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Monday, February 14, 2011
A Valentine's Day round-up, from Cairo to the coasts
They kissed us in Tahrir Square but did they really mean it?
Since you can't smooch Facebook or Twitter, which also got a lot of the English-language placard credit from the Egyptian citizens who actually did the overthrowing, Valentine's Day came early last week for flesh-and-blood reporters from the U.S. networks and cables.
President Obama may have been a little slow on the Cairo adrenaline uptake. Journalists, on the other hand, flung themselves into the joyous mosh pit to be happily mauled and molested, soaking in the love like a kindergartner who gets the most V-Day cards in his class today.
NBC's chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, was just one of those smooched right on TV in the ebullience of the moment. But few seemed quite as thrilled as the floppy-haired, Ralph Lauren catalog CNN hunk, Ivan Watson, swept away in the pulse of joy over a change whose future is certainly uncertain. Hugs, kisses and hand holding ensued. That was then, of course, and our Valentine sentiments can be fickle and fleeting. Will Ivan get any flowers or candy today, when it matters?
I'm not raining on the Cairo parade and am probably just jealous. No one kissed us in the streets of Manila 25 years ago as a thank-you for helping tip the boat of autocrat Ferdinand Marcos into the seas of exile. And we were just as seduced by the crowds, the infatuation with possible peaceful revolution. But reporters were less "personalities" then; the world around us did not exist, as one "60 Minutes" producer once told me about his show, "to make our guys look good."
But they look good now. And just in time for Valentine's Day, so the love can flow unencumbered by the tangle of context, history and the longer narrative arc. "If you throw in too much complexity," Howie Kurtz said on his Sunday morning show, "Reliable Sources " about last week's press jubilation, "will you ruin my storyline here?"
That storyline was romance and exuberance, which is irrational by nature, but a perfect combustible combo for Valentine's Day. It is, like love, contagious. On Kurtz' show, Washington Post Mideast bureau chief Janine Zacharia called the coverage "breathless," and said people were "addicted to the pictures." How so much like the early days of romance is that?
Anderson Cooper, another CNN Love boat captain, said he was speechless. OMG, thank you, Egypt. Anderson was also cuffed in the head by dark characters during one street scuffle, which was news on his air for three days.The Silver Fox was always "committed to a certain version of the story," says Newsweek Mideast editor, Christopher Dickey.
Isn't that how love is?
Read More 'A Valentine's Day round-up, from Cairo to the coasts' »| Feb 14 at 02:10 PM
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Yank him, Obama; Reagan would have
A despot, secure for many years in the brutal exercise of his power through repression, tainted elections and close association with the United States, suddenly finds himself barely clinging to office. A populist momentum has arisen in the streets in one of those human waves of emotion that seems to be self-generating and unpredictable.
Masses of people bring tanks to a halt. The loyalty of the military to the regime is in question. The despot tries a frantic political ploy to calm the volcanic fury; it backfires.
There is an attempt to martial pro-government demonstrators, seeded with police and military. But the despot's supporters whittle down to this: thugs with rocks and guns trying to fend off the tide of history. Eventually, the ugly portrait is so painfully clear that the President of the United States, until then reluctant to intervene against a long-time ally in the fight against regional forces hostile to the U.S., agrees to pull the plug forcefully. The despot is whisked out of the country and the nominally democratic crowd chooses a hero of the uprising to lead them.
Wait. Mubarak hasn't been airlifted out just yet.
But we know how this could turn out because the scenario above unfolded in the Philippines exactly 25 years ago this month. Read More 'Yank him, Obama; Reagan would have' »
| Feb 03 at 06:38 PM
Monday, January 31, 2011
Free press and compassion clash (longer version of today's Op-Ed)
Today's printed version of the San Francisco Chronicle has a shorter version of this post on the Op Ed page. There is plenty of passion in journalism. But since I believe the role of compassion in our profession is also important, I wanted to offer up a little additional info on this case. Your comments appreciated.
Dr. Harvey Purtz had to bury his son, Chris, last June. Then he tried to bury an unpleasant moment of Chris' past. But a free press and the permanence of stories on the Internet have overwhelmed the Fresno podiatrist in a sad debate where principal and compassion clash.
"I was trying to bring freedom of speech to other places," Dr. Purtz told me about serving a tour as a medical adviser to an Iraqi medical division, "and now that freedom is being used against me at home."
He's talking about a 2006 story in the U.C. Berkeley Daily Californian about Chris, a former U.C. honor student and football star, who was accused of behaving very badly at a San Francisco strip club. No charges were filed, nor police report made and the younger Purtz denied the accusations.
But the Daily Cal interviewed club employees and a surveillance camera showed some scuffling. The incident got him suspended from the Bears football team.
Chris' mom met with the Daily Cal staff back then to dissuade them from running a piece about the incident. Her son had a brain disorder, she said, and the press would make things much worse, according to documents in a subsequent suit. The story ran anyway.
"That day, Oct. 12, was the moment I lost my son," Dr. Purtz told me tearily, though Chris' dropping out of U.C., his deterioration and ultimate death in 2010 took four more years. I could find no public record of how he died, but I can gather it was not peacefully. "His mother found him in his apartment alone."
Harvey Purtz sued the current Daily Cal editor, Rajesh Srinivasan, for steadfastly refusing to remove the adult club story link and some accompanying cold-hearted comments from the paper's electronic archive after Chris died. He demanded $7,500 for the family's "emotional distress."
Many journalists and others humbugged about the absurdity of a hapless suit that sought damages for a straightforward news piece from an editor who was a high school sophomore when the original 2006 story ran. (The paper has an arms-length relationship with U.C. that absolves the University of any liability in these things.)
University of Tampa journalism professor Dan Reimhold wrote, "I'd rather cut off my arm before removing something I consider accurate and newsworthy."
It can get bloody, as well as stuffy, here in the journalism priesthood. Read More 'Free press and compassion clash (longer version of today's Op-Ed)' »
| Jan 31 at 08:51 AM
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Fox Blonde Dismembers Tucson Sheriff
The sharpest moment I saw in the TV coverage of the Tucson tragedy over the weekend was Megyn Kelly on Fox News jamming the chief local cop and new national discourse advocate, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik.
Never mind that he's a Dem -- Politico calls him a "liberal" -- and she's a Fox commentator who appeared scantily clad in GQ. Ms. Kelly is also a lawyer and expertly grilled the instant hero of reasonableness about being a key law enforcement official ascribing motives to a suspect and engaging in political commentary at the beginning of a very important criminal investigation. "Why are you putting a political spin on this?" she asked.
"Is it really the place of a sheriff to stir the pot on either side of the political aisle?" Read More 'Fox Blonde Dismembers Tucson Sheriff ' »
| Jan 11 at 11:50 AM
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Ask Phil Bronstein questions on VYou
Most of us in the media world would like to use tools, as opposed to just being them. (You can't always get what you want...)
Part of my job is sniffing out interesting journalistic experiments and trying them out at Hearst papers and web sites.
Lately, we've been working with VYou, a new Q&A; video site. I like its back-and-forth sensibility. Here's how it works: anyone can ask a VYou user a question, anonymously or otherwise. The VYou user can record video answers for the questions h/she chooses.
It has a DIY aesthetic, more YouTube than Universal Studios; that's part of its charm.
Culture expert and Poop blog founder Peter Hartlaub from the SF Chronicle and political whiz Casey Seiler at the Albany Times-Union have been using VYou for a few weeks. Paolo Lucchesi, film star look-alike at sfgate's Inside Scoop is starting up. So's Richard Justice, premier sports columnist for the Houston Chronicle.
A number of notable writers, artists, and bloggers - from Gizmodo's Jason Chen to the SF Giant's bearded wonder, Brian Wilson, to Camille Ford of "Food Wars" to Chuck Klosterman - use the site.
But I can't Dicky Eklund this and expect colleagues to go into the public ring if I'm not willing to do the same.
So please check out my VYou site. And ask some questions (simply by typing into the box at the beginning of this post). They can be about media, newspapers, war reporting, investigative projects, crazy and tumultuous SF, TV, digital content, culture, politics, even my dog, Rocky, or my rabbit, Coal.
| Jan 05 at 08:58 AM
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Gavin, real-life Gossip Girls, and Kate Gosselin show us how smart and stupid we are
Gag me with a tall Poppy.
Hadley Marie Nagel, you are disgustingly incredible. There is your photo on the Sunday New York Times Style section cover looking like a princess with your mom holding the train of your golden gown.
But you're not just the average, Upper East Side 19-year-old debutante/John Hopkins gal with rich parents. You are a necessary goalpost of our culture.
The story, equally lavish and gushing, says this about your "dizzying display" of talents: "published articles, a scholarly paper, nationally syndicated Op Ed pieces, awards, advocacy work for sustainable organic agriculture and social justice. An expert shooter in trap, skeet and clay, a blue-ribbon winner in small-bore rifle competition, National Scholar, founder of Model United Nations and history clubs and a travel web site for teenagers, the youngest registered lobbyist on Capitol Hill..." and a coloratura soprano with a CD out. You're also a very attractive "5-foot-7, leggy ... natural blonde."
Phew! That all seems pretty unnatural to me. At 19, I was a drop-out in bell bottoms selling Great Books of the Western World door-to-door to support a meager journalism career. You, on the other hand, make even the two high-end young women in the story below you on the page, who have a hugely successful and surging Washington PR firm, look like pikers and trailer park queens.
But I'm worried about you, Hadley. I hope you escape the "tall poppy syndrome," a custom dating back at least to the ancient Greeks and Romans, where, the historian Herodotus wrote, royalty whacked off taller plants as a sign to underlings that they should get rid of "eminent citizens". Too much special-ness out there creates disparity, which could lead to dystopia.
Floral arrangements and ancient political fratricide aside, uber high achievers like Ms. Nagel have something important to teach us beyond envy and feelings of inferiority. After reading Hadley Nagel's story, life suddenly made perfect sense. Read More 'Gavin, real-life Gossip Girls, and Kate Gosselin show us how smart and stupid we are' »
| Dec 28 at 12:44 PM
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
What's more transparent, TSA's scanners or Wikileaks?
"We are transparency activists," says Wikileaks' elegantly rumpled Julian Assange.
Except about the still-mysterious Wikileaks, and perhaps the social personality quirks of its leader, who may or may not be the Silvio Berlusconi of whistle-blowing.
Reading the copious Wikileaks press, I get the sense that lots of people are willing to disbelieve claims that Assange is a sexual criminal but yet have primal trust in his role as avenging angel of public policy. At the very least, Assange seems an absolutist about transparency, though not every fact or cable or piece of low-minded conversation has the same value to society.
I'm reluctant to cast double standard stones. Journalists love transparency. For everyone else. We often hate it when it comes to our own craft, our sources, whose obscurity we'll go to jail to protect, and ourselves.
Just try substituting "classified" with "private" or "top secret" with "off-the-record" and watch reporters get edgy about openness.
But while information generally may want to be free, not everything a soldier lip-syncing Lady Gaga can cart away on computer disc is worthy of freedom. "Just because it's a secret doesn't make it nefarious," says Jon Stewart, our national news icon and twisted, contemporary Walter Cronkite.
Read More 'What's more transparent, TSA's scanners or Wikileaks?' »| Dec 01 at 01:18 PM
Monday, November 15, 2010
Junk legislation: Circumcision might get banned in SF
Arriving a little too late to save Gavin Newsom from embarrassment, San Franciscan Lloyd Schofield wants to put a measure on the city ballot to ban circumcision, which he claims causes all sorts of psychological, physical and sexual trauma.
(I'd ask my two sons but I don't think they remember the event itself and they're still way too young to find out what the long term implications are.)
SF Weekly's Snitch blog reports this today, along with the fact that Mr. Schofield also wants to restore foreskins. Which could lead to a lot of messy medical dumpster diving, unless you kept yours in a box. Snitch makes an unfortunate comparison between the circumcision measure and this month's Happy Meal ban. But this is manny, not nanny legislation. We won't go there.
There's also the required pun about "tip of the iceberg." Hah.
They didn't publish the old joke about the guy who needs his watch fixed, sees a store with a big clock in the window and goes in. "I'd like my watch fixed," he says. "Mr., I don't fix watches," says the proprietor. "I'm a mohel" (circumcisionist in the Jewish tradition). "So why put the clock in your window?" "Mr., if you were me, what would you put in the window?"
Mr. Shofield should steal his campaign slogan for this potentially painful debate from the guy who refused a pat-down search at the San Diego airport Saturday and his recording of the incident went viral.
"If you touch my junk, I'm gonna have you arrested."
That's the long and short of it.
| Nov 15 at 01:00 PM
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Courage, conflict, and context: digital timelines chart our lives
Cowering under my jeep on a side road in San Salvador, caught in a vicious crossfire between guerrillas and Salvadoran soldiers, I was thinking survival, not historical context.
A bullet ricocheted off the pavement and hit my gas tank, a few inches from my face. I yelled for two other journalists I'd driven there - also pressed to the ground - to jump back in the vehicle. I slammed it into reverse and we got the hell out of there. This was November, 1989.
A few days ago, I got a call from Larry Ross, a reporter who'd been around that night, the beginning of an historic offensive by leftist rebels that eventually led to peace. He brought back for me that terrifying moment. I liked having the anchor of someone else's intersecting memory. And I'm anxiously waiting for the video he said he shot of my jeep as physical evidence of my own presence in an historical timeline.
Remember looking up in the night sky as a kid and thinking about what a meaningless speck you were? OK, maybe that was just me. But who doesn't want to know where they fit in life's larger narrative?
Two weeks ago, I was at the Beverly Hills Hotel Grand Ballroom podium, giving an International Women's Media Foundation Courage Award to the elegant, eloquent and forceful Latin America journalist, Alma Guillermoprieto.
I'd never met her before this, but I realized as I started to introduce her that our lives had also crossed in the arc of Salvadoran events. She had broken the story, in 1981, of the vicious massacre by soldiers of nearly 1,000 men, women and children at the rural town of El Mozote. Nine years later, I reported on the repatriation of refugees to that same area who had been driven across the border into Honduras by escalating violence, culminating in the Mozote carnage.
There was one living witness, Rufina Amaya. Alma and I had both spoken with her, separated by time and each of us in our distinct Salvadoran war experiences. Amaya had given us both tours of the abandoned El Mozote, a place forever cursed by its past. Ravaged bodies greeted Alma in 1981, which had turned to bones still sticking out of the ground by the time I got there in 1990.
But we were joined by Amaya, by people, facts, history, images and geography, and I talked about the fortunate accident of that conjunction in introducing her at the L.A. Courage event.
After Alma came up to get her award, she mentioned the mystery and wonder of how "souls cross paths."
I already knew plenty about Alma and her hugely controversial massacre story, El Mozote and Salvador. But the awards dinner that night caused me to go back and surf the web for stories, details and dates of an historical occasion neither one of us would forget. That trolling experience was, like the web itself, jumbled, messy and a little overwhelming.
In our hysterically sharing but existentially unsatisfying social world, thousands of "Friends" or a mayor's badge from a local bar can't necessarily answer the bigger contextual questions of your life and where it fits in the grand scheme.
But the technology universe is just now providing us with some mapping possibilities to find ourselves in space and time. It can now tell us more than ever before about our own personal histories, and how they intersect with other people and events.
"Timeline" tools like Dipity, Intersect and Historypin easily gather our memories - whether recorded through text, audio, video or photographs - and chart them together to tell a much richer story and help us each get a bead on our place in history and the world. Suddenly geocoding and social-media-storytelling mean more than just "Checking In" at your favorite sushi restaurant or sharing drunken stories from last Saturday night.
Dipity is a straightforward, utilitarian tool that's free and fast: anyone can use it to create their own timeline. "Our mission is to organize the web's content by date and time," Dipity's site proclaims. "Users can create, share, embed and collaborate on interactive, visually engaging timelines that integrate video, audio, images, text, links, social media, location and timestamps."
Intersect is more whimsical: think geocoding mixed with old fashioned storytelling, with a dash of Fourquare. By bringing together personal and/or public storylines and intersections, the site's founders hope to "make sharing on the Web more interesting, more enjoyable, and more powerful."
Historypin takes photos from both national archives and private-sector collections, and "pins" them over Google Maps Street View to "create a fascinating fold in the space/time continuum." Archive photos can be dated and geotagged. Users can also submit their own pictures and stories. The idea is to paint "a precise portrait of how specific locations have changed."
Both Intersect and Historypin are relatively new - Intersect describes itself as "Really Beta" - and their successes largely depend on the size of their user bases, but I can see great possibilities, as both a journalist and a human being.
Also, while it may seem like I'm disrespecting mainstream social media sites as being a little too superficial, I mostly love what tools like Twitter provide in the way of communication and information. And they're regularly creating new timeline technology that adds depth: just today the NY Daily News introduced a Foursquare-based feature that allows you to "check in" at certain areas and see a photo of what the place looked like 100 years ago.
I'm guilty of not having tried out all of these sites yet, but I will soon and can imagine how satisfying it would be, both professionally and personally, to have all the pieces of Salvador charted out in a timeline, with contributions from other witnesses.
I believe that is an experience helpful not just to journalists and historians, but to all of us.
As Ben Bradlee, probably the last leonine newspaper editor alive, said awhile ago: Good journalism has always been about telling a good story. Still is. Today we have better tools to do that.
| Nov 10 at 10:16 AM
Monday, November 01, 2010
Would you like an O'Donnell with that Obama?
Stop whining about the wildly eclectic nature of Tuesday's elections. This is all part of a design, intelligent or otherwise.
When you open the cultural door to possibilities, you can't have a bouncer there deciding who comes in. The door is open. Period. Possibilities are endless. Everyone who has the money, moxie or serendipity can and will push their way through.
This dynamic was no more in evidence than when the country elected its first African-American president two years ago, something that would've been unthinkable not too long before. Did you not realize that this broadened opening is the same force that birthed the Tea Party, Alvin Green and the god-like truthiness of Jon Stewart?
You can't have a Barack Obama without a Sarah Palin. Rachel Maddow, meet the ubiquitous Bill O'Reilly. For every Al Franken, there's a Sharron Angle or Christine O'Donnell. They're all the spawn of the same dynamic, an expanding new reality where anything is possible and nothing is predictable.
And everyone who is successfully part of this cacophonous national uber-party, from wingnuts to traditional worker bees, has become a representative of San Francisco values.
How much fun is that? Read More 'Would you like an O'Donnell with that Obama?' »
| Nov 01 at 02:14 PM
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