Journalism Droppings -- II

Rocky Mountain, Bye

Although my stories sometimes appeared on its front page, I never read the Rocky Mountain News. Now I never shall.

It became the latest victim not only of a depression in the newspaper industry but of Americans’ steadfast refusal to read or to care about the affairs of their nation, state, region or city. As long as Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Anniston dominate the Web, the American people are happy.

Of course it didn’t help that the Rocky Mountain News was owned by the same set of scabrous incompetent inbred nitwits that owned and then gave away United Press International for $1.

Bitch about the mainstream media all you like, but they serve(d) a purpose. No Internet site, no local and no national television operation could, or would dare to, investigate the government. An America balkanized by ethnic group, interest group and readership interest (golfing, pets, home improvements) will become dumber and truly get the government it deserves.

It is no exaggeration when the press was called the fourth branch of government. Sorry, folks, but it took the resources of money and time to produce journalism that changed the world. I’m not an MBA, but it doesn’t take one to see that the downfall came when publishers couldn’t figure out the Internet and began giving away their content for free.

And, as the sage, Mr. Kristofferson, sang, freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. And, boy, are we going to be free!

The Pull It, Surprise

One sign of the downturn in the fortunes of newspapers hit me like a ton of bricks the other day – well not quite as heavily, but still it was a hefty load I had to haul in from the UPS depot and into the house. It contained the annual entries I often judge for a journalism association I belong to.

In the past, our contest was kind of like the Director’s Guild Awards compared to the Oscars. Not this year. The entries in one of the categories I volunteered to judge contain a dozen or more from some of the biggest names in the industry; former Pulitzer Prize winners. People I have gone out of my way to read on my own; a few I have made the acquaintance of in the past.

So this will be a difficult chore for me to help choose one single winner in two categories of such stature that the winners will use the award as a marketing tool.

I have judged plenty in my life, both personally and professionally. I taught and gave grades, I served on prize juries for student, specialty and national journalism. The reality is there is no objective way to judge the best from a group whose every member you could make a case for.

All I can hope for is to wisely weed the pile,and then keep a representative sample of entries to judge from all circulation-size papers, men and women, minorities and not; trying to figure out if journalism about Iraq and the financial meltdown is of greater or lesser importance than the misdeeds of small-town judges and crooks.

How ever it turns out, I am humbled by the responsibility of advancing someone’s career and agape at the fact that the very biggest names in the field and their well known newspapers who never entered in the past are now trying to hold on to glory, and their jobs, by grabbing at whatever prestige remains.

Earmarker in Chief

Is it good journalism or not to find out and print that President Obama, who ran hard against earmarks and the old ways of doing business, was listed in the current omnibus appropriations bill (which began life when he was in the Senate) as a sponsor of special interest legislation of the kind he railed against before he became a virgin?

It is kind of silly and in the long-run meaningless, but my view is that everything you can find that is true and newsworthy is important to put before the people (stupid as they are.) The White House said it was not an earmark at all but nevertheless asked Congress to remove Obama’s name from the list that had to be made public as part of earmark reforms.

If you don’t run that kind of trivial stuff, though, do you run stories about a lobbying firm that gets defense appropriation earmarks from a power congressman, who then gets hundreds of thousands of dollars in “campaign contributions” from that company?

It’s the same story, and it’s one that my favorite young reporter is all over – like stink on a politician.

No Textual Deviations Here

Here are the remarks of this blog's favorite journalist as he accepted this year's Everett McKinley Dirksen award (from Dirksen granddaughter Cissy Baker) last week for best congressional reporting. With the news business as stable as confetti at a ticker tape parade, his "You like me, you really like me" speech was about the only levity at the celebratory banquet.

First, foremost and always, I want to thank my wife, Stephanie Allen, for possessing the steadiness, sense of humor and appreciation of the absurd necessary to live with me and love me.

I'd like to thank my parents for not giving me back when they found out I couldn't throw a baseball with my left hand, and I'd like to thank my sister for always being in my corner.

Thank you to the National Press Foundation, my colleagues and editors at CQ, particularly the lead editor on the piece, the immensely talented John Cranford.

Now, I'd like to start on something of a sad note.

Since he broke into the big leagues when we were both 18, I've looked to Alex Rodriguez as a measuring stick against which to gauge my own success.

My ballplaying career ended at a small college. No contract of mine has ever started with the figure 250 or ended with the word million.

And let's just say that Madonna has been avoiding my phone calls since 1984.

But Alex and I do have some things in common. After all, Yankees fans, he and I still do have the same number of World Series rings: ZERO!

And there's one more thing we have in common: Drugs.I respect A-Rod for confessing, and in that spirit I feel compelled to make my own admission. I have experimented with two modern-day performance enhancers. They are known as blogging and tweeting.

I was young. I was stupid. I was naive.I can assure you that they, in and of themselves, have not made me a better journalist. But they have taught me something about our industry.Our online future relies on our ability to remain in touch with our print and broadcast past. It's too easy to post without looking.

I'd like to ask Rachel Bloom, CQ's senior researcher, to stand up and wave. You can sit down now, Rachel.

Rachel has a job, chief fact-checker for a weekly magazine, that seems like an anachronism now that newsroom status is determined by how often your stories get linked by Drudge or Huffington Post.

But Rachel is the lifeblood of our industry. She led a team of researchers who recreated my spreadsheets, triple-checked names and locations of earmarks and forced me to prove every last sentence of an 8,000-word set of stories.

Then, after publishing the stories, we did a crazy thing: We put them all online.

Our past and our future are not irreconcilable. We need to make sure that as we continue transitioning into the era of mobile browsers that we remember what makes our news valuable: That it is true.

Rachel's work, and that of a handful of her colleagues, left no doubt about the truths revealed -- that earmarks are distributed by the powerful to the powerful, that they are given out to politically vulnerable incumbents to shore up their re-election chances and that minorities end up with less than their white counterparts. We also examined how earmarks help communities overlooked by the executive branch.We stand by it, and no one has challenged it.

Members of Congress in both political parties and across the ideological spectrum have cited our findings, and legislation has been introduced based on them.

This is how journalism is supposed to work in a free society: Take information from a small number of people, give it to a larger number of people and trust that people will make better decisions because they are better informed.

Besides, it's a good business model. Ask a CQ Sales rep what people will pay for access to accurate, unbiased information.

Opinions are abundant and free. I fear that if we are not vigilant about accuracy and objectivity, it won't be long before the first question at a presidential news conference is posed by an essayist from mybarackobama.com

In his June 10, 1964, floor speech on the Civil Rights Act, Everett Dirksen paraphrased the writer Victor Hugo: "Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come," he said.

The time when fact reigns over speculation will come again. The spread of accurate information has been, and always will be, vital to the perfection of our union.

One final note: I'd like to thank some of the past winners of the Dirksen Award who have influenced me personally and been helpful in my career. Jack Kozszcuk, John Cochran, Susan Milligan, Paul Kane, Elaine Povich (who has known me since I was a pre-schooler), Brody Mullins (who was a Little League All-Star with me when we could still dream of playing shortstop in the majors). And Jill Zuckman, who cheerfully noted in a congratulatory e-mail that my obituary will now reflect that I am an award-winning journalist ... I love reporters.

Thank you.

Separated at Birth?

This is the best I can do to show how startled I was to watch the 1948 classic "The Naked City" on TV today while watching Howard Duff yet seeing and hearing Will Ferrell as the main antagonist.

Things I Hate – I

Rancid Republicans

I have tried to be open-minded all my life, considering my purpose both personally and professionally to seek the truth and disseminate it—recognizing that truth is best achieved through intellectuall give and take.

What a maroon I was.

There is nothing good to be said about anyone in public life who identifies himself or herself as a Republican. And very little good to be said about any Republican in private life, either, with the possible exception of those who are Republican out of family tradition. But don’t expect a professional Republican admit thinking anything through.

They are vile, lying hypocrites who would rather see people die in war, from starvation and from bankruptcy-induced suicide rather than concede that sometimes government owes us a little something from our taxes.

Am I overheated? You bet I am, and I will simply have to stop watching and listening to C-SPAN.

We have an economic crisis of historic magnitude. I don’t know the right answer, and President Obama say he doesn’t know his plan will work. But what do Republicans know? They know they get their jollies from marching in lockstep, opposing everything and anything the congressional and White House Democrats propose while offering nothing of their own as an alternative.

Well, they deny it, saying “Yes, must do something, but not this bill.” Their answer when it isn’t “no” is, “Cut it in half.” I say if my house is burning down and all I have to fight it is the water in the pond next door that I will need for the next year for drinking, cooking and bathing, then I will not be parceling out the contents of the pail. I will dump the whole pond on the house, and so would you. Water IS available somewhere, at some cost, but right now my house is burning down.

I used to look deeply at Republican arguments on all kinds of measures that were before Congress. Sometimes, they had a point and sometimes Democrats would be too reflexive. But never before have I seen one party uniformly, down to the laces of their jack boots, think alike on a bill so complex and important. The only time parliaments or voters act like this is under Soviet- or Nazi-style dictatorships.

These poor stinking mackerels are so afraid of having the real nutjobs on the Right defeat them in primaries they would rather lose a general election to a liberal. Which is what is going to happen in 2010, by the fish-crate load.

Sure, every side in a political fight has talking points, but the Republican ones are paid for by industry, trumpeted by the Limburgers of talk radio, and found to be thorough lies. Speaking of Rush Limburger, he says $10 billion in the bill for the National Institutes of Health is a boondoggle. He should know better. Aside from creating jobs instantly in a field he knows nothing about—academia—and aside from leading to potential disease cures, apparently the big problem for him is that his drug-addiction wouldn’t have been possible without medical research.

Then there is the bizarre, Goebbelsian, stunner that the bill has a secret provision that would force your doctor, at your bedside, to check with a government “bureaucrat” before he or she could make a decision on whether you should live or die.

The reality is that there is money for research and development of a concept known as “comparative evaluation research,” which is what corporate and small-business America does every day. You look at a problem, do research to find the most effective solution and then apply it. Doing this in medicine, of course, would help a doctor sift through treatment options to find out which one is most appropriate and at what cost in terms of side effects and probability of success.

It exists now. There is a whole (underfunded) government agency devoted to this – and proscribed by Congress, captive of the medical and pharmaceutical industries, from establishing any guidelines. It was such a good idea that some years ago a government position was created to encourage and oversee “comparative evaluation research.” The person who created the position? Well his middle initial was W.

Then there is the statement by some blusterflub in the Republican party whose bleat I did not recognize on the radio that the bill provides $50 million for the arts and nothing for small business. NOTHING FOR SMALL BUSINESS? The bill spends about $800 billion. Most of the businesses that will benefit, as are almost all businesses in the United States, are small! Oh, and artists like to work, too, even though all 5 million of them contribute nothing to the economy.

Then there is the congresswoman who looks like your school’s lunch lady but has an IQ less than that of mystery meat. This would be Candice Miller of Michigan, a Republican of course, who denounces mass transit, the most basic of stimulus items, as “waste” while at the same time demanding that those wastrels in the House and Senate majority take a new look at the bill and ADD NINE BILLION DOLLARS – in giveaways to the auto industry. Did I mention she is from Michigan, and most likely an ex-congresswoman?

She probably hates whoever it was who lied on the floor of the House today that the bill gives “news cars to bureaucrats.” This may be a reference to an accelerated schedule of replacing government fleet cars—which have to come from somewhere. (Psst, Congressman Oilpan, those cars might even come from Detroit.

In short, these baloney peddlers, unable to get their tiny minds around the fact that the American people want the Obama-Pelosi-Reid solution, can resort only to name-calling, picayune pot-shotting at legitimate small pieces of the recovery bill and, really, insanity. (see Rep. Pete Sessions, Dallas Republican, who compares his party to the Taliban.)

These foul filthy flibbertyjibbets known as Republicans don’t even play the nasty game of politics right. Before their leaders got the word from Limburger, the de facto chairman of the Republican party, some of them walked into bipartisan negotiations, won some concessions and then turned around the voted against the bill and their own demands.

There is only one person I know well who kind of admits to being a Republican. So maybe I am not getting a broader more nuanced view. But I have no interest anymore in trying to understand, anymore than I want to understand the squirrels who eat my tulip bulbs. At least squirrels are reasonably cute.

Their vermin cousin Republicans are not cute. They are dangerous to America and ought to be exterminated from public life—at the voting booths, if we can be sure they haven’t rigged them again.

Dumb Democrats

I think Kennedys should stop breeding.

Two of the most stupid, harmful, Democrats I know are the sons (the ones who haven’t killed themselves yet) of Robert F. Kennedy. One is his namesake, RFK Jr., who has made a career of charging the federal government with running a conspiracy to create autism and cover up evidence that thimerosol in MMR vaccine has no connection with the condition.

Every, EVERY, reputable scientific body has found no evidence of such a connection, and yesterday three special mastery courts ruled against parents making such claims and in such a manner as to refute any further possibility that science is wrong.

They did so on Darwin’s birthday, which reminds me of Joe Kennedy, III, as possible refutation that some men completed descending from the apes. I worked for a Democratic congressman at the time young Joe was a member. He was universally thought of as the dumbest Democrat in the House.

You have seen him if you watch cable TV, the nice curly haired guy with a Boston accent helping old people get heating oil and avoid freezing to death. Courtesy, he notes, “of the people of Venezuela.”

Don’t buy it. “The people of Venezuela” he is thanking numbers exactly one. Dictator Hugo Chavez, who owns Citgo and who most recently has been heard whipping up his population to boycott, harass and yes, attack, Jews.

Way to go, Joe! Your Nazi-loving namesake must be goose-stepping in his grave.

How to Win Friends in New York

"I was stupid. I was an idiot, all these things. And I think New Yorkers can probably relate with that ..." -- A. Rodriguez

All Ears, But Mostly Tin

The most prominent features of President Obama's physiognomy are his ears.

But sometimes they are made of tin.

At his first press conference he repeatedly referred to "my Treasury secretary" instead of "ours," fell into the old ways of Washington by prefacing a perfectly good answer with the meaningless and content-deprecatory, "As I've said before," and actually referred to the burden of "signing" letters of condolence to families of service members killed in our two wars.

Dear Mr. President, you are supposed to actually write the damn letters, not just sign some junior speechwriter's hackneyed elegy.

And, you let my good friend Helen Thomas get away with the premise that there are only "so-called" terrorists hiding along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Yet, good for you for giving seven-minute essay-style answers to simple questions, at least refreshing viewers that a president can actually know what he is talking about.

All Hands ON Deck

Thank God for Capt. Chesley Sullenberger for refusing Katie Couric's idiotic attempt to bring God into the conversation about the US Air pilot's truly heroic feat in landing an airliner atop the Hudson River.

Couric asked him if he were praying as he assessed the situation, looked for Teeterboro Airport, communicated calmly with Air Traffic Control, glided at a perfect angle toward ferry boats, keeping the wings level, the tail down and the nose up.

The good Sully said something to the effect there may have been 150 people behind him praying but he was busy flying the airplane and trying to save their lives.

Basically, forget God. And fuck the morons in this world who want to attribute the historic feat of airmanship to unseen hands instead of to the merits of training, skill, advances in airplane design and government regulations. The hands were human hands on the stick. Where were God's hands all the times an equally experienced pilot crash landed and killed all aboard?

Marvelous Man

I love folk music because it is about something, the vocals front the music unlike in rock and it is eminently memorable and singable.

My favorite folk artist, whom I have seen live maybe three or four times to my utter delight each time, is unknown to most people, but luckily not to his peers who today bestowed a Grammy lifetime achievement award both for his body of work and his influence on better known artists. (Awarded today, announced on the teevee tomorrow night.)

He is Tom Paxton, and if you have never heard of him, I am 100 percent sure you have heard his songs. Younger readers might even have sung them in school or at camp.

Older readers who are not that familiar with folk music might remember the commercial he wrote for Ken-L-Ration (“My Dog’s Bigger Than Your Dog.”) Parents probably have sung a couple of the songs while carpooling (“Daddy’s Takin’ Us to the Zoo Tomorrow”) and the universally known (“Marvelous Toy.”)

Social critics would know of his “I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler” (updated here) “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues” and the three-hanky “Jimmy Newman” – the GI who won’t wake up even though the chopper has come to take him home.

And who hasn’t heard, “Bottle of Wine” and “Wasn’t That a Party?”

For the sentimentalists among us there are “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound” and the aching “Last Thing on My Mind.” (for country fans)Those two are the first of his songs I learned as a freshman in college from a guitar-playing folk wannabe as we sunned ourselves on the campus mall while others were dancing to the Beatles.

Growing old is where we were bound and growing old was the last thing on our mind.

But not too old to have some fun, as Paxton sang on a 2005 Grammy-nominated album:

Well I met this young girl at a folk club,
Like you do, like you do.

So I bought her a drink and we chatted,
Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t you.

And then after the show she invited me home,
And she said we were two of a kind,

Then she played me every record
That Tom Paxton ever made,

And you know that was the last thing on my mind.

Get Thee Behind Me, Empress

Back in the early ‘70s, the literati – namely young Washington journalists with too much time on their hands – began playing a game called, “Stennis, Anyone,” in which you strung together the names of congressmen and senators to come up with funny names for legislation.

Stennis, of course, was the racist from Mississippi, but, hey, the name worked. One of the best examples was something like the Fong Hong Spong Long Hong Kong bell bill. Or the Bible Church Bell Tower bill to do something for religion.

This kind of word game has been a specialty of mine and it is the biennial version of it that inspires my best work for the Style Invitational. It is my favorite right next to the annual competition, see last week’s The Nitty Gritty posting, to make funny couplets about the previous year’s crop of dead people.

Tomorrow morning the results of the legislative bill-names contest are published. And all I got was a shared mention with another contestant, using his (or the Empress') wording, but not mine.

Empress, I divorce thee.

No more entries, no more brain teasing, no more Empress, and basically since I am not reading the print version much any more, no more Post subscription.

Judge for yourself as to whether any of these deserved mention.

Bright-Cao resolution to replace Rudolph on Santa’s sleigh team

Kissell-Massa resolution to improve civil discourse in the House.

Austria-Shock trooper provision banning military training to neo-Nazi governments.

Harper-Lee bill to protect the species Mimus polyglottos

Schauer-Shock bill to prevent home water heaters from exceeding 120 degrees.

Kaufman-Coffman hernia research bill

Hunter-Lujan-Begich-Udall-Udall- anti-nepotism bill

Peters-Hunter Capitol Page School Protection Act

Risch-Fudge diabetes research bill

Adler-Coffman-Kaufman-Dahlkemper-Driehaus-Franken-Heinrich-Leutkemeyer-Schauer-Schock-Schrader-Risch-Austria “Talk Like a Teuton Day” Resolution.

Fleming-Coffman lung congestion relief act

Austria-Posey act to replace the edelweiss as the national flower

Lance-Peters anti-torture bill.

Risch-Paulsen amendment limiting treasury secretaries to net worths of $10 million.

Udall-Udall-Warner tax relief for the start-up Warner Cousins movie studio.

Franken-Paulsen amendment to publicly finance campaigns of actual comedians.

Pingree-Lee bill to honor the contributions to children’s television of Pincus Leff.

Kosmas-Hunter bill renaming the Naval Observatory after Carl Sagan.

Rooney-Polis bill renaming Maryland’s capital after the Steelers’ owner following the Ravens loss in the AFC championship game.

Pierluisi-Perriello-Hagan bill prohibiting immigrant Irish from taking the jobs of consiglieres.

Franken-Lee “My Dear I Don’t Give a Damn” resolution honoring famous last words.

Franken-Titus bill to fund mad scientists’ work on inflammatory diseases.

Hunter-Thompson libel law reform and shotgun control act.

Hunter-Thompson ridiculous final Act.

Cao-Peters Anti-Cloning Bill

Muckraker of the Day

Someone today reported that Sen. Judd Gregg, President Obama's choice to head the Commerce Department, spoke out and voted in favor of abolishing the department

Here he is with Savannah Guthrie on MSNBC's "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" program.

D.C. Droppings - XII

The Party's Over
President Obama (God, isn’t it sweet just to say that over and over again) will get most of what he wants in his economic plan. But true to form, like the fabled scorpion who cajoles a tortoise to carry him across the river, Republicans will try their best to destroy themselves just out of spite.

The GOP is as distasteful party as the NDSP of the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. They take perfectly good ideas and perfectly good words and twist them into crosses they bash intelligent people over the head with.

Take their bleating last week – bought hook, line and sinker by the mainstream media – that the Democrats won the House vote on the economic stimulus bill on a “party line vote,” suggesting that for all his post-partisanship, Obama failed. The mainstream media are supposed to portray things as they are, but they failed again this time.

The truth is that 12 Democrats voted with the Republicans while all Republicans voted against the Democratic bill. That is not a party line vote. The only party line being followed was the ghastly Republican line that said, “We don’t want Obama to succeed.”

One of these snot-noses (it was early and I didn’t catch which one) actually had the gall to complain that the Obama plan seeks to spend nearly a trillion dollars with hopes it will “trickle down” to the masses. “Trickle down,” of course was the Republican economic program since the says of the robber barons – pour federal money onto the elite and some of it might eventually make some laborer a few dollars better off by the time he retired.

“Trickle down” to me means the best part of these jamokes trickled down their fathers’ legs.

I have no clue as to which formula of tax cuts and spending increases will bring America back, and it is quite possible Obama does not either. But I know not one Republican leader has proposed an alternative. When you are looking at $895 billion in projects, it is pretty easy to snipe at small items. And when it comes to small items, look around for Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyle, John Boehner and that shanda Eric Cantor.

They are losers who condemned Democrats and others as unpatriotic for not giving George Bush everything he wanted in national defense but feel no such treason when they stand in the way of million of jobless, starving, emotionally crushed Americans.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

Journalism, More or Less
On a slightly lesser note, the mainstream media bought the whole Rod Blagojevich story that he was railroaded by not allowing the call witnesses at his impeachment proceedings. A lie. He could call anyone except a few people the prosecutor did not want to testify for fear of jeopardizing the criminal trial.

And on another familiar note, here is the lead I would like to have written following Super Bowl XLIII:

Jesus H. Christ, tired of sports figures hypocritically giving him credit for their own hard work and talent, turned on his biggest booster, Kurt Warner, Sunday and guided Pittsburgh Steeler Santonio Holmes' feet to remain inbounds to catch the winning touchdown that defeated Warner's "Cardinals" in the Super Bowl.

"I am waiting for that one-time grocery clerk to come out and blame me for his last second fumble, and believe me I can wait for eternity to hear it, but I doubt I will," Christ said. "I've got bigger things in which to intervene than a lousy football game," he added. "This is the last time I will do it, so Kurt, hang em up."

Toothless in D.C.
Today was 2-2. I am now recovering from the loss of my two front teeth. No accident, just genetics and mostly bad dental hygiene, and when the swelling stops, I will look really pretty with a perfect upper bridge. It will be the first time I will not have had a rather fetching space between them, and I am sad I won’t be able to spit water as far as I used to.

I guess that means I'm grown up.