Weekend Tids and Bits

 

 

That Makes All the Difference honors go to Donna Barrett, CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., who tells us in an Editor & Publisher column that newspapers aren’t dying because they’re losing readers, they’re dying because they’re losing revenue.

 

Well, that certainly lifts spirits and concentrates on the positive. It’s a day-brightener like telling someone with an inoperable brain tumor that they have the heart-lung capacity of a 20-year-old.

 

Barrett cites the usual suspects for plunging revenue, including the recession and the All-Purpose Newspaper Demon called Craigslist. But she might also want to rethink the use of some of her stats, including “More Americans read printed newspapers than own dogs.”

 

If that’s high in the pitch of her ad reps, they’re selling lead life vests and wondering why they never see repeat customers.

 

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Coming Storm Forecast: Look for cash-strapped governments on all levels to accelerate a move to stop printing legal notices in newspapers and start posting them on government websites. In many cases, that will require a change in law, and in all cases newspapers will howl that taking away a blatant taxpayer-funded subsidy –oops! taking away a vital public service –puts democracy at risk, not to mention a low-cost/high-profit revenue stream.

 

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Another Obscure Holiday last week besides Earth Day was Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day, April 23. This is the mutated Take Our Daughters To Work program launched by the Ms. Foundation in 1993 to expose girls to the idea of careers. By 2003, limiting career exposure from parents to girls seemed discriminatory enough that boys were added. Now it is a non-discriminatory reason to skip listening to boring stuff at school and listen to boring stuff at work with Mommy and Daddy instead.

 

My own experience was to take then-teen daughter Elaine to work and put her to work for the day in the mailroom. That seemed to permanently satisfy her career exposure needs, since she never asked again.

 

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Ken Lerer’s lecture at the Columbia J-School has some keen insight into why newspapers, paper checks and facsimile machines are fast becoming anachronisms. He’s a co-founded of The Huffington Post, and the easiest way to read the Columbia Journalism Review article is online, natch. Catch it at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/tough_love_with_ken_lerer.php?page=all  

 

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Math/Smath – It’s An Epidemic If We Say It Is: The swine flu hysteria is focused on Mexico, where  the AP reports that it “has killed as many as 68 people and sickened more than 1,000.” So let’s do the math, boys and girls. The population of greater Mexico City alone is 22 million. And let’s assume for our math problem that all 1,068 cases of swine flu are confirmed (which they haven’t been) and uniformly lethal (which they aren’t). That means the percent of the population at risk is .000049. That’s about half the number of folks in greater Mexico City who die in traffic accidents each year. And if you restrict the math to just the 68 who have died, whether or not they all died from swine flu, then this scourge has wasted .0000031 percent. And, of course, the disease isn’t just limited to Mexico City, so if you take the percent of Mexico’s population of 110 million that have died from this horror, it’s .00000062 percent.

 

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When Pigs Report

 

It ain’t as easy as it looks.

 

Those who think the impending death of newspapers means we no longer need journalism tend to think any citizen can get whatever information is needed from the web. And it’s true – you can get all sorts of information from the web with just a few clicks.

 

But whether or not that information is accurate, organized or even needed is something else. Consider the current Swine Flu Festival, being conducted across the web because today is Friday, and except for the occasional disaster, not a lot happens on Fridays.

 

Start with The Drudge Report, the web’s supermarket tabloid on steroids. It’s main story screams “Outbreak” and the kickers over a picture of pigs calmly report:

 

“MEXICO CONFIRMS 16 DEAD; 50 MORE DEATHS BEING PROBED...

Travelers warned of mysterious respiratory illness...

Mexico City launches huge vaccination campaign...

7 hit by strange new swine flu in USA...

Heighten Risk of Pandemic...

Concern in Texas...

Mutated from pigs, transmitted to humans...”

 

Now flu of any sort is nasty stuff. The World Health Organization (WHO), with its customary flair for finely tuned estimates, says flu kills 250,000-500,000 persons annually. So this is really serious and threatening news, right?

 

They think so at AFP (Agence France Press), where around noon they were counting 16 swine flu deaths, with Mexico “probing 50 more.” That must be French conservatism, because 14 hours earlier, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) had 20 dead and 137 infected.

 

Reuters, the financial information firm with a news hobby, reported in the early afternoon today that “A deadly strain of swine flu never seen before has killed as many as 61 people.” They got to 61 bodies by taking the 16 dead announced by Mexican authorities and tossing in 45 more that “may” have died from the disease.

 

The Associated Press struck a similar tone with “At least 16 people - and possibly dozens more” dead in Mexico from swine flu, noting that WHO was reporting 57 dead, but that it wasn’t sure from what, and dutifully saying far down in the story that only 16 had been confirmed by Mexican authorities as being from swine flu.

 

Bloomberg has been taking the most cautious approach, saying “Disease trackers are asking U.S. hospitals to help follow a new strain of swine flu and are trying to determine whether it’s related to hundreds of illnesses and 57 deaths in Mexico.”

 

And The New York Times handled it in a one-paragraph item citing the WHO figure of 57, and a much longer and more explanatory story on the seven U.S. cases, all of whom have recovered.

 

Now anyone with a web browser and a lot of time can read all this stuff and sort it out, and call the sources with questions, and decide what is fact, what is speculation, and what is some health bureaucrat enjoying his or her time in the media spotlight. But most of us don’t have that kind of time or the required skills.

 

Instead, we depend on folks called journalists. And when the last newspaper has shuffled off to history’s graveyard, we’ll still need journalists to sort things out and report the event, because it ain’t as easy as it looks.

 

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Satan’s Pride and Joy

 

Satan must be so damned proud.

 

The debate over Central Intelligence Agency torture of suspected terrorists now centers not on whether it was right or wrong, but on whether or not it was effective.

 

Since time began, turning our attention from issues of good or evil to procedural details has been high on Hell’s agenda. And at no time has success been as spectacular as in the last 100 years.

 

The debate in Nazi Germany was not over whether the execution camps were wrong, but whether the Final Solution functioned efficiently. Stalin’s artificial famines, forced collectivization and endless Gulags were criticized less for being wrong than for being economically inefficient.

 

And now the heirs of those who so proudly wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” are treated to an August 1, 2002 memo from the ironically named U.S. Department of Justice that says:

 

·        It’s okay to grab a suspect’s head, slap them in the face and throw them against specially-built walls.

·        There’s no problem with putting a suspect into a box for 18 hours at a stretch.

·        Sleep deprivation for 72 hours is fine, as is forcing suspects to assume and hold body positions that bring intense muscle fatigue pain.

·        Putting feared insects into the box with the subject presents no issues.

·        Water-boarding, aka near-drowning, is perfectly legal, even if you do it to one suspect 183 times in a single month, and give another suspect a break with only 83 episodes.

 

We prosecuted folks in Germany and Japan who did things like that to detainees in World War II, but we have it on no less authority than former Vice President Dick Cheney that these things were necessary to keep us safe. Or as he told ABC News in a December 2008 interview”

“. . .So, it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.

“And I think those who allege that we've been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don't know what they're talking about.”

So a “remarkably successful” wrong is right, and therefore only a failed wrong is wrong, which opens the question of whether a failed right is wrong or a wrong right is failed, and. . .and the howls of laughter in Hell rise in unending crescendo.

 

Some have made so bold as to suggest that doing these things constituted crimes, both by those who ordered and did them and by those who blessed the whole stinking mess in pages of BureauLawerSpeak.

 

That must also amuse the Hell out of Satan, who has watched our concern as a nation slip from a mutual pledge of “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” to a more convenient pledge of “your life to protect my fortune -- and honor be damned.”

 

Damned it will be, and Satan gets his amusement with little effort. Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and the rest of the goose-brained goose-stepping Right are doing all the heavy lifting here, and the Prince of Darkness has no doubt prepared appropriate rewards.

 

Rewards in which we’ll all share unless we stop nattering about how effective a criminal act was in nabbing the loot and start prosecuting those who in the guise of protecting us from harm exposed us to a far greater evil.

 

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Mother Earth Beckons

 

 

Today is Earth Day, which means it’s time for Baby Boomers to hug your inner tree, at least for those still limber enough for that sort of thing. After all, we started this one.

 

Begun in 1970 at the urging of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day kicked off with large rallies in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities. The Associated Press, in a year-end review it published then, estimated the city rallies at 25,000 and added that some 10 million school children also participated. The 35-word entry doesn’t mention much more, except to note that the day was to “draw attention to the globe’s environmental problems.”

 

That’s because there wasn’t much more to mention. Some environmentalists worried that the earth was growing too cold, some worried that it was growing too hot, and some thought the earth was just right, but didn’t say so because being just right was very unfashionable then.

 

Others worried that the earth was becoming too populated, ignoring the historical record of wars, plagues and famines that routinely regulate that.

 

Still others noted that April 22 was the 100^th birthday of Vladimir Lenin and wondered if the celebrations were part of the ubiquitous Communist Plot to Overthrow Democracy, probably by boring it to death.

 

And don’t forget that April 22^nd was the birthday of J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska, who founded Arbor Day which became a holiday in 1872, and is still celebrated in Nebraska, where occasions to celebrate anything except leaving the state are few.

 

But most of us who were then alive and young were just glad that Wednesday, April 22, 1970 gave us a chance to stop worrying about wars in Cambodia and Vietnam, Women’s Liberation, Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, the Chicago 7, school desegregation violence, the My Lai massacre, the Israeli-Arab conflict, the Weather Underground, Mary Jo Kopechne’s fatal ride with Senator Edward Kennedy, and the whisker-close safe return of Apollo 13.

 

All those 1970 worries bubbled before the first Earth Day, and worse would come after, including Kent State and other nightmares, so for all the grand talk about Saving Our Environment, most who lived at the time concentrated on the more immediate task of Saving Our Ass.

 

Which is why except for the annual spasm of we-gotta-fill-the-space-somehow stories, Earth Day isn’t much of a threat to our more robust secular holidays like Mothers Day, Fathers Day or Super Bowl Sunday. In fact, a search on Hallmark’s website turned up zero Earth Day greeting cards and just five Earth Day e-messages.

 

Still, it is observed. President Obama gave an Earth Day address at a wind farm in Newton, Iowa, proving that his administration has risen above petty irony. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicts that by Earth Day next year, we’ll be celebrating climate change legislation, although it’s not yet clear who will be charged with getting Mother Nature to fall in line – or what we do if she doesn’t.

 

So if  Baby Boomers are distressed that Earth Day observances are somewhere between filing income taxes and colonoscopy on the scales of enjoyment, they can still take heart.  In spite of everything, everyone on the planet will one day be One With Mother Earth.

 

And the actuarial tables suggest that for most of us, it’s coming sooner than we think.

 

 

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Labor Awakes to Immigration Reform At Last

 

 

 

You remember Illegal Immigrants, don’t you?

 

Before the 2008 election, the 12 million or so mostly Mexican souls who live and work in the United States illegally were a hot-button issue. The Bush Administration addressed the issue on multiple fronts:

 

·        They tried to pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform with all the political grace and skill of a dog trying to pass a swallowed peachpit – and got about the same result.

·        They built walls on the border, ignoring the irony that the laborers building the walls were often illegal immigrants. The net effect of the walls was to boost ladder sales in Mexico.

·        They raided homes and factories in the dead of night or in mid-shift, spreading the kind of terror in the name of the law that Hitler and Stalin would have approved.  The net effect of that was to produce a groundswell of folks reminding the Bush Administration that this was America, where that kind of crap wasn’t supposed to happen.

·        They encouraged the far-right fringe to howl “Deport ‘Em All!” to the entertainment of the Republican party faithful, whose idea of informed discussion is hearing whatever idea they’ve managed to hold repeated.

 

And then the economy went to Hell and the administration had to console itself with torturing the occasional captive at Gitmo while The Decider made excuses for not noticing that an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” meant the Constitution, not his rich cronies. No time for immigration reform.

 

Now the Obama Administration has found time to raise the issue again, and this time there’s a chance that something sensible might result. And no, that’s not because President Obama thought of it on his daily jog on the waters of the Potomac. It’s because Organized Labor, which went into a coma during the Reagan administration, has come awake at last.

 

This month, the Service Employees International Union and the Laborers International Union of North America called for a plan to bring the illegals out of the shadows, help them organize and fight for the rights of working men and women – in short, common sense immigration reform.

 

So did folks from the AFL-CIO, the United Farm Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers International.

 

But wait a minute – aren’t these the very folks whose jobs the illegal immigrants are supposed to be taking? Shouldn’t they be joining the moon-howl of the “Deport ‘Em All!” righties?

 

No, they say.

 

Hell no!

 

Labor has correctly figured out that allowing a permanent underclass to be exploited without protection of the law or hope for the future is a tool that hurts all workers and benefits only the rich employers. And the only way to fight that kind of oppression is for all workers to stick together. You remember – they used to call it solidarity.

 

I wrote a book along these lines, “Opening the Borders” (Level 4 Press, 2007), and there are others, but it’s not going to be books that finally bring about immigration reform. It’s going to be the working men and women of America and their unions realizing that anything that oppresses any part of labor is oppressing all of labor.

 

Yes we can! Si Se Puede!

 

And it’s damned well about time.

 

 

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What would Lydia Do?

 

 

Swirling economists and pundits heading for the hole in the bowl of their theories search frantically for meaning in the economic mess they failed to predict, but Lydia could save them a lot of trouble.

 

She’s busy, of course – the schedule of a modern four-year-old girl makes that of most senior executives look like a slacker’s journal. As her grandfather, I may have some clout with the Oracle of Oak Park, Ill. So if the puzzled chattering class asks me nicely, I may seek wisdom on their behalf.

 

And just to prove the goods, here’s a freebie from a visit last week. Asked what her Daddy, my son, did at work, Lydia patiently explained that he “works on the computer, talks on the phone and shakes peoples’ hands.”

 

My son is a marketing executive at a major Chicago firm, and his job description is no doubt lots more sophisticated, just as the economists’ theories of what got us into the current mess are much more sophisticated.

 

But that doesn’t mean Lydia isn’t square on the mark. Like many four year olds, she’s a dispassionate, clear observer of what she sees and a spin-free reporter. She doesn’t see “senior citizens” or “golden agers,” she sees old people. Or fat people. Or, if she were looking at those who either ran or advised the world’s major economies for the last decade, dumb people.

 

They would be dumb people because they usually don’t see what they’re looking at and seldom say what they see when they do.

 

Suppose Lydia were asked to look at how people made money.

 

Lydia would see people who make, sell, or do things other people will buy -- people who work.

 

She wouldn’t even notice the many folk who are handsomely paid to talk about those who work, and paid even more when they predict how they will talk tomorrow based upon how they talked today. Nor would she notice all those placing bets on the accuracy of the predictions. Told that these were the traders and analysts of a “market,” she would be disappointed to learn that none of them could actually sell her an apple or a candy bar.

 

Some market.

 

And because she is four years old, Lydia wouldn’t understand how a house could become much more valuable next week than it was this week, even though the house and the neighborhood around it hadn’t changed a bit. If someone attempted an explanation she’d say “You’re being silly!”

 

She would be right.

 

Blame the folks who’ve been running things, and blame the rest of us for letting them get away with it, but we have all been very, very silly. And now we’re in a Time Out and will have to stay there until we figure out how to reconnect value and reality.

 

Those who need hints can ask themselves “What would Lydia do?”

 

 

 

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