An “activist” is a vigorous advocate for a cause.  Famous activists have included Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Lech Walesa, and Leo Tolstoy.

Scott Roeder is not an activist. He is a “murderer,” or most accurately, an “assassin”.  Please amend your headlines accordingly.

I recognize that the appearance of objectivity (as opposed to actual objectivity) is important to journalists, but please, show a little perspective.

Next week, we’ll discuss the word “militant”.

“He wants to congratulate you on calling the Coakley election ten hours early.”

Congratulations to Boston’s excellent independent newspaper, the Boston Phoenix, for catching this.

(The Boston Globe is a wholly owned subsidiary of the New York Times Company.)

I’ve carped before about the prevailing legal illiteracy of the media, and the various atrocities against accuracy it produces. There are bright islands in the dark sea — journalists who educated themselves about law before reporting on it, and who take the time to craft a story that accurately conveys complex legal issues. Those journalists are a pleasure to read, and I often learn things from them. But they are not the norm. The norm is a mix of willful ignorance and laziness.

The Polanski affair reveals that there is another element to this prevailing legal illiteracy: some journalists’ unhealthy contempt for the intelligence of their audience. Patterico has pulled back the curtain to reveal a bit of this unbecoming contempt in the course of his dialogue with Washington Post blogger Anne Applebaum. Applebaum wrote a post on the Washington Post blog that made several mistakes about the case, and further said several things that were materially misleading. Among the mistakes and misleading statements: Applebaum said “there is evidence of judicial misconduct in the original trial” when there was no trial because Polanski entered a guilty plea. Applebaum wrote “there is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age,” which may be true, but is grotesquely misleading for a journalist to write without also noting that Polanski admitted under oath during his guilty plea that he knew the girl was thirteen at the time. Applebaum writes of “Polanski’s crime — statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl,” but fails to note that Polanski was charged with both statutory rape and rape, that the girl’s grand jury testimony made it clear that it was rape, and that even in her recent press statements she has maintained that she said no and Polanski ignored it. (Perhaps Applebaum, like Whoopi Goldberg, thinks it was not rape-rape.) And so on.

Patterico is an exceptionally able and dogged investigative blogger; I say that even though I frequently disagree with him on issues of substance. He has engaged in a dialogue with Applebaum culminating today in this post, in which Applebaum defends her inaccuracies in flat-out appalling terms.

I used the word “trial” in the layman’s sense – trial meaning a judicial investigation, court proceedings etc – and see no need to correct, as it would confuse the matter further.

The notion that a professional wordsmith can’t convey the difference between a trial and a guilty plea without “confusing the matter” is sheer lunacy. The credible possibilities are (1) Applebaum didn’t know it was a plea, because she didn’t investigate adequately before writing, making her careless; (2) Applebaum didn’t really grasp the difference between a trial or a plea, making her ignorant; or (3) Applebaum thought her readers couldn’t grasp the difference between a trial and a plea, making her contemptuous, or (4) Applebaum thought that accurately describing the event as a guilty plea would not serve the argument she was trying to make, making her dishonest. Based on the “confuse the matter’ language and general tone of her response to Patterico, I think the most likely explanation is #3: she thinks her audience is dumb.

Her defense of her statement about Polanski’s knowledge of the victim’s age is just as appalling:

Yes, there is “evidence” that Polanski did not know the girls age – or that he was told but did not believe it: He has told people since that, anyway. Pictures of her from the time show a girl who could be anywhere from 12-25. “There is evidence” is a broad expression and I see no need to correct that either, as again it would simply be confusing.

Either this is dishonest, or it reveals a paternalistic attitude towards readers. The most powerful evidence of whether or not Polanski knew that his victim was thirteen is his admission, under oath, that he knew. Saying that “there is evidence that he did not know” — without revealing that he admitted that he knew — is incredibly deceitful. If it’s not intentionally deceitful, then it reveals Applebaum’s attitude that, as a journalist, her role is to decide what facts are credible and what facts are not and present only the facts that she believes to her audience, even if that means concealing sworn testimony that contradicts her conclusion. Again, that suggests that she thinks that her audience is just too dumb to come to the correct conclusion themselves unless she sifts the evidence for them and presents it as an advocate.

Her big-picture conclusion is also revealing:

In any case, none of these particular issues has much to do with my main point, which were that this was a confusing story and that it’s very peculiar that the Swiss suddenly decided to arrest him now. I do not condone his original action in any way, and didn’t write that I did, either: However, I dislike the reduction of complicated stories to simple facts. And please don’t write back that “he drugged and raped a child” because that is not an accurate description of what happened.

But she unquestionably does like reducing complicated stories to simple facts. That’s what she did, and it’s clearly what she thinks it’s her role to do. She asserts that it’s not an accurate description to say that Polanski drugged and raped a child, yet that’s exactly what the child in question testified that he did. A responsible journalist might carefully marshal all of the facts and lay out a case of why the evidence does not support the victim’s grand jury testimony that Polanski gave her alcohol and a quaalude and then, over her repeated objections, penetrated her vaginally and anally. But that’s not what Applebaum’s doing, and not what she’s saying. Applebaum’s just saying that she has concluded that’s not the real story, and so she wants to report that conclusion to her readers. It appears that she does so based upon the presumption that her readers cannot evaluate that themselves based on the facts — that the evaluation would be, in Applebaum’s repeated words, “confusing.”

Between Patterico and Applebaum, Patterico comes out of this looking far more like a competent and trustworthy journalist. And, again, I say that as someone who frequently disagrees with — and sometimes really dislikes — his opinions. Read the series of posts; they are a great dissection of journalistic practice.

Want to promote a cause or trend?  Want to catapult your pet issue from obscurity to fame?  Why not befriend a reporter for the New York Times?

Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters.

Specifically, New York Times reporter Virginia Hefferman asked a bunch of her friends. Five of them had quit Facebook.  From this, she projects yet another nationwide trend story, an “exodus” in fact, even as she concedes:

The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July.

The site’s overall numbers, those stubborn facts of course, do not prevent Hefferman from characterizing Facebook as an impending “ghost town”.  Like Pauline Kael, who was shocked that George McGovern lost the 1972 election because no one she knew voted for Nixon, the Times is happy to project the future from the behavior of a few New Yorkers so isolated from the mainstream that, well, everyone I know has a subscription to the sunday New York Times.

Next trend projection from the Times:  Americans overwhelmingly reject the fiction of Stephen King and the music of Beyonce in favor of Don DeLillo and Polvo, because that’s what everyone I know is reading or playing.

Ken is a fortyish professional on the west coast.  Almost every day Ken reads something in the newspaper, or on the web, then pulls up the dashboard of his group weblog and writes about it.

Meanwhile, in the San Francisco bay area, Ezra, who works at a non-profit agency, has experiences with people in his life.  Invariably, Ezra writes a blogpost on a weblog he shares with other authors, to discuss his experiences.

And on the east coast, Patrick, a lawyer, copes with the demands of a law practice.  He remembers when things were less hectic, complaining that he had more free time before he joined the legion of Americans who now compulsively write about things and ideas at a group weblog.

These individuals are part of a national trend in which Americans of all ages, classes, races, and genders participate in the modern phenomenon that is the group weblog…

Sound contrived?  Well it is.  If one takes a sample of people who are strongly connected in some fashion, or have a deep interest in some activity, and excludes all others, their anecdotes can be spun as any sort of trend or a new problem society must face.  The story writes itself.

Of course if I do it, it’s dishonest wanking.  But when the New York Times does it, it’s quality journalism.

Newspapers are dying a slow, painful death, at least in their present form. Fortunately they have the chance for what we all aspire to: death with dignity, death on their own terms, death without desperate, pathetic bargaining with God.

Will they take that opportunity?

Oh, of COURSE not. Via Politico:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

Yep, you read that right. The Washington Post is selling its access to Obama Administration officials — facilitated by its journalists — to the lobbying community. The come-on is as whorish as anything ever uttered from a street corner through an open car window:

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of [Washington Post CEO and Publisher] Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less.”

Oooh, hotttttt. But wear a rubber. These folks ain’t clean.

Edited to add: Politico has edited its article to add the Washington Post’s response, which is, in so many words, that the flier was sent by their business division without the knowledge of the news division and without being vetted. I have two responses: (1) I find it very difficult to believe that the business division would commit specific personnel to participation in an event without getting some level of buy-in from the participants, especially with so much money on the line, and (2) even if it was only the business division’s idea, the business division is part of the enterprise and makes major decisions impacting the state of journalism at the Post all the time, and this incident speaks volumes.

Edited again: the Twitter feed at #WaPoDeals is quickly becoming pants-wetting hilarious.

Another edit: The WaPo editorial response.

In the gossip-driven feeding frenzy that keeps alive the tawdry tale of rising and declining wannabe John Edwards (now with video), the New York Daily News wins quip of the day :

Hunter had been hired by the Edwards campaign to videotape the candidate’s movements, but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform.

The commodification of sexual scandal is nothing new, of course, and in times like these more than ever the media are motivated to regard as “news” whatever will maximize sales.  Thus, there’s a regrettable tendency to spew rather than eschew.

What’s cheapened in yellowing press, beyond the players’ tattered reputations, is a factor arguably worth conserving: the vitality of sexual allusion as a literary device.

For some of their puissance, these worthy tropes depend on indirection– a wink, a nod, a knowing glance.  But in a cultural milieu where everyone seems to say entirely too much altogether, and where even the king is in the altogether, it’s hard for prose to play allusively without seeming turgid.

So it goes, too, with visual and spatial art.  Around 1920, that brash jokester Duchamp tagged a mustachioed Mona with a vulgar schoolyard pun.

Marcel Duchamp, ca. 1919 and then on and on.

(For the Gallically disinclined: reading the letters aloud in French makes one say “Elle a chaud au cul” — an observation unsuited to polite company.  French lends itself to this sort of pun, as a legion of Speak-and-Spell-wielding youth will testify.)

On a mission to shock the bourgeoisie, Duchamp kicked off a new wave in the longtime cheapening of time-honored bawd.  Just prior to this, but almost entirely without force in Duchamp’s proto-postmodern context, was the sexual allusiveness of Degas:

Degas, Dancers at the Bar, 1900, Phillips Collection

So frequent were his graphical forays into the world of dance that a representation by Degas of some ballerina stretching thus, or adjusting her slipper, or otherwise assuming a complex or lyrical stance seems straightforwardly representational.  Similarly simple seem the shiny statuettes (by the seashore):

Degas, Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot, ca. 1900, Metropolitan Museum

We’re in territory not far from Duchamp but several steps removed from the schoolyard.  In French, the expression “prendre son pied” (to take one’s foot) means “to experience pleasure” and has the specifically sexual connotation of orgasm.  This erotic idiom is often used figuratively nowadays to express with hyperbole any sort of pleasure at all– Q: “Did you like the new Star Trek movie?”  A: “Ah oui, j’ai pris mon pied!”.  (This is similar to the cavalier way English speakers toss around the suffix “-gasm”, as in “Geekgasm“.)

By way of this idiom, Degas invests some, and therefore all, of his graphical and plastic dancers with another layer of allusion to intensify the already erotic connotations of classical dance.  The indirection is not subtle, but it is somewhat less obvious and grating than “LHOOQ” since the foot-touching gesture makes literal sense on its own terms within the theatrical context: sometimes, a touching of the foot is just a touching of the foot.

This brings us, of course, to pirates.  How did it come to pass that “to take one’s foot” became an idiom for orgasm?  Prior to the Revolution, and therefore prior to the metric system, the French used measurements akin to the imperial system.  When corsairs went to divide their spoils after a stint of rapine, each would naturally demand his portion of the whole.  The allotted part, by convention, was a foot-high mound of booty.  No, really.

Taking his foot of gold was the pirate’s pleasure.  Since not everything that happens in Tortuga stays in Tortuga, taking the foot gradually became anyone’s pleasure in anything, and eventually ended up a punchline in Amélie.  And just as a noble, sexy, piraty bit of bawd has by now been stripped bare by its broad overuse in French, so too has the vitality of allusiveness in our mother tongue suffered under the weight of too popular a press.  We’ve seen enough; it’s time to close your eyes and think of English.

So let’s insist that the media fanning the torrid flames of political passion and self-immolation avert their gaze from gossip.  Let’s demand actual journalistic attention to news worthy of the name, even if the purveyors of parley have to trim their sales.

Eventually, you have to put your foot down.

Radley Balko, our favorite journalist, chronicles forty years of hysterical, overwrought covers from Time Magazine, warning of the imminent doom facing America from threats as varied as online pornography and Dungeons & Dragons.

Yet somehow, America hangs on.

These covers, and Balko’s commentary, are a bracing reminder that the interests and agenda of the media do not necessarily correspond with those of the public at large.  You need reliable news about what’s going on in the world.  Time magazine and the rest of the media need to sell advertising or to keep eyes glued to commercials.  If that means feeding you horror stories about the dangers of SATAN!, so be it.

An article last March 31, 1933, titled “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving,” by Walter Duranty of the New York Times, implied that reports of a famine in the Ukraine engineered by the Soviet government were political fabrications arising from a diplomatic dispute between Great Britain and the Stalin regime.  The article stated:

In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with ‘thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation.

and went on to imply that stories of man-made famine and genocide in the Ukraine were exaggerations or false.

Since the publication of “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving,” several readers have written to complain about the accuracy of the article.  After careful review, we conclude that in certain respects, the article appears to have been in error, in that it now appears that an engineered famine did take place in the Ukraine.  We further note that some Ukrainians do refer to this event as a “genocide.”

However, we reject any implication that follow-up reporting from the Times on the controversy surrounding this issue should refer to previous Times reports which cast allegations of genocide into doubt, or that the Times should make some gesture of apology, such as disavowing the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Duranty for excellence in reporting on the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, we regret the error.

It continues to amaze me that anyone familiar enough with the internet to send an email or comment on a web site thinks that it could possibly be a good strategy to say “shut up or I will sue you/report you/retaliate against you.”

Case in point: Kathy Kelly of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana.

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Does the New York Times, which itself has a pretty horrible environmental record, have any business preaching to Americans on the virtues of rough, sandy, irritating recycled toilet paper?

Unlike some, I’ll mourn when the Times goes bankrupt, as it will.  But I’ll understand.

Via the John Locke Foundation.

We’re told that bloggers are not journalists because real old-media journalists use real sources and stuff and bloggers just look things up on Wikipedia.

Via Regret the Error, I see the cracks continue to appear in that particular facade. See, an internet prankster saw that the heroically named Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jakob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg was to be named the new German economy minister. The prankster decided to see if anyone would notice if he altered Karl-Theodor’s Wikipedia entry to throw an extra “Wilhelm” in the middle.

No one did.

In fact, multiple German media sources, reporting on the appointment, copied the embellished name from Wikipedia and ran it.

This is my favorite part:

Along with other papers across the country, both Bild and Spiegel Online published corrections, but their tone seemed less apologetic than irritated at having had their reliance on Wikipedia revealed. On Thursday Bild wrote that the 37-year-old had been the “victim of a falsification” that many media sources, “including Bild, fell into.”

Yes, because when you can’t crib out of Wikipedia, what is the world coming to?

Sheer brilliance.  Patterico, one of our favorite bloggers, is set to interview Greg Packer, the most ubiquitous “man on the street” in the history of journalism.  According to Packer’s Wikipedia biography (yes, this average “man on the street” has a Wikipedia entry):

Gregory F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), an American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York and a 1983 graduate of Huntington High School located on Long Island’s North Shore. He has been quoted in more than 100 articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a “man on the street” rather than a newsmaker or expert). According to the Nexis database from 1994 through 2004, Packer has been quoted or photographed at least 16 separate times by the Associated Press, 14 times by Newsday, 13 times by the New York Daily News, and 12 times by the New York Post. His strategy is to appear at a likely news event and offer short statements to reporters. Although he always gives his real name, he has admitted to making things up to get into the paper.

And Packer has been interviewed many times since 2004.  Among bloggers who scorn lazy journalism, spotting and ridiculing a Packer interview is almost a sport.  Have reporters never heard of Google, Yahoo, or even Nexis?

What would you ask Greg Packer, given the opportunity?

As a lawyer, and as someone who writes about legal issues as a hobby, I’m constantly frustrated by the fundamental legal illiteracy of the media. That illiteracy is made up of one part ignorance to two parts sheer laziness — most of the legal issues that the media gets wrong are not really that complex, and most reporters could get it right if the were just willing to do a bit of digging.

It would be bad enough if a legally illiterate media merely misinformed the public. But the media’s illiteracy allows it to mislead and frighten the public with various legal chimeras. Case in point: a recent Los Angeles Times article suggesting that the PATRIOT Act has led to people being classified as terrorists for misbehaving on airplanes.

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I just heard of a wonderful, magnificent scam, on NPR’s food and cooking show The Splendid Table (which actually isn’t at all like those old Saturday Night Live skits).

What does it take for a restaurant to win a Wine Spectator magazine award for excellence?  $250 and a website.  No wine needed.  No restaurant needed:

Evidently, the most crucial requirement to win this award is the $250.  Spread among the nearly 4000 restaurants that applied, and almost all won awards, that’s a cool mill.

Wine Spectator, while admitting that its staff never visited about 200 award-winning restaurants, naturally denounces this as the “publicity-seeking” equivalent of a troll.  A fancy way of saying, “We got caught, but we’re not going to apologize and make it right.  We’re not about to own up and fire everyone involved.”

Which is precisely what the magazine should do.  “And by the way, did we mention that balloting for the 2009 Wine Spectator awards for excellence is about to begin?  Send your restaurant’s application, with the processing fee of $250, and we’ll notify you if you’ve won an award.”