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August 14, 2004

In The Times' hinterlands

: The Times doesn't get Jersey, never has. See below and see this by Adam Nagourney in Sunday's paper:

Voters seem willing to accept, to a certain extent, gay people as television characters and even as next-door neighbors. Yet for politicians, there are limits, as Mr. McGreevey made clear.

Listen to the voters about the voters, man, not to McGreevey about the voters. Go read forums and blogs and comments and see that you're just not listening.

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Blog contest

: Gizmodo is holding a contest with a gadget giveaway. Enter by midnight Sunday.

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Garden State

: Zach Braff has a Garden State blog and just as his movie opens, his state gets the biggest news in at least a decade:

Wow,

First a movie about the state, now a Gay Governor... what's next- the World's Fair?

What an exciting time to be from New Jersey. Why's he quitting? Hell even Marion Barry hung in as Mayor of D.C. after he got caught taking a sip of the crack rock. A gay affair is nothing. When I was president of my elementary school student council I once purposely peed outside the urinal as an act of civil disobedience for being scolded for sniffing fruit scented markers. What did they expect? They were fruit scented! If you don't want kids to sniff markers, make them smell like ass, not grapes.

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Bon Appetit

: If PBS had any class, they'd preempt all their programming for a day -- say, tomorrow -- to run 24 hours of Julia Child, who brought taste to America and class to PBS and fun to Saturday Night Live. Instead, my PBS station was running frigging infomericals for painting kits this morning.

: Here's Julie's tribute to Julia.

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Down and down we go...

: Golan Cipel is looking so bad he'll make McGreevey look good. The latest:

A man who said New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey sexually harassed him was pushing for a cash settlement of up to $50 million before the governor decided to announce he is homosexual and had an extramarital affair, sources said.

Golan Cipel's demands also included a last-minute push to have McGreevey's administration approve development plans for a private medical college in the state, two senior members of the administration said Saturday. Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity....

The school's board members include Charles Kushner, a real estate developer who gave millions to Jewish organizations and politicians, including Mr. McGreevey and former U.S. senator Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.).

: Cipel says he never did it with the gayGuv and that he's straight.

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The Chinese Wonkette

: Wendy Cheng is the hottest blogger in Singapore.

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Our new head of homeland security: Oprah

: This is getting absurd. First, John Kerry makes this numbnutty statement on terrorism that was the perfect Daily Show punchline: "I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history." Proactive is bad enough. Sensitive is just plain laughable.

So then Dick Cheney laughed. Hell, so did Jon Stewart. So did I. Sensitive? Come on! Said the Veep:

Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge he would fight a "more sensitive" war on terror. (Laughter.) America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was ever won by being "sensitive." (Applause.) President Abraham Lincoln and General Grant did not wage sensitive wars. President Roosevelt and Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur did not wage a sensitive war. A "sensitive war" will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans on the morning of 9/11, and who now seek chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more. The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity. (Applause.) As our opponents see it, the problem isn't the thugs and the murderers we face, but it is somehow our attitude. Well, the American people know better. They know that we are in a fight to preserve our freedom and our way of life, and that we are on the side of right and justice in this battle. Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be treated more sensitively. They need to be destroyed. (Applause.)

It should have ended there: You say something stupid. It passes. But now John Edwards is defending Kerry's Birkenstock moment: "He took that word and distorted and tried to use it to argue John Kerry will not keep the American people safe," Edwards said. "He's talking about a man who still carries shrapnel in his body. He's talking about a man who spilled his blood for the United States of America."

So now he's playing the shrapnel card? That not only draws attention again to the dumb Kerry quote, it keeps playing Vietnam.

I'd rather see both sides outdoing each other with how they're going to go get Bin Laden and islamofascists: I'd hunt 'em down.... Well, I'd bomb 'em... Well, I'd nuke 'em... That's what I want to hear.

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The Jersey anti-defamation league

: In the op-ed pages of The NY Times, Eric Denzenhall essentially accuses New Jersey of being homophobic:

Yet perhaps the most important variable sealing Mr. McGreevey's fate was the setting for his drama. While New Jersey leans Democratic, these are not the Democrats of the Upper West Side or Malibu. These Democrats are still loyal to the "Three I's" of Garden State politics - Ireland, Israel and Italy. These are the union boys, the tradesmen, the enlightened professionals who remember their parents cut stone in Newark and stirred great vats of soup at Campbell's in Camden.

With the Three I's, one can weather corruption charges, as Mr. McGreevey did until this week. In Jersey politics, rolling with the punches of graft has long been a shibboleth of manhood. Being gay, however, is not. It's one thing for a governor to sell a political appointment. It's another for him to have sex with the guy he appointed.

Crap. Look at the forum posts on NJ.com or the comments on this blog or listen to even the most neanderthal talk radio (i.e., NJ101.5) or listen to conversations around here and you will hear that people really do not object to McGreevey's homosexuality. What they object to is the cardinal sin in this state, the sin of sins, the misstep that always kills governors here: Wasting taxpayer money. If all McGreevey had done was shtupped a guy named Golan Cipel, he would not have resigned. He resigned because this now explains why he put the guy on the state payroll at a high salary for a job he never should have filled. He wasted our money. Off with his head.

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Don't listen to me, I'm just a white guy

: Ah, the weekend: When I can catch up with my Jay Rosen reading.

It was a remarkable week at PressThink: Jay covered the hubub over the discrimination minority journalists showed Bush v. Kerry when each came to speak to them... Jay took the contrarian stand that they should show their opinions (and I agreed)... then Jay's blog turned into a friggin' op-ed page with various players writing pieces there (rather than in the big papers that employ them). This is what happens when you allow news to become conversation. I hope that is not lost on the big news guys who are reading the action over at Jay's. I fear it is lost, but I can always hope.

I have to say I got pretty mad at a white guy at all the white-guy bashing I read in the guest posts (read: old-style columns) put there by the Unity players (both of whom I know professionally). Ernest Sotomayor, president of Unity and Long Island editor of Newsday, said:

Let’s be clear: the downslide in the credibility of the media began long before this convention was held, and it began when nearly every publisher, nearly ever executive editor and nearly ever TV and radio news director and station manager in the business was a white male.

The charge that the news media is soundly liberal and dismissive of conservative viewpoints was levied long before our convention, and it was levied against a media workforce that still today is overwhelmingly white, and has been for more than two centuries.

Oh, so the downfall of media is because it's run by white guys, eh?

First, that's patently stupid. Second, it's terribly hypocritical. How the hell can you tell people not to dismiss you because of your ethnicity or skin color (or gender or whatever) and then turn around and dismiss other people because of their skin color? If being black or brown doesn't make you wrong, being white doesn't, either. You dismiss centuries of effort by many good, honest, hard-working, decent, professional journalists just because they were white? Where I come from, we call that bigotry.

Then Juan Gonzales, responding to Terry Heaton, said:

Sure, media executives and journalism foundations have expended lots of money, energy and effort toward integrating newsrooms. But much of that effort has been haphazard, poorly thought-out and misdirected. Moreover, the strategies were created and implemented by the very executives and managers who formerly presided over segregated newsrooms. That’s like asking a group of wife beaters to fashion a program to curb domestic violence. Maybe the analogy is a little extreme but the basic point is not.

A little extreme? Hey, when did we white guys start beating our wives? Not only is that a little strong but so is the phrase "segregated newsroom" as well. That brings to mind images of german shepherds guarding the whites-only copy desk at the Daily News. Except, of course, the newsroom was not segregated. It may not have had as many people of color as Gonzales or I or anybody might like, but it was never segregated. "Wife-beating" and "segregation" are loaded words -- attack words. And the attack is aimed at us white guys.

Add to that the gab at this week's 92nd St. Y/C-SPAN blog panel, where the moderator started off complaining about blogs being populated by white guys, and this camel has born his last straw. What do you want me to do, Mr. Moderator, stop blogging because I'm white? The inference is absurd and offensive.

I would love to see more people of all kinds of background and viewpoints blogging; I work hard to convince people to blog; I'll tell you in about a week of something else I'll be doing. Great cause. All for it. Increases the diversity of viewpoints and thus the wisdom of the crowd and thus the value of the network and of the medium; it's good for all of us. But there's no need to attack me and my ilk on the way to that goal.

But far more important is that this shows how these guys miss the real point of diversity. It's not just about white and black and hispanic and asian and whatever ethnicity and skin color you want to add to the list. As I argued here, it's really about diversity of viewpoint and opinion and experience and perspective; that is what will make the conversation of news and politics and government better. Hostility to white people won't accomplish that. Limiting the definition of diversity to ethnicity, as defined by this now-big organization and its leaders, won't do that.

Gonzales, to his considerable credit, does go on to say that Unity itself should open itself to white members.

That is not to say that UNITY is some exclusive club. It has always been open to participation by white journalists and executives, though I will be the first to admit there are significant numbers of members within each of the minority organizations who are not comfortable with inviting more white journalists, straight and gay, to attend our conventions. Those members, in my opinion, are wrong, and I have always told them.

As one of those who helped to found the UNITY concept, and as a board member of the alliance for the past two years, I have argued consistently for UNITY to head in a more inclusive direction. In other words, as our alliance has moved from the fringes to the center stage of American journalism, I believe we have a responsibility not only to advocate for more hiring and promotion of journalists of color but to press for raising the general standards of our industry and profession.

In the end, diversity is about how we think, not how we look.

But to define diversity that way -- for journalists -- means that they have to admit that they think one way or another, that they have individual viewpoints and perspectives and biases and agendas. And to increase the diversity of them, we'd have to reveal them. And that is a loaded proposition. But it is the proposition I make. For until we do that, we will constantly be accused of the biases and agendas we do not reveal. Once revealed, they are not the issue. What becomes the issue is the diversity of them in our field. And isn't that what this is all about, in the end?

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Jim, we hardly knew ye

: In the Globe and Mail, Lawrence Martin writes about the 25-year-old Jim McGreevey he knew at the Kennedy School at Harvard:

The future governor of New Jersey, then 25, walked into the library with a flourish. (He did everything with a flourish.) Accompanying him was a raven-haired beauty who looked like she had just stepped off the cover of Vogue.

Student McGreevey upstaged her. While she demurely followed, he pumped hands with everyone in the room, as if he were running for something. A guy sitting next to me grumbled, "What a piece of work." He was referring to him, not her.

A couple of days later, I found out that Jim McGreevey was moving into my dorm, as was the woman. The place changed overnight. Animal House, if I recall, was one of Jim's favourite movies, and he did his part to turn our residence -- Cronkite Graduate Center -- into a replica. Food fights, stink bombs (he stuck one under my door), boozing until the break of dawn. Wild weekends at Cape Cod.

But all the while, Jim McGreevey had The New York Times under his arm; and all the while, he was campaigning; and all the while, we suspected he was going to make it.

At 25, he had virtually every detail on his route to the White House mapped out. His plan was to assemble the perfect academic résumé, become a mayor, a state legislator, governor, senator -- and then make it to the big house. During ceasefires in the bun fights [uh, do you think you might want to change that to "food fights"? -ed] in the dorm cafeteria, he'd lead political seminars on the issues of the day and lay out these plans....

No one thought of him as being gay; it was never a topic of conversation. There was one student in the dorm who appeared to be homosexual -- and he was about the only student in the place that Jim didn't cultivate....

His rise was meteoric, his crash even more so. But it's not certain it's a final fall. There is a lot more to the Jim McGreevey story to come. The guy we knew was a force who could never be contained.

: In case you didn't see it already, here's the story of Golan Cipel's accusations against McGreevey.

I heard on the radio that yesterday was the end of the statute of limitations on filing a sexual harrassment charge.

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Shopping blog

: Hearst's new shopping magazine, Shop Etc., has a blog and readers can sing up to be writers.

It even has an XML button -- but with no explanation of what that is. I imagine shoppers puzzling over it: "What an odd size tag ... what could that stand for? ... eXtra Medium Long?"

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