Catholic San Francisco

Catholic San Francisco

Back in the Game!!!

   

    I won't be posting much. I'm back in the pros, writing a twice monthly history column called "The Rear View Mirror." Cute, uh? It appears every other Monday in the San Mateo Daily Journal. I've written seven columns so far and loving it. 

   I started with a piece on the Mystery Barge that was once Redwood City's best kept secret. Actually it was the CIA's secret. Turned out the barge was part of an operation designed to recover the code books from a Soviet submarine that went down in the Pacific. The latest is on the last Indian in San Mateo County. Should be interesting considering the controversy about the canonization of Junipero Serra, the founder of the California missions.

    I try to tie the past to the present. All the publicity about the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition gave me the opportunity to write about San Mateo County's connection to the expo, which included Van's Restaurant in Belmont that was once part of the Japanese exhibit.

    The column is on line. Just go to San Mateo Daily Journal, click archives and put in "rear view mirror." BTW: the column ends with the reminder that, as it says on rear view mirrors - "objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear."

     This may very well be the last posting. Everything I predicted in "Philip's Code" has come true, mainly that America's idea of communicating is to yell the loudest.

   

The Hits Just Keep Coming: "Spotlight," New Movie on Sex Scandal

    Remember that you heard it here first: a new movie about the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal is sure to get the story wrong. How can I say this when the movie isn't even in the can? Because I know the story behind the story, which is more about the church than it is about sex abuse. I was on the ground floor when this scandal broke. Actually, it was the fifth floor of the Fox Plaza building in San Francisco where the Associated Press bureau was located.
     The movie has big league names, including director Tom McCarthy and actors Stanley Tucci, Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams. It's entitled "Spotlight" and focuses on the Boston Globe's alleged breaking of the sex abuse in the church. I suppose there will be comparisons to Watergate and the Washington Post but don't expect the Pope to resign.
      The movie isn't at a theater near you and it might not make it if there are some second thoughts - and there should be. For one thing, the National Catholic Reporter was pretty well exclusive on it long before the Globe and so was the San Jose Mercury News. The NCR was reporting on predator priests as early as 1983. The Mercury's Carl Cannon won honors for his 1985 story. Cannon wondered in the American Journalism Review why his stories didn't get the attention received by the later ones, asking if  "there are lessons to be learned for investigative reporters and journalism as a whole?" You bet there are lessons. For one, that the Boston Globe has more clout with the rest of the media than the Merc. Another lesson is that pack journalism rules with reporters following the leader.
      The church scandal is a prime example of Oz reporting in which you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain even though you know something is wrong. I knew something was wrong a few weeks after the AP picked up the Mercury story. An education group met in San Francisco and one of its papers had to do with sex abuse in public schools. I can't remember all the details and wished I had saved the handout given to the AP. I figured it would be as well covered as the church story. It wasn't, so I don't have any clips. Later Education Week did a series on school sex abuse in a series called "Passing the Trash," which was about offending teachers being moved from one school to another. It wasn't until 2010 that the AP got around to doing a series on sex abuse in schools. Few newspapers ran it. Ashamed? They should be.

No Media Equality in Marriage Debate

   Those who worry that today's Supreme Court ruling effectively upholding same sex marriage will lead to polygamy or incest should calm down. Ain't no way. Phil Davis was right in "Philip's Code" when he said "the slope doesn't become slippery until the media greases it."
    His dictum holds in almost all news stories, but the coverage of  same sex marriage is the best example I can think of.  Right from the start, I wondered why arrangements other than same sex weren't on the news budget. After all, thousands of couples live in polygamous marriages, although they are illegal. And in parts of the South people reach a milestone when they become the first to marry outside their family. All kidding aside, polygamy is, and was, a huge issue. Federal troops went in to Utah which was forced to renounce the Mormon practice. Are today's journalists like everyone else in that they have short memory spans or have no regard for the past? If so, they shouldn't be
.   Some might think I am biased because I am part of today's mixed marriage, by which I mean one between a man and a woman. No. I frankly don't care who gets married as long as they are consenting adults. I do h  ave concerns about a church being forced to marry someone, but that is not what I want to write about. I want to focus on the media, because I think the media foc-us - the public - on this one. (BTW: I saw a spokes person for gays - speaking to a row of  TV cameras and microphones - say "f--- Eight" after today's ruling. Lots of class.. I don't want to get in to how "gay"  and "straight" were imposed. She was speaking, of course, in San Francisco.)
    When I said "right from the start," I meant San Francisco where it all started when Mayor Gavin Newsom married homosexuals. All a reporter had to do was ask him if he would perform a ceremony for more than two people, regardless of gender. A few days later, a national TV reporter did and Newsom answered with some flip remark about marrying a horse.  After today's ruling, Newsom thanked a lot of people. All he had to do was thank the media which limited the debate by simply using the term "marriage equality" which Newsom said several times in his "thank you" address. Recently, in a "guest perspective" column for the San Mateo Daily Journal, Assemblyman Mark Leno delivered "marriage equality" at least three times.
 The issue wasn't one of "marriage equality," which would involve everybody. It was about same sex marriage - nothing else. Are we leaving in the age of "newspeak?" Do reporters have agendas? Is this the result of  "liberal media?" I think there is much more involved. For one thing, I miss the old United Press International, the one that had reporters who asked tough questions, giving the AP fits. I sometimes think objectivity died with the old UPI, which  had a logo featuring the silhouette of a fedora topped reporter who held a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. Today that reporter would have all sorts of electronic gear, doing dozens of jobs instead of the main one, which is to question authority. The problem today is that mass media is the "authority." .
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The Litter on Twitter

    People who play reporter on Twitter will have to be more careful if the instant message system's performance during the Boston Marathon story is an example of journalism's future.  Two innocent men were identified erroneously as suspects in Twitter's rush to judgment, according to The Atlantic and James Temple, who writes the Dot-Commentary column for the San Francisco Chronicle.
    One of the fundamental rules of reporting - at least at the wire services - was "get it first, but first get it right." There were other standards that apply here, commandments such as "don't quote an anonymous source unless you can support it elsewhere." Basically, an anonymous source was a tip. And, of course, there was the "three source" rule, which was more broken than observed.
     The major league media didn't do all that well on this story either. Television network reporters often gave me facts without naming the source. Whatever happened to "according to...?" Some accounts I heard said three unexploded bombs were found. Later, this was jettisoned as false, but I was left to wonder where the report came from. Again, no attribution.
     In addition, the pressure cooker bombs were said to have been placed in "duffel bags." Later we were told the bombs were in backpacks. Once again there was no "according to." Reminded me of the "trench coats" the killers wore in the 1998  mass slayings at Columbine High in Colorado. The killers actually had on dusters, the long coats favored by Jesse James. I had the feeling that reporters today don't know anything about military gear, either coats or duffel bags.
     Sure, mistakes occurred in the past. As "Philip's Code" points out, stories were usually read by three people before they hit the wire and still errors could be made. The corrections that followed explained what had happened. Perhaps it is time to go back to the future.
 

Don't expect Jackie Speier to Grease the Slope

      Don't expect Rep. Jackie Speier, who is leading the charge against rape in the military, to lead reporters to a startling, and timely, fact: A big percentage of sexual assault victims in the armed forces are men.
     There's a line in "Philip's Code" that says "the slope is only slippery when the media greases it." We are seeing a lot of examples lately, particularly in stories about same-sex marriage, in which the term "marriage equality" frequently appears. The comments threads under such stories usually contain a few remarks about same sex marriage leading to making polygamy legal. If  "equality" is the goal wouldn't all consenting adults have the right to marry? I don't think there's a chance of  that happening because the media has had plenty of opportunities to head in that direction but it has pretty well kept quiet. Talk about "don't ask, don't tell!!!!" All a reporter had to do was ask San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom if he'd perform a marriage of more than two people.
    Speier, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has drawn a lot of ink with her campaign to curb sexual assault in the military, although the stories seem to have fallen off since early March when several victims testified before the Senate Armed Services sub-committee on personnel. They included Brian Lewis, a former sailor who said he was raped by  a fellow non-com in 2000. According to reporter Gary Martin of Hearst, Lewis told the panel 56 percent of the sexual assault victims in the military each year are men while 44 percent are women.  The AP buried Lewis' testimony near the end of its story, which ran nearly 20 paragraphs, and didn't note the statistic.
     The male rapes were news to a lot of people, including me. It shouldn't have been. I checked and as far back as 2003 Florida Today had a long story about such attacks. Newsweek had one in 2011. Yet Speier seemed to dance around this angle when she hitch-hiked headlines, including when she helped promote the movie "The Invisible War," which deals with the very real and troubling problem of heterosexual rape in the service. I asked her aide if the congresswoman had noted the male victims and was told "she had noted that many times." I asked for some examples. She sent me three stories, all of which buried that aspect. In two, the reporter could have been responsible. One, however, was written by Speier herself. It ran in several papers, including the New York Post. Speier opened by saying that "next year 30,000 young women will sign up to serve in our country's military. Absent from the glossy recruitment brochures is the tragic fact that one in three women in the military will be raped or sexually assaulted by a colleague or superior during her career." Later, she wrote that "women, and men, join the service with a sense of honor and duty, but not to become victims or military sexual trauma." That was the only time males were mentioned. Again, "don't ask, don't tell" is still the law - a law of journalism.

   
       
      

Keep an Eye on the OCR

  Anyone interested in the future of newspapers - and that should be everybody - should follow what's going on at the Orange County Register, where the management is spending more and more on solid reporting in an effort to lure readers. Apparently publisher Aaron Kushner realizes that the important part of newspaper is NEWS, not PAPER.
    According to press reports, Kushner has added about 75 reporters with more coming. Kushner, a Stanford graduate, is only 39 and no ink-stained copy room slave. He has a master's degree in organizational analysis, which is a good thing because he'll have an outsider's view of journalism.
    He told the Associated Press that his lack of industry experience means he hasn't been on the slippery slope of newspapers' near death experience.
     "So when we sit down and look at what's possible, our view of the world is different," he said. "We're a little crazy in that we really do believe that  we can grow this particular newspaper."
     The Alliance for Audited Media reports that the average daily circulation of the OCR rose 5.3 percent as of Sept. 30 from a year ago to 285,068 on weekdays and 387,547 on Sundays. The figures contrast with 0.2 percent decline for the industry as a whole.
     Before the end of March, Kushner's plans envision charging online access that is the same as for the print edition.
     "The value of the journalism isn't any less," he said. "The reporter isn't paid any less."
     I pray he succeeds and proves that, as Phil Davis would say in my book, that "life is a gamble and the reporter is the guy you trust so much you let him hold the stakes."
      I hope all this optimism isn't too much and too late. The main thing Kushner will have to do is establish public confidence in his product. Seems to me newspapers suffered reporter-assisted suicide a long time ago.
     Call it "liberal bias," "lockstep reporting," or whatever you want, newspapers became pretty much alike when AP inherited a news monopoly after UPI hit the financial iceberg.  During the last decades of the 20th Century, newspapers grew fat and were virtually the only gatherer and distributors of news.  That commanding position was outflanked by the Internet. Some saw the technological advances as a big plus for readers who could quickly hold reporters accountable with rapid fire commentary on their work. The reality turned out to be much different. The Internet has brought out the worst in some people who engage in outright lies or distortions. No need to mention - but I will - people who use phony names and monopolize comment threads with personal attacks. I guess no one is proud of their family name anyone. Didn't Shakespeare say something about stealing "my purse?" Kusher has to get back journalism's good name - if it ever had one.

     
     
    
    
       
   

     
    

Reich Should Stick to the Economy

     I've long admired Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary who is now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. I still do, but I have some advice for him: don't teach journalism. I read his opinion piece in Sunday's Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle in which he lambasted Republican attacks on the major league news media.
    I was with the AP when I first realized Reich was a man of integrity, a man of his word who wanted to do the right thing. I covered a labor convention in San Francisco and heard him tell the delegates that President Clinton, who spoke a day earlier, was sorry for not mentioning possible "anti-scab" laws, then the top priority of unions. I thought that took some guts because it showed that Clinton was really out of touch with the working class. My editor didn't want to use that angle It was a long time ago, but I think he might have settled for burying it. He was in a humble mumble mood the next day when a leading columnist - I think it was the late Alexander Cockburn - wrote his entire day's offering about the oversight. I note this because Reich's piece dismisses GOP assertions that the mainstream media is run bv "liberal elites." We all know that the "liberal media" is a myth, right up there with global warming. "Liberal incompetents" would be closer to the truth.
   The news media has (I use the singular for the same reason I employ it when referring to the United States) always been a liberal bastion. No harm in that. Business is a conservative field. So what? A reporter can be liberal and be unbiased, or, at least aware of bias and still write a balanced report. I think that's the way it was until around the 1970s or so when a lot of news people brought their agendas to work. 
    Reich hits particularly hard at "Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators." Believe me, folks, Rush and his bunch wouldn't have a market if the traditional news outlets had been doing their job. When Limbaugh made his debut, the news media had grown so powerful it could limit "choice" to one subject. The newspapers are no longer the only game in town and they have tons of critics on the Internet. But they still can dictate the agenda. Think not? The sheriff soap opera in San Francisco is reported to the puke point by the Chronicle - and thus everyone else in the news biz - yet five years ago the fire chief's similar troubles were kissed off in a day or so. And how did "marriage equality," a term that should cover any consenting adults, come to be limited to the debate about same sex couples?  Inquiring minds in Utah want to know. And so do a lot of cousins.
    Professor Reich, your facts just don't add up.



   
   

"Season of the Witch" is a Reason to Bitch

    David Talbot, son of movie actor Lyle Talbot and founder of Salon.com, has written a book entitled "Season of the Witch" that chronicles the horrific history of San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. Sounds a lot like "Philips Code" so naturally some people wondered if  I knew Talbot. The two books deal with the same time frame, but that's about all they have in common. My book makes no claim to being a history. It's a critique of the news media, one I hope was done in an entertaining way.  I tried to contact David Talbot  several times, but to no avail. Even his underlings did not return my messages, which led me to conclude that while the post office is "snail mail" contemporary communications methods are often "fail mail." I met David Talbot only once. That was more than a decade ago when I interviewed his father who lived in San Francisco, resulting in one of those "you-know-his-face-but-not-his-name" stories. Later, I wrote Lyle Talbot's obituary. His son's book is subtitled "Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love," which I think should be changed to "San Francisco History for Dummies." If you are not a native of San Francisco - and Talbot isn't -  "Season" is a good place to start your education.

   The book recounts a terrible time that saw the Zebra killings, the Symbionese Liberartion Army  (SLA), the mass suicide by the Peoples Temple followers of Jim Jones, the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. etc., etc., etc.  If the sources listed in the back are any indication, the author did gumshoe work during his research. However, he seldom cites a source in the text, which can be jarring when he writes about something or someone the reader knows. For instance, he said Tom Cahill, San Francisco's police chief at the time, "urged fathers to use the rod on their children - and their wives." Talbot fails to note where that information came from. I knew Tom Cahill. A friend of my wife's family, he was at my wedding at Star of the Sea in 1962, and, of course, we connected during my work at UPI. I can't think of anyone less likely to beat his wife. I concede Cahill may have made a remark in jest, but if so the information should have been clarified. The book also mentions - barely -  "sociologist Todd Gitlin" for observing that the SLA was the graveyard of the 1960s New Left. It fails, however, to note that Gitlin, one time president of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, but known to many as Shit Disturbing Students), wrote the powerful book, "The Whole World is Watching," which postulates that mass media is the incubator for radical movements, a theory proven almost every day. For example, any protest that drew four "occupiers" was good for some coverage while 35,000 anti-abortion protesters marching on the San Francisco waterfront were virtually ignored.

    I wish Talbot had gone more deeply into how the news media shaped San Francisco's reputation and clout during this time, which is what I  tried to do.  He quoted Herb Caen and some local reporters, but did not go in to how AP and UPI, which both had well-staffed bureaus in San Francisco, carried the city's story to the rest of the nation. After all, this was a time when newspapers were just about the only game in town. They were powerful enough to support two major wire services, unlike the moribund empress dowagers newspapers are today, a description that could apply to San Francisco itself.
    The author describes San Francisco Examiner Guy Wright as a "conservative," an adjective that's a kiss of death from Talbot. Wright, he said, "sounded" like killer Dan White "himself" when, after the assassinations of Moscone and Milk, Wright told his readers San Francisco had become "aberration city ... a city without a norm." If Wright left a journalistic legacy it was not this. It was his lone wolf crusade to show that fire department recruitment standards were lowered to the point "that skin color and gender will count for everything and ability for next to nothing."  A few years later the fire department would be devastated by the so-called "swastika incident," which was a pure fabrication aided and abetted by the Chronicle and the wire services. Then there's the Zebra killings, which saw whites killed for no other reason than their skin color. Talbot writes that the killings that went into double figures "faded" from the city's collective memory. How does something that terrible "fade" unless it is allowed to do so?
      Also unnoticed is the role Ramparts, the muckraking San Francisco-based magazine, had in shaping San Francisco into an outpost of radical change. (See earlier posting) Warren Hinckle, the power behind Ramparts, is noted but once. The book reports that Diane Feinstein tried to dump a drink on Hinckle, an amusing incident that was news to me. I find the omission of Hinckle strange because Catholics seem to be favorite targets of both men.

      Talbot blasts the "old boy" network of Irish and Italian Catholics he said ran the city (strange that one never sees terms like "new boy" or "old girl"), forgetting that the likes of Mayors George Christopher or Elmer Robinson hardly fell into either of those camps. The police department was a bastion of a "rosary and billy club culture," he said. Talbot concedes that the Irish values were "family oriented" but says it's a good thing they were replaced by today's San Francisco values of "live and let live." He postulates that San Francisco was healed from its time of terror by "learning how to take care of its sick and dying," a reference to AIDs. He should have talked to someone old enough to recall a time when "Catholic values" helped bring about a string of emergency hospitals throughout the city, emergency hospitals that did not charge. Even the ambulance service was free.

     For all the ranting against Catholics, there is only one person in the book who strikes me as someone I wish I had known and  he was Catholic: John Barbagelata, Moscone's main political rival. Barbagelata knew of Moscone's sexual escapades but refused to use the information. "Barbagelata was old school, and he believed you don't do certain things to another man's family, no matter how passionate the feud," Talbot writes. Sounds like good values to me - even if they might be Catholic or conservative.


      


 

     

The Chen Story: A lesson in Oz reporting

                

   Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng finally got out of China. Looks as though he will be attending New York University Law School. I hope he finds time to lecture at the Columbia School of Journalism.

   I read today's New York Times report about  Chen's arrival in New York. Quite long. I had to read all the way to the last paragraph to find out his protests were about forced abortions and forced sterilizations. I already knew this, but only because I had searched the Internet for background when I read earlier stories or heard news reports about him on television.

   The Chen story is a fine example of  the journalism courses taught at the University of Oz where the first rule is "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

    The Times report described Chen as a "blind legal advocate." Does that mean he wants the law to be blind? I read earlier news accounts that labeled him a "blind dissident." For a long time I thought he was protesting for more guide dogs or a Chinese version of the ADA.

    The major league media weren't the only opinion makers to dance around abortion and sterilization when writing about Chen. Susan Ariel Aasronson, a prof at George Washington University, was given a column in the San Francisco Chronicle. She was described as "the author of books and articles on trade, corruption, Internet freedom and human rights." She never once mentioned forced abortion in her piece headlined "China's corruption plight." She did say Chen "worked to expose government human rights abuses, including mistreatment of the disabled." That was all.
 
     Some will probably blame this oversight on "media's liberal bias," but we all know that is a myth - like global warming, Sure, there's a liberal bias, but that doesn't mean a reporter with backbone can't do the right thing. Besides, a "pro-choice" backer can see that this is a matter of  choice, thus making government force the issue. No. I think the problem results from quickened technology. It is just too easy to go along with whatever the omnipresent media banter dictates.

      Remember Steven Mosher? A student at Stanford University a few decades ago, Mosher exposed forced abortions in China, but the issue quickly became the quality of his scholarship.
   
     "Chen Guangcheng and I have been fighting the same battle for years," Mosher said in a news release in which he said he had witnessed "forced abortions, coercive sterilizations and infanticide in China." Yet, even he described Chen as a "blind, self-taught attorney" and saved the abortion reference to near the end of the news release.

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The story NOT on page 1

In just one week, three San Francisco Bay area teachers were arrested on sex abuse charges. I'm not surprised if this is news to you. I saw very little in my local papers. The latest case involved a Union City high school teacher who is accused of having sex with a 16-year-old student. The earlier cases involved a teacher and a 14-year-old. The other was a case of sexual assault by a teacher whose students include second and third graders. All in one week!!

My first reaction was "what if these people had been priests?" I bet the story would be on page one. Today the San Francisco Chronicle ran a six graf story about the latest case. Pretty short, but enough to gain 175 comment postings under the story in around six hours. Few of the comments noted the difference in coverage. That is to be expected. Please see this blog's 2007 entry on the AP teacher sex abuse series that few newspapers ran, even though it was too little and much too late.

All this is more evidence that news is what newspapers say it is. Think not? I wonder where the Occupy movement would be if the MLM (Major League Media) covered it the same way it covered anti-abortion marches. There's an anti-abortion demonstration coming up this month in San Francisco, an event that in the past drew 35,000 people. You didn't know? Again, I'm not surprised.

A "1 percenter" and proud of it

The Occupy Wall Street movement could help the sale of "Philip's Code," enough, I hope, to lift me into the "1 percent" category. One point the book attempts to make is that language is no longer dictated through usage but is imposed by an increasingly powerful mass media. The use of "1 percent" is a perfect example.

A few months ago the term "1 percent" was used by the media to refer to the percentage of people who served in the military or had relatives in the armed forces. Even before that, the Hells Angels thought of themselves as representing "1 percent" of motorcycle riders. That's because in the 1960s the American Motorcycle Association, worried about the "Wild One" image, issued a report saying that 99 percent of bikers were law-abiding citizens. Today the Hells Angels patch proclaims 1 percent. Now, suddenly, the term defines the richest Americans.

I used to think of myself as being in the old one percent, which became even more important when my Marine grandson came home recently from Afghanistan, joining a long list of relatives who served, including two grandfathers and four uncles.

I gave this a good deal of thought today, Pearl Harbor Day, when I realized that World War II veterans will soon all join the final muster. When they are gone, who will be around to fact check the history of a war whose impact can be felt today?

The book also tries to show that the past is alive, or, as Faulkner wrote, it isn't even "past." It makes mention of how the veterans spoke up during the controversy over the Smithsonian Museum's exhibit on Hiroshima. I learned later that they challenged the basic facts of the PBS show, "The Liberators," which the veterans claimed gave credit for liberating Germany's death camps to the wrong Army outfits.

Today the Internet allows even the lower 99 percent of the population to air its opinions. Still, it is the media with the money that counts. Think not? Don't you find it strange that 35,000 people can march in San Francisco and get little notice from the media - which is what happened to anti-abortion protesters.
Internet or no Internet, when the last WWII veteran dies, look for a rewriting of history from a university near you.

Royal Girls Rule: The Rest of the Story

The coverage of the change in the line of succession to the British throne was a lesson in reporting right out of "Philip's Code," although I grant that few Americans care much about the subject matter.

Most stories I saw or heard zeroed in on the fact that the 16 nations that recognize the British monarch struck "a historic blow for women's rights" when they abolished primogeniture, the male precedence in the order of succession to the throne. Every headline was along the lines of "Girls Rule" or "Girls Get Equal Shot at Crown." That crown won't, however, sit on a Catholic, whether male or female. The Commonwealth countries did allow that the king or queen could marry a Catholic, which was formerly a no-no. Other religions were OK - just not Catholic.

The New York Times' story by John Burns was right on target: the move was a "blow for women's rights," but, seasoned reporter he is, Burns also stressed the religious angle, noting in the opening paragraph that "the possibility of a Catholic monarch will have to wait." The San Francisco Chronicle used Burns' story under a headline that read "Girls rule: Boys lose first dibs on ascending the throne."

My local papers, the Daily Journal and Daily News, made no mention of religion. Both used Associated Press stories by Cassandra Vinograd. What an appropriate first name for a reporter, particularly for this story - a Cassandra is one who can see in to the future but is not believed. My first impression was that this Cassandra could guide the future by simply ignoring one fact and stressing another. Remember what Phil Davis said about the truth being the sum of the facts. True, the AP story emphasized the gender angle, but it also noted the change regarding Catholics, albeit buried. What I can't understand is why my local dailies used the AP story but dropped the Catholic part. I will ask the editors. Stay tuned.

The Economist and the future of news

The prestigious British magazine The Economist, which traces its lineage to 1843, predicts advances in technology will eventually take news consumers "back to the coffee house" era when men in whigs and three-cornered hats debated public policy ad nauseam. Has the author been in a coffee house lately? I've never heard anyone in my local Starbucks debate anything. Most flee with their hands tightly clutching cups. Those who stay stare down at laptops that resemble tombstones, making me visualize the line in Eleanor Rigby about "all the lonely people." I think a better analogy for the future would be a beer hall - that's beer hall as in putsch.

I can not understand why the 14-page special report in the July 9th edition failed to mention wire services, the main gatherers and distributors of news. Perhaps bringing up the subject might undermine the article's premise that "news is becoming a social medium again, as it was until the early 19th century - only more so." Just who was the author? I was just about ready to conclude that "it beats the hell out of me" when I spotted very small print at the bottom of the first page that informed me of the availability of "an interview" with the author. I checked it out and got an earful from Tom Standage, the magazine's "digital" editor. Digital is apt, since he gave the finger to some honored journalistic traditions - such as a byline. The first graf of the report states: "The Internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan - as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says Tom Standage." The graf is set off in type much darker than the rest of the piece, making it seem more like a headline than part of the story. Standage's name is given, but not his job title or qualifications. All I could think of was those phony names people use in postings under "comment" lines.

Looking to the future is an easy assignment since no one knows for sure what tomorrow brings. We can take a pretty good shot at the past, however, and on that score the article came up short. In seeing that "in the Internet age, transparency may count for more than objectivity," The Economist goes on to report that "during the 19th century newspapers gradually adopted a more objective stance" in order to appeal to a wider audience. Really? Anyone heard of Mr. Hearst? Newspapers then were outrageous in their partisanship. Everyone connected with the Economist report should be forced to watch "The Front Page." The wire services were the real pioneers in objectivity. Truly, they could not afford to offend. That, perhaps, is one reason many people criticize news agency writing as bland.

The section on objectivity delves in to what it refers to as "the Foxification of news." Why the surprise at the power and success of Fox News, or any outlet that gives conservatives a voice? Several of my earlier postings concern the birth of talk radio, which wouldn't have seen the light of day if print media had been more balanced.

The Economist report is better, I think, when it concerns the business end of news. I am the first to admit that I know little about that subject, although I am sure bad business decisions are responsible for more newspaper deaths than bad reporting. I know that first hand, having worked at UPI for 25 years and saw the stake put through its heart. Under bold type reading "Fun while it lasted," a chart shows the decline in newspaper ad revenue from 1980 to today. I was there when newspapers were pretty much the only game in town. My book reports on what I saw which was what happens when no one stands up to the neighborhood bully. The important part of newspaper is news, not paper.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell - And then some

The news media has a strict "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in covering gays (AKA homosexuals) in the military. Reporters don't ask important questions so they don't tell us very much. A recent PBS News Hour featured two members of a commission studying what would happen if DADT ended. One said the military treated everyone as "equals" and gays merely wanted the same treatment, nothing special. Everyone is treated as equals? So that's why female service members have different standards and living facilities, not to mention the contrasting worlds rank creates. Is there a reporter with the guts to ask if allowing openly gay soldiers in barracks will lead to the end of separate female and male quarters? I recall a movie about the army of the future that shows male and female space troopers showering together.

I sense that few reporters actually served in the military. I shouldn't be surprised. Veterans were slim in the ranks of reporters when I worked at AP. I remember a news conference by former soldiers who sued CNN over its "Tailwind Story." The 40 or so assembled journalists were asked to raise their hands if they served in the armed forces. About five or so hands, including mine, went up. This incident is covered in my book, so I won't go in to details.
I think the problem is that there are no really good military writers. I don't mean war correspondence, of which there are many outstanding ones. I mean the "peace correspondence," the reporter, possibly a veteran, whose full time job is covering the armed forces, who reads the Marine Gazette and All Hands and has contacts in all services.

If there had been a few of these around during the WMD controversy a key question might have been asked: What was the mission statement given to the troops just before the invasion? Was it "Find Those Damned Weapons of Mass Destruction!!!" No, the Eve of Battle statement by Major General James Mattis to the soldiers and marines who would risk their lives was a simple one: Get rid of Saddam Hussein who "for decades .. has tortured, imprisoned, raped, and murdered the Iraqi people." Weapons of Mass Destruction were only mentioned in passing, and then in the past tense.

I suppose the failure to highlight the statement should be expected from a news corps that struck deals with Saddam to pay little attention to his crimes in exchange for access to news elsewhere (See John Burns' comments in "Embedded."
Today Bing West is an exception when it comes to military writers. He's very good, but I consider him a military writers' writer. Reporters read him to be informed. When the reading public mentions a military writer it's usually Thomas Ricks, author of "Making the Corps" and "Fiasco." I wasn't impressed by either book. How can one take seriously a writer who, on page 398, dismisses lack of coverage of the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004 by saying that by then "journalists were fatigued and probably numbed somewhat to the violence." And this after conceding that "if a battle of this intensity had occurred during the spring of 2003 invasion, reporters would have treated it like another D-Day." Someone didn't do their job - and I don't mean the marines.

No Protestants Need Apply

I loved stories about "firsts," even though they sometimes ended in embarrassment when you learned later that whatever the subject was it wasn't a "first," or "last" or "only." A good word to use in such stories was "apparently." But there was nothing "apparent" in the historic "first" when Elena Kagan was named to the U.S. Supreme Court. The event marked the first time in American history that there was no Protestant on the nation's highest court. What a history lesson!!! Yet, there was little mention of this in the traditional media. There was a lot made of the fact that three women were now sitting on the bench, which rounded up the usual suspects when it came to diversity.

There was, however, an opinion piece in the New York Times that said the lack of a Protestant showed how little religion mattered on a court that at one time regarded "Jewish" and "Catholic" seats as a mark of diversity. Pat Buchanan and Jim Webb came under fire when they pointed out the lack of a Protestant justice.

The last time I saw this journalistic dance around the obvious was when Ronald Reagan became the first divorced man to be president. At that time I just figured reporters moved in circles were divorce was viewed as a rite of passage. I couldn't help, however, recall the opposition divorced Democrat Adlai Stevenson faced when he ran against Eisenhower in the 1950s, which made me conclude that reporters know little about history, even though they are allegedly writing the first draft of history.

There's a void to fill when it comes to writing history for the mass media. I practically ended up writing full time history pieces toward the end of my career. I loved it, but I felt I got those stories by default because younger reporters failed to see the relevancy. I have a good deal to say about this in my book, which quotes an editor who used almost every history piece he could get. "Most readers know so little about history that these stories are news to them," the editor said. I think Carl Nolte's popular "native son" stories at the Chronicle are evidence of this.

It seems that today the journalistic collective memory doesn't go back even a few years. Why else would the New York Times run the aforementioned commentary when just five years ago religion was a key factor in the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito? Alito's Catholicism was important enough for the Associated Press' Rachel Zoll to write that for "the first time in U.S. history, five Roman Catholics, a majority, would be on the high court." Zoll led her story by saying that the appointment would end "more than 200 years of Protestant domination on the Supreme Court."

Eventually, such coverage was so persistent Alito took note of it in a speech to the Justinian Society, a law group. "There has been so much talk lately about the number of Catholics serving on the Supreme Court," he said. "This is one of those questions that does not die." He went on to complain about "respectable people who have seriously raised the questions in serious publications about whether these individuals could be trusted to do their jobs." Before Alito there was John Roberts. The Los Angeles Times even went after his wife with a piece headlined "Wife of Nominee Holds Strong Antiabortion Views."

Do I hear "double standard" and "liberal media?" I think there is far more involved and it's been evident since UPI became moribund decades ago. The AP was handed a virtual monopoly on the gathering and distribution of news. If the AP doesn't take note, as it did when Alito was picked, then the angle that didn't get used is the tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear. The situation is better now. The Internet has several blogs that reported on the limited definition of "diversity" in the mainstream coverage of Kagan. Some even wondered if there were any veterans on the court or asked why all justices graduates of Ivy League schools, which made "old school tie" more important than "old boys network."

I hope I live long enough to see an atheist named to the court. I want to see how the story is framed.

Something good about the Chronicle. Now that's news.

In just a few paragraphs, a letter to the Chronicle summed up what I have been trying to say about the future of news. In short, news won't have much of a future if reporting is driven more by technology than content. The important part of newspaper is NEWS, not PAPER.
I doubt Mark Thomas of Berkeley was thinking about this when he praised Chronicle reporter Justin Berton in his April 10 letter. Thomas was the climber who survived a trek on Mount Shasta that took the life of his friend, Tom Bennett.
"...the media greatly added to the anguish and suffering of myself and Tom's family through their eagerness to print or broadcast a story regardless of the accuracy of the facts or the appropriateness of the source," he wrote in commenting on Berton's story, "Climber tells of doomed descent," which was in the April 2nd edition.
Berton, he said, was willing "to wait until I was ready to talk. He was willing to talk with me on my terms without making demands for details or photo/video for a sensational story."
"It seems to me that many reporters get credit for being the first or the loudest in telling a story, and I think that these are the wrong incentives to have in reporting," Thomas wrote.
Thomas concluded by saying Breton "should get credit for waiting and producing a quality story with great sensitivity."
I was so moved by the letter that I told Breton that someday he would value the letter more than a Pulitzer.
"I already do," he messaged back.

Brown bombs and no one hears

Jerry Brown's "Governor Moonbeam" image continued to shine Sunday, but no one seemed to notice,which says more about the modern news media than it does about California's literal elder statesman.

The San Francisco Chronicle asked the three candidates for governor their thoughts on the closing of the Nummi plant in Fremont. Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner gave long answers that appeared in the paper's Insight section. Brown did not provide a response. The newspaper reported that Brown's "campaign had assured The Chronicle it would submit his answer by a Wednesday deadline, but did not deliver it as promised."

Hard to believe this is not all over the news chain. If it does make it we won't be able to escape. More lemming reporting brought to you by the low side of high tech.

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.