Saaaay...cheese?

I have become a devoted fan of BBC World News, probably the most thorough, least commercial-ridden source of broadcast news.  News that is actually news, with a minimum of sky-diving  grannies, reunited twins, and all that other human-interest drivel.  News with a European slant and a little too much soccer, but...look, I may as well be honest.  I love the crawls.

Those phrases that slide across the bottom of the screen are a feature of every "news" channel, as if to say, "There's just so much to cover, we can't get it all in, go to our website, subscribe to our Twitface page, send us your photos, ooh, here comes another one..."  Yes, but the ones on the Beeb are special, intriguing, more like a secret code.  Rarely does the newsreader even mention the best ones.  A few weeks ago it said STRIKE DISRUPTS TRAINS AND UNDERGROUND, leaving me to guess which country has rail, subways and unions.  France?  Japan?  Canada?  I never did find out. 

This week the unsung hero who types these things surpassed herself/himself.  RUSSIA BULLLDOZES CHEESE MOUNTAIN, it said, causing landslides and cascades in my brain all afternoon.  Cries out for video, doesn't it?  Where is this mountain?  Why?  Who built it, and who destroyed it?  Why have I never heard of a Russian cheese?  Was Ukraine --not mentioned for weeks on American media -- somehow involved?  Did Putin sense another bare-chested photo-op and drive the lead bulldozer?  Who doesn't like cheese?

Reader, they got me.  I went to their website, and the real story is sadder, weirder, and more prosaic than you might expect:  The cheese, together with other foods, was imported illegally after Vlad the Disdainer banned products from countries which hit Russia with sanctions after the annexation of Crimea.  Russians whose rubles are steadily losing purchasing power were as outraged as Russians ever seem to get.  "It's like our authorities don't care about the people," said Olga Saveleva, who has started an online petition (which should be at "noshit.ru" but isn't), and whose murder will not be solved.  No, I hope not, but look at the record.

Not big enough for American newsertainment, which devoted countless hours to the lion that died so some schmuck dentist could have his Hemingway moment (#FelineLivesMatter).  How grateful we are to the BBC in these dark days, bringing us news of fresh disasters.  And decomposing cheese.    

 

Five star final

"I don't care what the papers write about me; my constituents can't read," William "Boss" Tweed is supposed to have said. "But they can see those damn drawings." He was talking about the work of Thomas Nast, among others, depicting him and his associates as a cabal of bloated crooks. Strange how potent line drawings can be.

Even now, when literacy is common, there's nothing like an editorial cartoon to touch off anger and violence, as when a Danish newspaper committed the cultural faux pas of publishing drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. The presence of a Muslim or two on the paper's staff could have prevented a lot of trouble -- all it needed was for someone to say (in Danish), "What the hell are you doing?"

I have no idea how many black people work in the editorial department at the New York Post, but apparently none of them saw the infamous chimp cartoon before it went to press. As everyone knows by now, it portrayed a dead chimp labeled "stimulus bill," inspired (if that's the word) by an occurrence the previous day in Connecticut, when police had to shoot a 200-pound chimpanzee which had mauled a woman. A black journalist, or even a culturally sensitive white one, could have pointed out that this drawing would be seen as racist, given the long history of slandering black people by calling them apes and monkeys. A sensitive journalist would have explained, patiently, that even though George W. Bush was frequently compared to a primate (there may still be a website called Smirking Chimp), it was a comment on his facial expression and overall intelligence, not his race. If the Post's editor and publisher didn't get it (and apparently they don't), the journalist still could have warned of the inevitable firestorm from New York's favorite political arsonist, Al Sharpton.

For the record, I thought the cartoon was dumb and insensitive, but probably not racist in intent. It took a momentary topic of public interest -- worth maybe forty-five seconds on Leno or Letterman -- and tried to use it to express a political viewpoint. That's what cartoonists do (classic example: David Levine's drawing of LBJ displaying a surgical scar in the shape of Vietnam). It would have worked just as well, I suppose, if the police in Connecticut had shot a rabid dog or a rampaging bear. The Post's crime lay in not being able to see the cartoon as an African-American might well see it, as a racist slur on Barack Obama. Of course, thanks to Rev. Sharpton, the whole Western world had now seen it, in addition to the paper's relatively tiny fan base. And he had help from people who should know better, like Julian Bond and Spike Lee.

All this self-serving outrage could not have come at a worse time. Yesterday the Rocky Mountain News published its last edition after a century and a half, leaving Denver with only the Post. San Francisco is on the brink of losing its only daily, the Chronicle. The Minneapolis Star Tribune is on its deathbed, too, and many cities and towns have no newspapers at all, leaving them at the mercy of USA Today, which has the substance (and the appearance) of a Howard Johnson menu. Even the New York Times, the self-styled "newspaper of record," is visibly shrinking. The era of the dead-trees newspaper seems to be hastening to its end after roughly three hundred years. Even if some of them survive as online ghosts, they will never be the same. It's not as if we don't need newspapers, but they aren't profitable, or profitable enough.

We at the Sky believe, along with the men who wrote and ratified the First Amendment first, that a free press is more important than all that other stuff -- habeas corpus, personal arsenals, not having troops quartered in your house. We don't believe you can have a functioning democracy if citizens are dependent upon radio and television stations which are on their way to being owned by six people; on the Internet (sorry) where just anybody can write an opinion and call it fact, much as I'm doing now, yeah, I smell the irony; on a handful of papers where once there were hundreds. We believe a bad newspaper like the New York Post is better than no newspaper at all. And we were just about to call upon the Obama Administration to save our press.

Billions for banks, insurance companies, auto makers and Wall Street bastards, but not a penny for newspapers? They are as essential to this country as water, energy and schools. They are disappearing because of the rising cost of everything from ink to transport, not the gross mismanagement characteristic of those other industries. They employ thousands. They are a lifeline for people who, incredibly, still don't have computers. They print letters from the known, the unknown, and the quite mad. They can drive you crazy and turn your fingers gray, but they still bring you a snapshot of the world at the moment the press-run began, a time capsule that isn't updated every five minutes when it doesn't disappear altogether. If they're nothing else, they're the daily crossword. An old, yellow clipping that falls out of a forgotten book can recall the past better than a Proustian madeleine. Go ahead, do that with a dead website.

I love the Internet. It contains multitudes undreamed of by Walt Whitman. That's the trouble. Its very freedom (which I will die defending) makes it a treacherous source of information. We need many newspapers written and edited by serious professionals if we are to make sense of a hopelessly tangled world. If money is the only thing making them disappear, give them the money. Even USA Today is worthier of salvation than the companies that made Hummers and Sierras, or the banks that gave mortgages to the unemployed. For better or worse, a nation's newspapers are its memory and its soul.

Whitewater: The Next Generation

Blagojevich, Blagojevich, Blagojevich...when you say a word over and over, it starts to sound like nonsense.

Not to the intrepid Washington newshounds, though. They love to say it. They say it loud and there's music playing, the sit-up-straight-and-pay-attention music that CNN uses to alert us to a breaking story about a plane crash or a missing child. It fills their heads to the point where they fail to notice that nobody is paying any attention. People in forty-nine states and even in Illinois are preoccupied with other questions, like "Where do I go to file for unemployment?" "How do food stamps work?" and "Would my family be better off if I accidentally fell asleep in the garage with the motor running?"

An apparently corrupt governor with an obvious connection to the president-elect, and both of them Democrats? Christmas has come early. Right now Barack Obama could call a press conference to announce that he's moving the White House to the moon, and the first question he took would begin, "Concerning Governor Blagojevich..." In fact, damned if it didn't happen a few minutes ago after he named his Secretary of Education, and he came as close as he ever has to telling the reporter to shut up and sit down. (Obama reminds me of the exquisitely unthreatening characters Sidney Poitier had to play for most of his career; one of these days, I hope to see him cut loose and go all Virgil Tibbs on some deserving party.) It's the guilt-by-association tactic that didn't work during the campaign, with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, so why would it work with Rod Blagojevich? Forget about fairness. Three months ago, when the Republican governor of Alaska was running for vice-president, did anyone ask what she knew and when she knew it about the Republican senator from Alaska then under indictment (and eventually convicted) on seven felony counts? Sarah Palin's ignorance of everything except the Bible is just about encyclopedic, but it stands to reason she must have heard something about Ted's House of Gifts. Were they afraid of making her cry? And even if Obama were dirty, is it likely the smartest man in Chicago would get on a phone he knew was tapped and have an incriminating conversation with the dumbest man in Chicago?

It can't just be the fun of saying "Blagojevich," a name few could pronounce two weeks ago. Or "Blago," or the unspeakable "B-Rod." I think it's the joy of scandal itself. Most reporters are men, and men are supposed to know stuff. They're supposed to know about cars, be able to peer under the hood and figure out what's wrong, although everyone knows you can't diagnose an automotive problem without a computer these days. They're supposed to know all about sports, to be able to name long-dead shortstops or point guards. They have to be able to discourse on why Woody Herman was better than Stan Kenton. They think nobody else can carve the turkey or grill indigestible meats outdoors, and as for sex...well, I blame Playboy . So when forced to report day after day on economic and financial matters so arcane that even the Securities and Exchange Commission can't explain them, the boys began yearning for a juicy story they could understand.

It's starting to look like Patrick Fitzgerald was a little hasty in coming to their aid. He still has no indictment, which can only come from a federal grand jury, and members of his staff wanted to wait until they had an exchange of money or at least an offer on tape. The attorney general and the legislature are trying everything they can think of to get rid of Blagojevich, who naturally is not going anywhere; when and how Illinois will get a second senator is anybody's guess. But the repetitive drone of questions, speculation and half-baked opinions will continue until something sexier comes along. And of course, the farther right you venture, the wilder grows the surmise. For example, Sean Hannity knows that Obama will cover up the governor's crimes (and by association his own) by "firing" Fitzgerald. Reality: every US attorney, and thousands of other political appointees, will resign as of January 20 so that the new President, as always, can appoint his own people; they'd do the same if John McCain had won. Is the Fox audience that stupid?

Anyway, barring another reporter with better aim and bigger shoes, we're going to get Blago'd till the spring thaw. Or until we get news media that isn't in show business, but I can't wait that long.