OmbudSunday: a partial roundup of ombudsman columns

# The Louisville Courier-Journal: Pam Platt tells us what the loss of the shuttle Columbia means to her.

# The Florida Times-Union: Mike Clark quotes “Howard Kurtz, Washington Post media reporter, on the good old days of the news media:”

There was no golden age (of journalism). There was certainly a time when politics and government were treated more substantively and seriously by the media. But what some people mythologize as the good old days was a time when women wrote mainly for what was known as the women's pages, when newsrooms were almost entirely white, when news about Negroes was treated differently than news about whites. Reporters of the Front Page mold may have been more in tune with the people they were writing for, but they were less educated, less specialized, less knowledgeable and sometimes drunker than today's journalists.

Oh, and some media columnist for a European newspaper, famous for its sophisticated use of the words "fuck" and “cunt,” opines that “In the American press, day after day, the White House controls the agenda. The supposedly liberal American press has become a dog that never bites, hardly barks but really loves rolling over and having its tummy tickled.''

# The Washington Post: Michael Getler reports that a “reader sent the following message last Monday:”

I implore you to challenge the paper's editorial staff to question the President's unwillingness to participate in press conferences, especially now when our nation is being led into war. I find it astonishing that so few reporters/columnists have brought the Bush administration's refusal to face the press to the public's attention, because, frankly, this avoidance of accountability is both disturbing and ominous.

While acknowledging that President Bush has held about the same number of news conferences as Presidents Carter and Ford, and more than Nixon, at this point in his first term, Getler (whose anti-war sympathies are seldom far from the surface) calls on the President to hold a “a proper, announced-in-advance, full-scale presidential news conference sometime between now and when the bombs start dropping,” to allow for “concentrated follow-up questioning.”

# The Oregonian: Dan Hortsch responds to a message sent by the state Superintendent of Public Instruction “to nearly 200 school district superintendents. The Superintendent wanted to ‘correct the misleading headline and story’ that appeared that day in The Oregonian.”

The Oregonian piece, headlined "Oregon will set a lower bar for minority, disadvantaged students," is about how the “State Board of Education's adoption of a plan to alter the timelines in meeting some requirements of the No Child Left Behind federal education law” would set “standards for the next decade for low-income, minority and other students [that] would be lower than for nondisadvantaged students.”

Hortsch reports that the piece is fairly accurate, and that state officials believe their approach to be “a sound, gradual approach to closing the achievement gap, rather than set unrealistic targets for schools." He notes that, “state education officials also objected to use of the word ‘lower’ in reference to standards that would be used for students in certain groups. They contend that in fact Oregon would raise standards from the present.”

OmbudSaturday: a partial roundup of ombudsman columns

# Orlando Sentinel: Observing that, “A newspaper in Lincoln, Neb., staked out some new territory for American Indians this past week when it stopped referring to the professional football team in the nation's capital as the Redskins,” Manning Pynn argues that the issue of using controversial names in a newspaper has “a couple of elements.”

First, he asks, “Is naming a team after a minority group offensive?” The corollary is “Would a team deliberately call itself something it didn't like or respect?” The answer, of course, is no.

Pynn’s “second element has plenty to do with journalism.” It boils down to, “teams, not newspapers, decide what to call themselves.

If a sports team's moniker truly were offensive, though, the newspaper wouldn't cure the problem by keeping that name a secret. If anything, that would help protect the team from warranted criticism and contribute to the offense.”

# The San Diego Union-Tribune: Gina Lubrano appears to take peace marchers at their word when they report 1,200 marchers in their contingent in the January 18th Martin Luther King, Jr., parade. Marchers were “outraged” that The Union-Tribune had reported only that there were “more than 100.” No independent corroboration for the higher number is given, and since we know that the primary organizer of anti-war demonstrations, International A.N.S.W.E.R., is notorious for using inflated numbers, perhaps a little skepticism of numbers reported by the anti-war movement might be in order.

Euro-Anti-Semitism or valid satire?

The Independent (UK) was recently taken to task in Little Green Footballs, and elsewhere, for publishing a grotesque anti-Semitic cartoon of the Israeli Prime Minister. The cartoon appears to many, including The OmbudsGod, to clearly invoke the ancient blood libel against Jews (that Jews eat and/or drink the blood of non-Jewish children) – which is still in common use in the Arab media.

Today, The Independent asks “the question: was this cartoon anti-Semitic?

Coercive marketing and the PTO

A lot has changed in school since I was a kid, some of it for the better, a lot for the worse. One thing that is really ticking me off is the use of children as a marketing arm for various goods and services only vaguely related to school.

For example, our local PTO routinely holds “contests” where classes that make a certain sales quota are rewarded with an ice cream or pizza party. In other words, little Jimmy and Sarah and LaToya are being used to coerce Mom and Dad into buying stuff so that the PTO can get a kickback from the ACME Over-Priced Products Company of P.O. Box, New Jersey. This is all coordinated through our local taxpayer-funded schools – attendance mandatory by law.

It used to be just Scholastic that had penetrated this market, and the books they sell are reasonably priced and closely related to education, but it’s gotten worse. For example, Wednesday (or is it Thursday?) is grocery day. Yep, every week you can have your kid schlep home groceries from school, as though his usual load of books and papers isn’t enough. Now they’re selling “discount cards” good for I don’t know what, but if 20 kids (virtually the entire class) sell one they get a pizza party. Guess who little six-year-old Tommy expects to buy this latest swindle?

This isn't just my local school district. An entire industry aimed at marketing through the public schools has cropped up. Only unlike the crops of well-educated students the schools are supposed to be producing, this industry deserves to be ploughed under and the fields salted so that it will never happen again.
posted at 10:56 AM


Going to war without France
Dean Esmay reports that the:

Line of the week comes from Jed Babbin, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense:

Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless, noisy baggage behind.

As stated on last night's Hardball with Chris Matthews.

International A.N.S.W.E.R.: "It's us against them.”

Would an “anti-war” front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party fib about the number of protestors at a demonstration?

Many newspapers have received complaints about under-counting the number of demonstrators at the recent International A.N.S.W.E.R. sponsored demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere. The experience of Minneapolis Star Tribune ombudsman Lou Gelfand appears to be typical of what was happening. Here are samples of the fifty-something “vibrations” he received:

"Your Sunday piece about the protests in Washington mentions that there were only 30,000 people in the march. I attended and there were at least 500,000. C-Span was reporting 700,000." -- Zachary Jorgensen.

"I attended the rally in Washington [and] there were over 700,000…" -- Elizabeth Tellen…

Complainants often said that the Washington Post reported 500,000 rallied.

In fact, as Gelfand notes, The Post reported that:

U.S. Capitol Police suggested the march drew 30,000 to 50,000 people. Protest organizers said that the number was closer to 500,000. The truth might fall somewhere in between the guesses, or it might fall somewhere beyond the edges.

As a rule, the larger the demonstration, the more seriously it is taken. So whose number are we to accept?

I don’t know about the Capitol Police number, but this piece in The Nation, about an experience from an earlier A.N.S.W.E.R. protest, shines some light on the numbers used by the protest organizers:

"I'll make a deal with you," said an ANSWER organizer at the Capitol rally to Terra Lawson-Remer of Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations (STARC), who was coordinating media outreach for the NSYPC event. "We won't play the Mumia tape again"--ANSWER had already broadcast a taped speech by Mumia at the Ellipse--"if you'll tell the press we had 150,000 people here." Lawson-Remer was in a bind; she didn't want them to carry out this threat, but she believed the turnout was in the 50,000 to 75,000 range. The ANSWER organizers pressed the point, arguing that whatever they said, the media would report fewer. This was not a difference of opinion about the truth. "It's not about accuracy. It's about politics. It's not about counting," said ANSWER's Tony Murphy condescendingly. "It's us against them. [The pro-Israel] demonstrators had 100,000 here last week." (Responding to a web version of this article, ANSWER's legal counsel called this account a "disgusting fabrication," but I can attest to its accuracy because I was there.)

ANSWER is notorious for inflating its demonstration numbers…

I certainly know whose numbers I won't be accepting at face value. And if they're willing to lie about basic stuff like this, what else are they willing to lie about?

Analysis of the State of the Union Address

If you have a little time, rhetoric scholar Andrew Cline analyzes the State of the Union Address.
posted at 12:27 PM


Wycliff’s latest screed against Bush
Don Wycliff, ombudsman for The Chicago Tribune, launches into another of his patented anti-Bush screeds today, focusing on the State of the Union address. After informing us that:

We led the coalition that kicked Hussein (sic) out of Kuwait, devastated his country and his army, clamped a crippling and demeaning regime of sanctions on Iraq and maintained it for the last 12 years. We've bombed his country routinely, cordoned large sections of it off from Baghdad's control and now have breathed new life into the effort to disarm Iraq--by force of arms if necessary.

None of this is any more than Hussein (sic) deserves (although his people do not), but it does give one an idea why he might be angry enough to want to lash out in the nastiest possible way at the United States.

Wycliff then minimizes all this by his misleading characterization that:

There is no evidence that Hussein (sic) has acted on that impulse--at least none that the Bush administration has seen fit to share with the American people.

Hmm. Saddam attempted to assassinate a U.S. President, has enormous stockpiles of deadly weaponized chemicals and biological agents (which he specifically promised to get rid of), is attempting to obtain a nuclear bomb and is known to harbor, fund and supply terrorist groups – several of which have targeted Americans. Nope, no evidence. Move along. Move along.

One curious point Wycliff makes, in an attempt to tar the second President Bush with the first, is that in 1990 Saddam Hussein sounded out the United States about how we would react if he invaded Kuwait, or at least the disputed area then claimed by Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie informed him that:

We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960's that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.

When questioned later, she stated:

Obviously, I didn't think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take ALL of Kuwait.

But what this shows is that Saddam does respond to signals. And if the signal is that he can continue to do what he is doing without fear of American intervention, then he will continue. It shows the folly of sending ambiguous or mixed messages to Baghdad.

The unambiguous message must be do as you promised to do at the end of the Gulf War or we will remove you. Had it not been for the ambiguous message Ambassador Glaspie delivered the first time, we probably wouldn’t have had to fight the First Gulf War, or a second one. Now is not the time to be signaling Saddam that we aren’t serious.

As an aside, Saddam’s full name is Saddam Hussein al-Majd al-Tikriti. He is usually called either Saddam or Saddam Hussein. Hussein is Saddam’s father’s first name. You’d think the ombudsman of a major regional newspaper would get his name right. Yet week after week, month after month, Wycliff persists in calling Saddam by the brutal dictator's father's name.

Oh, and don’t miss Wycliff’s little dig against the U.S. and Israel at the end of his column.

As I listened to the president speak … my mind went back to one of the hit movies of last summer, "The Sum of All Fears."

…the movie depicted a terrorist group's successful effort to acquire and smuggle into the U.S. a nuclear bomb, which is detonated in Baltimore and devastates that city.

Interestingly, the nuke in that instance … was made in Israel, with fissile material supplied by the United States.

It’s a f-ing Hollywood movie, Don. Get real.

Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet

Poughkeepsie Journal ombudsman Kathleen Norton advises readers on writing letters to the editor. She cautions that:

Editorial Page Editor John Penney also reminds readers that Internet sources of information are not always credible. He urges readers to state their opinions, but not to state facts in absolute terms unless they are sure they are true.

Sometimes media columnists need reminding, too.


Those sophisticated Europeans

The main fixture of the Dutch football season is the match between Ajax, from Amsterdam, and Feyenoord, from Rotterdam… I had the misfortune once — through an error at the ticket office — to find myself sitting in the midst of the Feyenoord fans. It was a profoundly disturbing experience. Imagine thousands of football supporters screaming ‘Fucking Jews!’, or ‘To the gas chamber!’, or ‘Next stop Auschwitz!’ every time a player from the Amsterdam side touches the ball. Imagine, if you can bear it, thousands of people making hissing noises, mimicking the flow of gas…

Something very strange is going on here…

Ian Buruma in The Spectator.

via Tim Blair



Guardian policy on the Iraq situation
Ombudsman Ian Mayes reports that an “updated statement of the Guardian's position is likely this week to coincide with the Blair-Bush meeting at Camp David.” The current position is that:

We support a multilateral resolution, primarily through the United Nations, involving the final, verified destruction of all and any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iraq's compliance with other UN resolutions, the concurrent phased lifting of non-military sanctions, an end to the no-fly zones and to UN controls on Iraqi oil and the opening of Iraq's borders to free movement...

We have not ruled out our support for the use of force as a means of last resort... We have condemned the Saddam regime on numerous occasions... We support containment, deterrence, diplomatic isolation, targeted sanctions pending a change of government...

But lest you think the Guardian might have a realistic policy for accomplishing all this:

We do not support the US policy of forcible “regime change”; we have condemned targeted assassination...

Mayes informs us that the Editor’s morning conference:

was not an anti-war rally, either in tone or atmosphere, although there were perhaps speakers who had hoped it might be, calling for the paper to declare itself unequivocally against the war in the way that it had declared itself against Suez in 1956…

The leader then…, "The world must be told clearly that millions of British people are deeply shocked by the aggressive policy of the Government. Its action in attacking Egypt is a disaster of the first magnitude. It is wrong on every count - moral, military, and political...”

Which brings us to an observation by Iain Murray, in The Edge of England’s Sword, reminding us of the impact of the Suez debacle:

Let's not forget that it was America's refusal to back Britain, France and Israel over the Suez crisis that is probably the defining moment that set the Middle East along the road to ruin. If Nasser had been dealt with then, we probably wouldn't have Saddam now. Moreover, that incident helped cause the British and French empires to break up prematurely, I think, a process America encouraged, leaving a legacy of suffering and war in Africa and other areas (the legacy is not nearly so bad in areas that had come to independence gradually and thoughtfully, such as India). Finally, it was also the cause of the splitting of France from the Atlantic alliance. Dulles and Eisenhower have a lot to answer for, and simply blaming Europe for it is just not good enough. I also have a suspicion that it will be looked back at by historians as probably the biggest delay in encouraging true Anglospheric feeling. It certainly made at least one generation of British Tories more suspicious than they should be of America.

Forcing an end to the attack, which also resulted in the downfall of the Anthony Eden's government, was arguably the low point of Eisenhower's presidency.