The corpse that won't stay dead

Wasn't there a Spanish king who had a lisp so bad people started speaking that way so the problem would seem normal? A real emperor had no clothes story. Are we seeing this happen with President Obama, who mispronounced Navy corpsman as "corpseman" during a prayer breakfast speech? Never head about it? Not surprised. There's little, if any, mention of it in the traditional news media. It's all over the net, however. I think it would have been ammo for late night comics, given the pounding Bush took for similar slips. (See earlier postings about the Quayle-Clinton era as well as Obama and "57 states."). Does all this matter? I think so if one regards these incidents as lessons in media power. Will "corpseman" become the correct pronunciation? Living memory tells us there was a time when "gay" meant only happy. And how did "gone missing" become so accepted when just a few years ago it meant you were AWOL? News stories about missing persons used to say simply that they "are missing." These earlier examples, however, pretty much came when the mainstream media could regard net comments as nothing more than puddles. Not so now.
The imbalance results from "liberal bias," right? I'm not so sure. I think there's a good chance reporters covering the speech didn't know the difference between corpsman and corpseman. I'd bet they didn't know what a corpsman is. When I entered the news game almost every one I worked with had been in the military. When I left hardly anyone had. I saw many stories shortly before I retired that used "battleship" to describe a destroyer or refer to a corporal as an "officer." The late lamented media mag Brill's Content had a piece about military reporting that said social concerns in military coverage far outweighed that of preparedness.
Things might be a bit better now because the Internet will eventually catch you. If only the news powers regarded blogs as a means to improve reporting. Start now by owning up to the "corpseman" goof.

"Ramparts" Needed Watching

I wish I talked to Peter Richardson before he wrote "A Bomb in Every Issue," the latest history of Ramparts, the flashy 1960's San Francisco-based magazine his subtitle claims "changed America." I was on the 50-yard line when Ramparts was born. At its conception would be more accurate. The full subtitle reads: "How the short, unruly life of Ramparts magazine changed America." I think it's more exact to say Ramparts "changed American journalism." I concede my version might not be needed. Adding "journalism" seems synonymous or redundant. So goes American journalism, so goes America.

To truly appreciate Richardson's effort one should first read "If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade: An Essential Memoir of a Lunatic Decade," the memoir of Warren Hinckle, the brains behind Ramparts. No Hinckle, no Ramparts. To know Hinckle is to know Ramparts. I'm in Hinckle's book. Only a page and a half, but it says a great deal about us and the paths we took in life. Pages 6-7 recall our days on "The Crusader," the student newspaper at Riordan High, an all boys Catholic school in San Francisco. Warren was editor and I was sports editor, profiled in the book as a "burly football player" whose view of "our journalistic calling was that it came somewhere after football and girls." Warren's life, in contrast, centered around teletype machines and printing presses.

I was his "traveling companion" on trips to the San Francisco Examiner where Warren would "drool over the teletype machines." Reading those passages now, I find irony in the fact that I was the one who ended up in a career on the other end of those teletype machines.I was as shocked as anyone at Riordan when I, not Hinckle, won the Press and Union League Club scholarship in 1956, the year we graduated and Hinckle was valedictorian. A bigger shock came ten years later at the class reunion when Hinckle tried to address his classmates and was booed - a lot. I shouldn't have been surprised. In its pioneer editions, Ramparts was billed as a Catholic literary magazine. Many thought "anti-Catholic" was more like it. The first chapter of "Lemonade" would be called "Catholic Dirty Tricks." I remember one alum at the 1966 gathering screaming "you don't speak for us" through hands held as a megaphone.

I suppose it's true that you can't go home again, but I did go back to Riordan during the last decade and felt very much at home, even though the student body is no longer dominated by Irish and Italian offspring. The events that drew me were memorials, one for a classmate and the other for a former faculty member, both of whom served in the Marine Corps, the teacher in WWII and Korea and the graduate in Vietnam. I didn't spot Hinckle at either memorial. I would have liked to talk with him. I did talk to many classmates, though, and all seemed glad that we had fine male role models during our teen years.

"We were lucky," one said,"almost all these guys, even some of the religious, served in the military. They really gave us a feeling of individual responsibility and team work." I think that's true. I wasn't a very good student, but I left Riordan with the feeling that what I did with my life had consequences. That's probably why "Philip's Code" puts so much stock in the character of the news reporter.

If I go on in this vein much longer I will start hearing "Rosebud," but I do want to underline that Hinckle had a huge impact on journalism, a legacy we live with to this day. He was a promotional genius, which I witnessed as a reporter at UPI in the 1970s when he gave me an exclusive that received international play.

In 1973 Warren asked me if I wanted to interview prison fugitive Joel Kaplan, who two years earlier had been lifted by helicopter right out of a Mexican prison. Later, Hinckle co-authored a book about the inventive escape called "The Ten Second Jailbreak" which was eventually a movie starring Charles Bronson. In 1973 there was so much interest in Kaplan the rival Associated Press ran a long feature on efforts to find him. Hinckle lined me up with an exclusive interview with Kaplan at a North Beach cafe. Kaplan had been stashed away, supplying information for the book. Turned out the escape was probably legal, although the reasoning behind that was very complicated and needs a book of its own. Keeping Kaplan under wraps helped create interest.

I thought a few times about writing a book similar to Richardson's, but when I mentioned that to friends they felt I was too close to the subject to be objective, which is again ironic considering Ramparts and its offspring killed off even attempts at objectivity. I think my friends were right. It would have started and stopped with Hinckle. They also said I overestimated Ramparts' influence.

"Watergate was far more important," was the way one of them put it. I'm not so sure about that. There might very well have been no Watergate without the trail blazed by Ramparts. Besides, I concluded decades ago that there were two factors far more important than Watergate or Ramparts: the placing of UPI on life support, which gave AP a virtual news monopoly, and downsides of technology, both of which I tried to show in my book.

The news culture spawned by Ramparts urged reporters to "question authority." What happens when the news media becomes the "authority?" Not much if the traditional news outlets can't be held accountable, which was nearly impossible until talk radio gained power. On the last page of his book, Richardson asks Hinckle why Ramparts had been so successful in its early years. "Probably because the rest of the press was so shitty," he replied. I am sure there are a lot of talk radio people who would say the same thing if they were asked what was the key to their popularity

Things aren't much better now. In addition to talk radio, today's version of the underground press of the 1960s includes rantings on the Internet, the home to the "validation journalism" in which people get their news with their favorite slants built in. There is hope. If enough people learned where news comes from, how it is gathered and distributed, they could use all the latest advances in technology to convince the news powers to stop firing people and get back to basics to the point they will regain the public's trust. Getting the news out is not the same as getting the news. That's why my book is dedicated to all journalists who still believe the pen is mightier than the mouse.

A Glimpse of the Future of News

The coverage of the slaying of an abortion protester in Owosso, Michigan, on 9-11 (the date alone should have grabbed editors' attention) proves, once again, that the first casualty of war is truth - especially in a cultural war. The story provides a glimpse in to the future of the gathering and distribution of news. What I see isn't pretty.
Unless you are involved in the abortion debate, you might have missed the shooting death of James Pouillon, who, in life, gained local, limited notoriety by picketing at schools with bloody photos of aborted fetuses. The story may not have been in your area's papers, but it's all over the 'net, giving Pouiloon much more than his allotted 15 minutes of fame.
The story wasn't in my papers. I've asked the San Francisco Chronicle's John Diaz to explain. So far, no answer. Editors at two free Peninsula dailies I read were far more honest. Both said they didn't know about it.
I wrung my hands when I heard about the killing. Not because I was happy. {I'm not that hardened). It was a newsroom habit developed over the years, one that signaled that we were going to have a big story. "Boy," I said to myself,"this one REALLY has a local angle."
The local angle is named Ross Foti, who has drawn the wrath of many for carrying similar signs at Peninsula schools - even a Catholic school - and clinics. Like Pouillon, Foti has become the center of debates over free speech as well as abortion. Yet I saw nothing in our locals about the Michigan killing. Seemed a natural to me.
Why didn't the local editors know about this story? My guess is that we are paying the price for letting UPI become moribund. News hinges on what AP does with it. I wouldn't have known about the killing if I hadn't seen the first, slim AP story that moved automatically on sfgate, the Chronicle's online edition. The giant news agency usually does an outstanding job in the early, developing stages of major "breaking" news. Does it, however, try to promote similar stories equally on its news budget, which becomes the stories we will talk about? I've asked for comment, but, you guessed it, still no answer to my email.
This has happened before. About three months ago, the killing of a late-term abortion doctor in Kansas was all over the news, followed later by a killing at the Holocaust Museum in the nation's capital. Around this time I spotted on sfgate an AP story reporting that a military recruiter had been shot to death. While the first two garnered strong Bay area coverage, the recruiter's death was virtually ignored, even though there was a good local angle - the Code Pink picketing of recruiting offices in Berkeley.
There's plenty on the Internet about all these killings. All seem to be written by lawyers or PR people who want you to know certain facts but leave out others. The stories by backers of legal abortion try to beat down those by anti-abortion forces that see media bias in the extensive coverage of the Kansas killing and the comparative slim amount given the Michigan killing.
"The truth is the sum of the facts" was something I was taught years ago by a former AP political writer turned journalism teacher. "If you want to tell one side of a story you're in the wrong business."
Now the news business is the "wrong business" to be in if you like eating. I can't help think that one of the reasons newspapers are so emaciated is that too many journalists forget some early lessons.

Does AP stand for Agenda Pope?

There's an epiphany in "Philip's Code" where the central character realizes the wire service he works for is so powerful it is "the Vatican of news," meaning it has the last word on, well, words. The coverage of the Sonia Sotomayor trek to the Supreme Court serves as a good example. Sotomayor was billed as the "first Hispanic" on the court, a term the Associated Press ran with, which meant just about all news outlets followed. But, hold on. Is a news reformation going on? Bloggers brought up the name of Benjamin N. Cardozo, named to the court in the 1930s. Was he the first Hispanic? Pretty much depends on how one defines "Hispanic," which set off a lively, and interesting, debate on the Internet. Some insisted Cordozo qualified because his ancestry could be traced to Portugal, which butts up against Spain. Others said no way. Cardozo probably never heard the word "Hispanic." I'll bet he thought of himself as an American who was Jewish. Which brings up another interesting point. Cardozo was appointed at a time, which is in living memory, when religion played an import part in selections for the court. There were "Jewish seats" and "Catholic seats." Little noted, except by bloggers, is the fact that Sotomayor gives the court six Catholics. Not an issue - if the Catholicism of other nominees hadn't been controversial.
The AP could have noted the blog disputes, not with some meaningless sidebar, but, briefly, in its main story. What we need is a news counter-reformation instead of a reformation - one in which trust is established. Otherwise we will continue to see individual interpretation of the news.

Obama: The road to Morocco wasn't smooth

Bush was bashed for calling the fight against terror a "crusade," but Obama gets away with trying to rewrite the Marines Hymn. That's pretty much what he did in his speech in Cairo when he said Morocco was "the first nation to recognize my country" and then pointed to the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796. Sounds like Morocco was a good guy, not a nation backing pirates and forcing us to pay tribute and ransom. A few years later we would be at war with these pirates and the Marines could sing about the shores of Tripoli. Someone in the news media should have wondered about this. Guess it's the Clinton years again when it comes to history. A book called "On Bended Knee" recounts how the press was dazzled by President Reagan to the point of genuflection. I think I will write a similar book about Clinton. The title, of course, would be "On Bended KneeS."
Obama also said "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance" and went on to add that "we see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition." We could all use a history lesson on that. What about before the Inquisition?
The line that bothered me the most, however, was the reference to Al Qaida, which "claimed credit for the attack" on Sept. 11. "Credit?" A first-year journalism student knows the term is "claimed reponsibility."

Should I sue over "State of Play?"

I just saw "State of Play," the suspense movie about the fictional moribund Washington Globe, like so many newspapers on life support, kept alive by a few dedicated reporters. Anyone know a good lawyer? Just kidding, but the parallels with "Philip's Code: No News is Good News - to a Killer" are difficult to ignore. Yes, I know I'd be in line behind the BBC. Nevertheless, I had the feeling as I watched the movie that someone behind the credits read my book.
In both, the reporter is personally involved. In the book, there's the death of the main character's son. In the movie, the reporter "shagged" a source's wife. Both get major breaks from the coroner's office, both deal with technological changes, and both use reporter's tricks to get information. I expected Russell Crowe to use lines from the book - "Truth is the sum of the Facts," "NEWS is the important part of newspaper" or "news is what the newspapers say it is." Not only that, there are main characters who are military vets who lost faith and hope.
And, of course, there are the surprise endings. I may be biased, but the book's is better.

Is Obama Getting a Press Pass?

Looks as though Obama has been issued the same kind of press pass Clinton was, at least when it comes to history. The latest slip came in the President's first interview, the one with Al-Arabiya, which broadcasts to the Arab world. Obama said he wanted a return to "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago." Those wonderful days brought us the Iranian hostage crisis, the Beirut Marine barracks bombing, the Pan Am flight 103 bombing, etc. etc. etc. Respect??? We backed the Shah in Iran. Nuff said.
I saw very little media reaction to his seeming lack of knowledge about history. Perhaps today news outlets lack enough reporters to go after all angles. I'd buy this, except the watchdog press was licking itself during the Clinton years as well as the Obama-Biden campaign, (See earlier postings.) All of this would matter little except for the fact that Dan Quayle became the national punching bag for misspelling potato. Not to mention Bush's pounding, which spilled over to TV comedy. (BTW, when will we see Obama's initials in headlines a'la Bush?)
I guess this is the coverage we can expect when we are down to one major wire service. Is "liberal bias" the problem? I'm not so sure. I think it's possible to be have liberal bias and still do the job. That's the problem - professionalism, or lack of. Come to think of it, the reason is that there is no spell check for history.