"Truth or consequences" — Remember that?

Debra Pickett of Sun-Times deserves warning: If I ever meet her, I will hug her, mostly because of today — her discussion and dissection of the latest truth controversy: Front & center, Oprah Winfrey, you lover of dissembling.  Oprah endorses the “emotional truth” defense mounted by fiction author in guise of nonfiction author James Frey of A Million Little Pieces best-seller fame. 

The book’s appeal, abetted by an Oprah show appearance, lay in this guy’s having conquered vice in pursuit of virtue — managing the transition from addict to role model, etc. — which he relayed to the gullible in excruciating detail, much of which he made up.  (For shame!)  Exposed, he says so what?  Said it on Larry King, and Oprah called in to agree with him, blissfully unaware that the halfway alert Oprah fan will be somewhat less likely to be inspired by her show’s next success story. 

If Oprah had any sense in the matter, she would have called in to Larry and reamed the author out.  Not on your Nielsen rating.

Along comes Ms. Pickett, noting that the author once lived in Chicago and drawing comparisons with his plea and Chi scam artists, many in office thanks to gullible voters. 

Read Ms. Pickett, please.  She has a nice touch and in her we may have a durable winner.

Bias alert: he blew whistle? Or just blew it?

You’d think one of our most main stream outlets would play it down the middle, wouldn’t you?  Letting us decide?  Not so in case of ABC, which has decided for us that the NSA operative who spilled classified beans to NY Times did not violate his so-called sacred trust but gave us news wholly fit to print:

“Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet,” says Brian Ross of ABC, hoping we all will think, if ABC says it, it must be so. 

However. “Did it ever occur to ABC News that maybe the NSA wants to keep Tice quiet because they take seriously the sensitive nature of what they do every day to protect the nation against terrorist attacks?” asks John McIntyre at The RCP Blog.

If it did, the thought was dismissed immediately, we presume.

“My question is,” continues the RCP man, “why is a guy who divulges highly classified information to people who aren’t cleared to have that information necessarily a whistleblower? How does ABC News know that Mr. Tice is a whistleblower and not a criminal?”

Hey, they have their sources.

Bias alert: he blew whistle? Or just blew it?

You’d think one of our most main stream outlets would play it down the middle, wouldn’t you?  Letting us decide?  Not so in case of ABC, which has decided for us that the NSA operative who spilled classified beans to NY Times did not violate his so-called sacred trust but gave us news wholly fit to print:

“Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet,” says Brian Ross of ABC, hoping we all will think, if ABC says it, it must be so. 

However. “Did it ever occur to ABC News that maybe the NSA wants to keep Tice quiet because they take seriously the sensitive nature of what they do every day to protect the nation against terrorist attacks?” asks John McIntyre at The RCP Blog.

If it did, the thought was dismissed immediately, we presume.

“My question is,” continues the RCP man, “why is a guy who divulges highly classified information to people who aren’t cleared to have that information necessarily a whistleblower? How does ABC News know that Mr. Tice is a whistleblower and not a criminal?”

Hey, they have their sources.

Daily papers in decline

“Among the five major dailies in the Chicago of my early boyhood, my father preferred the Daily News, an afternoon paper reputed to have excellent foreign correspondents,” says Joseph Epstein in Commentary. “Democratic in its general political affiliation, though not aggressively so, the Daily News was considered the intelligent Chicagoan’s paper.”

Something has happened, however.  Epstein cites all the familiar grim details about newspapers’ decline in our day:

Four-fifths of Americans once read newspapers; today, apparently fewer than half do. Among adults, in the decade
1990-2000, daily readership fell from 52.6 percent to 37.5 percent. Among the young, things are much worse: in one study, only 19 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four reported consulting a daily paper, and only 9 percent trusted the information purveyed there; a mere 8 percent found newspapers helpful, while 4 percent
thought them entertaining.

He adds loss of advertising, draconic staff cutbacks, reduction in size of pages, UK parallels to all this.  His father read his Daily News religiously, but

Today, his son reads no Chicago newspaper whatsoever. A serial killer could be living in my apartment building, and I would be unaware of it until informed by my neighbors. As for the power of the press to shape and even change my mind, I am in the condition of George Santayana, who wrote to his sister in 1915 that he was too old to “be influenced
by newspaper argument. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed.”

He gets the NY Times, reading it (a) to see who died, (b) to learn “if anyone has hit upon a novel way of denigrating President Bush; the answer is invariably no, though they seem never to tire of trying,” and (c) in general to stay abreast of what’s said, as Santayana did in 1915.  This daily exercise takes him a half hour.