By Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Dec 13, 2002 - (Last
week's weblog)
Quick blog today -- vacations have me doing double duty.
Springsteen's coming to town: March 10, The Boss will play the
Dunkin' Donuts Center in Providence. Ticket sales begin at 10 a.m. Tickets
to Bruce will cost $75, and will go on sale Saturday morning at 10 a.m.
at the box office, through Ticketmaster outlets, www.ticketmaster.com
and by phone at (401) 331-2211.
Lott's lot: Watching Andrew
Sullivan anguish over Trent Lott's refusal to resign, I realize that
young conservatives are surprised by all this in a way those of us who
lived through the civil rights struggles of the '60s will never be.
Sullivan quotes Jake
Tapper's piece on Lott's close friendship with a proud segregationist,
Richard Barrett, who's alarmed by Lott's apparent apologies:
And Barrett remembers that November 1994 night, right after Lott was
reelected to his second Senate term when, "at his victory celebration,
at the Coliseum Ramada Inn, Trent entered the hall and the first person
he went up to shake hands with and greet was me. He called me by my
name and was very affable." But has Lott ever specifically talked
to Barrett about supporting segregation? Barrett finds the question
naive. "Does Jesse Jackson talk to Al Sharpton abut integration?"
he asks. "Do they have to? Is there some split in the black caucus
on that issue? There is certainly no split in Mississippi on segregation.
Mississippi is still the solid South." Barrett spent a lot of time
on the phone Wednesday night with close advisors to Lott, he says. "We're
all like one big happy family in Mississippi. We're the heart of Dixie.
I've certainly never heard him say anything in favor of integration,
let me put it to you that way."... Barrett has harsh words for
President Bush's Thursday rebuke of Lott. "Sen. Lott was right"
in his original comments, Barrett says. "Integration is immoral
and should also be illegal." Barrett thinks that whatever he's
saying now, Lott still believes that in his "heart of hearts."
What about Bush? "His heart of hearts has been addled by his drug-abused
brain," Barrett says.
Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher, writing
today of the local papers' reaction in Mississippi, notes that a resignation
would be costly indeed to the state -- Lott's position enables him to
funnel many federal projects to Mississippi.
Sullivan also notes that Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove is a Democrat,
and would appoint a Democrat to replace Lott if he were to resign.
Nothing left to do but play it out.
Good
Music - described by publisher John Rollins as "a music magazine
for grownups" - will roll with its first issue next spring.
Tiny
machines that fly like insects will soon be a reality
Prophet
Of Sound: There have been many attempts to create a universal
language: many deserve to be forgotten, but Jean Francois Sudre's Solresol
is gathering supporters after nearly 150 years.
Obscurity
is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy
and other interesting thoughts by publisher Tim O'Reilly.
Lott
Comments Fuel Pickering Critics
AgoraPhone
Dec 12, 2002
Dick
Cavett's tale of two women: Interesting, somewhat sad story by
Dick Cavett in the New Yorker about the night he asked writer Mary McCarthy
the wrong question, and the repercussions rippled through the years for
both McCarthy and Lillian Hellman:
Nora Ephron's play "Imaginary Friends," about the feud between
Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, opens this week at the Ethel Barrymore
Theatre. The play centers on an incident that occurred on my old PBS
show, in 1979. I always enjoyed having McCarthy as a guest. She was
lively, witty, opinionated, and striking on camera....
Link
to this item | Comment
Go
vote: About.com's 3rd annual awards competition saluting the best
political humor on the Web is open and angling for your votes in these
categories: Overall Humor, Cartoons, Satirical News, Parody, Bush Humor,
Partisan Warfare, News & Commentary.
Link
to this item | Comment
Scientists
grow teeth in lab: BBC reports,
Scientists have successfully used tissue engineering techniques to
grow almost fully formed teeth.
It points the way for biologic repair in dental disease
They believe the breakthrough could eventually lead to a biological
tooth substitute to replace human teeth.
The researchers made a suspension of individual cells from a young
tooth reorganise into a tooth crown containing both enamel and dentin.
Link
to this item | Comment
Should
Linking Be Immune From Lawsuits: The Case In Favor of a Federal Statutory
Immunity For Linkers Findlaw columnist Julie Hilden writes,
...part of the reason for an immunity is that linking is, I believe,
highly socially useful - probably one of the Internet's most useful
features.
It allows websites to collect information from everywhere on the Internet.
As a result, a few persons' labor can save labor for thousands or millions
of users.
Link
to this item | Comment
Mormons,
Jews Meet Over Baptizing Dead: Newsday reports,
SALT LAKE CITY -- Mormon and Jewish leaders met Tuesday in New York
City to discuss the Mormon church's apparent breach of its agreement
not to posthumously baptize Holocaust victims and other deceased Jews.
Link
to this item | Comment
Hysteria
over a lawn ornament: A couple named Chris and Heather moved into
a new neighborhood in Boone, N.C., and put a gargoyle on their lawn. Then
all hell broke loose. The exchange of letters tell it all. via
Judy Watt.
Link
to this item | Comment
Newsroom cred: I've added a link to today's
installment of The Providence Journal's ongoing series on former Mayor
Vincent A. (Buddy) Cianci --
"Nightmare on Power Street" an account of the DeLeo incident
from -- to Tuesday's item "To
60 Minutes: Here's Buddy Cianci's 1984 admission of guilt."
More than one colleague here in the newsroom has wondered aloud what
other 60 Minutes stories -- the ones we don't already know so well
-- have borne little relation to reality.
When I was a baby editor it was drummed into me that "if the readers
can't trust us on the little things, how can they trust us on the big
ones?"
Much of Rhode Island is probably wondering that about Morley Safer and
60 Minutes this week.
Link
to this item | Comment
Dec 11, 2002
Tech gifts for journalists: Writing at Online
Journalism Review, JD Lasica has tucked one of the coolest tech-gifts
roundups I've seen under the sober headline Gear
for the Multimedia Newsroom. The 2003 NewsGear suite of products stems
from product tests and a kit of recommendations by The Advanced Journalist
Technology Project, an initiative of the Ifra Centre for Advanced News
Operations in Darmstadt, Germany.
The recommendations include the Visioneer Strobe XP100 portable scanner
that has no power cord -- you plug and scan through your system's USB
port; Olympus C730 Ultra Zoom digital camera, included because its optical
zoom is a whopping 10x, with almost no shutter delay, and three laptops,
including the Acer TravelMate C100 Convertible Tablet PC.
Related: At Business Week, The
Best Products of 2002. I'd like the binoculars with built-in digital
camera, Santa.
Meanwhile, JD's personal site gets very personal indeed, with photos
of his insides out there. He's posted two frames from a recent Electron
Beam Tomography scan (similar to a CT scan), so you get to see his skull
and a cross-section of his heart and lungs.
Link
to this item | Comment
U.S.
set to use mines in Iraq: Tom Squitieri at USA Today reports,
The Pentagon is preparing to use anti-personnel land mines in a war
with Iraq, despite U.S. policy that calls for the military to stop using
the mines everywhere in the world except Korea by 2003. via
Craig's
Booknotes
Link
to this item | Comment
"The Pill" for men? New Scientist
reports, Reversible
male contraceptive deforms sper
A male contraceptive that works by deforming sperm could available
within just a few years, if tests on men go well. This fast track development
is possible because the drug is already licensed for use in treating
a rare genetic disorder in people, called Gaucher's disease.
The drug is taken as a pill, not injected, and it could have fewer
side effects than experimental hormonal male contraceptives, which include
a cocktail of hormones designed to suppress sperm production while maintaining
normal testosterone levels.
Furthermore, its contraceptive effects may be more completely reversible
than other non-hormonal drugs in development, say the researchers conducting
the experiments at the University of Oxford, UK.
Link
to this item | Comment
DiIulio
Saga Highlights Primacy Placed on Secrecy: Dana Milbank, in the
Washington Post, deals with the odd apology by former White House staffer
John DiIulio for his criticisms of the administration in a letter to Esquire:
The apology issued last week by John DiIulio, which echoed White House
press secretary Ari Fleischer's denunciation of his remarks as "baseless
and groundless," is destined for the Pantheon of Famous Recantations.
It sent the grassy-knoll crowd into a frenzy: Did Bush aides threaten
DiIulio's employer, the University of Pennsylvania, with loss of federal
funds? Did the Huntsman family, Bush friends and big Penn donors, threaten
to cut off the school?
Writing in the Philadelphia Daily News yesterday, DiIulio offered a
less sinister explanation. Acknowledging that his recantation was a
"verbatim" replica of Fleischer's charge, DiIulio said his
father taught him to apologize "on your knees, or not at all. In
other words, whether completely culpable or not, and whether there are
complicated mitigating if not exonerating motivations and circumstances
or not, you do not express honest, heartfelt remorse for wrong by quibbling
over how the wronged person or persons characterize it."
Link
to this item | Comment
The
secret life of non-readers:
Once, you devoured novel after novel, only to find your literary passions
wane with age. Maybe even this newspaper feature seems a bit long for
your attention span. At the height of book-buying season, JOHN ALLEMANG
meets the 'aliterate' - educated people who no longer read for pleasure,
and certainly not the books they should - and finds he is one of them.
Is this our culture's shameful decline, or is life too short to spend
holed up with Dickens and Proust?
Link
to this item | Comment
Return of the elves: Elf
Bowling 2 -- Elves in Paradise is my favorite 5-year-old's favorite
game (his mother's embarrassed, but you have to admit that wiseguy elves
making cracks at you while you try to bowl them off the end of a cruise
ship deck is pretty funny).
Now, just in time, there's Elf
Bowling 3. Santa's teaching the elves to fly this time, using Mrs.
Claus's pink bra as a slingshot. Meanwhile, reindeer sail across the sky,
and you'd better not hit one.
Link
to this item | Comment
DiedOnline.com:
You place special HTML code on your website, in your email signature,
in your AIM sub-profile and pretty much wherever you can place HTML
code. This will display a little image saying if you are dead or not.
You log into the member area within the time period you specify (your
death check date). When you log in, the system knows you are alive.
If you do not log into the system by the specified date, you will be
labeled as dead.
...What if the system notifies people of me being dead and I'm not?
Oops. You will be emailed a notification 2 days before your scheduled
death check date saying you need to update you death check date soon.
This gives new meaning to being on deadline.
Link
to this item | Comment
Google
Viewer: The Google Viewer displays the pages found as a result of
your Google search as a continuous scrolling slide show.
Google
WebQuotes annotates the results of your Google search with comments
from other websites.
Google
Timeline: The zeitgeist defined as what users searched for most often.
Dec 10, 2002 - (Last
week's weblog)
To 60 Minutes:
Here's Buddy Cianci's 1984 admission of guilt: Longtime Journal reporter
Bob Kerr had seen an advance copy of Morley Safer's 60 Minutes
interview with Buddy Cianci, which aired Sunday night, two days after
Cianci entered federal prison at Fort Dix, N.J. to begin serving a 64-month
sentence on a racketeering conspiracy conviction.
Kerr was livid in his Sunday column:
If you tune in to 60 Minutes on CBS tonight, prepare to get ill.
No matter what your feelings are about former Providence Mayor Vincent
"Buddy" Cianci, the story that the vaunted news magazine presents
about him is a sloppy, lazy piece of work that allows outright lies
to go unchallenged and presents a disgraced former Boston Globe columnist
as Buddy's folksy apologist.
Buddy, in his final days of freedom, apparently managed to pull off
one more spin, to charm one more out-of-towner with his well-worn miracle
worker shtick.
The result, a preview copy of which was provided to The Journal, is
an embarrassment, a twisting of the truth that will leave millions of
people who have never had the personal Buddy Cianci experience to consider
him a roguish charmer who did wonderful things for his city and fell
victim to a misguided federal vendetta.
Viewers will hear Cianci discuss the infamous night in 1983 when he
invited Raymond DeLeo, a onetime friend, to his house in Providence
after learning DeLeo and Cianci's wife were having an affair. They will
hear Cianci say he and DeLeo "had a fight." They will hear
Cianci say that the cigarette involved "wasn't even lit."
They will hear Cianci say that he "lost a happy home" because
of the confrontation.
What viewers will not hear is that DeLeo was unable to fight back because
of the presence of an armed Providence police officer and a group of
Cianci friends. They will not hear that the corner of DeLeo's left eye
was burned by the cigarette. They will not hear that the Ciancis' marriage
was already over at the time, that they had been to court to start divorce
proceedings.
Kerr -- and most of the rest of Rhode Island -- are astonished that mighty
CBS couldn't be bothered to check its facts, apparently because the truth
wouldn't have made such a good story. And we all know the story,
all its juicy details. Lots of Rhode Islanders said, "If he'd been
messing with my wife I would have done the same thing." But we all
knew exactly what he had done.
Bringing in former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle to shed light
on Buddy was a lot like asking Morley Safer to comment. Neither of them
has been paying much attention to Providence -- 50 miles south on Route
95, and in another state -- over the years. Was it too much to ask that
60 Minutes check its facts, at least interview the local journalists?
Because projo.com com is behind a registration wall, a 60 Minutes
viewer isn't going to run into the facts on the open Web. So I'm going
to publish Bob Kerr's column here, with its own permalink. And then I'll
publish the 1984 Providence Journal report of Cianci's sworn statements
before a Superior Court judge in Providence.
Feel free to spread it around as an antidote to unchallenged, bad journalism.
And let's hope 60 Minutes isn't so far gone into entertainment
that it won't now face and report the facts it didn't want to hear Sunday
night.
On May 24, 1983, Cianci was indicted on charges of assault, kidnapping
and attempted extortion. Here's an excerpt from his appearance in court
on March 6, 1984, from the paper of record.:
Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. stood before a judge yesterday, admitted
to two counts of assault, and left the courthouse facing a possible
prison sentence and perhaps the end of his political career.
Cianci, 42, the mayor of Providence for almost 10 years, pleaded no
contest to assault and to assault with a dangerous weapon. Under questioning
by Superior Court Judge John P. Bourcier, he acknowledged, tersely and
somberly, that the allegations were true.
In exchange for Cianci's plea, Atty. Gen. Dennis J. Roberts II dropped
four other charges stemming from a March 20, 1983, confrontation between
the mayor and Raymond DeLeo, a building company president from Bristol
whom Cianci accused of carrying on an affair with his wife, Sheila.
(The mayor and his wife have since been divorced.)
AFTER DAYS of negotiations, Roberts reportedly issued an ultimatum:
If Cianci didn't accept the plea offer by 10 a.m. yesterday, the case
was going to trial on all six counts.
About 50 spectators, some crowded into standing room at the back of
the courtroom, watched in surprise as Cianci's lawyer, John Tramonti
Jr., told the judge that a plea bargain had been struck, that there
would be no trial.
Bourcier ordered a brief recess, and Cianci waited in a closed witness
room down the corridor from the third-floor courtroom. Then it was time
to go through the legal ritual of the plea and the admission of guilt.
Bourcier read the first charge, the one accusing Cianci of jabbing
a lighted cigarette at DeLeo, hitting him with an ashtray and attacking
him with a fireplace log. The judge asked if the charge was true.
"Yes, it is, Your Honor," Cianci said in a low voice.
The second charge, a misdemeanor, was based on DeLeo's statement that
Cianci punched, slapped and kicked him during a tirade in the converted
carriage house on Power Street where the mayor moved after separating
from his wife. That charge was true, too, Cianci admitted.
Anyone from 60 Minutes could have called Cheryl McGurn at projo.com
and asked for this report. Many people ask for archive searches every
day, for everything from obits to traffic-accident reports to graduation
lists.
Here's a little more from the 1984 account of the moment of truth in
the courtroom:
IN COURT yesterday, (Deputy Atty. Gen. Susan E.) McGuirl gave a partial
account of what prosecutors said they would have proved about the confrontation
at 33 Power St. had the case gone to trial.
Cianci called DeLeo at the builder's Bristol home on March 20, and
they agreed to meet at the mayor's house at 8:30 p.m., she said. Cianci
told DeLeo that a mutual friend, former Atty. Gen. Herbert DeSimone,
would be there.
McGuirl, reading from a statement, said that when DeLeo arrived, "James
Hassett held (him) by the door." (Ptlm. James K. Hassett was
one of the police officers assigned to drive the mayor's limousine.)
Cianci's divorce lawyer, William McGair, and Joseph DiSanto, the
city's public works director, also were there.
Cianci confronted DeLeo, McGuirl said: "You've been fooling around
with my wife." Then the mayor slapped the 60-year-old builder on
the left temple, "repeatedly punched and slapped him, and kicked
him on the shin several times."
The mayor twice tried to burn DeLeo with a lighted cigarette, and the
second time he caught DeLeo on the eyelid. Cianci picked up a log from
the fireplace and tried to hit DeLeo, she said. He also hurled drinks
and spat in DeLeo's face.
Judge Bourcier cut the narration short. Cianci already had admitted
that the assaults occurred, he said. "Is all this necessary?"
he asked.
Roberts told the judge he would present the full account in a report
when it is time for sentencing.
BECAUSE of the plea bargain, Cianci no longer faces counts of kidnapping,
kidnap conspiracy and attempted extortion stemming from his confrontation
with DeLeo.
Cianci later was given a five-year suspended sentence and forced to resign.
He became a radio talk-show host, and mounted his re-election campaign
from that platform. He won the 1990 election for mayor by 317 votes.
Over the years, city employees in both his administrations were convicted
of assorted corruption charges, but Cianci himself was never caught with
a "smoking gun." Nevertheless, a jury convicted him of racketeering
conspiracy, a charge totally unrelated to the DeLeo incident.
Journal staff writer Tom Mooney, in an earlier report on the TV show,
gets the government's rebuttal:
U.S. Attorney Margaret Curran defends Cianci's prosecution, noting
that while the government never produced evidence of bribes landing
in Cianci's hands, "he was closely involved with people doing that."
When Safer questions whether Cianci's prosecution was worth it -- considering
as he declared earlier in the piece that "what he did was simply
transform a city" -- Curran replies: "How much more could
Providence have done if it was not generally believed to be a completely
corrupt city where you had to pay to get things done?"
Here's Bob
Kerr's Sunday column.
Here's the entire March
6, 1984 account of Cianci's Superior Court appearance.
Here's the "Nightmare
on Power Street" account of the DeLeo incident from the Providence
Journal's ongoing series on Cianci.
Here's a link to the Providence Journal
archives. Searching is free, retrieval fees start at $1.50 for one
story, less for many. Human help is available at (401) 277-8111.
Here's the exhaustive report of
Cianci's 2002 trial on federal corruption charges.
Here's Providence Journal reporter Mike
Stanton's ongoing series on the political life and times of Buddy Cianci.
Some of these may require registration. That's why you have a hotmail
address, right?
Link to this item | Comment
Trent
Lott must go: That's conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan's
conclusion:
After his disgusting remarks at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party,
it seems to me that the Republican Party has a simple choice. Either
they get rid of Lott as majority leader; or they should come out formally
as a party that regrets desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans.
Related: Joe Conason, writing at Salon,
A national disgrace: It's strange and disturbing when Andrew Sullivan
is angrier about Trent Lott's "unreconstructed" racism than
the editors of the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public
Radio and the rest of the so-called liberal media establishment.
Link
to this item | Comment
We're the good guys, right? It's called
"Technical
Difficulties" and it's terrific. Just click it.
Link
to this item | Comment
In
the Bush Administration, Loyalty Is a One-Way Street Only: The
author, J. Bradford DeLong, was
a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under
Clinton, and is now a Professor of Economics at Berkeley.
DeLong looks at Larry Lindsey, fired last week as Assistant to the President
for Economic Policy:
...Larry lost in his attempt to get the 2001 tax cut to reduce marginal
tax rates where they are highest -- among the two-children-$25,000-annual-household-income
class: in the mind of the Bush White House, the point of tax cuts is
not to improve incentives but to reward contributors, and although the
two-children-$25,000-annual-household-income class vote in large numbers
for Republican presidential candidates, they don't buy tables at $1000-a-plate
campaign fundraisers. He lost his fight to keep the White House from
imposing steel tariffs. He lost his fight to maintain the progress toward
freeing trade in farm products and reducing welfare-for-agribusiness
made in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton cooperated with the Gingrich-era
Republicans--who for all their faults really did believe in their free-market
ideology.
Attempts to get the White House to understand the seriousness of the
threat to America's capital markets from the corporate oversight crisis
were doomed from the beginning. In his previous career the President
had been a director of a company that used off-balance sheet vehicles
to hide big losses. In his previous career the Vice President had been
CEO of a company that had failed to report material accounting changes
and so fudged its numbers. In such a context, what would happen to anyone
in the White House to say that such practices seriously degrade the
quality of financial information and keep financial markets from doing
a good job of allocating investment funds where they ought to go?
Link
to this item | Comment
Female
writers, academics call Nobel Prizes sexist: AP reports,
One of the nine women who wrote the article was Ebba Britt Brattstroem,
a professor in literary history and wife of Horace Engdahl, permanent
secretary of the Swedish Academy, which picks the Nobel Literature Prize
winners.
"Today it's time again for Sweden to make a fool of itself in
front of the whole world. Today the Nobel prizes are handed out to a
row of men. Nothing new from the flock of penguins, one could say. How
is this possible, in 2002?" the women wrote, noting that just 3
percent of all the Nobel winners have been women.
The nine women said they were "ashamed" that Sweden, known
for equality between sexes, is "hosting the sexist manifestation"
which the Nobel Prizes has developed into.
"But next year we will rejoice with the rest of the world. If
all Nobel Prize winners this year are men 'by chance,' next year we
may have only female prize winners, also 'just by chance'. We are looking
forward to that."
Link
to this item | Comment
Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
|
