these people down there, but failing to report on stories up here! There wasn't even any new news to report.
What's the thinking behind this? What kind of scoop did, say, channel 5 get by sending someone to DC? Is it just to get the ubiquitous picture of the White House portico in the background? (the same setting that's on every White House live story) Or to pretend that the channel isn't provincial? I don't get it.
And even better: this morning (7/30) it seems like the big twist on the story (some great investigative reporting here) is that the President drinks BudLite. Even people who are very interested in this story have to care less about this. What a waste of time!
Norman: Thanks for your comments. Like you, I don't think Crowley's actions were based on race. Rather, I think they were based on an overwrought sense of the respect he thinks is due to a police officer.
Rather than understanding why Gates would (mistakenly) see this as a matter of racial profiling, and rather than thinking about the symbolism of standing in Gates' own home with handcuffs and a gun, Crowley instead chose to focus solely on the fact that Gates was mouthing off.
Dan, up until yesterday, like yourself, I could not think of a rational reason for Sergeant Crowley's arrest of Professor Gates (based on your statement on Beat the Press). It should have been possible to defuse the situation without an arrest. Here was a short, middle-aged, partly disabled, unarmed man who posed no physical threat whatsoever. However, yesterday my son posed this explanation:
"Honestly, I think the motivation for his arrest WAS based on race, but not for the reason you may think. Crowley grew up in multi-racial Cambridge and was said to have many friends of different races and ethnicities. Maybe when this elitist, Harvard snob started calling him a racist cop, it infuriated him so much that he was more inclined to make the arrest. He was mad, hurt and offended...and the thought of being branded a racist cop irked him so much that he may have acted a little irrational during the confrontation."
So the bottom line is that both men acted irrationally, and in both cases it was based on previous experiences related to race. This is the most coherent explanation of the whole incident.
I semi-seriously suggested to my son that President Obama ought to invite both men to the White House; they should sit down and talk awhile; then they should hold a joint news conference. Now it looks as though that might happen!
Dan, I thoroughly enjoy your comments on Beat the Press. After all the others have weighed in on each issue, you seem to be able to provide the most insightful comments of all.
Lou: Hah! Thanks for the endorsement. You've given me an excuse to tell people that my book, "Little People," is online at www.littlepeoplethebook.com.
Dan is very bright and thoughtful. A good writer, and a good observer of the media. Except when it comes to politics...where all his thoughtful brainy insights go out the window so he can simply promote his own political ideology.
I'd recommend his book on dwarfism! He did a great job...I suppose because it was a subject that didn't have to do with politics.