Category Archives: media

05.15.13
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A little late now (in more ways than one), but …

Twenty-five years ago today, I graduated from UW–Madison with a double-major Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and political science.

Twenty-five years later, we are right in the middle of college graduation season, with thousands of college students graduating with journalism degrees.

Ben Bromley has some bad news for them:

College kids are sharp cookies, and likely are looking to land someplace more stable and secure than journalism. Someplace like the edges of the Earth’s tectonic plates.

But there still are a few delightfully demented youngsters seeking newspaper jobs, God bless ’em. They’ll bring to the nation’s newsrooms a sense of optimism and enthusiasm most newspaper veterans lost sometime during the second Bush administration. But on the down side, they’ll remind we lifers how old we are — and how much the business has changed since our bylines first appeared in print.

Nearly 20 summers ago I interned at my hometown paper, a country weekly. This was a couple years before computerized page design became common, and long before the advent of digital photography. When I describe this bygone period to our new hires, they look at me as if I am reporting live from the Paleozoic Era. “What was it like commuting via woolly mammoth? Did you write your first city council story on a cave wall?”

Back then, we printed out articles and headlines on paper. Editors then fed the printouts into a machine that coated them with wax, and placed them on pieces of paperboard the size of a news page. Ah, the smells of the 1990s newsroom: melted wax, ashtrays and unshowered police beat reporters.

That era’s tools of the trade now seem as ancient as spear heads. We shot photos on film. We used a device called a proportion wheel to size our pictures — remember, this was before you could Photoshop your face onto an image of Channing Tatum’s body in two minutes flat — and a pica pole to measure out everything on the page. Every now and then, I dig the pica pole and proportion wheel out of my desk and ask newbies to identify them. They sit silently and blink, certain I am holding artifacts on loan from the Smithsonian. …

We thought it was pretty slick in the late 1990s when we could dial up to the Internet and send our pages to the printing plant without leaving our desks. But to kids today, the sound of a 56K modem connecting — “ba donka donka donk … ksssshhhhhhhhh” — is about as modern as a pay phone.

Even the borderline burnouts still believe journalists sometimes can change how the world works. But most of the time, the world changes how we work.

I wish you good luck, class of 2013, and I ask that show your veteran colleagues due respect. Remember, one day you’ll be the dinosaur.

Here’s the thing about Ben: The “hometown paper” he interned at was the Grant County Herald Independent, where I started work May 23, 1988. Before he was an intern, he was a Lancaster High School graduate who was one of the creators of LHS’ underground newspaper, the Arrow Free Press. I did a story about the Arrow Free Press. (The next issue, the Free Press’ staff box was called the “Steve Prestegard Fan Club.) So if Ben is from the Paleozoic Era holding artifacts on loan from the Smithsonian, what does that make me?

Young journalists do not ask me for advice. If they did (other than asking them if they really, really wanted to get into this silly line of work), I would say that journalists need to do four things —

  1. Be willing to work long and irregular hours …
  2. … with little feedback (and what feedback you get is often negative).
  3. Have skills in multiple media, and be technologically savvy enough to use print, audio, video, online and social media. (For that matter, journalists need to be able to use media that haven’t even been developed yet. No one had heard of the Internet in 1988.)
  4. Be entrepreneurial. The barriers to entry in journalism are lower than they’ve been since probably the days of “Poor Richard’s Almanack.” But journalism schools still send into the world more graduates than jobs exist for those graduates and the ink-stained wretches like Bromley and myself. I was told in college that being fired (assuming it wasn’t for incompetence) was a badge of journalism honor — you know, sacrificing your job for the sanctity of your work, or some crap like that. Chances are, though, that whether by choice or not, a journalist today will be unemployed at least once during his or her career, so having freelancing skills — that is, the ability to turn your journalistic abilities into a business, with everything that entails — will become more and more important.

Would I have heeded any of this advice in 1988? Definitely number three. (I’ve always done sportscasting as a side to my regular employment. Given what a goofy profession radio is, I’m probably happy that I’ve never worked full-time in radio.) I knew number one, and probably had figured out number two. (What happens after you get a publication  done? You start working on the next edition, unless (A) you’re leaving it or (B) it’s leaving you.) Having had no experience or interest in number four, the concept of being “entrepreneurial” would have sailed right over my head, and I’m taller than  most people.

I’ll probably have more on this next week, when I celebrate, if that’s what you want to call it, 25 years in full-time journalism.

05.13.13
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How to change the culture

Jonah Goldberg:

… a couple of weeks ago I was on a panel at Hillsdale College. It was sponsored by my friends at Liberty21, a scrappy new think tank.

The topic: “Can Conservatives Reclaim the Culture?”

First, I am not sure that conservatives ever claimed the culture in the first place. Sure, in retrospect it almost always seems like the past was more conservative than the present. But that doesn’t mean the conservatives were dominating the culture in the past. It might mean that we’ve just gotten even more liberal since then.

But we can debate all that another time. The thing I wanted to get to is that I think the way the Right talks about popular culture is deeply flawed. If conservatives are going to persuade non-conservatives to become more conservative — which is nearly the whole frickin’ point of the conservative movement — then going around wagging our fingers at every popular movie and TV show is probably not the best way to do it.

One way you persuade people to become more conservative is to explain to them how conservative they already are and build out from there. Persuasion is hard when your main argument is: “You’re a complete idiot and everything you think you know is ridiculous and/or evil.”

Moreover, there’s a Jedi-like Manichaeism running through youthful liberalism: The Light Side is liberal; the Dark Side is conservative. It’s like with little kids; tell them some food is good for them or that some dish has vegetables in it, and they’ll preemptively hate it and refuse to eat it like a jihadi at Gitmo dodging a spoonful of peach cobbler. Tell college kids that something is conservative and they’ll immediately assume it’s not for them. We can spend all day talking about how stupid this pose is, but that won’t do much for the cause.

The better way is to identify things that are popular and celebrate the conservative aspects of them. For instance, as I’ve written before, whenever a sitcom character gets pregnant, the producers make sure to talk up the character’s “right to choose.” But, at least since the painfully unfunny show “Maude,” the character always chooses to keep the baby, and once she does she acts like a pro-lifer. She talks to the fetus. She cares about what she eats. While NARAL considers what is in her belly to be nothing more than uterine contents, the mother-to-be gives those contents a name and acts like it’s already a member of the family. I understand a big part of the pro-life agenda is to make abortion illegal. I get that. But if you could get more people to think abortion is wrong it would A) be easier to make it illegal and B) less necessary to do so.

Or just think about crime. Going by what liberals say they believe about the criminal-justice system, never mind the War on Terror, they should be denouncing vast swaths of what Hollywood churns out. Cops play by their own rules. Good guys use outright torture to get valuable information in order to save lives. But with the exceptions of 24 and Zero Dark Thirty I can’t think of a time when the Left seriously complained about any of it.

Now if you point this out to some liberals, they’ll say that’s because “it’s just TV” or “it’s just a movie.” But you know that if a TV show or movie came out demonizing gays, they’d be screaming bloody murder.

My point is that the Left has quietly surrendered the argument over big chunks of the popular culture, and because they don’t complain about it, conservatives don’t press our advantage. We spend too much time reacting to liberal bait and liberal cues. We act like the opposition, being more against them than for anything of our own. One small place to start is to understand this is our culture too.

05.08.13
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Holy entertainment media, Batman!

Christian Schneider has, shall we say, an interesting theory:

One year ago, before facing a recall election, Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker traveled to Chicago to give a speech to the Illinois Policy Institute. Following his talk, Walker fielded a question from a woman who, citing a recent movie on education reform, asked whether Walker was the “Superman” she was waiting for. Walker chuckled, then said he was more partial to Batman.

With this admission, Walker stepped squarely into a debate that takes place exclusively in the dark corners of the Internet, where politics nerds and comic book dorks meet to clandestinely debate the political ideologies of superheroes. Which superhero a given politician idolizes may actually tell us a little bit about his or her political philosophy, given one undeniable fact:

Superman is a liberal, and Batman is a conservative.

As noted in Glen Weldon’s superb new book “Superman: The Unauthorized Biography,” the Man of Steel has deep roots in FDR’s New Deal era. Just start with a comparison of the two heroes’ professions: Superman’s alter-ego, Clark Kent, is a member of the dreaded liberal mainstream media, and his father, Jor-El, was one of Krypton’s most noted academics and scientists. Bruce Wayne is a Scarlet Pimpernel-esque billionaire playboy whose father made his money in the real estate market before the economy collapsed (sound familiar?) and whose company, Wayne Enterprises, manufactures military weapons. Superman hangs out with reporters; Batman’s best buddy is a cop. …

Sometimes, Superman gets directly involved in Democratic politics – in the early 1960s, he befriends President John F. Kennedy and trusts him enough to divulge his real identity. Kennedy goes so far as to disguise himself as Clark Kent to fool Lois Lane while Superman rushes off on a mission. (In 1986, Superman meets Ronald Reagan, but the storyline makes Reagan seem like a buffoon.)

Batman, on the other hand, is less of a believer in the inherent good of man. In the early Bob Kane comics, Batman was cruel, often mutilating his opponents before killing them.

And Batman’s opponents are illustrative, too. Ra’s al-Ghul is an environmentalist who wants to destroy humanity and its inherent decadence. By fighting him, Batman is essentially defending wealth and free markets. Other notable Batman foes include a who’s who of lefty bad guys, including another tree hugger (Poison Ivy), a college professor (the Scarecrow) and an occupier with a respiratory problem (Bane).

The most recent slate of Batman movies from director Christopher Nolan are seen by many as sympathetic to Republican politics of the past decade. In “The Dark Knight,” Batman is reviled by the public as he wages a “war on terror” to keep Gotham’s citizens safe. (Nolan might as well have called the hero “Bat W. Man.”)

In “The Dark Knight Rises,” Batman takes on a gang of filthy hippies who occupy the stock exchange and fight for the “oppressed” against the 1%. We find out that Gotham fell into disrepair because Bruce Wayne’s profits were down and he didn’t have enough to spend on charitable activities to keep at-risk youths out of trouble. Batman cherishes order; his opponents relish revolution.

(What if you’re a reporter who hangs around cops? What’s your ideology then?)

On Facebook Schneider added to his righty-superhero list industrialist Tony “Iron Man” Stark and Spiderman. He added today:

First, it is true that each superhero morphs over time.  Different writers and illustrators bring different sensibilities.  As Glen Weldon points out in his book, by the 1950s, Superman had morphed from an FDR New Dealer to more of an Eisenhower Republican. (Known these days as a “Democrat.”)  By the 1970s, Superman was seen as part of the “Establishment,” and his writers struggled to keep up with the revolutionary times – often attempting ridiculous storylines dealing with racial issues.  In the days of counter-culture, Superman was the “culture.”

But that doesn’t change the fundamentals of who each character is and how their origin stories depart.  There are simply too many political differences between each superhero for this all to be mere coincidence.

And then Superman switched from being an Eisenhower Republican to a Kennedy Democrat. Really.

Schneider quotes the New York Times’ Ross Douthat:

Across the entire trilogy, what separates Bruce Wayne from his mentors in the League of Shadows isn’t a belief in Gotham’s goodness; it’s a belief that a compromised order can still be worth defending, and that darker things than corruption and inequality will follow from putting that order to the torch. This is a conservative message, but not a triumphalist, chest-thumping, rah-rah-capitalism one: It reflects a “quiet toryism” (to borrow from John Podhoretz’s review) rather than a noisy Americanism, and it owes much more to Edmund Burke than to Sean Hannity.

My personal favorite, of course, comes from journalism as does Clark Kent, but at the top of the management chart:

05.02.13
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And don’t let the door hit you on the way out

Hot Air passes on a Huffington Post (or is it Puffington Host, Mr. Taranto?) report that half of the staff of the Los Angeles Times has threatened to quit if the Koch brothers — who by the way employ more than 2,000 Wisconsinites, most at Georgia–Pacific — purchase the Times.

At a Los Angeles Times in-house awards ceremony a week ago, columnist Steve Lopez addressed the elephant in the room.

Speaking to the entire staff, he said, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Austin Beutner’s group.” No one raised their hands.

“Raise you hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Rupert Murdoch.” A few people raised their hands.

Facing the elephant trunk-on, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by the Koch brothers.” About half the staff raised their hands. …

As Tribune Co. emerges from a four-year bankruptcy, the predominantly Democratic city is quivering at the rumor that libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch may be interested in buying the LA Times. The brothers are believed to be the only group prepared to buy all eight Tribune papers, including the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant, as a package — how Tribune would like to sell them.

The ownership that most Angelenos seem to favor is a coalition of LA billionaires who have expressed interest, led by former Democratic mayoral candidate Austin Beutner and including prominent Democratic donor Eli Broad.

Many say local ownership is preferable because there’s more accountability and involvement. Local owners know and care about the city. Because they live here, they’re concerned and accessible. They won’t tarnish the paper, because they have local reputations to uphold. It would restore the family feel that the paper had for more than 60 years under the founding leadership of the Chandler family.

However, local ownership can have a dark side. Until the 1960s, the Chandlers used the Times to promote real estate development and Republican ideals. Similarly, when local real estate investor Doug Manchester bought the San Diego Union Tribune in 2011, he turned it into a platform for local business interests. To the dread of most Angelenos, Manchester has expressed interest in buying the LA Times, though he’s not considered a frontrunner.

The rest of the Puffington Host piece is a slurry tank full of speculation about how the Kochs might turn the Times into their own libertarian mouthpiece, vs. how other potential owners might turn the Times into their own fill-in-your-favorite-pejorative mouthpiece. (Including support of, horror of horrors, business and development. The irony of “a coalition of LA billionaires” being considered more acceptable is lost on the Puffington Host.)

Big Journalism asks a self-explanatory question:

Brent Bozell, president of Media Research Center, appeared on The Kudlow Report, Wednesday on CNBC to point out the double standard in the media when outrage is expressed over the politically conservative duo owning the newspaper.

“If you’re going to say that a known conservative entity like the Koch brothers should not be getting into the business of dictating what a news operation should do, what does that tell you about Warren Buffett?” alluding to the multi-millionaire, Democratic Party supporter and activist who owns many newspaper companies. 

The useful part of the Puffington Host piece is the history of the Times as what was considered a conservative newspaper under the Chandlers. (The Los Angeles PBS station did an excellent documentary on the Chandler family.) The Times helped launch the political careers of, among others, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The Times was not taken seriously nationally, however, until, under publisher Otis Chandler, the Times stopped letting ideology determine its news coverage. (The same applies to the Tribune when its publisher was the isolationist Robert McCormick.)

I can’t comment on the other potential owners save one, but it’s pretty obvious that the Kochs didn’t amass their wealth by letting their personal views get in the way of making the right business decisions. (Ditto another potential owner, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.) The opinion page (and the Times’ is about as liberal as it gets) is one or two pages out of a daily newspaper. (And the Southland already has a pretty conservative/libertarian opinion page at the Orange County Register.) A newspaper gets a reputation for good or ill based on how it covers the news of the area it serves, not for the ideology of its owners, or what’s said on its opinion page.

Here’s an Economics 101 lesson for liberals and the media: A business product or service is purchased when the buyer and seller agree on price for what the buyer gets. If the buyer doesn’t want it for the seller’s price, the seller doesn’t sell. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are successful because readers and advertisers like what they’re buying. The Kochs are successful because their companies’ customers like their companies’ products and services. (Particularly in the case of Fox News, which is getting higher ratings than the better-established CNN or MSNBC.)

What about the Times staffers? (None of whom are entitled to their jobs, because no one is entitled to their preferred job, or in fact any job.) Hot Air answers:

Call their bluff. Wherever you stand politically, we can all agree on that, right? If you’re a liberal, you want to see the fair, balanced, impartial LA Times newsroom rise as one and walk out in protest of having to work for libertarian oligarKKKs. If you’re a conservative, you want them gone for different reasons, partly as a smoking gun of bias and partly because it’ll clear the decks to hire more neutral reporters. And if they don’t walk out, that’s okay — their cheap bravado will have been exposed in all its cheapness.

Here’s another econ lesson: The value of an employee is how much it costs (financially and otherwise) to replace that employee. If the Puffington Host’s prediction is correct that half of the Times newsroom would depart, here’s one possible (though hysterically argued) result:

Perhaps one brave Times reporter would go public with a story killed by the new owners. She would lose her job, and it would be written about in The New York Times. And, it would pressure the LA Times owners to be more objective. But many of the people working at the Times support a family or are still developing their careers and can’t afford to lose their jobs — especially in a town with few job opportunities for newspaper journalists.

If half the staff quit under Koch ownership, that would leave half as many people likely to stand up to the owners — probably the half that would be more likely to do so. Not to mention, it would be a tremendous loss of talented journalists who have built a wealth of LA knowledge and relationships over years of experience.

Care to guess how long it would take the Times to replace half their staffers? Given that journalism schools keep pumping out more graduates than journalism has jobs, not very long at all. (I might even take a job offer were it not for the fact that anymore California ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.)

There are people who work for much smaller publications than the Times who do work that as good, if not better. The Times also is likely to have more newsroom staffers than it actually needs, particularly given that it is a — surprise! — union newsroom. Losing institutional memory of Los Angeles would not be a good thing, but to claim that half of the newsroom’s choosing to leave would be “a tremendous loss of talented journalists” is an assertion without evidence.

The other obvious point is belief without evidence that the Kochs would automatically be bad newspaper owners is based on their politics. That is, as usual, a way to dismiss any viewpoint left of the Puffington Host’s as illegitimate. That opinion ignores the fact that there are millions of Californians whose political views are closer to the Kochs’ views than the views expressed on the Times editorial page.

Perhaps the Kochs should purchase the Times and watch some number of its staffers leave. (Or if the Times purchase doesn’t work out, perhaps the Kochs can look at two other media companies not doing very well these days: Journal Communications, my former employer — a place that was better to work at under employee ownership than as a publicly traded company — and the publisher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, or Lee Newspapers, publishers of the (formerly conservative) Wisconsin State Journal, La Crosse Tribune and Kenosha News.) When I was in UW journalism school, “journalist” was defined as “an out-of-work reporter.”

04.26.13
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Steve designs an SUV

The idea for this exercise came from a Motor Trend Classic story:

Envision this: You’re the editor of Motor Trend. And, naturally, you have lots of friends in automotive journalism. You see them at industry events, major auto shows, and press launches of important new vehicles, typically at exotic locations here in the U.S. and overseas. Now imagine inviting those friends to a bar after the first day of the New York auto show in April with these words: “Let’s design a dream car.” You’ll build a driveable version in less than six months, in time to be unveiled on a turntable in Los Angeles in November.

Sound improbable? Of course. But, believe it or not, this scenario transpired 45 years ago. Instead of New York, it was in London, England. The publication was The Daily Telegraph Magazine, and the editor was John Anstey. The car was a collaboration among auto journalists, Anstey, Jaguar, and the design house of Bertone, and was known as the 1967 Jaguar Bertone Pirana Coupe.

In March 1967, the increasingly powerful Anstey cooked up another wild scheme to promote his weekend magazine, gathering a group of motoring writers at that year’s Geneva motor show and asking them, in effect, “If you could build your dream car, what would it be?” The group of motoring scribes examined what was then the state-of-the-art in automotive design, culling elements from Aston Martin, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Lotus, and Maserati to come up with their ideal 2+2 Grand Touring coupe. But this was no mere pipe dream. After pushing the magazine’s senior management, Anstey actually obtained the budget to push the “dream coupe” vision forward. What’s more, he had the audacity to promise delivery of an actual car in just six months.

Sad to say, no such scenario presented itself when I was a business magazine editor. But the concept of this story was so captivating that I decided to create my own 2+2 as the one-man design team.

That, however, got waylaid by another idea — to create the ultimate sport utility vehicle. Not something like a Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator, but the original intention of the British Land Rover Range Rover — a vehicle that farmers could use for their daily work and take the family somewhere for the weekend. So it needs to be on- and off-road capable, but not Spartan.

Range Rover, you ask? According to Range Rover Classic, the original Range Rover was designed as a “Four-In-One car” …

  •  ”A luxury car”
  •  ”A performance car”
  •  ”An estate car”
  •  ”A cross country car”

… or, put another way in brochures …

  1. “It is a seven-days-a-week luxury motor car for all business, social and domestic purposes.”
  2. “It is a leisure vehicle that will range far and wide on the highways and noways of the world in pursuit of its owner’s activities and interests.”
  3. “It is a high-performance car for long distance travel in the grand manner.”
  4. “It is a working cross-country vehicle with a payload capacity of 1200 lb.”

… all by the definitions of 1970 Great Britain. (An “estate car” there is a station wagon here, but you knew that.) Today’s definition of “luxury motor car” generally does not include nonexistent air conditioning, rudimentary carpeting or a lack of automatic transmission choice, but none of those were available on the original Range Rover. Nor were four doors, until 1982.

I assume the Range Rover was developed because of a lack of British pickup truck tradition. In part for that reason, the Range Rover got some interesting uses:

The Range Rover became very popular as a police vehicle to patrol motorways (“freeways” over here).

Fire truck. Notice the extra rear axle.

Think of this as the six-wheel Vista Cruiser edition.

Before the Nissan Murano convertible SUV, there was …

The other inspiration is the Mercedes–Benz Geländewagen, developed by, of all people, the Shah of Iran. So obviously it had some military uses:

Canadian military, with the roof machine gun option.

Norwegian military.

Also with six wheels.

We’ll call our SUV the Cross Country, the former name of Rambler station wagons in the 1960s, because this SUV is intended to meet that purpose. What I have in mind bridges the gap between SUV and truck (with a specific retro design feature in mind), for those who might need either at some point.

(Unfortunately, since I can’t really draw, I have to describe, instead of show, what I have in mind.)

One goal here is to offer a few choices for the buyer. You can buy a Chevrolet Suburban, Ford Expedition or Jeep Grand Cherokee with any engine and transmission combination you like, as long as it’s a gas engine attached to an automatic transmission. GM and Ford no longer build pickups with manual transmissions, and the only Dodge — I mean Ram — you can buy with a proper transmission is the 3500 attached to a Cummins diesel.

The gas motor choice is GM’s LS3 E-Rod V-8, which is rated at 430 horsepower and 450 pound-feet of torque. Why 430 horsepower in an SUV? That’s 20 fewer horsepower than the answer-in-search-of-a-question Lamborghini LM002, the 12-cylinder four-door pickup.

The diesel choice is the Navistar Maxxforce 7, which has 300 horsepower and 660 pound-feet of torque. (The diesel was formerly used in Ford Super Duty pickups until Ford designed its own diesel. Having driven a Maxxforce-equipped moving truck, I am much more impressed with Navistar engines than with, say, Isuzu diesels.)

The manual transmission would be the ZF 6S700, which offers a low first gear and an overdrive sixth. The automatic would also be from ZF, the AS Tronic 700.

The Cross County would be a four-wheel-drive, not all-wheel-drive, vehicle most likely, for heavier-duty truck-like uses. I think independent front and rear suspension works better for handling, with (based on the Range Rover) lots of suspension travel built in, and, borrowing from the Corvette, magnetic shock absorbers with adjustable stiffness control inside the Cross Country.

Inside would have the usual SUV accouterments (air, stereo/navigation system, sunroof), with the extra proviso of a lot of gauges, which are always preferable to idiot lights. (The first Range Rovers had just a speedometer, fuel gauge and temperature gauge; the lack of tachometer is strange for a manual-transmission-only vehicle).

About that design feature: The first Range Rovers and G-wagons were two-doors. Four-doors are all they sell now. (G-wagons were available in two- and four-door versions and as convertibles.) You’d probably want at least an option for a third row of seats. But, you think to yourself, how do you get the utility of a pickup truck and the seating capacity of an SUV?

My first idea was to adapt the sliding roof design of the Studebaker Wagonaire and the GMC Envoy XUV. Those were huge failures in the marketplace, which is why despite seeming like a good idea, it apparently isn’t.

The roof of the first two generations (this is a 1977) of Chevrolet Blazers was removable.

The same was the case with the first Dodge Ramchargers. That, I think, solves the pickup-vs.-SUV issue. If you need the extra space, take off the top.

04.25.13
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Tributes to the old guys

I seem to be writing a lot of tributes to the “old guys” these days.

Last November, it was the first newspaper publisher to ever hire me.

Earlier this month, it was my friend Frank Bush.

This week, it’s Dick Brockman, the 31-year publisher of The Platteville Journal. Who, as a good newspaperman would, died in time to get in this week’s newspaper. (Media types appreciate that kind of irony and black humor.)

 

04.22.13
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Lessons from one week ago

Now that the second of the two Boston Marathon bombers has been captured …

… it’s time to evaluate.

That begins with law enforcement and intelligence, from Steve Spingola:

As far as the lock down, call it 20/20 hindsight, but the tactic itself may have actually helped the suspect elude capture, as thousands of eyes remained inside. Ironically, once the “stay sheltered” ban was lifted, a set of eyes observed something suspicious. Plus, this tactic sends a message to other wannabe Jihadists that they can shutter an entire metro area with a few pressure cookers.

Certainly, the boots to the ground teams on the street did an outstanding job. However, I think this case merits a thorough, top-to-bottom policy review. Once again, all the intelligence fusion centers, NSA electronic listening, etc. failed to provide the intelligence needed to prevent the attack. The shoe bomber hopped aboard an airliner undetected; the underwear bomber successfully took a commercial flight, even though he was on the no-fly list (due to his name being misspelled by one letter); while a bombing in Time Square was prevented by a faulty detention device and a vender who had spotted a suspicious SUV. In each of these instances, surveillance—as a method to prevent terror attacks—failed miserably.

So much for sacrificing liberty for security—a doctrine Benjamin Franklin warned against.

Sure, after the fact, video surveillance has proved valuable; although it appears private video footage broke the Boston case open. Moreover, during this investigation Americans learned that suspect #1 traveled overseas for six months, posted strange things on social media, and was red flagged by a foreign government (probably Russia), which asked the FBI to check into his activities. One would have thought suspect #1 would have been one of a hundred individuals fusion center operatives would have kept close tabs on.

So, the question needs to be asked: was the $500 billion our nation has spent since 9/11 to employ over 800,000 people and create a vast electronic intelligence apparatus worth the expense? …

What can the government do to prevent terrorism? Discontinue the surveillance of large swaths of the American populace, 99.999 percent of whom will never commit an act of terror, and, instead, focus our resources on those with a motive.  Think about it: how do the surveillance cameras mounted atop traffic control signals on 124th and Burleigh prevent acts of terrorism? Wasting taxpayer dollars to conduct surveillance of Americans diverts resources from the real problem: extremist groups and foreign nationals overstaying student visas that pose a real threat to this nation’s security.

As far as the media, they continue to report that this was the first terror attack since 9/11, which is simply Obama administration propaganda. Ft. Hood was a terrorist attack. As was the case in Boston, Hassan was radicalized from within and took his orders from afar. Classifying Ft. Hood as “work place violence” is akin to claiming that Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy is an immaculate conception.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza evaluates the media:

The events in Boston over the last four days have riveted the nation — and put journalism, the profession that I love, under the microscope.  I’ve been thinking about what lessons I can learn as a political reporter from everything that has happened over these last 96 hours. …

1. Better safe than sorry. For all of the things that reporters got right this week, the after-action report will focus on what we got wrong.  The reporting that a suspect had been taken into custody on Wednesday became a story of its own, a development that no serious journalist wants to see.

The reality of a news environment driven by Twitter (more on that below), cable television and constantly updating news on the web is that the desire to be first has become all-encompassing. Everyone, of course, still wants to get it right but in the race to be first judgment about being right can get skewed. …

2. Twitter is a reporter’s best friend…until it’s not. I am a big believer in the power of Twitter. I use it daily. I think it has revolutionized journalism (and news consumption generally) in ways we are just now beginning to grapple with and understand. And, as expected, Twitter was the de facto news source for many people — including most journalists not in Boston — this week.

That was a good thing — at times. Twitter helped me understand where the bombs had gone off, sent me to reporters on the ground in Watertown Thursday night and provided images of an empty Boston and the SWAT teams searching for the suspects.

It was a bad thing too. The immediacy of Twitter means that one moment of bad judgment by someone with lots of followers (or even someone without lots of followers) can distort coverage for minutes or hours. …

So, trust but verify.

3. Primary sources matter…: Because of the general dearth of experts on any subject — the Boston bombings included — it’s important to identify the people who really are authoritative sources and give them priority.

So, what the FBI and the Boston police department say (or don’t) matters more than what some random person on Twitter — even one affiliated with a news organization — says or what an anonymous source might tell a reporter on TV. …

4. …and so do good reporters: People who follow me on Twitter know that i have spent much of the week praising NBC’s Pete Williams who has been the star that has emerged from this dismal chain of events.

Pete stood out by reporting only what he KNEW to be true and making clear that there was plenty he didn’t know. Ditto the Post’s Sari Horwitz and Doug Frantz. (One of the bad tendencies of journalists is an unwillingness to acknowledge what we don’t know. The truth is NO ONE expects us to know everything about every topic.)

Good reporters are the ones who take in all of the incoming — from Twitter, from their own sources, from colleagues — and filter out what doesn’t matter or can’t be proven. “The essence of journalism is the process of selection,” Williams noted in a National Journal profile. He couldn’t be more right. Judgment — knowing what is and isn’t news — is the single most important trait distinguishing good reporters from the rest of the pack.

By the way: Never love your job, because your job does not love you.

Speaking of the media, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ biggest waste of space not named Paul Krugman, should learn that sometimes he should stop at his column’s first half-sentence …

Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation …

… instead of proving his own point with several hundred words of irrelevancies, illogic (a carbon tax has exactly what to do with Chechen terrorists?) and plain stupid ideas (see “carbon tax”).

Jonah Goldberg makes infinitely more sense:

… we now live in a climate where there’s a ghoulish appetite to transform every act of terror and murder into a useful plot point in a political narrative. This is a bipartisan phenomenon, and while I think you could make the case that the Left is worse (in fact, I will in just a minute), it’s silly to deny that we don’t do the same thing.

Moreover, given where we are as a country, it is unavoidable. This sort of thing is too seductive. The Left desperately wants every terrorist attack to be conducted by Rush Limbaugh’s biggest fan, so it’s impossible not to cheer when the Left is disappointed. And given the outrageous double standards that the Left — and the elite “responsible” media — use to demonize the Right, the urge to throw it back their face is irresistible. …

The Left likes to claim that conservatives want these terrorist incidents to turn out to be al-Qaeda attacks in order to justify an often-bigoted “war on terror” narrative, which in turn fuels the military-industrial complex, imperialism, and meat-eating, or something like that. And at the margins there is some of that on the right. Some folks are eager, for one reason or another, to see the Muslim world as a monolithic threat, more powerful and sophisticated than it is.

But here’s the thing. Al-Qaeda exists. The Muslim Brotherhood exists. Islamist terrorism exists. We know this because these people keep trying to kill us — often successfully. Moreover, they clarify things by admitting it. They say things like, “Hey, you guys! We the Islamist terrorists are trying to kill you! We will remind you about this every 15 minutes until you are dead, converts, or slaves.”

I’m paraphrasing, but you get the point. These are not literary interpretations or academic exaggerations of the sort that cause people to think that football is a crypto-fascist metaphor of nuclear war. …

Islamic terrorism is not some subtext, discernible with the sort of magic decoder ring that they give out in English departments. It’s the text, found in weekly, if not daily, headlines. So sure, sometimes people on the right might exaggerate the threat from Islamist terrorism, but it is a wholly understandable exaggeration. You can only exaggerate the truth, you cannot exaggerate a lie. An exaggerated lie is simply an even bigger lie. … 

The reason why most Muslim or developing-world terrorists are treated as representative of something larger is that, wait for it, they are representative of something larger. And to the extent white non-Muslim terrorists are usually cast as lone wolves, the reason is: That is what they are.

And, as far as I can tell, those white guys that are part of larger conspiracies, ideologies, and religions are pretty much always associated with them. In fact, there’s far more evidence that lone wolves who don’t have such associations are routinely cast by the media — and certainly by people like [Slate's David] Sirota — as if they do. Jared Loughner was a deranged isolated individual. That didn’t stop the Left from immediately associating him with the tea parties, Sarah Palin, etc. (By the way, have they found Sarah Palin’s Facebook map of Chechnya yet?) Timothy McVeigh is still treated as a leader of the militia movement, even though he didn’t belong to any militia movement. And President Clinton was perfectly happy to associate mainstream conservatives with McVeigh.

This is an old and truly disgusting game for Democrats. FDR played it relentlessly. Going so far as to claim — in a State of the Union message! — that anyone who wanted to restore the “normalcy” — i.e. peace, prosperity, and liberty — of the 1920s under Republicans was in fact seeking to install the very fascism we were fighting abroad. Lyndon Johnson and the mainstream media did everything but declare Barry Goldwater a Nazi on national television. Oh wait, they pretty much did that too.

In many ways this is a replay of the smug anti-American asininity of the Left during the Cold War. The idea that the Soviet Union was a threat was often treated as a paranoid delusion, while the “real” threat from the domestic American right was a grave danger. Hitler was dead. Germany and Japan were U.S. allies. But Communism, which was killing and enslaving hundreds of millions before our eyes, just wasn’t something to get worked up about — at least not compared with the super-scary John Birch Society.

Proving the maxim about stopped clocks being right once (digital) or twice (analog) a day, the Daily Caller reports:

On HBO’s “Real Time” on Friday night, host Bill Maher entertained CSU-San Bernardino professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism, who maintained that despite the events in recent days, religious extremism isn’t only a product of Islam.

But Maher took issue with that claim, calling it “liberal bullshit” and said there was no comparison.

“You know what, yeah, yeah,” Maher said. “You know what — that’s liberal bullshit right there … they’re not as dangerous. I mean there’s only one faith, for example, that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a bad cartoon of the prophet. There’s only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith. An ex-Muslim is a very dangerous thing. Talk to Salman Rushdie after the show about Christian versus Islam. So you know, I’m just saying let’s keep it real.” …

“I am not an Islamophobe,” Maher replied. “I am a truth lover. All religious are not alike. As many people have pointed out — ‘The Book of Mormon,’ did you see the show? … OK, can you imagine if they did ‘The Book of Islam?’ Could they do that? There’s only one religion that threatens violence and carries it out for things like that. Could they do “The Book of Islam” on Broadway? …

“Now, obviously, most Muslim people are not terrorists. But ask most Muslim people in the world, if you insult the prophet, do you have what’s coming to you? It’s more than just a fringe element.”

Slate reports:

Then, shortly after 11:30 this morning, Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the two suspects, stepped out of his house in Maryland and delivered an extraordinary message about character, shame, and collective responsibility. …

Tsarni said he was coming out to express condolences to the families of the victims in Boston. He spoke with anguish and specificity about each of the dead. He had nothing to do with the bombings, yet he felt an awful connection to them. He couldn’t imagine, he said, that “the children of my brother would be associated with them.”

Association is a hard thing. The suspects are Tsarni’s nephews. He’s related to them, but he’s also separate from them. “We have not been in touch with that family for a number of years,” he said. …

A reporter asked what might have provoked the violence. “Being losers,” Tsarni shot back. “Hatred to those who were able to settle themselves” in this country. Then Tsarni raised his voice to make a point: “Anything else to do with religion, with Islam—it’s a fraud. It’s a fake.” He went on: “We are Muslims. We are Chechens.” But that didn’t explain his nephews’ violence, he said. “Somebody radicalized them.”

Tsarni tried to explain that his birth family had drifted apart. Speaking of his brother, the father of the two suspects, Tsarni said, “My family has nothing to do with that family.” In fact, he continued, “This family [has] had nothing to do with them for a long, long time.” When a reporter asked why, he refused to say more than, “I just wanted my family [to] be away from them.”

The press wouldn’t let go. “Are you ashamed by what has unfolded?” a reporter asked. “Of course we are ashamed!” Tsarni exclaimed. “They are [the] children of my brother.” But even his brother, he cautioned, “has little influence” on the two young men.

A reporter asked Tsarni how he felt about the United States. Tsarni, his voice rising, declared it the “ideal” country, a microcosm of the “entire world.” He went on: “I respect this country. I love this country—this country which gives a chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being.”

A reporter asked whether the young men had ever been caught up in the fighting in Chechnya. Tsarni spat back, “No! They’ve never been in Chechnya. This has nothing to do with Chechnya. Chechens are different. Chechens are peaceful people.” The young men weren’t even born there, he said. One was born in Dagestan, the other in Kyrgyzstan.

Muslims, Chechens, immigrants, the family, even the parents—it wasn’t fair to hold any of these people responsible. And yet Tsarni couldn’t escape the feeling of collective disgrace. “He put a shame on our family,” he told the reporters. “He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity.”

In the end, Tsarni raised his hands and asked to say one more thing: “Those who suffered, we’re sharing with them, with their grief—and ready just to meet with them, and ready just to bend in front of them, to kneel in front of them, seeking their forgiveness. … In the name of the family, that’s what I say.”

Finally, Iowahawk sums up the week by channeling his inner Billy Joel.

 

04.19.13
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The announcer who did not talk too much

The Dallas Morning News reports as the subject would have described it:

Pat Summerall died Tuesday. He was 82.

That’s how Summerall, almost a decade ago, said he would craft the first sentences of his obituary — short and to the point.

The legendary sports broadcaster died in his hospital room at Zale Lipshy University Hospital, where he was recovering from surgery for a broken hip, a family friend said.

Summerall’s comment about his obituary was made at his Southlake home after a 2004 liver transplant that saved his life. He was serious.

Typical … succinct … vintage Summerall.

His minimalist staccato style coupled with a deep, authoritative voice was his trademark as the pre-eminent NFL voice for a generation of television viewers.

Summerall worked 16 Super Bowls in a network career that began at CBS in 1962 and ended at Fox in 2002.

In the 21 seasons in which play-by-play voice Summerall worked alongside John Madden, they grew into America’s most popular sports broadcast team. Their work for CBS at Super Bowl XVI, following the 1981 season, remains the highest-rated NFL game of all-time, with more than 49 percent of the nation tuned in.

“I was so lucky I got to work with Pat,” Madden said in an interview around the time of Summerall’s transplant. “He was so easy to work with. He knew how to use words. For a guy like myself who rambles on and on and doesn’t always make sense, he was sent from heaven.”

Summerall did either color or play-by-play on 16 Super Bowls, working first with Ray Scott …

… before becoming 0ne of TV sports’ first players-turned-play-by-play guys:

Summerall first worked with Ray Scott, the famed announcer of few words. And that’s certainly where Summerall became the announcer of few words himself, although he was certainly capable of understated humor:

As CBS’ and Fox’s number one NFL announcer, he got to do a few memorable Packer games:

Summerall did other sports, most famously golf, plus tennis. He even did the NBA, including a game famous to the (few remaining) fans of the Bucks:

The former basketball player also did NCAA basketball tournament games for CBS in 1985. He did sports for WCBS radio in New York (whose first all-news day started with its own news — a plane crash into its tower), and hosted NFL Films’ “This Week in Pro Football.”

Summerall had a great voice, and worked ideally with his more loquacious partners, particularly Madden. Remember Scott’s stereotypical call — “Starr … Dowler … touchdown”? For Summerall, it was “Staubach … Pearson … touchdown,” or “Montana … Rice … touchdown.”

Ed Sherman asks an interesting question:

Could Pat Summerall have been given the assignment to call 16 Super Bowls, all those Masters and U.S. Opens in tennis in today’s landscape?

It is an interesting question. The networks likely wouldn’t have been jumping all over each other to sign a former kicker who really didn’t say much on the telecasts. It’s more about color and flash, and unfortunately, sometimes screaming and yelling in today’s game. Summerall hardly was a flamboyant personality. …

Summerall did it because of two main assets: A wonderful deep voice that punctuated his wonderful sense of brevity. He didn’t overwhelm a telecast. Rather, he melted into it, providing the ideal sound track to accompany the hum of the venue and the pulse of the action taking place down below. …

He played the straight man, always bringing out the best in his partners.

What Summerall did really was an art. Would it work today with the volume turned up several levels in 2013? Who knows?

Sports on Earth:

I still hear Pat Summerall saying something spare — “Third and ten . . .” — and I know the light has been fading outdoors. I know just as sure as any clockwork that Daylight Saving Time might be on its way, or that Daylight Saving Time has crashed in and blackened 5:30 already. I do not need to move from this seat. I do not need to look through a window. I know.

The deep, economized sound of the voice tells me the weather without telling me the weather. Of course it does. I know it’s quite probably crisp outside. I know the trees have taken on some mighty colors even if I’m not really looking at them during this game. I know there’s a plausible chance the sky has grayed, the birds mostly have left. I know that if I went outside and walked along the sidewalk to the driveway, the leaves might make that great sound when they crunch under my sneakers. I might look down the street to a distant front yard, see some kids playing, some hopeless bomb flying incomplete. …

In the den where the voice resonates, or in living rooms otherwise silent, or at the neighbors’ where you enter the house and can hear it from the other room, or in those houses where it maybe even comes from two places, the voice signals the momentous. It comes from on high in Irving, Texas, or from the Meadowlands of New Jersey, or from out by the bay in San Francisco, or Lambeau Field in later years, from the weighty games of the then-dominant NFC. It means the game matters, might sway the conference race, might determine home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.

For 28 seasons and 16 Super Bowls the voice implies gravitas, for a time alongside Tom Brookshier, then 22 seasons mingled with John Madden in the two-man NFL symphony, the voice giving way to the tick-tock of “60 Minutes,” or sounding kind of funny giving the Fox evening lineup.

I hear the voice, and I know the wall calendar has just about run out of pages. I can taste my mother’s Thanksgiving dressing, picture the grandparents driving in. The Christmas tree stands right over there; it seems so familiar with the voice. Friends will be over. May I get you a drink? Can’t wait for the playoffs. There goes Madden, explaining some contour of the game you did not know.

Now, here’s Summerall: “Third and 10 . . .”

The voice lets the game supply the drama, as all its admirers acknowledge and commend. It’s reliable, egoless and a bit clumsy on occasion. You might root for it through its unexpected pauses. There it goes all low and minimalist without a hint of a shout, as Adam Vinatieri’s field goal sails through to beat the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI: “And it’s right down the pipe.” Here it rises just a bit on the word “good” as Matt Bahr’s field goal at Candlestickstaves off the 49ers dynasty in the 1991 NFC Championship Game: “The kick . . . (pause) . . . is good . . . (pause) . . . There will be no three-peat.” Here it lets Marcus Allen’s amazing 74-yard run against Washington do the goose-bumping: “Here’s Marcus Allen . . . (pause) . . . cutting back up the field and Marcus Allen could be gone.”

Allen runs the last half of the field sans narration.

All you hear is the roar.

It makes your neck hairs salute.

Awful Announcing adds:

No matter the venue, the broadcast partner, or the sport, Summerall’s voice was always the same.  Calm.  Commanding.  Reliable.  That voice is one that will never be duplicated.  When you heard Pat Summerall’s voice, you knew what you were watching mattered.

His understated delivery made sure the game was always at center stage where it belonged.  He never talked more than his broadcast partners.  John Madden would never have been John Madden without a partner like Pat Summerall.  Perhaps that’s one of the greatest testaments to one of the greatest careers in not just sports broadcasting, but all of broadcasting.

Summerall’s legacy has been far underrated by the social media generation.  To be fair, maybe we’ve lost our way a bit in what makes the best sports announcers.  Pat Summerall was never someone who would compel fans to make Youtube tribute videos.  I even tried to find a favorite Summerall call from Youtube to try to insert in this article, but perhaps it’s fitting there really isn’t one.  Summerall didn’t need to jump out of his chair or come up with clever nicknames to do his job.  In a sports world that lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps on viral videos, highlights, and catchphrases, Summerall was none of that flash.  Only substance.  Only the best.

In the ’70s and ’80s, when I hadn’t figured out that, yes, you can like more than one announcer, I preferred NBC’s Dick Enberg to Summerall. Today, ABC’s Al Michaels is the best football announcer. But Summerall taught a valuable lesson to someone who yearned to have his job. If you have a talkative partner, less can really be more.

04.18.13
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About the latest obscenity

The term “breaking news” isn’t supposed to apply to weekly newspapers. Until it does.

Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing strikes me as similar to the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the Olympic Games.

I remember seeing that live. I was watching the Olympics (far too late at night) because my wife was in Atlanta as a volunteer. (She spoke Spanish and, in one instance, Portuguese. All I can do in Spanish is order beer.) She walked through Centennial Olympic Park to and from the Omni for indoor volleyball. In the pre-cellphone days, I woke up everyone in the house she was staying in, 90 minutes from Atlanta, to make sure she was all right.

And, of course, any time you hear about mass casualties, 9/11 comes to mind.

Facebook Friend Steve Spingola passed on some insight about how police are investigating the bombing:

Could they find fingerprints? It is possible; however, when constructing the devices the perpetrators probably used latex gloves. Moreover, had they not worn gloves (doubtful), fingerprints are simply perspiration deposited on a surface. The heat and the blast itself might have altered touched surfaces.

A better investigative tool is DNA. The only sure fire way to destroy DNA evidence is fire, which, it appears, likely occurred during the blast. Forensic investigators might be able to find on some DNA remnants, though, because only microscopic particles are needed to test.

I believe the key here is public and private security video. These bags were strategically placed. The event was probably swept by bomb sniffing dogs prior to the start of the marathon. This leads me to believe the devices were placed after the police had cleared the area. Unfortunately, video can be defeated when a person’s face is concealed by a hoodie and sunglasses. Technology, which might be online now, that is a part of the FBI’s $1.2 billion Next Generation Identification system, does make use of 3D partial facial recognition construction. This is done using biometrics (measurements of noses, ears, eyes, and faces) with data obtained from our new driver’s licenses and existing booking photos. If you’re interested in learning more about high-tech detection, checkout Wisconsin privacy researcher Miles Kinard’s e-magazine expose, “American Stasi: Fusion Centers and Domestic Spying” (you can find it at Amazon.com).

As you may or may not know, I am a person who believes the billions of dollars the government has spent on surveillance initiatives has done little to actually prevent terrorist attacks. High-tech initiatives failed to detect the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and the Times Square bomber. A vendor actually tipped-off the NYPD about the SUV in Times Square. The underwear bomber was on the no-fly list, but his name was off by one letter and the software failed to flag him.

Surveillance may or may not assist law enforcement after the fact, but, I believe, it does little to deter suspects who might be willing to die to carry out a plot. The best methods to suppress terrorism are similar to the best practices to suppress criminal activity–proactive, boots to the ground police work and after the fact investigation, coupled with tough penalties to deter those contemplating future attacks.

Tim Nerenz adds on Facebook:

One of the most disturbing things to me about the Boston Marathon bombing will be that many people will actually be happy about who did it. They will celebrate because it will fit their biased political narrative and advance their own power-trip agenda. It doesn’t make any difference to me if the freak was a jihadist, white separatist, PETA, anti-abortion, occupier, communist, mental patient, or just some bored worthless slug. The evil ideology that unites all of these acts of sensational mass violence is the idea that the ends (you pick ‘em) justify the means. Nothing ever justifies the intentional taking of innocent lives – nothing.”

(I got to witness the result of the “intentional taking of human lives” yesterday. And as people in West, Texas, probably knew before yesterday, the unintentional taking of human lives is as tragic to those affected.)

The point seems banal in the wake of suffering,  but it requires repeating: If you live your life in constant fear over what might happen, you lose. (Note I did not use the cliché “The terrorists have won.”) I maintain, as Spingola may agree,  that we have sacrificed too much to try to prevent another 9/11-style attack, when preventing terrorism is a moving target. Monday didn’t involve airplanes; it involved pressure cookers and shrapnel. And many of our elected officials appear perfectly happy in shredding our constitutional rights to prevent (or so they think) the next school shooting.

As powerful as elected officials think they are, they can only punish, not prevent, evil.

04.12.13
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Records truly is his middle name

Today is the 89th anniversary of the first day of WLS radio in Chicago.

WLS today is a news–talk station. For three decades, though, beginning May 2, 1960, WLS was one of the United States’ premier pop and rock music stations.

One reason was WLS’ 50,000-watt signal, which at night could be heard in, according to WLS, 48 states and 23 countries.

That signal brought to towns big and small WLS’ disc jockeys, including John Records Landecker:

If you listen to the clips (including the cool echo effect, which makes the DJ sound even bigger), you’ll notice that the music is, well, good and bad. The music had less to do with WLS listenership than the personality of the station, including Landecker, who may have had the station’s largest audience given the fact he worked nights for most of his time there.

Landecker had several regular bits, including “Press My Conference” (here assisted by WLS’ Larry Lujack) …

… “Americana Panorama” …

… “Can I Get a Witness News” (featuring weird news stories in the pre-Internet days), and, of course, the nightly live, no-seven-second-delay Boogie Check:

Landecker also wrote a couple of parody songs, “Cabrini Green (Rent’s Dirt Cheap)” to the tune of AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” and “Jane (Beat the Machine Dame),” to the tune of Jefferson Starship’s “Jane.” Both songs were about Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne.

Landecker has written a book, Records Truly Is My Middle Name (because it is — his mother’s maiden name), and he’s been pushing his book on every media outlet he can find. And most of them probably are happy to put him on because Landecker inspired a lot of people in radio …

… and because most media people are really good interviews.

From Radio Ink:

Why did you decide to write this book?

Landecker: That’s a very good question. That’s a question I ask myself many times. I didn’t have a job for a while there. I had attempted to segue into talk radio. That didn’t seem to be panning out. Other attempts at employment didn’t work out. I thought about this a lot. For somebody like me, who has spent his entire life going into a radio station and doing a show every day, and that being somewhat of a creative process, where you put yourself out there, if you stop doing that, you don’t feel right. I think the book is actually one big show. It’s a radio show, only it’s on paper. Before, if I wrote something down, it became part of the radio show. It has elements in it that I think if I were in a certain type of format today, I would include as part of my show. I think other people who are in certain types of format include it in their shows … where they came from, who they are, their family, their foibles, sex, drugs, rock and roll. You know, that kind of thing.

RI: Why do you think people are going to want to read it?

Landecker: Because the stories are entertaining. That’s it. It has nothing to do with the fact that I was on the radio or that my middle name is Records, which is all in there, of course. It’s entertaining. I will just give you a small idea of what I’m talking about. My first wife and I were getting divorced. I had two small girls. I decided, as a responsible father, I should take them on a vacation to someplace secluded, where we could have quality time. I contacted a travel agent who booked the three of us on a small island in the Bahamas. They only had one dining room in the whole place. There weren’t many other tourists there. However, there was a group from Playboy Enterprises shooting centerfolds for their Italian edition. I’ll let you read the book and find out what happens after that.

Landecker was working April 4, 1968:

We had a very special guest in the studio that day; Stevie Wonder. Stevie was a big star at the time for Motown Records in Detroit, but he also supported a local school for the blind in Lansing, so he came to town semi-regularly. The music director at WILS (Craig Dudley) knew Stevie, and knew that he loved playing disc jockey, so he invited him to come to our station, sit at the control board, play records, and talk on the air.

I was there that day, and was lucky enough to watch him in action. It was just an amazing sight. He cued up the records, turned the knobs, turned the microphones on and off; you name it. Even though he couldn’t see a thing, he knew exactly what he was doing. There were a few Motown Records employees with him, but he was doing it all by himself. I was standing in the back of the studio watching the whole thing, in awe of his abilities.

That’s when the news came across the wire that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot.

At first it wasn’t clear if King was dead or not, but we all suspected he was. An instant tension filled the room. The Motown executives didn’t say a thing. None of the radio station employees (including me) responded, and neither did Stevie. But we all knew we were experiencing a significant moment.

Even though this clearly affected him, Stevie was a total pro. He finished the show.

The Wisconsin State Journal’s Doug Moe must have been listening about the same time I was:

I heard about the book from my friend John Roach, the Madison Magazine columnist and television producer. Like me, and many other southern Wisconsin baby boomers, Roach grew up listening to WLS-AM/890, a Chicago Top 40 hits station with a powerful signal and colorful DJs like Larry Lujack, Fred Winston, Bob Sirott — and John Records Landecker.

Madison had its own smaller market version: WISM-AM/1480. The DJs had names like Clyde Coffee, Charlie “Rock and Roll” Simon and Jonathan Little.

Little is still around town, and I’ve kept in touch with Simon, whose real name is Larry Goodman. He moved to San Diego and has a successful career in radio sales. Larry took a piece of Otis Redding’s doomed plane with him and traded it to the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas for a Paul McCartney autographed guitar.

WISM was cool, but WLS was the big time. There was no Internet, streaming or satellite radio. Big city stations with strong signals ruled. The other day Roach recalled sitting in his room in Madison listening to the WLS DJs talk about bands like the Rolling Stones coming to Chicago. “It seemed exotic,” John said.

Later, when Roach got a job out of college at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Ill., he met the WLS DJs who did live shows from the park.

John Records Landecker — who handled the 6-10 p.m. shift for WLS through much of the 1970s — came to Great America to open a ride called the Tidal Wave. In those days both Roach and Landecker would take a second drink, which they did, after the promotion. It turned out each had been a high school sprinter, and you can guess what happened next.

“We raced through the darkened streets of Great America,” Roach said. “I won. I’ve never let him forget it.”

Last week Roach put me in touch with Landecker, who spoke about his life and new book with good cheer, though his life has had downs as well as ups, and the book reflects it.

(I grew up also listening to the aforementioned Little and Simon on WISM, and in Little’s case later on WZEE, Z104, when Little left WISM and turned Z104 into what WISM used to be. Little only has one of the greatest radio voices of all time, and Simon’s wasn’t far behind.)

Landecker was on WLS-TV’s “Windy City Live” when he got his own Boogie Check. (Click on the link.)

The Chicago Tribune’s Rick Kogan interviewed Landecker for print …

Kaempfer spent many, many hours interviewing Landecker, coaxing stories and anecdotes out of him. He also conducted interviews with 30-some people who had known, worked with or admired Landecker. This group is a who’s who of local radio — Kevin Matthews, producer John Gehron, program director Mary June Rose — offering telling memories and assessments.

Former radio personality Don Wade says: “(Landecker) really works at his craft. He may come off like he’s goofing off, but trust me, he really works at it. He takes it very seriously.” …

Landecker now hosts evenings on WLS-FM 94.7. It is the same station, the same shift that he had when he arrived here in 1972 and became a star. This was the big time, Top 40 tunes blasted across the country to millions of listeners, introduced and interrupted by the voices of such folks as Bob Sirott, Larry Lujack and Landecker, who now writes, “I didn’t realize how big we were in the 1970s while it was happening.” How big? As one of the station’s former general managers, Marty Greenberg, puts it, “We were the New York Yankees and we didn’t even know it.” …

The book is filled with many such honest reflections, terrific photos, some of Landecker’s funniest parody songs and snippets of favorite interviews. It’s peppered too by a self-effacing tone: “Maybe I’m just a guy writing a book about the times we all lived through.”

His WLS show might not dominate the ratings like it once did, but in so many important ways it doesn’t really matter.

… and video:

I have not read the book other than online excerpts. However, I have not read a single review of the book that doesn’t practically gush. That’s probably because, in addition to his being apparently a great storyteller, Landecker hearkens back to the days when rock and roll was more real, and DJs were live and local. (And, for me, when I wanted to do what Landecker was doing. I didn’t.)

Landecker is still on WLS. The FM version, that is, whose signal does not go out to 48 states and 23 countries, but it does go over the World Wide Web. WLS-FM also has Brant Miller, who was on The Humongous 89 at the same time as Landecker, and WLS’ first nationally known DJ, Dick Biondi. (After doing mornings on WLS-FM, Miller is the meteorologist on the 4:30, 6 and 10 p.m. news on WMAQ-TV in Chicago. Apparently Miller doesn’t sleep.)

Back in 2010, when Chicago played at the EAA in Oshkosh, I sent Landecker an email at his previous station (a talk station in Indiana) mentioning I’d been listening to him since the 1970s. He replied by thanking me for listening “all these years.” Which I imagine made us both feel old.