Category Archives: News

Reporting for Doody

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ElvisNixon

Tender is the Right: the president (left) and the king.

Not all burglaries are about cash and pricey stashes. Sometimes information is more valuable.

By which I mean: Happy fortieth, Watergate hearings!

For those of you old enough to remember (it was the first news story I remember), Watergate makes the current IRS dustup look like a tea party. Oh gee. I mean … Let’s make that a trip to Disneyland.

For those of you who don’t remember, a sitting president presided over a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., to snoop on DNC records and bug the place.

The most entertaining evildoer ever—the irrepressible G. Gordon Liddy, modern-day birther, patriot, mustachioed star of right-wing talk radio—was in charge. Nixon resigned. Forty-three people went to jail. There’s really been nothing like it in this country since.

Not even the Clinton impeachment compares. Don’t let Fox News tell you otherwise.

Okay, so four decades later the IRS busted a tea party organization’s balls. Like that’s a big surprise. Yeah, the IRS went about it all wrong, but if any group applying for tax-exempt status should expect a good old-fashioned taxman third degree, it’s a group whose main purpose is to oppose taxation. Duh.

Maybe I’m not the audience for this story, but I’m just not feeling it the way I’m feeling some of the other scandals circulating right now. Scandals like … Oh, let’s see … Maybe the government’s snooping on reporters’ movements and phone records—which the Obama administration is busy defending while making a good show of going after the IRS.

I dunno. Is it just me (and every other journalist type with old-timey journalism ideals), or does this strike you as a bit of a double standard? On one hand you have a government agency scrutinizing a group requesting special status … possibly more than it scrutinized liberal groups requesting that same special status. On the other hand you have the government spying on reporters—protectors of the free flow of information—for simply doing their job.

I guess there’s as little sympathy for reporters these days as there is for the IRS. That’s too bad on both counts. IRS agents don’t deserve the comparison. And reporters? Believe it or not, they’re actually doing something valuable. When they’re doing something valuable.

Investigative journalists do good work. And there aren’t many of them anymore. Mostly because investigations are expensive, and no amount of armchair blogging will get you there.

A real investigation requires getting off the couch. (Believe me: The irony’s not lost.)

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—the Washington Post reporters who broke the news about a conspiracy to cover up the break-in at the Watergate that extended to the highest levels of government—know all about investigative journalism. Unfortunately, most young people today would need Google to investigate who they are.

So screw the tea party’s complaints about partisanship in the Obama administration. And let’s instead put the screws to the Obama administration (and every other non-journalist on the planet) for their lack of equivalent concern about the flagrant violation of reporters’ rights.

To do good investigative journalism is tough enough these days. But to make criminals of the investigators themselves sends a very bad message: An informed citizenry isn’t that important. But how did we get here—under a Democratic president, at that?

I imagine more through the slow burn of ignorance than a Gulag-style attempt to suppress free speech. Because, unfortunately, in this era when most Americans associate journalism with TMZ and trending Twitter hashtags, no one but journalists actually know what journalists do.

But that’s not the journalists’ fault. It’s all of ours—for not demanding truth and in-depth news. For refusing to pay for quality journalism … and getting exactly what we paid for.

Let’s face it: Information is valuable. Just ask Liddy.

No Monopoly on Stupidity: You Reddit Here First (I Mean Last)

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Go to Jail

You don’t have to be a real journalist to go to jail.
Photo by Mark Strozier

What’s the deal with Reddit, and why does it seem to occupy both the Boardwalk and Park Place of our online mental real estate these days?

When it’s not busy trying to solve crimes, the quickly evolving social bookmarking site is fast gaining fame for Ask Me Anything (AMA) interviews with the likes of Vampire Weekend, Barack Obama and scary-seeming (but actually nice, based on my 10-minute telephone interview with him some 15 years ago) Gen X novelist Bret Easton Ellis.

Before you go and get all Millennial on me, I realize, as a once-proud member of Generation X (it used to be cool; trust me)—if I’m the one asking this question, it can mean only one thing: Reddit is over. Done. Move on, everyone. There’s nothing to see here.

Yeah, but there kind of still is. At least for the moment. If for no other reason than to put it all behind me—behind us.

Okay, maybe some of it is a personal problem—a gut reaction to the thought that what I used to do as a paid professional is now being done for free (sometimes well) by pretty much everyone online (including me). I know. Cry me a river.

As an aggregator of almost every clever and boneheaded thought committed to pixels, Reddit is both the best and worst of what an online community can be. Like the Internet itself, it is the product of both man’s most noble motivations and his basest instincts. It is lightness; it is dark. It is hope; it is despair. One minute it will restore your faith in humanity, while the very next it will send you to the Dickensian depths.

To people like me, who aren’t social enough to find Facebook useful, its relative anonymity is refreshing. But at the same time I admit to being somewhat frightened, annoyed and overwhelmed by what too often seems like a China-sized Craigslist with convictions. I mean, the other kind of convictions. I’m not talking about crimes here. Well, nothing punishable by law. Yet.

As both a product of the last generation of digital immigrants and a former newspaper editor, my first reaction was: God, this thing needs an editor. That there are no editors is what makes Reddit great. It’s also what makes it so potentially dangerous—as we saw with the witch hunt users launched after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Last month the Reddit community, through their own half-baked investigation attempt, decided that missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi was bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Soon after, Tripathi’s body was found floating in the Providence River.

Oops.

The moderator of Reddit’s “FindBostonBombers” subreddit later apologized for targeting the innocent student. And while there’s no way to know for sure what was going through Tripathi’s head right before his death, an entire online community calling him a killer certainly couldn’t have helped.

Sure, Reddit has a purpose and can do good things—if it focuses on its strengths and abilities. Attitude is one thing. Investigation is another. And interviewing? Well …

I’m glad Reddit is giving the public direct access to the people they want to communicate with. And it’s neat that the public is free to curse like truck drivers and ask meaningless showoff-y questions like (to Bret Easton Ellis): “Bone and Silian Rail, Egg Shell with Romalian Type or Raised Lettering, Pale Nimbus white?” But, gosh, I’d happily give up the excitement of live participation and having to wade through the community’s alternating attempts at kissing butt and seeming cool for some real depth and meaning.

But that’s not what the unfiltered, democratic Internet is all about. Here, we seem to think, all voices are equal, and all equally deserve to be heard. Which, on its face, is fine as long as no one’s getting hurt—or falsely fingered for murder.

Like any good American (and journalist), I hate censorship and love the First Amendment. That’s a no-brainer. But let’s not forget that just because we can write or say something doesn’t mean it’s worth committing to the limited (and shrinking) real estate in our brains.

Crap is crap, whether it’s on Baltic Avenue or Boardwalk.

The Show May Go On

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CarsonCavettKing

History repeats on you: Dick Cavett (left) and Alan King roast Johnny Carson at the Friars Club.

Does broadcast TV even matter anymore? It’s a recurring thought that gained intensity for me with the most recent salvo in the Late Night Wars over who’ll host The Tonight Show.

Late Night host Jimmy Fallon just got the Tonight Show nod, with Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live set to take over Fallon’s slot.

Okay, so … Does anyone give two craps? Yeah … if they’re living in 2009.

But it’s 2013. We watch TV on our computers and mobile devices, when and where we want to. We don’t care about networks and time slots.

I did care the last time around, just four years ago, when Conan O’Brien, who’d been promised the show five years before, briefly took the reins.

Conan got The Tonight Show, only to give it up some eight months later in a tiff NBC blamed on low ratings. Longtime Tonight Show viewers may have been put off by the raw energy Conan and his team brought to those early shows that featured Letterman-style stunts in the Universal Studios lot, Onion-esque trips to mundane local businesses and cheeky Universal Studios tram tour hijackings.

Some probably didn’t know what to make of the wax figures of Tom Cruise and The Fonz that Conan and Co. shot from a circus cannon—a highlight of those ballsy early shows. More than once in Conan’s brief honeymoon period, I marveled at how far the network was willing to let him go. Aside from the earliest days of Late Night With David Letterman, I couldn’t recall seeing anything quite so funny and fearless on network TV.

It wasn’t long before headlines about the network’s disappointment started surfacing. The writing was on the wall: Conan’s days were numbered. But why did it matter?

Conan’s takeover of The Tonight Show did matter back in 2009 for two almost contradictory reasons: one, Conan was the last in a line of old-time late night talk show hosts who could trace their pedigree all the way back to Steve Allen and the dawn of TV; two, Conan was the first in a new generation that could reenergize the brand while honoring its traditions.

Conan perfectly bridged the old and new—an idea perhaps best represented in the epic opening of his very first Tonight Show, which showed Conan on an East-to-West-Coast sprint down tree-lined suburban streets, through Wrigley Field, by the St. Louis Gateway Arch, into a Midwestern Victorian doll museum, down the Las Vegas Strip, and into Universal Studios’ back lot to the tune of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” The song was a relic, but it felt like a revolution—a new day for an old show.

With the hand-off to Fallon, the memory and legacy of The Tonight Show no longer seem so important. Maybe it’s because most of Fallon’s current viewers can’t even remember the Johnny Carson era. Or maybe it’s because our relationship with TV has changed so radically in just the last four years.

Network TV doesn’t mean as much to us as it used to. It’s just one of a million viewing options we can choose from these days. And if it doesn’t work out with Fallon, there’s always Meyers or any other number of funny guys who could be wooed from YouTube, iTunes or Netflix. It doesn’t really matter where or when. Either for the network or for us.

Let’s make it official: The Late Night Wars are over, another casualty of low ratings.

Marketing Mom

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Mother Brunch

I just got this ad in my email. You can’t book a brunch table through this blog—assuming you still think brunch is a good idea.

I’ve been trying to figure out why Mother’s Day advertising is so uniquely annoying—like no other holiday-themed ads I’ve seen.

Sure, Christmas ad campaigns can be pushy and repetitive, but they’re easily blocked or ignored (at least by us non-parents). Using Presidents Day or the Fourth of July to sell appliances seems silly, but it doesn’t offend my patriotism. Even Father’s Day campaigns—maybe because I grew up fatherless, maybe because there are none—don’t faze me.

But I’m guessing that even for the minority of Americans who have a simple, perfect relationship with a living mother, Mother’s Day ads are part of one huge guilt trip intended to make each of us feel crappy or inadequate in our own special way.

Mother’s Day advertising assumes a lot of things:

  1. That the mothers in our lives are living saints.
  2. That they’ve been there to support and sustain us since the beginning.
  3. That they are martyrs who deny themselves the simple pleasures in life—flowers, chocolates, perfumes, massages, overpriced brunch buffets washed down by watery mimosas—that only we can provide them on this one day each year.
  4. That they’re kind of dumb, won’t stand up for themselves, and exist only for those around them.
  5. That they need cheesy heart-shaped jewelry to feel loved or relevant.
  6. That we have excellent relationships with them.
  7. That they are alive.

For the majority of the assumed target market for Mother’s Day advertising who have living mothers, their relationship with Mom is likely complicated. You can bet there’s at least some guilt there: I don’t call enough; I don’t visit enough; I don’t appreciate all she’s done for me; I need her to keep making my car payments …

Most Americans are easy marks for Mother’s Day advertising. And smart advertisers know they can make mad money by tapping our society’s collective rich vein of mother-borne guilt.

Mothers have come a long way in the last 30 years. The idea of a “working mother” is no longer an aberration (and is actually pretty offensive to those who’ve done a mother’s work).

Mothers can work (outside the home) all they want these days. As long as they don’t expect the same pay as their male colleagues and don’t need to take personal days to care for sick children, and as long as they still come home each night to make a nice dinner and keep everyone feeling happy and safe.

So while mothers have more options now, they don’t have any fewer responsibilities. (Check out CNN’s recent stories about how moms who leave are still vilified—while dads have been free to leave since the Pleistocene.)

I can’t imagine how they do it all, but I do imagine they sometimes can’t. Which leads to all sorts of guilt for Mom herself.

There’s no shortage of guilt to go around, all of it fueling a massive Mother’s Day advertising blitz that manages to make every single one of us feel crappy and inadequate. I guess that’s why I find Mother’s Day advertising so uniquely annoying.

Um … enjoy your brunch?

Whitewashing the News

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PerilsLet’s face it. The media love women and girls. Specifically, they love stories about white women and girls in distress.

Whether it’s women imprisoned in a Cleveland home for a decade or Jodi Arias’ first-degree murder conviction, there’s something about white females in trouble that brings a disproportionate share of media attention.

This is no news. You’ve heard similar stories for decades.

Media coverage of kidnapping and abduction in recent years (or ever, really) would suggest that most victims are young, white and female (see: Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, Caylee Anthony). The media love stories that feature fair faces because they’re good for ratings (or clicks or hits). Media consumers love them because they seem exotic.

They seem exotic because they are. In reality, hundreds of thousands of people go missing in the United States each year, and very few of them look like Smart or Dugard.

Nearly half of those on the FBI’s list of missing persons in 2012 were men. When’s the last time you heard about a missing man? And even though African-Americans accounted for roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population in the 2010 Census, some 34 percent of those reported missing in 2012 were black.

Despite being underrepresented in the news (as victims), black people have long been overrepresented in U.S. prisons and their death rows. The Death Penalty Information Center notes that in nearly 80 percent of U.S. executions, the victim was white, while about half of all murder victims are black. Juries, like media consumers, are unusually moved by white victims.

Most Americans can’t name a single person now on death row. But most of us will know within minutes if Jodi Arias (who portrayed herself as a victim at trial) gets a death sentence. Because the media know we want to know. The Arias case has captured our imaginations in ways few murder cases ever do.

It sucks that the media focus disproportionately on cases like Arias’—often to the detriment of stories that truly merit our attention. But let’s not forget that the media are only following demand.

The second we stop demanding more coverage of the Arias trial or the case of the kidnapped Cleveland women, the media will move on … to whatever other exotic-sounding story captures our imaginations next.

Like … just maybe … putting a white woman to death.

Drone Home

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hummingbird

Sure, it looks innocent enough here …
Credit: U.S. Forest Service, Coconino National Forest

There’s a cute little hummingbird hovering outside my open bathroom window. Aww, I think at first, imagining myself as Snow White with her singing bluebird.

But the thing hovers a bit too long, and cute turns to creepy. I wrap the towel a little tighter around my body and wonder: Is it a drone?

A few days ago in this space, I went off about video surveillance. Sure, it became a big (brother) issue after the Boston Marathon bombings, where security cameras helped the public help law enforcement identify the suspects. But everyone—especially here in weird old San Diego—knows that when it comes to surveillance, video cameras are old news. The new news is … drones.

Welcome to Drone Town USA: San Diego for now, but coming soon to airspace near you.

It should come as no surprise that San Diego—where there are more military personnel than in any other U.S. city—is ground zero for drone technology. According to the Los Angeles Times, more than 7,000 of the region’s residents are employed in the drone biz. (Don’t call them worker bees!)

Most work for defense contractors like General Atomics and Northrop Grumman, but a growing number are engaged in more peaceful pursuits at smaller upstarts that develop drones for comparatively benign (but maybe only slightly less controversial) uses than war. Like law enforcement or safety inspections.

But even when they’re pressed into benign use, drones, which have been almost universally associated with war and bombing the crap out of civilians in places we don’t dare send ground troops, have a pretty big PR hurdle to overcome. And once the war association is gone, there’s still the matter of privacy.

Slate magazine says the “golden age of privacy is over.” That may well be, but what does it mean? I mean, aside from paranoia.

For me, probably like most of you who reside in a reasonably democratic state—putting aside ID numbers and financial info, and maybe that colonoscopy in 2010 (who wants that image in someone’s head?)—the idea that any person, organization or hummingbird would give one whit about what I’m up to is laughable.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty to be paranoid about in modern life. I’m not laboring under any sunny-eyed assumption that private business and my government genuinely care about me or see me as anything more than one tiny component of a calculation in a spreadsheet or actuarial table. And maybe in part because of that, I have a hard time getting worked up about personal privacy. Especially when ensuring it seems so futile.

Last week, when the Associated Press’ Twitter account was hacked and the stock market took a momentary dive, password security became the privacy concern of the moment. Yesterday, I heard a tech analyst on the radio say “passwords are dead.”

Anyone can hack a password if they really want to. Even two-step verification (where you have to respond to a texted or emailed prompt to verify your identity) isn’t much better.

Like Twitter, WordPress, which hosts this blog, requires just a simple password for login. If someone really wanted to, they could hack this account and post something totally nuts. Heck, they could be doing it now. The only question would be why. Most of us know blogging’s not exactly a cash cow, and bloggers are a dime a dozen these days.

But with so many floating (like a hummingbird) threats out there, it’s easy to understand why we everyday folks might be a bit concerned or confused. I see evidence of it every day.

Just yesterday, I was in a meeting where colleagues expressed suspicion about an offer from our health insurance provider to limit our premium costs if we’d answer a questionnaire about our general health and get our cholesterol levels checked. We were assured the results would be for our use alone, but how can you know for sure?

To save $30 a month, I was happy to get checked. Privacy is cheap for me. Not so for others. Maybe someday I’ll feel the same. But that someday’s already here, and for those of us in the wired (and the increasingly untethered wireless) world, it’s already too late.

The hummingbirds are at the window. Happy showering!

Public Enemy?

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surveillanceIn the week since Boston Marathon bombing news slowed, leaving reporters grasping for anything half as gripping to write or talk about, a new obsession hit headlines: surveillance. The knowledge that the Tsarnaev brothers were caught on surveillance video at the bombing site spurred lots of paranoid talk about privacy in public and worries about the U.S. becoming a police state.

No one should be surprised there was surveillance video in Boston. There is surveillance video in many major cities these days.

There’s a camera mounted to a street light a few blocks from my house. It didn’t surprise me to first discover it, and it doesn’t bother me today. In this underserved neighborhood, the cops need all the help they can get. (Though I can’t say I’m a big fan of the police helicopter that buzzes my backyard most nights, but that’s another story.)

I’ve read (and almost remember) some Orwell. I hate police states as much as the next person. But I can’t help thinking the recent public outcry is a bit overblown.

First of all, from my many years as a newspaper editor, I’m pretty familiar with privacy and libel law. (By the way, fellow bloggers: Do yourselves a favor and bone up. You may be flying under the radar for now, but just wait till you finger the wrong bombing suspect online. Ignorance of the law won’t protect you in a suit.)

When I’m working as a journalist, privacy law is my friend. Because in the U.S., people in public places don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy, you can photograph them or shoot video of them without having to ask their permission. Of course you can’t defame them or use their image to sell something, and just because you’re holding a camera or a digital recorder doesn’t give you the right to be rude. But when it comes to public spaces (except around nuclear power plants, airport runways and other Homeland Security-type places) it’s pretty much anything goes for photojournalists. And that’s not a bad thing.

But it cuts both ways. When I’m out in public, walking or running, privacy law isn’t exactly the enemy, though it can be annoying. Early mornings in Philly, I used to run along the picturesque Schuylkill River … where local news stations often set up cameras to capture sunrise shots to show as backdrops for weather or news reports. Every time I saw them shooting along the trail, I’d put my head down and try to be inconspicuous as I ran by. I didn’t like the thought of being a backdrop for the weather, but tough noogies for me. If I wanted to run in private, I’d have to buy a treadmill and run at home.

These days I sometimes wind up as a background blur in Balboa Park wedding videos. I don’t dislike it any less than I used to, but I no longer even try to be inconspicuous—since the effort only makes me more conspicuous. Truth is, unless you’re famous or doing something you shouldn’t be doing, no one gives two craps about you as an anonymous person caught on camera. So get over it.

Until privacy laws fundamentally change or people start shooting into our bedroom windows with telephoto lenses, we can relax. Cameras are around us everywhere. They’ve surrounded us for decades, and increasingly, we’re turning them on ourselves. If the growing popularity of reality TV is any indication, the biggest risk of video surveillance these days is winding up with a million hits on YouTube or a show on the E! network.

I’m guessing this is an old-person argument. Ask anyone under 30 if getting caught on video in public sparks fears of a creeping police state. Ask, that is, if you can pull them away from recording their own lives on Facebook for long enough to focus on your question.

No News Is Bad News

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MurrowLast week, as so many Americans seemed to hang on each tiny tidbit of breaking news, someone very close to me—frustrated by the media’s panicked scramble for new information—questioned the point of having journalists at all. (Before you ask: No, I didn’t kill him.)

My first instinct was to get indignant. To stomp on the floor and ask, “Are you crazy? Do you know what a privilege it is to have a free press in this country?”

Then I took a step back. Sure, the importance of journalism is second nature to me—and, I hope, to most journalists and journalism students today. But in these days when more and more people get news and information from social media and the blogosphere, it’s hard to tell what is news, what is journalism.

If we’re judging journalism content by postings to YouTube or the Reddit community (which last week collectively ascertained, and then reported, that one of the Boston Marathon bombers was a missing Brown University student), I agree: What’s the point of having journalists at all?

Thing is, YouTube posters and the Reddit community are not journalists. They are not paid. They are not trained. They can write and speculate all they want. Their numbers may make them strong, but not necessarily right. Trouble is: Too few of us understand that. And with the huge and growing percentage of people who get most or all of their news from friends or social media, it’s easy to see why.

The Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media 2013 report found that nearly a quarter of 18-to-29-year-olds rely primarily on social media for news and information. Further, 72 percent of adults get most of their news from other people—either in person or on the phone. In other words, people are more willing to trust what their friends tell them than what paid professionals like Brian Williams or Diane Sawyer have to say.

If you’re counting on your mother or your brother to bring you the news, I repeat: Who needs journalists?

Well, North Korea for starters. But also China, Iran, Syria, Vietnam, Bahrain—all of which Reporters Without Borders named “Enemies of the Internet” last month. And those are hardly the only violators.

Without press freedom and an open Internet, bad things happen. Dictatorships thrive. Citizens are silenced. People starve, endure torture, die. Of course there are less extreme consequences—like in my assumed bastion of democratic freedom, the United States.

At their best, journalists work hard to uncover corruption and worse. Most of the big American scandals of the last century were revealed by well-trained, hard-working, dedicated journalists. Think of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate investigation. Think of Edward R. Murrow’s exposure of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt. Even think of Upton Sinclair and his early 20th century reports on worker abuse and abysmal conditions in the meatpacking industry.

In a world without journalists, in a world where no one is watching those in charge and safeguarding the rights of the people, bad things can—and invariably will—happen. That’s worth remembering—particularly in times like last week when it may be tough to tell who’s a journalist, and whose reports are only adding to the scramble.

On the Run

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Running ShoesAs we close out a crazy week of explosions, shootouts and the lockdown of an entire U.S. city—a week in which many of us who didn’t directly experience any of it have found connections just the same—I feel compelled to make a small addition to the discourse that may make sense only to other runners. (And may not even make sense to runners.)

As a longtime runner, I understand how cultish and strange the running life can seem from the outside. I understand because it can seem cultish and strange from the inside too. In years past, my running has veered into crazy addiction, and I still feel a pang of remorse whenever I’m out in the world—not running—and see someone else running.

I know. It’s weird … to everyone but fellow runners. But runners know: The physical part of running is the least significant. And for people who run marathons—like those whose lives were forever altered last Monday—the psychological component just got a whole lot more … psychological.

Most of us have heard of runner’s high. It’s a real thing. Running makes me feel better both physically and mentally. It’s my meditation.

The trance-like state a long run puts me in spurs all sorts of ideas and answers. It brings peace. Of course last week’s marathon runners felt anything but peaceful Monday. But in light of everything else that has happened these past few days, how can anyone who survived with all limbs intact complain?

With this in mind, I decided to finally self-publish a mini running memoir I wrote a couple summers ago that no one else would likely publish since it’s probably too disturbing or internal or disjointed for most—or all—readers. It’s about how running has helped me process the self-destruction of my birth family, all of whom are now either dead or out of my life. Maybe other runners will find something comforting in it. I hope so.

If not, oh well. A good long run will make us all feel better.

You can read the mini memoir here.

Race to Judgment

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Huntley_Brinkley_Report_NBC_News_1963

What would NBC’s Huntley and Brinkley do?

Despite repeated reminders to avoid reporting news before fully checking it out, the media have been at it pretty consistently since Monday’s marathon bombings.

Culprits include the usual suspects—bloggers mostly. No big surprise there, right? But in the race for scoops, even biggies like CNN and The Washington Post—with their actual editors and fact-checkers—have performed little better.

Wednesday afternoon, CNN reported that there’d been an arrest in the Boston bombings. And they soon retracted the story. Their rush to be the first to add new to the limited available news quickly backfired.

Later, The Washington Post reported that a suspect had been arrested in the ricin mailings to President Obama and two others, including a Mississippi senator. They named the man in an email blast to all their subscribers. Only one problem: They named the wrong man. Oops.

CNN’s screwup reminded some of the rush to pin the Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics on security guard Richard Jewell. Despite numerous news accounts accusing him of planting the pipe bomb that killed two and injured more than 100, Jewell was ultimately exonerated and later hailed as a hero for reporting the bomb and trying to evacuate those in its path before it exploded.

Jewell famously sued The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and NBC News for libel, and won settlements from both the latter and our friend CNN—but it was too late for redemption. In 2007, he died a broken man at 44.

The media ruined Jewell’s life back in the newly online ’90s, long before bloggers and citizen journalists would’ve had a chance to—assuming such a thing were even possible. Back in the days of limited media options (remember the dreaded Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed massive media consolidation?), then-influential news outlets like big daily newspapers held much more power than they do today.

These days, if an old-school mainstream news outlet reports erroneous information, there’s not as much at stake. There may be retractions, or even apologies—then it’s back to business.

In the jumble of online speculation, rumors, armchair analysis, and maybe even a little real news here and there, no single story carries much weight anymore. The chance of getting a scoop too often outweighs the risk of a making a terrible mistake.

Sadly, we can only expect more terrible mistakes as time marches on without salacious updates. Happily, you won’t see any new marathon bombing news here.