Merry Christmas

Because there is a new startegic arms treaty with Russia, Kraft is selling Easy Mac to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, and Switzerland and Chile finally have a good link in Six Degrees of Separation, but sometimes all you wanna see is two adorable queens wrapping Old Navy sweaters.



Oh, all right, I'll say something vaguely analytical. I can totally see a treatment of this story which a) would have been print and b) would have attempted to solve the mystery of why they're getting the letters. Either one, in my opinion, would have completely killed the charm of the story. It's standard holiday fluff without those two personalities - they're simultaneously so specific and so general, and so very very New York. And I like many a journalist have gritted teeth while well-meaning teachers and editors have floated ideas for 'multimedia,' but this is a perfect example of doing it right.

UPDATE: Oh well, can't have everything.

And that's all I'm gonna say. Merry Christmas, everyone!

On douchebags, criminals, and Justin Bieber

Today I wasn't really planning on posting, but a headline on WikiLeaks in my Google reader made me realize something I should have realized a long time ago - this story is being covered all wrong.

I'll admit, I haven't been keeping up with WikiLeaks news as much as I should have. A, because there's so much else going on - as I said in my last post, last week was a massive week for news, and a lot of the stories that were blowing up then are still going on now. But also because the volume is so daunting. Hundreds of thousands of cables, endless permutations of secrets. It's all a lot to take in.

I guess the little lazy news consumer that lives inside of me was hoping that there'd be one huge thing, one Manchurian Candidate-sized story. I figured when that happened I'd pay attention.

So tonight, when I saw my headline, I realized I was being played.

WikiLeaks Cables: BP suffers blowout in Azerbaijan

On first glance, that looks like what is quickly becoming a pretty standard WikiLeaks story, no? You've got your Deepwater Horizon-level blowout in a country you've never heard of. You've got, in a complete reversal of everything you'd expect, the crown prince of Thailand going to Europe for sex. You've got Chevron trying to develop a transborder Iran-Iraq oil field.

Quite long, lot of detail, links to source docs, comment from BP, only a few little typesetting errors. Actually, it's a pretty decent piece of reporting. So why did this one in particular set off my spider senses?

The hint is right there in the headline.

Do you guys remember the BP oil spill? Of course you do, but I mean, do you remember how insanely huge a news deal it was? Eventually I had to stop listening to NPR until the damn thing was plugged. I was job hunting while it was going on, and the AP, the NYT, CNN, everyone was trying to hire someone to go down to New Orleans and cover it. Seeing more than a dozen reporter jobs a month is rare these days. I probably saw twenty in the first two weeks of the spill.

Every shrimp boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico was interviewed at least once. Rachel Maddow put on her best dyke-about-town getup and trudged through the swamp in a four hundred dollar hoodie and Chucks. Drill Baby Drill died overnight. It was easily Manchurian Candidate big, as far as stories go.

And now there was another one, and the story showed up in my Google Reader from the Guardian at 1 in the morning. I don't even think the Times has covered it yet. If it gets a bullet on CNN I'll eat my face.

There wasn't a Manchurian Candidate big story here. There were TWO. Iranian-Iraqi oil field?! Seriously?! And I can't help imagining the Thai king one will seem that size to people in Thailand. That's three massive stories that I would completely, totally, definitely have erased from my Google feed unread had something not connected in my brain.

How many more?

How many WikiLeaks stories can you name? Oh sure, you know all about Julian Assange. You know about the DDOS attacks, the bail hearings, the Swedish broken condom extradition, the OKCupid profile. You know about the Espionage Act, the Free Bradley Manning rallies at Quantico.

You know the human side. Because that's how these stories are being reported; as sidebars to celebrity gossip.

To a certain extent, that is natural. Assange is a publicity hound whose aim is to star in his own moral fable, and he's doing a pretty good job so far. If not for WikiLeaks, he'd probably be one of those guys in their mid-40s who hangs out at the local undergraduate coffee co-op, hiding behind a Chomsky biography and preying on freshmen girls who grow out their armpit hair to show daddy how much they hate him. He's a creeper, he's a douchebag, he's a saint, he's a vigilante, he's a hero, he's a terrorist - he's a KEYWORD.

Would you let this man date your roommate?

There's a saying in Internet age journalism that the perfect headline would be something like "Lady Gaga teams up with Justin Bieber, cast of 'Glee' to launch artisan cupcake store." Actually, the perfect headline would be even more keyword-dense - it would cram as many search terms into as little space as possible. 'Assange,' 'Cablegate,' 'WikiLeaks' - they all make pretty good Twitter trending topics.

Besides, it's not like WikiLeaks has a lot of competition for their title as 'Most SEO-Friendly Whistleblowers.' There used to be lone wolfs like this everywhere - I had a professor who cut his teeth during the halcyon days of disgrunted ex-CIA grunts in the 1970s and he'd tell us stories of swimming in classified documents. But today there's much more net-savvy among government organizations, more red tape, and fewer journalists who are paid less, asked to do more and often unsupported by newsrooms and other professional environments. News organizations have so many economic existential threats that no one is particularly eager to add legal ones by pissing off the wrong people. It's a great time to be the Manchurian Candidate.

But lo, here was a source of good stories who wasn't bad looking and liked to say douchey, headline-worthy things! It's like if Justin Bieber showed up with a battered manila envelope in the dead of night. Now news orgs could do well by doing good - publish the important stories without driving casual news consumers away from boring facts and into the doughy embrace of Perez Hilton.

It's as if, being afraid people would be too alienated by the technicalities of federal coverups and missing tape recordings, newspapers decided that Watergate was really a story about Deep Throat.

Of course, maybe (read: probably) I'm being paranoid. Maybe this is just the result of years of study of how people gravitate to stories, and maybe it's going to end up bringing more people to these stories which would otherwise have been lost in the white noise. But I wonder. The NYT has tremendous power to set the dynamics of coverage for this type of story; the NYT consulted with the government before running cable stories; and the NYT is as guilty of keeping the source as the lede as anyone else here. I wonder if someone the NYT talked to suggested that it would be better if people got the sense that WikiLeaks was really the story here, because they knew.

They knew that the contents of any one, and probably many, of these cables could, in and of themselves, be the stuff of a multi-installment head-rolling expose. They knew that a constant barrage of stories that were actually about fraud, crime, abuse of power, intimidation, and blackmail would be infinitely worse for the people in power. They knew that, however explosive the content under the lede is, as long as the lede stays firmly fixed on Assange and WikiLeaks a lot of readers, casual and professional alike, are going to empty their Google feeds without looking too closely. And they knew that sooner or later, people would get bored of the stories and the news would have to move on, running like hell after the next hot keyword.

They knew that, eventually, everyone gets over Bieber fever.

Radio silence

So, I began and then I stopped. No posts for a week. You'd be justified in finding that a bit odd, since last week was a massive news week. (And for more reasons than just a rich teenager having a perfectly vanilla moment of countercultural flirtation with something that isn't even illegal. Honestly, what's next? Someone from Kidz Bop gets a hickey?)

No, what I'm referring to was when I opened up my NYT iPhone app on I think Friday and the first SIX top headlines were "Senate (party) stalls/blocks (important legislation), cites (other party) obstruction."

Not because it's news that the Senate in particular and Washington in general would much rather run in curly-Q's (I can NEVER spell that word, and being unable to spell words is so rare for me that I refuse to look them up on general principle) and collide into each other in the hope of some accidental polyester-clad frottage to engorge their shriveled members than actually make any decisions regarding governance, or that they would blame their unwillingness to earn their ludicrous health care premiums on all the other perverts in bad suits. But because the only thing worse than having to do anything is getting into a very public Mexican standoff, where rather than no one choosing to do anything for fear of alienating some voters, no one CAN do anything because they know whatever they do will end up alienating A LOT of voters.

He just wants to be touched. Someone. Anyone. Please.

This has happened before in my lifetime but not in my professional experience; I was an unspecified number of years below legal voting age during the government shutdown in 1995, and my interpretation of what it meant was skewed by growing up in a notoriously dysfunctional school district where the teacher's union either went on strike or threatened to at least once a year. Since getting a journalism education largely entails learning to keep your mouth shut before you know what's going on (you can always do some Monday morning quarterbacking later), I find it hard to have a very nuanced view of how it will play out.

My UN-NUANCED view is that it will end with the Democrats losing the staring contest and passing all the tax cuts, which will give Republicans free rein to lay even more of the deficit at Obama's doorstep and put the Democrats on the defensive for at least the next two years. I don't think there will be a serious left-wing challenger to Obama in 2012, and I think the Republicans will end up mired in another attenuated primary struggle (Brown will try and fail, DeMint is a joke, Palin might try to run as an independent which would be hilarious, Pawlenty won't make a big enough splash and will end up the VP candidate, it'll come down to Romney and Huckabee and Romney will take it) that will sap a lot of the Tea Party energy they had going this year.

Obama will get a second term, but not by a lot, and I don't think the Democrats will win back the House. He'll have an even tougher second term than first, only be able to pass legislation with the teeth removed (ex., we'll repeal DADT, but on such a farcical timetable that little gay ten year olds today will probably still be second-guessing themselves when they walk into the recruitment office after graduation), and largely be remembered as one of those visionary, single-tear-Indian presidents that will get another Nobel Peace Prize when he's seventy because maybe he couldn't get birth control in classrooms in the Ozarks but at least he's been doing that lecture tour on solar powered cars for the last five years.

Can he somehow avoid this by allowing all the tax cuts to expire, by reversing his stance on executive privilege and ending DADT with the stroke of a pen? No, he'd lose the middle and crash spectacularly. He's absolutely right about that. The point is IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE GOTTEN HERE. The minute - the minute - that anyone who claimed a shred of moral authority threatened to end unemployment benefits for hungry people unless tax cuts were preserved for millionaires, Obama should have gotten on television and said unequivocally, "This does not happen in America."

It's ironic and sad to me that a man who got elected for two reasons - that he promised, both verbally and in his person, a vigorous and vital defense of the promise of civil liberty, and because he recognized in American youth a deep hunger to foster democratic social justice with their votes and their advocacy - should not only lose what power he had to further the lot of minority groups by frittering away his credibility, but also completely squander his grassroots support by not deputizing those who really, truly, want to make a difference. JFK gave his youth contingent the Peace Corps. We have gotten nothing.

Look, this is why I can't write about politics full-time. I'm a general assignment reporter, so sometimes I do end up having to cover a race, or follow a piece of city or town legislation. Always local, nearly always small-time, and even then it's all I can do to keep an objective hand on the keyboard. The political coverage I've had to do so far has been neutral as milk, even boring. I'm PROUD when I can get it to boring. It means I've stopped shouting in my head, actually knuckled down and been a good reporter instead of satisfying my ego. That's what semi-anonymous blogs are for.

When I talk about philosophy, literature, even religion, I can be an appreciative audience for the many varieties of human wisdom. When I talk politics, I have two speeds; YES, EXACTLY and FUCK YOU.

That's why I don't think any of the articles I've read about DADT or the Bush tax cuts or unemployment insurance qualify as 'bad news' in the sense that I mean for this blog. Yes, they're bad news in that they're bad for America, and I'm sure if I went deep enough into the B section of any of the major dailies or smaller papers or blogs I'd find some that were poorly written as well. But the journalists who write about this objectively are doing work I can't even conceive of, under circumstances and pressures that would break me quickly if I were subjected to them. Knowing that takes a little edge off your mocking jones.

Instead, I've found myself wondering if there's anything short of abandoning our public mandate and becoming unpaid lobbyists that journalists can do to fix this. The cheap answer is abandon the 24-hour news cycle. But that's not realistic, or really, the point of breaking-news or assignment coverage. There is a place for long-view journalism, but you also need Twitter. And of course, nearly all of those kinds of decisions take place several pay grades above the reporter that writes the stuff.

What reporters CAN control (to a certain extent, depending on how well you manage your managers (more on this later)) is the way they write about politics. They can control verbs and nouns, they can avoid jargon or loaded terms, they can over-report, they can get expert testimony, historical or scientific perspective. If they're going to go for balance, they can at least pick the most moral voices on either side of the scale.

I can envision a professional accreditation society for journalists that admits members based on their ability to do this, that weighs the merits of your insightfulness and admits only those who have proven that, if they have to report on the thoughtless actions of thoughtless people, they will at least do so thoughtfully.

I can imagine the public recognizing this accreditation and learning to look for it when they read something that makes them think or question. I can imagine lawsuits for journalists who claim this accreditation falsely. I can imagine news organizations bragging to their readers or listeners that all their journalists are accredited.

But I can't imagine it happening NOW. Because however much people are reading, and listening, and craving to know the news, they aren't paying for it. I don't care if you read Huffington Post or Little Green Footballs, you probably get your news from someone who's better educated than your son's fifth-grade teacher and paid less than your pizza delivery boy.

We do a hard job, but anything that makes us more professional right now is bad for business. Because no one can afford to pay.

Extra extra: Ballet critic hates fat people

I don't like food, I love it. If I don't love it, I don't swallow. -Anton Ego, "Ratatouille"

So, there probably aren't a lot of places in the newspaper world anymore for a professional ballet critic. I can't say I know a lot about ballet - I staged a fake knee emergency to avoid going onstage in my community center ballet recital at age 5, and I've probably been to about 10 or so ballets since. An embarrassing percentage of those were performances of the Nutcracker, and I can't imagine there are a lot of more boring, miserable duties in the life of a professional ballet critic than trying to come up with something interesting to say about the Nutcracker. Maybe that's why this happened.

Ballet critic defends right to call skinny people fat

Well, that'll certainly get some page hits.

Look, it's nothing new that the NYT doesn't like fat people. In fact, not liking fat people is probably a better fit on the ballet beat than their weekly 'pediatrician discovers children are fat' story for the front page, or their twice yearly 'fashion industry discovers fat people buy clothes' story for the magazine. Of course, that doesn't mean that the story isn't wrong on nearly all levels.

The wrong STARTS in graf 1, when he implicitly compares ballet dancers - probably some of the hardest-working athletes in the art world - with Renaissance odalisques whose idea of hard physical labor was lifting their own grapes, putting on a court gown, or fucking high-status men for jewelry.

Then he gets into the shade he threw at the two dancers, which was about at the level of a bored drag queen who hadn't had her coffee yet. The Times thoughtfully included a picture of the dancers, where you can totally see what he's getting at. I can only see one set of the woman's vertebrae.

Like most bigots, Macaulay is way more offensive when trying to defend himself than in the original breach. Here's some of his better gems:

"The general feeling was that my characterizations went beyond the pale of civilized discourse. One reader wrote that the review was “appalling,” “heartbreaking,” “childish, “hurtful” and “incompetent.”"

How delicately he invokes our sympathy. However much his feelings were hurt by the boors who didn't appreciate his review, he never complains, but remains stoic in the face of overwhelming artistic oppression.

"When I described Nilas Martins as “portly” in The New York Times and Mark Morris as “obese” in the Times Literary Supplement, those remarks were also greeted with silence. Fat, apparently, is not so much a feminist issue as a sexist one. Sauce for the goose? Scandal. Sauce for the gander? No problem."

Seriously. Get over it, fat chicks.

"Ballet demands sacrifice in its pursuit of widely accepted ideals of beauty. To several readers that struggle is, regrettably but demonstrably and historically in the case of many women, concomitant with anorexia."

So concomitant, in fact, that it has COMPLETELY FUCKED YOUR SENSE OF REALITY. You live in a world where anorexia is the new normal. Know how I know? YOU THINK THESE PEOPLE ARE FAT.

Anyway, enough foreplay. Let's bump uglies, Alastair.

"Some correspondents have argued that the body in ballet is “irrelevant.” Sorry, but the opposite is true. If you want to make your appearance irrelevant to criticism, do not choose ballet as a career. The body in ballet becomes a subject of the keenest observation and the most intense discussion. I am severe — but ballet, as dancers know, is more so."

And there we have it. Macaulay isn't a big meanie, or a bigot. He's Anton Ego - the last pure aesthete in a world full of senseless compromises to bad taste. I wonder if he's saddened by all the inroads fat people have made into other forms of media - you know, all the fat people presented as socially well-adjusted, romantically viable, empowered protagonists in movies and television, all the fat people in positions of corporate authority, all the fat children and teens with functional senses of self-worth and dreams for their future that don't hinge on unrealistic weight loss - and thinks 'At least I can save ballet.'

Once upon a time, you couldn't be in a ballet corps if you were too tall. You couldn't be in one if you were black. The idea being that it destroyed the visual of perfect symmetry among the secondary dancers, who weren't meant to be individually notable for any physical quality. Because it was all about the 'purity of line,' the 'ideal of beauty.'

Newsflash, Anton; fat bodies have lines too. Not that either of those dancers would know (seriously, my god look at them they are not fat what is wrong with you) but there is no emotion that a fat body can't convey if the body's owner knows how to convey it. They can move. They can tell a story. They can fly.

What you are actually talking about - what you are bemoaning - is not a dearth of beauty. Beauty has nothing to do with it. It's fashion. You live in a world where a level of body fat concordant with optimal health is a deviation from the dictates of a particular culturally-derived artistic ideal - JUST LIKE TITIAN. Titian wasn't painting beautiful women. He was painting fashionable women, many of whom happened to be beautiful. And in a world where vast swathes of the population didn't have enough to eat - and probably looked like your dream ballet dancer - fashionable meant rolls.

You're not talking about beautiful bodies - at least, not in any way I've ever heard echoed by sexually active adults. You're talking about fashion, which in your case has trumped substance. Allow me to remind you of another Anton Ego quote.

There are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.

When you find reasons to denigrate the contributions of artists based on ephemera, you aren't defending art. You're insulating it from change. If the standards of beauty in ballet are actually loosening, making room for more dancers who would have been turned away a generation ago, THAT MAKES BALLET BETTER, NOT WORSE.

You had a chance to be the friend to a new type of dancer. You blew it, and you probably harmed or killed two talented dancer's careers.

So, you're here. good for you.

I decided to start this blog because I'm tired of writing 500-word Facebook status updates.

Let's start by explaining who I am and who I'm not, and therefore, what this blog is and isn't. I'm a working journalist very early in her career. By 'very early,' I mean that referring to it as a career at all takes a certain amount of self-inflation. I work in journalism, largely by some strange instance of cosmic kismet for a very well-respected New England news organization. I'm privileged to collaborate regularly with some of the smartest and most talented people I've ever met, and I literally learn something new nearly every day.

About three times that frequently, I mess up. I'm not a perfect journalist. I don't even know if I'm a very good one. But I'm a workaholic with a one-track mind and very little tolerance for bullshit, and in journalism, you can coast on that for a little while.

I'm also passionate about the news. By that I mean THE NEWS itself - how it's written, how it's produced, and how the work of those who produce it can impact the public conversation.

And much of our news is bad. I mean, really bad - not just dire and pessimistic, but poorly considered, poorly researched, poorly argued and poorly written. Sometimes it's ideologically slanted or pure propaganda. Sometimes it's inane. Sometimes it's just wrong.

We all know this - seasoned and talented professional reporters, public consumers, and stumbling neophytes like me included. It sometimes feels like the more you read, the worse the problem gets. But what we all know is that the more you read and listen, the more you're beginning to perceive a small sliver of the giant ball of suck that the news can be.

So I've started a blog to complain about it.

By now it should be clear that this blog will NOT be a formal indictment for all journalistic sins. For one thing, I'd have to start with myself, and I'd probably never finish. It's not going to be an expert journalist offering professional journalistic criticism. There are a lot of better places to go for that.

It's just going to be me, Torchy, complaining about the things that annoy me. I don't pretend it'll be in any way comprehensive or consistent - some days it's a lot easier to annoy me than others, and there's plenty of subjects I just don't care enough about to develop a good head of blogging steam. (I wouldn't come here expecting a lot about sports.)

I'm also keenly aware of the dichotomy between being a responsible public journalist and a human being. Expect a lot of these posts to focus on reporter bias - how a reporter, consciously or otherwise, can adopt an apparent tone of objectivity but subtly lead his audience toward a particular conclusion. When I'm wearing my work hat, I spend a lot of time trying to eradicate any reporter bias from my work - sometimes with mixed results. But I don't intend to wear my work hat here, so don't expect objectivity. I'm loud, I curse a lot, I'm unapologetically liberal and hypocrisy infuriates me beyond any semblance of manners. You have been warned.

So anyway, the things I can't promise - consistency in tone or output, language your grandmother would approve of, tolerance for hypocrisy. I also don't intend to promise much self-editing, and probably not much sourcing. This is first and foremost a cathartic place for me, and catharsis doesn't really work if you're worrying about citing sources or checking your AP Style guide.

What can I promise then? Well, I promise to reply to comments with as much respect as the comments themselves demonstrate. I promise to supply links to stories I'm talking about, or if I'm discussing a trend or a context to find as many links as I can on it, because I actually do want people to form their own opinions rather than just swallowing mine.

So there. You get two promises. Take em or leave em. Let's roll.