Day: September 20, 2005

Brian, are you grieving?

 
Veteran journalists “greatly unsettled” by Katrina experience
Los Angeles Times
NBC anchor Brian Williams says reporting Hurricane Katrina has moved him to consider other areas of coverage that he says need to be addressed. He tells Matea Gold: “I will be asking my network to lead a discussion on the issues of class, race, energy, the environment, disaster planning, Iraq — all those things and more. This encompasses so many of the major issues of our time.” (Related AP story.)
— from Pointeronline’s Jim Romenesko letter. 
 
B. Williams has discovered the other America.  He doesn’t ride the subway enough maybe?  In and out of limos, is he, with barely time to tip the driver?  He does one story and has ideas for entire coverage for his bosses, stem to stern.  Well (a) it won’t sell, because people won’t want to hear his moanings and groanings and (b) his list is all left-wing: nothing about the state of marriage in the U.S., especially among blacks, and its ravages; the decline of literacy coast to coast, especially among blacks; the increased sense of dependence on government as opposed to personal responsibility, especially among blacks.  He’s got the same old tired subjects and you know where he will get his coverage playbook when the time comes.  What a jerk.
 
(For ongoing top-flight inner-city coverage, see Manhattan Institute and its City Journal, with special attention to Heather Mac Donald, author of The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society, an Ivan R. Dee book out of Chicago.)

Brian, are you grieving?

 
Veteran journalists “greatly unsettled” by Katrina experience
Los Angeles Times
NBC anchor Brian Williams says reporting Hurricane Katrina has moved him to consider other areas of coverage that he says need to be addressed. He tells Matea Gold: “I will be asking my network to lead a discussion on the issues of class, race, energy, the environment, disaster planning, Iraq — all those things and more. This encompasses so many of the major issues of our time.” (Related AP story.)
— from Pointeronline’s Jim Romenesko letter. 
 
B. Williams has discovered the other America.  He doesn’t ride the subway enough maybe?  In and out of limos, is he, with barely time to tip the driver?  He does one story and has ideas for entire coverage for his bosses, stem to stern.  Well (a) it won’t sell, because people won’t want to hear his moanings and groanings and (b) his list is all left-wing: nothing about the state of marriage in the U.S., especially among blacks, and its ravages; the decline of literacy coast to coast, especially among blacks; the increased sense of dependence on government as opposed to personal responsibility, especially among blacks.  He’s got the same old tired subjects and you know where he will get his coverage playbook when the time comes.  What a jerk.
 
(For ongoing top-flight inner-city coverage, see Manhattan Institute and its City Journal, with special attention to Heather Mac Donald, author of The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society, an Ivan R. Dee book out of Chicago.)

Chi Trib uber Sun-Times, big

Sun-Times gave the fatal Mundelein seminarian drunk-driving crash story page-God-knows-where Metro Briefs treatment on Sunday, but Chi Trib has been all over it, moving it along almost daily.  Today, five days into it, the Trib has breakthrough info that the seminarian car owner has an “Ohio rap sheet” in a 2001 corruption case, which was news to church authorities.  This blog’s brother, The Churches, has extended coverage of news and web accounts.

More: The Mundelein Review, a Pioneer Press paper and owned by the Sun-Times owner, has nothing on the crash that can be found on the web.  Nor does any other Pioneer paper.  I don’t get it. 

Cup only half empty

Chi Trib’s second-day story on Afghan voting is “Observers say 50% turnout in Afghan election a success,” which is a sort of correction on yesterday.  Trib’s woman in Kabul has been talking around, relying less on Fatima, who got confused and who’s to blame her? 

That was yesterday.  Today she has various experts she calls on or listens in on to tell her what’s happening, namely the “chief election officer,” the U.S. ambassador, Al Qaeda’s deputy leader (per Al Jazeera TV), “some people,” the head of “the Afghan Research Evaluation Unit, an independent research group in Kabul” (per AP), someone from “the International Crisis Group think tank,” a 19–yr-old high school student, and an unemployed 53–year-old.

This was a busy day for her, and my guess is she plopped down on a bar stool when her story was filed, for a stiff one, and then to bed. 

May I ask, however,

* Chief election officer of what, appointed by whom? 

* Whence this Afghan Research Evaluation Unit and who are they, and how are they to be characterized?  Objectively, of course.

* Ditto re: the International Crisis Group think tank?

It would be good to know these things, even as one sympathizes with the harried reporter in a foreign land where explosions occur often enough to be noticed.  (And indeed, a little Googling finds the latter two with fine web sites — http://www.areu.org.af/ and http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm — that present them as serious operations to be taken seriously.)

Finally, an idea: compare the list of legislators, impossible to sift through for sake of voting responsibly, with our Cook County judges ballot.  No comparison, it would be seem, but she does compare 50% voting with far lower percentages voting here, saying or suspecting that they are not to be compared, because for Afghans it’s brand new and we are inured to it — this, by the way, is a comment she gleaned from above-mentioned “some people.” 

It would be indeed churlish to ask (a) how many and (b) who; so I will pass over these twin questions in silence.