Category / Journalism

by DrMabuse

Quick Quickies

Since it is book-related, Paul O’Neill fesses up that the Iraq plan was in place well before 9/11. The first major blow from an insider.

Updike’s first short story: “The moment his car touched the boulevard heading home, Ace flicked on the radio.”

Anybody have any clues on the Key West Literary Seminar fracas? Moorish Girl (and all of us) wants to know.

Six Bay Area ladies talk mystery writing.

A big Blair-like blowup at USA Today. Jack Kelley has resigned.

The Times gives a lot of space to the image.

And an engineer attempts to deconstruct postmodern literary criticism.

by DrMabuse

The Cincinnati Enquirer is a Purveyor of Filth

Cincinnati Enquirer: “And for those outraged that the low-rated Doonesbury survived while Boondocks didn’t, we made the decision to drop Boondocks because we did not want to keep publishing a comic that we regularly needed to censor. During the past year, Boondocks was substituted a number of times because it was deemed inappropriate for a family newspaper. And not just this family newspaper. Editors across the country were making the same decisions.”

Well, you have to give the Enquirer credit for a creative excuse. Some folks have caled Boondocks unpatriotic or racist. But this is the first time I’ve heard of it being “inappropriate for a family newspaper.”

But is the Enquirer really a family newspaper?

August 5, 2001: This expose trying to demystify the N-word, mentioning “nigger” ten times and “nigga” ten times.

Peggy O’Farrell, April 9, 2003: “Dr. Safwat Zaki, a urologist with UC Physicians at University Pointe, says products purported to enlarge the penis don’t work. Some surgical options are available: Pumps can be implanted into the penis, and fat can be injected to increase its girth. But the injections don’t last, and the implants carry the risk of infection and scarring.” The Enquirer informing its readers on how to increase penis size? Indecent!

Margaret A. McGurk, Boogie Nights review: “Mr. Anderson handles the porn-making scenes with restraint; by focusing on the onlookers rather than the actors, he achieves an almost romantic mood. A few other sex scenes are hard to watch, particularly one that ends with a savage beating. Yes, there is some nudity, including a brief, display of Eddie’s claim to fame.” Reporting sex scenes! What is this? Adult Movie Guide? Indecent!

Jane Prednergast, March 25, 2000: “The Fort Thomas suspect used a condom, leaving detectives without semen to identify in the first home-invasion rape Fort Thomas has seen in years. That’s one aspect of the case that makes it different from the serial rapes being studied by investigators in Mason, Mont gomery and Colerain Township.” You don’t talk about semen or condoms in a family newspaper. Indecent!

Mike Boyer, September 29, 2002: “Pedro’s is planning a semen collection facility serving the entire Midwest on its farm, with Wisconsin-based Genex Cooperative Inc.” Indecent!

Tom Loftus, November 8, 2003: “Seelye said his jail’s procedure is to search new inmates ‘down to their undergarments’ in most cases. A thorough strip search was not done in Hawks’ case because such searches are done only when there is some suspicion that an inmate is bringing contraband into the jail, he said.” Groping inmates! Beyond indecent!

The Starr Report on the Enquirer servers: Colorful langauge all over the place.

Indecent, I say! Why stop with Boondocks? Why not shitcan all the writers?

(via Old Hag)

by DrMabuse

I Love You Too, Irvine (Sort Of)

To his supreme credit, Alexander McCall Smith claims that his remarks about Irvine Welsh have been “misinterpreted.” Welsh’s status has been downgraded to “a partially indecent hooligan whom I’ll never buy a drink for.”

A new Michigan law requires publications that depict “explicit content” to be covered up. Booksellers and reading groups are furious. And they’ve filed a lawsuit. In the meantime, they may want to consider covering up Ann Coulter’s books. Pretty explicit stuff, given that she’s advocated blowing up the New York Times building, as well as suggesting, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” (via Sarah)

Catherine Kennan has a very juicy piece on highbrow personals. It doesn’t get any closer to understanding the phenomenon (who can?), but it does feature a very amusing exchange between Kennan and one of the guys behind a personal ad. And it’s impossible to resist this ad: “Find the 10th coefficient in the expansion of the binomial (1+x) to the 20th power. Then love me some more. Mathematical Ms, Cambridge.” (via Chica)

The latest culprit behind declining book sales? USA Today suggests it’s the DVD.

Sarah Waters has turned down a Who’s Who entry because she’s not sure how relevant the directory is to today’s world.

Columbia Journalism Review has a piece on former New Republic editor Gregg Easterbrook. It’s another guy fired because of blog story, but the cause here is far more nefarious (and strangely immediate).

And more on Norr from the Daily Planet. Efforts to track down settlement terms are nice from an outside source, but there are few conditional questions revealed.

by DrMabuse

Slow Fade to Black

Jan Wong has some great tips on how to kill your journalistic career. “Try to come across as sympathetic, nice and non-threatening,” she says to aspiring journalists. Wong apparently reads through hundreds of articles, looking for contradictions. That kind of preparatory work is fine. But Wong isn’t applying her bum rush approach to sacred cows. Instead of going after potential contradictions within the story of a breast cancer survivor performing self-biopsies in Antarctica, Wong asked her subject about her troubled marital woes. And when a Beijing University student approached Wong for help in fleeing to the West, Wong turned the student over to the Communist Party.

And that’s not all. After putting away her tape recorder and paper, Royal Bank CEO John Cleghorn confessed to Wong off the record that his wife had, at one point, left him. Wong used the quote anyway.

It’s one thing to be a muckraker, asking the tough questions and exposing the hypocrisies within a subject. Rattling the chains is what good honest journalism is all about. But when trust means nothing, when one cannot distinguish between the interview environment and the off-the-record comments that subjects confess sotto voce (I’ve heard more than a few in my on-again, off-again work and, no, I ain’t fessin’), then what’s the point of journalism? In the long run, as more subjects catch whiff of Jan Wong’s style, they’ll be less likely to reveal anything or even present themselves for an interview.

This is exactly what happened to Rex Reed. Reed made a name for himself in the 1960s with frank, confessional pieces (if you can find it, the now out-of-print Do You Sleep in the Nude? includes some of these career-building interviews), even earning Tom Wolfe’s seal of approval, before he humiliated Warren Beatty in Esquire. The Beatty interview (in name only) involved Reed writing a lengthy profile about trying to interview Beatty, using hearsay and unsubstantiated facts in an effort to sabotage him as a has-been, just as Bonnie & Clyde was to be released to the American public. It didn’t work. Predictably, Reed’s career drifted away from profiles, towards uneducated and flamboyant film reviews (case in point: read the end of this Roger Ebert Jurassic Park 3 review) — all best avoided, unless you think the vapidity of People Magazine is sui generis. The Reed-Beatty “interview” is now regarded as a textbook example of dishonest journalism.

Of course, Wong’s hypocrisy has had a few side effects. The article also notes that Wong can be found cowering from Margaret Atwood and Allan Fotheringham at Toronto writer functions. My guess is that in ten years’ time, we’ll find Wong replacing some major critic on a Canadian movie reviews program, before writing a column that nobody reads in a major Toronto newspaper.

by DrMabuse

The Golden Scam

I don’t have cable. Hell, aside from a DVD every now and then, I barely turn my television on. But Gary Dretzka’s TV Barn column makes me wish I did have cable, if only for an hour. It seems that Trio’s got sixty salacious minutes making the rounds. A modest tell-all ditty from When We Were Kings director Vikram Jayanti called The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret. The doc goes into length on how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the junket whores behind the Golden Globes, is granted endless loot and, well beyond the shameful nod to Pia Zidora in 1982 and other dubious merits, the awards ceremony is inclined to favor young, dumb, and full of come mythos.

Jeffrey Wells has more on the subject: “With relatively few exceptions, the HFPA members are a bunch of eager-beaver pseudo-journalists (a fair portion of them write for publications in Germany and Japan) who smile much too broadly and get far too excited when celebrities are in the room. They’re not ardent admirers of the art of motion pictures as much as people who appreciate huge bowls of tasty shrimp sitting on studio-supplied buffet tables. They’re pigs who squeal on cue in order to flatter Hollywood and keep themselves feeding at the trough.”

It’s not unlike what seems to be going down in the literary world of late, at least as Choire Sicha reports it.

(It looks like there was some serendipity in finding the links, but Greencine Daily led me to Wells.)