Which means that today is the one-year anniversary of the end of my employment with Marketplace Magazine and Journal Communications. Which, you’ll recall, prompted the creation of this blog.
(The irony is that today I’m speaking at a Ripon elementary school’s Career Day. That is a better activity than what I was doing one year ago today.)
A year ago tomorrow I wrote:
I’ve been told, and it makes sense, that I should start a blog to maintain the discipline of writing. (Rust is a terrible thing, as anyone who owned a 1970s-era car should know.)
And so, here begins, for an indeterminate amount of time, The Presteblog. The Presteblog is likely (though not certain) to read much like Marketplace of Ideas … the opinion column and blog of Marketplace in the 10 years I was the editor of Marketplace. …
The late Marketplace of Ideas blog was usually four days of business/political stuff (and in three years of daily blogging I certainly never lacked for material), along with what I called “Frideas,” on subjects that might be found in the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal — which included everything from cars to pets to parenting to adult beverages to my sons’ Cub Scouting. We’ll see if I can maintain that schedule. …
We’ll all see where this goes.
I have more or less followed that format over the past year. (I violate it when the calendar doesn’t cooperate, such as when the 30th anniversary of your high school’s state boys basketball title occurs on a Tuesday.) Four days a week readers get my views, or others’ views with which I mostly agree, that lurch between conservative and libertarian. (And if you can’t come up with an opinion to express in this state these days, you shouldn’t be opinionating.) Fridays are the date for ruminations on all the aforementioned nonpolitical subjects and others, such as the one coming next hour.
While some readers may conclude that I’m a doctrinaire right-winger and whatever the GOP does is perfect, actual readers know I do not believe that. The Democratic Party’s contribution to our country is overwhelmingly negative, but that doesn’t mean the Republican Party’s contribution has been always positive. (I think there are few members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy in Wisconsin who criticize Gov. Scott Walker. I do, though probably not in areas of which Democrats would approve.)
I try to be original in what I write, with others’ views to buttress and restate mine. I prefer facts and logical arguments to, calling, for instance, public employee union heads poo-poo heads. (However: Democratic U.S. Senate candidateTammy Baldwin is a socialist. That’s not name-calling; that’s a fact, even if she won’t admit it.) There is enough on which to criticize President Obama without delving into conspiracy theories about his citizenship.
If nothing else, the Presteblog has been a good exercise in the discipline of daily writing. When I started the Presty the DJ blogs, I began to combine Saturday and Sunday entries until they got too large. (And on some days the weekday blogs get large enough to make … the … page … very … slow … to … load …) I am often sitting in the living room at 1 a.m. finishing up tomorrow’s blog, and not always because this laptop is as the as slow as a Chevrolet Vega on bad gas.
The irony is that daily journalism takes up the smallest space in the journalism portion of my career. In order of length, it’s 11 years of quadriweekly (?) business magazines, five years of weekly newspapers, and 7½ months of daily newspapers. And yet here I am with nearly a year of blogging every day, not just every weekday.
This blog also got me onto Facebook, where I somehow have managed to accumulate 298 Friends. (I was on Twitter before, where I have 536 followers.) The person who advised me to switch from Blogger to WordPress also pointed out that Facebook has enough users to count as the third largest country on earth. (Irrespective of the double-counting thing, that is.) I got onto Facebook for networking and to promote this blog. The added bonus has been the number of people with whom I’ve gotten to connect, or reconnect, and in a few instances deconnect, as well as annoy with my disagreeable (to them) political views. I’m also on Google+, though I’m not sure why.
I maintain my skepticism of social media as really being all that unique. It strikes me as merely another way to communicate, with its own particular characteristics, and its pluses and minuses, the latter including the inability to take back something you said or wrote that in retrospect could have been expressed better. Blogs, on the other hand, give one the opportunity to communicate — or, put another way, show off yourself — in multimedia, with photo, audio and video options:
Blogs do, however, require you to promote your blog. This blog gets picked up every so often at wisopinion.com and wisupnorth.com. I also blog at RiponPress.com and at IBWisconsin.com, which give me new audiences to offend. And keeping up my reputation as a media ‘ho I will appear generally wherever someone will have me — “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes,” Wisconsin Public Radio, and even the lion’s den, the People’s Republic of Madison.
Obviously the older the blog entry is, the more hits it’ll get. It is interesting, though, that the oldest of the top 10 is eight months old, the second oldest is five months old, and most are from November and December. And if you look at the list, my favorite subjects for others to read are state politics and the associated Recallarama crap, fall 2011 sports, facial hair, my ongoing verbal war with my hometown, and Cadillacs and Chevrolets. (Apparently all I need do to bump hits is to write about the logical next step from Occupy _______: Assassinations.)
The odd thing about this is that I like doing this. I started the blogs when I returned to Marketplace to reach new audiences. I don’t have to be writing two separate blogs at 12:29 a.m. with a body heat-sucking cat in between me and the laptop, but I am. And I see from my blog software that people are actually reading this. As I’ve written before, negative comments are second in preference only to positive comments; the worst is to hear “You write? Never heard of you.”
So The Presteblog continues for, as previously threatened, an indeterminate amount of time. We’ll all see where this goes.
Whoever came up with the idea to put the Scott Walker recall petitions at IVerifytheRecall.com might be in line for some kind of journalism award.
If the website accomplished nothing else, it helped demonstrate the lack of knowledge within the state’s news media — or at least those caught signing the petition to recall Walker or one of the Republican state senators — about the state Open Records Law. (Which during my entire professional lifetime and at least a decade before that has been the sword journalists use to strike against those in state and local government who don’t want the public to know what they’re doing. The irony level is off the charts.)
It also may have demonstrated that either many people who work for media organizations haven’t read their employer’s code of ethics, or those media organizations haven’t explained their codes of ethics to their employees very well. (Journalism codes of ethics were devised out of the belief that journalism is a public endeavor, and out of the reality that journalism is the only line of work specifically protected by the First Amendment.)
There is also a third option, and I’m surprised no one has mentioned this before. Perhaps the media types who signed the petitions signed thinking they were helping their employer. A gubernatorial recall means months and months of stories, and, even better, millions of dollars of advertising, hopefully with their employer! (Any media company with Wisconsin operations that is not making buckets of money this year needs to replace its entire sales staff.)
I’m not sure into which category Rob Starbuck of WISC-TV in Madison fits, but he is the latest media person whose signature has been discovered by Media Trackers:
After Media Trackers first reported the signings, Colin Benedict, news director for WISC-TV, told Media Trackers that when he learned of the events he immediately “took action” and made sure “additional steps” were implemented in the newsroom process to prevent conflicts of interest in political reporting. “I directed that [Starbuck] not participate in any interviews related to the recall elections,” he said. Benedict also clarified that the signing was in violation of the station’s policy for newsroom employees.
Finding broadcasters on the recall petitions is more of a challenge because many of them don’t use their real names on the air. That’s usually not the case with print, which was how Boots and Sabers (H/T: Wis U.P. North) is able to pass on this from the Wisconsin State Journal:
Wisconsin State Journal editors learned this week that six staff members signed petitions calling for the recall of Gov. Scott Walker.
Five of the six signed a petition on Nov. 15, 2011, the first day the documents were circulated, and just before an internal memo from State Journal editor John Smalley reminded staff members of the newspaper’s policy against such activity, based on a long-standing code of ethics.
“We were surprised and disappointed,” Smalley said of finding the staff members’ names by searching a database of signatures at iverifytherecall.com. “We apologize to our readers for the lapse in judgment by several staff members.” …
Smalley said the newspaper considers signing a petition of any kind a violation of the company’s ethics policy. A portion of the code reads: “Participation in public affairs or events that may leave the impression that news judgment is being influenced by activism is prohibited.”
I don’t know what WISC’s or its parent company’s employee manual states, but for a media person to sign a petition violates the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics:
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.
Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
When a journalist puts his or her name on a public document that advocates a partisan or otherwise political activity, the journalist has violated both of those points. That is whether the petition is for or against a Democrat, Republican or nonpartisan candidate, or a referendum. WISC is based in Madison, but non-Madisonians and non-Dane County residents watch WISC too. WISC’s viewers have good reason to wonder whether WISC has been fairly covering the Recall _____ movement.
Those claiming that journalists’ political activities are protected by the First Amendment are the same people who would be screaming bloody murder had Starbuck signed a petition advocating the recall of Walker’s predecessor, Democrat James Doyle. (Particularly in the People’s Republic of Madison.) And anyone who claims they signed petitions only so people got a chance to vote is telling a tall tale. Anyone who signed the Walker recall petition opposes Walker and wants him out of office.
That certainly applies to elected officials who signed the Walker petitions, particularly those who do not have a D after their name. The list of signers include Madison Mayor Paul Soglin. (And apparently nearly every other Madison elected official.) Let’s say you’re a Madison resident who is known to be a conservative, and you have a problem with the city. Think you’re going to get a fair shake from Comrade Soglin and his apparatchiks? (The answer to which could be: You mean now, or since 1973?)
Appearance matters. The judges who signed the petition were wrong because they now appear to be biased. Starbuck and the Gannett 25 were wrong to sign because they now appear to be biased. All of them have damaged their own credibility by signing. In the court of public opinion, they’re now all guilty until they prove otherwise. The First Amendment does not protect you from the consequences of your actions, including exercising your First Amendment rights.
WFRV-TV in Green Bay had a surprising announcement Tuesday:
WFRV-TV Sports Director Larry McCarren has decided to part ways with WFRV-TV at the end of this month.
Larry has made a significant contribution over his 24 years at the station.
He is a noted authority on the Green Bay Packers and has been named Wisconsin Sportscaster of the Year four times.
Larry’s final newscast will be on Friday March 30th. All of us at Local 5 thank Larry for his years of service and extend him best wishes for the future.
I’ve lived in the Green Bay TV market for 18 years. I’m told when McCarren started on WFRV after the Packers cut him in the Forrest Gregg Purge following the 1985 season, he was legendarily bad. He’s still not the most dynamic TV personality, but that’s not why he’s stayed on WFRV for 27 years; it’s because he’s become the name-brand Packers authority on Wisconsin TV. Between his knowledge of the Packers and the NFL and his ability to communicate that knowledge, the man with the dangling left pinky has more TV involvement with the Packers between doing games on radio and WFRV’s “Larry McCarren’s Locker Room” than any other TV sportscaster in the state.
I’m told McCarren is 61, and in some media cases that’s retirement age. But I don’t think he’s retiring. The Green Bay Press–Gazette reports he’ll still be working with Wayne Larrivee on Packers radio anyway.
This is not based on inside information (which I lack anyway as a former Journal Communications employee-owner and employee); it’s merely a prediction, and you know how accurate those can be in my case. (However, I do recall saying during a Marketplace Magazine cover shoot at Lambeau Field in the fall of 1994 that WTMJ radio should hire McCarren to join Jim Irwin and Max McGee on Packer games. A few months later, WTMJ hired McCarren to join Irwin and McGee on Packer games.)
Journal Communications’ WTMJ radio in Milwaukee is the flagship station of the Packers Radio Network. WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee is Your Official Packers Station in the Milwaukee TV market. If you’ve been watching Journal’s WGBA-TV or its digital subchannel long enough, you’ll see a promo that says that WGBA is now Your Official Packers Station in the Green Bay TV market.
WGBA is the only Green Bay TV station without locally based sports anchors. WTMJ-TV’s Lance Allan, Rod Burks and Jessie Garcia do the sports on WGBA from Green Bay. (It’s amusing to flip between channel 4 and channel 26 and watch the same sports anchor simultaneously.) This is not a big deal for Packers, Badgers or Brewers coverage; it is a big deal for local high school or college sports coverage, which is pretty much nonexistent on WGBA, and one big reason WGBA’s news trails badly in the ratings.
There has been speculation that Journal will shut down WGBA’s newsroom and do WGBA’s news from Milwaukee. If that’s what Journal intended to do, they could do that before now; they certainly have the technological capability to do that. (WGBA’s weekend weather segments are also done from Milwaukee.) In some markets, one station produces another station’s newscasts; WKOW-TV, Madison’s ABC affiliate, produces the newscasts for WMSN-TV, the Madison Fox affiliate, and WAOW-TV, Wausau’s ABC affiliate, does the same for WFXS-TV, Wausau’s Fox station.
Whether shutting down the WGBA newsroom was Journal’s plans once upon a time, the new Official Packers Station thing makes me think that that’s not Journal’s intention anymore. WGBA will get significantly more ad revenue by carrying preseason Packers games and other Packer programming, including “The Mike McCarthy Show” and “Inside 1265” at a minimum, in addition to however many Packer games end up on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” WTMJ-TV and WGBA also will be carrying the summer Olympics, which always means a good Journal Broadcast Group revenue year. And this being an election year, you’ve already seen more political ads than you can stand, but not as many as you’re going to see.
Given the revenue bump Journal Broadcast Group generally and WGBA specifically will be seeing in 2012, this would seem to be a logical time to increase McCarren’s work with Journal stations. He will still be doing Packer games on WTMJ radio; he could be WGBA’s sports anchor and contribute to WTMJ-TV’s Packer coverage, as well as other Official Packers Station programming. For that matter, “Larry McCarren’s Locker Room,” or its next iteration, could be beamed to the other Official Packers Stations elsewhere in Wisconsin.
About “Locker Room,” the Tuesday afternoon version of the Green Bay Press–Gazette story was cryptic enough to make you think this scenario is not out of the realm of possibility:
His departure changes the status of “Larry McCarren’s Locker Room,” his Green Bay Packers-related show.
If the show continues, it would be entering its 25th season.
Earlier this month, WFRV management and McCarren said the future of the show was under discussion.
All this may be far-fetched, but Journal Broadcast Group has not been averse to making the big hire in the past. (Or the big purchase, given that Journal is the only in-state media company to own more than one TV station.) When Irwin and McGee announced their plans to retire in 1998, no one would have ever thought that Larrivee, then the voice of the Chicago Bears on radio and Bulls on TV in the nation’s third largest media market, was even a fantasy candidate to replace Irwin. But when the 1999 season began, there sat Larrivee and McCarren in the Lambeau Field press box.
(For that matter, I don’t know that Journal Broadcast Group wants to be this ambitious, but there are NBC stations in Madison, Eau Claire and Rhinelander that probably could be pried away from their current owners for the right price.)
Maybe it’s not far-fetched at all. Tuesday evening, the Press–Gazette added:
“A major factor at the end of the day is I think I belong where most of the Packer stuff is as far as the Packer (TV) network, coach’s show, preseason games and things like that, and that’s moving,” McCarren said. “That’s certainly a factor.” …
“We’re talking, and there’s a mutual interest,” McCarren said.
Steve Wexler, Journal Broadcast Group executive vice president said he couldn’t comment and added “other than he’s obviously one of the great broadcasters in the state, both in TV and in radio.”
It’s also possible the Packers could bring McCarren in house, where he could serve in similar capacity while working for the Packers Media Group, which operates the team’s official website, Packers.com.
Moving between stations seems more common in the Green Bay TV market than in the Milwaukee or Madison TV markets at least. Younger viewers may not recall when Tom Zalaski worked at WBAY-TV, or Tom Milbourn worked at WFRV, or Mark Leland worked at WGBA. But then Zalaski moved from WBAY to WFRV, which pushed Milbourn from WFRV to WLUK and WLUK’s John Vigeland out of TV entirely. (Leland went from WGBA to WLUK in a separate transaction, to use a pro sports metaphor.) For that matter, every commercial station in the Green Bay market has carried more than one network in its history. You have to be, well, my age to remember WBAY as a CBS station, WFRV as an ABC station, WLUK as an NBC station and WGBA as a Fox station. (WFRV and WLUK are both former ABC and NBC stations.)
McCarren’s TV hiring may not happen immediately. The aforementioned switches often came after the anchors’ noncompete clauses, which can be up to one year, expired. But it seems to make logical sense (which, granted, doesn’t always apply on TV) for McCarren’s role to expand on Journal Broadcast Group stations now that he’s leaving WFRV, and, note, by his decision.
Then proving that public disclosure is a two-edged sword, or perhaps a mirror, the Green Bay Press–Gazette, The Post~Crescent in Appleton, the Oshkosh Northwestern, the Wausau Daily Herald, the Sheboygan Press and the Door County Advocate in Sturgeon Bay ran similarly worded editorials last weekend announcing that 25 Gannett employees — nine from the Post~Crescent, seven from the Press–Gazette, five from the Northwestern, two from the Daily Herald, one from the Press, and one from the Advocate — had also signed the petitions to recall Gov. Scott Walker.
The Gannett 25 — about one-ninth of Gannett’s 223 Wisconsin news employees — are not the first journalists to have discovered, perhaps to their surprise, that petitions are public documents according to Wisconsin law. The first reported example was the Daily Jefferson County Union in Fort Atkinson, whose managing editor, Ryan Whisner, and regional editor signed petitions for the recall of Sen. Scott Fitzgerald (R–Juneau). Whisner, whose job duties appear to include Fitzgerald’s work, previously cheered on recall candidate Lori Compas on her Facebook page.
All of the aforementioned seems to violate, at least in spirit, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, specifically the “Act Independently” section …
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.
Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
— Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
… as well as part of the “Be Accountable” section:
Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.
Journalists should …
— Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media. …
— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
— Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.
Post~Crescent publisher Genia Lovett also spelled out Gannett’s Code of Ethics as it applies to political involvements:
All Gannett journalists are trained on and expected to follow the company’s principles of ethical conduct. The 32 principles include these six that are directly relevant to the recall petition issue:
» We will remain free of outside interests, investments or business relationships that may compromise the credibility of our news report.
» We will maintain an impartial, arm’s length relationship with anyone seeking to influence the news.
» We will avoid potential conflicts of interest and eliminate inappropriate influence on content.
» We will take responsibility for our decisions and consider the possible consequences of our actions.
» We will be conscientious in observing these principles.
» We will always try to do the right thing.
A Gannett journalist cannot uphold these principles and at the same time post a candidate’s sign in the yard, or sign a candidate’s nomination papers, or join a campaign rally, or sign a petition advocating a recall election.
I’ve maintained for years that there should be a Public Embarrassment of Your Employer rule that allows employers to fire employees who publicly embarrass them. The Daily Jefferson County Union should have fired Whisner under that rule. No reader of that newspaper should expect that any story with Whisner’s byline contains anything more than his biases against Fitzgerald specifically and Republicans generally.
Those who applaud Gannett for living up to its own code of ethics should pause for their inner cynic. Media Trackers outed the Daily Jefferson County Union’s petition signings. One can reasonably ask whether Gannett found out someone was about to report Gannett employees’ petition signings and if that prompted Gannett’s public mea culpa.
This appears to be a media example of what has been known in Washington since the Clinton administration as the Friday afternoon document dump — release the damaging information you’re required to release when few people are paying attention. In all cases except the Reporter (which doesn’t have a Saturday paper), Gannett’s shame-on-us editorials were published in their Saturday editions, which are the least-read editions of a seven-day-a-week newspaper.
One of the fascinating aspects of the Recall ________ movement(s) is who’s standing up on the side of public disclosure and who is not. According to some comments on some of the Gannett newspaper websites, the bad guys in this are Gannett management for supposedly abrogating their employees’ First Amendment rights:
Signing a petition should not be considered any different than voting. How dare the Post Crescent control the private activities of its employees. It’s a shame the names were released in the first place, and it’s actions like this that make it even more appalling. Just because they signed the petition doesn’t mean they can’t remain objective while doing their job.
(This ignores the fact that petitions on behalf of candidates’ attempts to get on ballots or referendum petitions are public records and have always been public records at least as long as the ’70s Open Records Law has been law. Voting is the only political activity guaranteed to be private.)
This is participating in our American Election process. It has nothing to do with integrity or their jobs. It is their right as American Citizens. Gannets should be ashamed of intimidating their employees. I hope if there is any disciplinary action, these employees sue Gannett and it goes all the way to th Supreme Court. The actions of Gov Walker impact these employees and their families.
(The utilitarian theory: They have right to exercise their constitutional rights because the commenter hates Scott Walker.)
Genia-I suppose that no one should have signed these petitions? That way the end result would have been to your liking. To limit professional journalists, judges, and others from participating in any democratic process is unconstitutional. I realize that Appleton is the home to the distinguished Joseph McCarthy, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow his witchhunt tactics.
(Godwin’s Law states that anyone in an online debate who accuses someone of being a Nazi automatically loses the debate. There should be a Wisconsin equivalent for accusations of McCarthyism.)
We are a democratic republic. The citizens of this democrat republic have every right to protect it from a Governor who no longer serves the interests of this state. People that sign the petition are defenders of Wisconsin. If the governor can be removed, they should be hailed as heroes.
(I eagerly await this commenter’s defense of a future recall effort against a Democratic elected official.)
As a Conservative and while I condemn any judge who signs the recall and refuses to recuse themselves from any case involving Governor Walker or his policies, journalists are a completely different matter. First, anyone who truly believes journalists act without bias is living in the FAR distant past. Second, journalists are not bound by any oath of office, code of ethicd (LOL) or any other committment. Finally, while I too dislike much of the bias shown BOTH ways in the media, we all recognize it for what it is and we move on.
(This is the most cynical comment I have read. Well done.)
Wis U.P. North nicely summarizes the non-media-expert view:
One, we commend Gannett for first admitting that some do have a bias in their company and second, holding their employees responsible for their actions. We are not sure if anything will ever happen to the 25 but it looks good in print. You can read above that the 25 are kicking and shouting that they did no wrong. Typical liberals.
We can now wonder if the media in T V and local print signed the Walker recall. Having I Verify The Recall is such a good thing to have.
If the people in the media would just be honest, we could deal with their bias. It is when they say they are not bias and then get caught red handed.
There is bias in the media and that will never change. People do have a right to not buy newspapers and not watch certain T V stations.
First: Anyone who claims they signed petitions only so people got a chance to vote is being disingenuous at best. Every legal voter had a chance to vote for Walker or one of his opponents in November 2010. Every legal voter will have a chance to vote for or against Walker in November 2014 if Walker runs for reelection. If you signed the Walker recall petition, you oppose Walker and you want him out of office. Period. Don’t lie and claim otherwise.
With most of what the media does, bias isn’t much of an issue. (I write that as someone who’s been baselessly accused of bias more than once, including bias in favor of a town’s St. Charles Catholic Church instead of others when a story mentioned a cemetery on “St. Charles Road.”) Truth be told, though, bias is easier for the unprofessional journalist to insert into a story than the non-journalist might think. Someone who doesn’t return calls to a reporter gets described by the phrase “was unavailable for comment,” which can give the appearance of denigrating the person who refused to talk to the reporter, even though the statement is 100 percent accurate. A story about a car crash could say that car A hit car B, or it could say that cars A and B collided; each implies a different version of what happened. Read the Green Bay Press–Gazette’s and Chicago Tribune’s versions of the next Packers–Bears game, and even though the facts will be 100 percent in agreement, the interpretation of them will not be.
Here’s an even better example: Let’s say your school district decides to add teachers to reduce class sizes in a few grades. That means the school district is spending more, which means your school property taxes will increase — let’s say 3 percent in our example. So either of these headlines would be valid headline choices:
School class sizes to drop in new budget
New school budget hikes taxes 3%
Either is correct, but each says something different from the other.
Journalists have biases, political and otherwise, because human beings have biases. Being unbiased is probably not possible, but being fair, objective and complete in your reporting is possible. It is nevertheless a reasonable question to ask a journalist already on record of opposing conservatives such as Walker whether they can be fair to or objective about conservatives not named Walker. (Remember that the phrase “the personal is political” wasn’t invented by conservatives.)
People who cloak their actions in the Constitution sometimes forget the difference between their right to do something and whether what they did was a good idea. (And many also forget that freedom of expression doesn’t include freedom from the consequences of your actions.) Yes, the Gannett employees had the right to sign petitions. The First Amendment even says they have the right to engage in political activity, contrary to what the Gannett Code o’ Ethics says.
On the other hand, the First Amendment applies to government, not necessarily to one’s employer. And there is no question that the Gannett employees’ signing the petitions that are public records gives the appearance of impropriety. Go back two paragraphs, and you can conclude that Gannett employees’ signing petitions gives the appearance that Gannett newspapers want Walker to be recalled and lose. As with any other worker or employer, any Gannett employee who doesn’t like having to follow Gannett’s Code of Ethics is free to pursue employment elsewhere.
If the media is serious about serving the public, then the appearance of “conflicts of interest, real or perceived” absolutely matters. That’s why codes of journalism ethics say journalists should “Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.”
Which is what this comment on the Gannett Blog gets at:
Speaking as a former Gannett employee in Wisconsin who signed the recall petition, the journalists who signed the ethics code AND the petition should be terminated. They are educated, professional adults who knew the rules — and broke them! This story tells me one thing: do not trust Gannett newspapers in Wisconsin. There are two other newspapers in Wisconsin where you may find fair, impartial news. End of discussion.
The most ironic aspect of all this comes from the Gannett Blog, an email sent to Post~Crescent employees by managing editor Jamie Mara that included this sentence: “Do not respond to any media requests or other communication you might receive from outside our office in relation to this matter.”
The online museum chronicles the state’s broadcasting past, beginning with Beloit College’s radio experiments in 1908 that became 9XB, and 9XM, which became WHA radio in Madison in 1922, the state’s first licensed radio station. Radio history buffs will find that WIAO radio in Milwaukee, which became WISN, is the state’s oldest continually licensed radio station. (Those who appreciate irony also will see that in 1925, The Capital Times started WIBA radio in Madison, now the home of conservative talkers Rush Limbaugh and Vicki McKenna.) They’ll also see the state’s oldest TV station, WTMJ in Milwaukee, started as WMJT (“Milwaukee Journal Television”) on channel 3.
My favorite part, though, is its newest section, dedicated to great moments in Wisconsin sports on the air. The first known play-by-play (probably not in the form we recognize today) was of a 40–15 UW basketball win over Ohio State Feb. 17, 1917. The Packers and UW football have been on the air since the late 1920s.
Early highlights such as the 1952 and 1963 Rose Bowls and the first two Super Bowls intersperse newsreels and a bit of play-by-play. (The site doesn’t have the 1963 Rose Bowl play-by-play of NBC’s Mel Allen, then the longtime announcer of the New York Yankees.) There is also video (but only narration) of UW’s March 1962 upset of number-one-ranked Ohio State, led by Basketball Hall of Famers Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek.
The Glory Years Packers are well represented, beginning with the 1961 NFL championship, which you can see here too:
The Packers clips end with Super Bowl XXXI. I assume Super Bowl XLV will eventually get there.
The happy synchronicity is that the advent of electronic files coincides with the dramatic improvements of the fortunes of the Packers and Badger football and basketball (last night notwithstanding) over the past 20 or so years. A look on the museum site and on YouTube show plenty of Packer and Badger highlights from the ’90s, ’00s and ’10s. Reel-to-reel and 2-inch videotape from earlier decades make highlights more difficult to store, but then again between the ’60s and the ’90s the term “highlight” can only be applied loosely to most Packer and Badger seasons.
Two of the clips demonstrate the vagaries of the broadcasting business. The baseball section features Cecil Cooper’s two-run single that won the last game of the 1982 American League Championship Series, sending the Brewers to their first (and only so far) World Series.
The clip is from ABC-TV’s coverage, not the Brewers Radio Network. WTMJ radio has been the originating station for the Brewers network nearly every year since the Seattle Pilots headed east in 1970. But in 1981 and 1982, radio rights shifted from WTMJ to WISN. And in the custom since Uecker became the Brewers’ lead announcer in 1980 (and probably before then), the Brewers’ number two announcer, Dwayne Mosley, called the game-winning hit because he called the third, fourth and seventh innings. (As have Uecker’s other partners, Lorn Brown (who preceded Mosley), Pat Hughes (who succeeded Mosley), Jim Powell, Cory Provus and now Joe Block.) Mosley also got to call the final out because Uecker was in the Brewers’ clubhouse for the postgame celebration.
The other is the clip of the 1994 Rose Bowl, called by WTMJ radio’s Brian Manthey and former UW quarterback Randy Wright. Calling the Badgers’ first Rose Bowl in 31 years and their first Rose Bowl win was undoubtedly the highlight of Manthey’s and Wright’s UW careers. It also was the last game of Manthey’s and Wright’s UW careers, because broadcast rights shifted from WTMJ to Learfield Sports after the 1993 season. Learfield hired Matt Lepay (who had been doing UW basketball for WTMJ) and Mike Lucas to do both football and basketball.
My favorite part of the site so far (because history projects are always in the “so far” mode) is the UW men’s hockey section, particularly the 1973 and 1977 national championships. The hockey Badgers were the first UW men’s teams in my memory that, to put it bluntly, didn’t suck. The 1977 team arguably is the best in UW history, with four All-Americans — forwards Mike Eaves (yes, now the UW men’s coach) and Mark Johnson (yes, now the UW women’s coach), defenseman Craig Norwich and goaltender Julian Baretta — and a 37–7–1 record.
You have to play the clips of UW’s overtime Frozen Four wins — 35 years ago today, the semifinal win over New Hampshire 4–3 42 seconds into overtime …
Ready for that faceoff coming up, Mike Eaves and Alley and now Alley is saying something to, uh, or check it, over to Murray Johnson is out there now … and off the draw a SHOT AND A GOAL! Mike Eaves got the draw and he put it in the net! Mike Eaves got the draw and he put it in the net off the faceoff! The Badgers win it in overtime at the 9:18 mark! And the Badgers are out on the ice!
… and one night later the championship win over Michigan 6–5 23 seconds into overtime …
Mike Eaves in the faceoff circle, and the puck is dropped, Alley tried to pick it up, it’s loose along the boards. Alley down in the corner along with Mike Eaves and Tommy Ulseth. Here’s Ulseth skating in behind the net, Tommy tried to stuff it, a shot, knocked down, it’s loose AND A GOAL! THE BADGERS HAVE WON IT! Steve Alley got the winner! Steve Alley got the winner and the Badgers have won the NCAA! On the rebound the Badgers have won the NCAA! The Badgers are out on the ice, [team physician] Doc Clancy, and the fans! The Badgers have won their second NCAA, at the 9:37 mark of the overtime!
… to hear the undisguised joy in announcer Paul Braun’s voice. Unlike other parts of the country, Wisconsin sports listeners want announcers who actually sound like they want their teams to win. Announcer impartiality never became popular in the Midwest, and certainly not in Wisconsin. Braun called the Badgers’ 1977, 1981, 1983 and 1990 national championships, and now calls Badger games on Fox Sports Wisconsin. And during his radio days, listeners never had a problem figuring out which team had scored.
My other favorite is the Braves’ 1957 National League pennant-winning home run by Henry Aaron, called by the Braves’ Earl Gillespie:
The pitch to Henry Aaron … a swing and a drive back into center field! Going back towards the wall! It’s back at that fence! And is it gone or not? It’s a home run! The Braves are the champions of the National League! Henry Aaron just hit his 43rd home run of the year! … Holy cow!
I never met Earl, but I know his brother, nephew and great nephew, who coached or played for Ripon College. So I guess I feel a bit of an affinity for Earl’s work. (In part because for a number of years I was the unofficial Gillespie family announcer.)
The reality of such moments calls to mind Rudyard Kipling’s line from “If,” “If you can keep your head about you when all about you are losing theirs …” Since a radio announcer is the listener’s eyes and ears, the play-by-play guy can’t merely scream with abandon like the fans behind or below him, nor can he shut up and let the pictures speak for themselves, since there are no pictures. The play-by-play guy also may be competing with his partner (in Braun’s case, I believe it was Phil Mendel, the Dane County Coliseum public address announcer, a UW professor and a real character), which can be a problem for announcers that call slightly behind the action. (I have some experience in that.)
There are a couple of inaccuracies. The word “categories” is misspelled. (There’s a joke somewhere about broadcasters not needing to know how to spell.) The 1961 Packers clip starts with Chris Schenkel, the Giants’ announcer, before Lindsey Nelson (the listed announcer) comes on. (Schenkel, an Indianan, had a deeper voice than Nelson, a Tennessean.) A few announcers aren’t listed (Jim Simpson and Curt Gowdy of NBC on Super Bowl I)
It would be cool to see clips of the announcer most linked to the Glory Years Packers, CBS-TV’s Ray Scott. (Who was only seen on road games in Green Bay because NFL games were blacked out in home markets until 1974.) And one always wants to see and hear more, of course. The site could augment its UW basketball and football files with, in chronological order, a wild finish and a monumental upset both called by the late Jim Irwin.
Some high school basketball clips would be interesting, too. Two words: Lamont Weaver. Two more words: Sam Dekker:
And this really needs to be added to the 2006 hockey file:
(It’s too bad announcers Brian Posick and Rob Andringa weren’t more into their work that night, isn’t it?)
But the collection of history is always a work in progress. In order to maintain such a site, you need to have actual clips, and then you have to get the rights to use them. The first is often harder than the second; I suspect the reason you haven’t seen radio snippets of the Curly Lambeau/Don Hutson Packers is because they probably don’t exist. And there should be few ’70s and ’80s Packers and Badgers highlights because, well, there were few ’70s and ’80s highlights. (In 1988, for instance, the Badgers and Packers were a combined 5–22.)
The site is certainly off to an entertaining start.
This blog will reach its first birthday, or anniversary, on March 31.
March 18, 2008 was the first day the Marketplace of Ideas blog started. Since I’ve been blogging continuously since that day, March 18 represents my first day as an opinionmongering blogger, I guess.
Following is what I wrote on the original Marketplace of Ideas blog and in the March 18, 2008 Marketplace Magazine. Obviously, Marketplace doesn’t exist anymore, but some things haven’t changed.
Before Jay Leno and Johnny Carson, NBC-TV’s “The Tonight Show” was hosted by humorist Jack Paar.
More conversationalist than comedian, Paar secured a space in TV history forever by the way he quit on the air in 1960.
NBC’s Standards and Practices department (that is, “censors”) had cut a four-minute-long joke, without bothering to tell Paar, in which an English tourist inquired about “W.C.” (“water closet”) facilities with a Swiss schoolmaster who spoke little English. The schoolmaster based his response on his belief that “W.C.” stood for “wayside chapel.” (The whole joke, which today’s middle schoolers might find amusing, is at http://www.tvacres.com/censorship_jack.htm.)
The next night, Paar announced, live on tape, that he was quitting, saying, “There must be a better way of making a living than this.” And off he went, leaving announcer/cohost Hugh Downs, looking as if he’d eaten some bad hors d’oeuvres, to fill the rest of the show.
One month, a trip to the Orient and a formal apology from NBC officials later, Paar returned to The Tonight Show. He began his opening monologue with this classic opening: “As I was saying, before I was interrupted. …” One round of applause later, he added, “When I walked off, I said there must be a better way of making a living than this. Well, I’ve looked. … There isn’t.”
The preceding is how I decided to announce my return to Marketplace, after a stint of nearly seven years in institutional public relations. That story won out over lyrics from The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”) or John Sebastian’s “Welcome Back,” which, I kid you not, I heard on the radio the morning I accepted this job. The headline is, of course, from the horror movie “Poltergeist” … or perhaps from WBAY-TV’s digital channel, the Retro Television Network, which appears to have been programmed with most of what I watched on TV in the 1970s and 1980s.
I’m not going to insult your or my intelligence by claiming that there is no better way of making a living than being the editor of Marketplace Magazine. It is, however, the best job, I believe, in print journalism in northeast Wisconsin. (As for the best broadcast job, tune in to Green Bay Packers announcer Wayne Larrivee this summer.) The editor of Marketplace directs the work of writers in interviewing interesting and successful people successfully doing interesting things. Marketplace readers are better educated, wealthier, more accomplished and more successful than your typical newspaper reader. What could be better for an ink-stained wretch than that?
I didn’t leave Marketplace in a Paar-style huff in 2001. The world of institutional public relations is occupied by many former journalists, as I discovered in a story I wrote on that very subject in 2000. It was a good experience, working in one of the most pleasant work environments in this area. (For one thing, being on the other side of the media-vs.-public-relations divide impressed on me the quality — or, more appropriately, lack thereof — of so many journalists in northeast Wisconsin and elsewhere.)
I’ve concluded, though, that for me journalism is either a chronic disease or an addiction. You can be in remission from disease or in recovery from an addiction, but it never really goes away. Even after I left Marketplace I would still scour the magazine section of bookstores looking at interesting magazine design. I’ve read, I believe, every issue of Marketplace since leaving Marketplace.
I look at publications like no one else I know, critiquing arguments in columns, photos, choices in layout and headline wording, the quality of lead paragraphs. One of the funniest books I’ve recently read was written by National Review founder William S. Buckley Jr., consisting solely of letters to the editor and Buckley’s responses; it’s called Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription(a sentiment shared at one point by everyone who has ever worked in the print media). And I’ve missed not being more “in the know” — to be in possession of more information than ever gets publicized. There is something bracing about having your name on a story for everyone to like, hate or otherwise critique. (The worst thing you can ever say to a columnist is not “I hated your column”; it’s “You write a column? Never heard of it.”)
This is not to suggest I’m the same person who left Marketplace in June 2001. The son I had when I left now has a younger brother and sister, the latter of whom believes the world revolves around her. I’ve become more skeptical and cynical about many things. (As someone once pointed out, make it idiot-proof, and someone will make a better idiot.) I’ve come to detest pretense and self-entitlement in people. Reading the following in a business magazine may shock you, but I’ve concluded that you should not love your job, because your job does not love you. I constantly struggle to match what I do and how I feel about things with what should be my priorities.
So why am I back at Marketplace? It’s because … it’s important. The readers of Marketplace deserve the most accurate, most timely, most insightful, most useful information about business in northeast Wisconsin — or should I say “The New North”? — that you can get. You deserve a magazine that will tell your story and understands the central importance of, among other things, profits. The productive people of northeast Wisconsin deserve an island in a sea of media mediocrity in which currents of hostility flow through a basin of apathy.
Andrew was without pretension – he really didn’t care who you were. He just wanted to lead other conservatives into the fight. This is a guy who mingled with titans like Rush Limbaugh, but just as easily with people none of us have ever heard of – yet. …
Those who knew him would laugh at the hatemongers who called him “racist” or “homophobe” – things that were the very opposite of who he was and what he believed. There is a great difference between Andrew and the people who despised him. He was angry because people failed to live up to basic standards of decency; the haters hated because he defied them.
For different reasons, Andrew’s friends and his enemies are both testaments to his character. …
Our movement lost a visionary and a leader, a guy who could see the challenge but inspire others to fight beside him. There will never be another conservative warrior like Andrew, but thanks to him, there will many, many more conservative warriors.
National Review’s Jonah Goldberg had one of the best tributes:
If you don’t know who Breitbart was, you haven’t been paying attention. A conservative activist, entrepreneur, author, muckraker, media pioneer, and performance artist of sorts, in his heart he was a radical.
His friends saw him as a fearless truth-teller and provocateur. (The word “fearless” will have to be retired from overuse when all of his obituaries have been written.) His enemies, and they are legion even in death, saw him as the most vile creature who ever slithered upon the earth. …
Andrew relished such attacks, truly, because they proved to him that he was having great effect in his work and that his opponents had run out of serious arguments. …
This is not to say that Andrew was beyond criticism. He made mistakes. He took full swings at some pitches he should have just let go. He overstated some things that needed to be said, and said some things that didn’t need to be said at all. He was a human run-on sentence who showed deference to no punctuation mark save the exclamation point, a conservative Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons we both grew up on, whirling and whizzing through anything in his path. Giving him a dose of Ritalin to treat his hyperactivity would be like throwing a glass of water on a five-alarm fire.
Andrew had profound contempt for those on the left who claimed a birthright to a monopoly on virtue and tolerance. …
He rejected in the marrow of his bones the idea that conservatives needed to apologize for being conservative or that liberals had any special authority to pronounce on the political decency and honesty of others.
Indeed, when liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.
He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on Obamacare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge — recycled over and over by the media — was a lie.
The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism’s undeserved monopoly on the “narrative” — one of his favorite words.
60 Minutes won awards for hidden cameras, but when he used the same technique to embarrass liberals, such tactics were suddenly proclaimed ethically beyond the pale. The joke was on the scolds because they had to cover the stories anyway. And the stories got results. Congress defunded ACORN. Heads rolled at NPR. Andrew understood that news and arguments change politics if you can get the news and arguments to the people — and if you don’t let those who don’t like what you say define you.
He left an electronic media legacy that will be hard to top, having helped launch the Drudge Report, the HuffingtonPost, Breitbart.com, and his collection of “Big” sites. He was an unapologetic conservative, but one who defied the media’s template; pro-civil rights, pro-drug legalization, pro-gay rights, to the point of boycotting CPAC when it barred the gay conservative group GOProud. Other than his mainstream pro-life views (he was, after all, adopted) you would be hard pressed to characterize him as a right winger on social issues.
So how did this socially liberal Jewish RINO from Brentwood become the Emmanuel Goldstein of the left’s unhinged 2-Minutes Hate? A lot of it, I suspect, is a viral strain of mindless repetition. I have appalled a few nice progressive friends by revealing my friendship with Breitbart. They know good people, like me, are supposed to despise him, but pressed can’t quite articulate why. Or cite his reported support for slavery and gay concentration camps or somesuch. Its most concentrated form takes place in the anonymity of comment threads and Twitter feeds. My personal favorite is the frequent taunting of Breitbart as gay, where the taunter either (a) assumes Breitbart considers it an insult, or (b) actually means it as an insult.
Breitbart, of course, reveled in it, and took great delight in retweeting and exposing that hate, the real source of which is clear: unlike meek approval-seeking chickenshits like me, he relished poking at hornets’ nests, lifting up rocks, calling out the bullies on the playground. He made himself an enemy of corrupt political con artists who operate on latent threats of thuggery, called them out on it, and, best of all, knew exactly how they would react before they did. He deserved a Pulitzer, but got something better: their opprobrium.
Doug Giles provides high praise for personal reasons:
I initially met Andrew Breitbart over the phone when I called him on September 8, 2009. That was the day before my daughter Hannah’s scandalous ACORN videos were released on the public’s head.
Andrew was on the road, and I was in Vail about to speak at a men’s conference and wanted to know, from a man I didn’t know, if he was going to make certain my girl would be “safe” in every sense of the word because the ACORNs were fixin’ to hit the fan.
Having seen several of Hannah’s devastating undercover vids and knowing the weight of what was about to land on my 20-year-old, I told Andrew that if he allowed anything bad to happen to Hannah that I would hurt him. And I did not mean that metaphorically.
Breitbart said he would defend Hannah with his life and treat her as if she were his own daughter. I thought, “good answer,” and with that we began a relationship and went through a tornadic, grueling, and thrilling war against a corrupt organization and a crooked media that covers and defends such sleaze.
Every step of the way, through vicious, non-stop media attacks, death threats to our family, and multiple lawsuits, Breitbart kept his word to me and ran interference for Hannah and the ACORN story like a champion. He made certain that the proper people got crushed and the truth tellers remained afloat. …
Here’s my takeaway from a man I didn’t seek to meet but am sure glad I did:
As stated, Breitbart kept his word and stayed in the volatile fray with Hannah just like he promised. Few people keep their word nowadays.
To Andrew, crap was crap no matter how one framed it. Andrew was an equal opportunity offender. Everything smells, so attitude sells.
Breitbart was bold. Would to God more men who love God and country had his moxie. AB was a provocateur par excellence.
He inspired young people who are sick of lies, hype and spin to take their talent and tools and use them against the tools of the machine.
Andrew understood the importance of conservatives getting involved in Hollywood and not just in DC.
Breitbart, by example, showed us all that if you aren’t drawing enemy fire then you’re not over the target.
If you didn’t agree with Andrew on all the issues, he was okay with that and reveled in robust discussions over cold beer.
Breitbart also gets credit for taking down U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D–New York) after this bizarre press conference:
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has quite the description of Breitbart:
Like [Saul] Alinsky, Breitbart employed unorthodox and sometimes unethical tactics to expose the corruption of the powerful. His targets were generally representatives of what he called, in an 2009 interview with this columnist, “the Democrat-media complex”: politicians (most notably ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner), journalistic organizations (NPR) and left-liberal advocacy groups (Acorn, the NAACP, Common Cause). Also like Alinsky, he was modest about what he could accomplish: “I’m not looking to slay the dragon,” he told us in 2009, “but I wanted to embarrass the dragon into being a more reasonable dragon.”
One key to understanding Breitbart’s effectiveness is Alinsky’s fourth rule: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” He demonstrated tolerance for bigotry at NPR and the NAACP, for violent partisan rhetoric at Common Cause, and for exploitation of the poor at Acorn. And he exposed Weiner, the sanctimonious male feminist, as a concupiscent con artist.
One key to understanding Breitbart’s effectiveness is Alinsky’s fourth rule: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” He demonstrated tolerance for bigotry at NPR and the NAACP, for violent partisan rhetoric at Common Cause, and for exploitation of the poor at Acorn. And he exposed Weiner, the sanctimonious male feminist, as a concupiscent con artist.
Breitbart’s foes typically responded in one of two ways, both ineffective: by faulting his ethics or by raging impotently against him. The first came closest to being effective with his 2010 exposé of the NAACP, which was based on a tendentiously edited video of Shirley Sherrod, then a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, confessing at an NAACP dinner to having harbored antiwhite sentiments. (Sherrod has since sued Breitbart for defamation.)
The episode occasioned a back-and-forth between this columnist and David Frum, a writer who seems to aspire to be a sort of court conservative to the liberal elite. We faulted Frum for describing Breitbart as “the conservative Dan Rather.” …
But the main reason Frum’s comparison was silly was that Rather’s act reflected a corruption of authority. By contrast, as we wrote, Breitbart “has no authority, only the inexpensive integrity of a rascal who is honest about what he is.”
Based in the liberal enclave of Los Angeles, Breitbart viewed himself as a one-man conservative gang and he took to the task of delivering rhetorical body blows — primarily via the web but also through television appearances — with a gusto rarely seen even in these hyperpartisan times. …
His untimely passing raises a fascinating question about our modern world: What did Andrew Breitbart mean to politics?
That may be among the most loaded questions in the political world due to Breitbart’s divisive — and proud of it — personality. ,,,
The legacy that Breitbart leaves on the political world is a mixed one. He was, without question a pioneering force in the rapidly-growing field aggregation of political news — both during his time at Drudge and HuffPo. …
And, Breitbart also understood before many others that the world of politics — and the way in which it was covered — was rapidly transforming itself into a form of entertainment for the public. The fusion of celebrity and politician — best epitomized by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin — was something that Breitbart (and Drudge) grasped longed before much of the mainstream media.
At the same time, Breitbart’s methods walked a fine line between envelope pushing and downright scurrilous at times. The Sherrod incident raised questions about whether Breitbart was a journalist with a conservative bent or simply someone willing to do whatever it took to bring down Democrats.
For those who preached the need to elevate the public dialogue about politics, Breitbart was enemy number one — a symbol of the small and petty nature of the world in which politicians were forced to reside. …
If you loved him, you really loved him. And if you hated him, well you really hated him. Having met Breitbart on a few occasions and corresponded with him infrequently over the years, I can’t imagine he would want it any other way.
Some of Breitbart’s opponents showed some class — Touré on time.com:
When he was here, I thought of him as a dangerous though barely effectual ideological comedian/Internet shock jock/wannabe public intellectual. But the moment I realized he was gone, he transformed in my mind into nothing less than a committed soldier for his side, by which I mean both conservatism and the family for whom he so ably provided. That is not hypocritical; it’s human. Death should temper how we think of people or at least how we speak of them. It’s inhuman to celebrate the death of an enemy unless they were engaged in trying to kill you or succeeding at oppressing you. Breitbart was not nearly that powerful. We gain nothing and our spirit loses in hating him now that his body is in the ground.
As for the others … well, National Review’s Jim Geraghty describes them:
You probably heard Matt Yglesias’s first response on Twitter: ”Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with@AndrewBrietbart dead.”
I don’t usually suggest physical violence toward others. That’s certainly not the way I want to see myself or the kind of example I want to set for my sons. But, if you’re going to say things like that — just an hour after word arrives that a man suddenly died, leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless — I don’t think you should be terribly shocked that some folks will want to register their disapproval over the bridge of your nose. And you’ll have it coming. …
I had observed, yesterday, that there were not merely a handful of folks on the left sneering about how happy they were that Breitbart had suddenly died. There were gobs and gobs of them, all over Twitter and the web at large. If you need examples, Charlie Spiering collected plenty here, though I’d urge most of sound mind to avoid putting themselves through reading that.
You can call this whatever you like — the Daily-Kos-ification of the Left, perhaps — but it confirms what many of us suspected and/or feared. I didn’t want to believe it, really. I personally know too many people I’d identify as Democrats, if not liberals, who are too decent to ever express such raw hate and cruelty. But a large chunk of the rank and file of the Left — way more than a small percentage — really don’t believe that their opponents deserve anything resembling basic human dignity or respect.
We’re not really people to them. It’s not an accident that New York Times columnist referred to his critics on Twitter as “right-wing lice.” They’re not good, decent Americans who just have some different ideas about how to make the world a better place. They run on hate. It appears their entire sense of self-worth is driven by demonizing those who disagree with them and celebrating their political viewpoints as the cardinal measurements of virtue and good character. They are positively energized by the thought of lashing out at those of us who have the audacity to think differently than they. They really do project and accuse the opposition of all their worst traits: rage, closed-mindedness, cruelty, intolerance, bigotry, and an inability to empathize with others. And they completely lack self-awareness. They are blind to the irony of their actions. As someone said on Twitter today (I can’t find the comment now), “How many of the people celebrating Andrew’s death have a ‘NO H8′ icon on their avatar?”
If, in their minds, we’re not deserving of that respect they clamor for endlessly — if their instinct, upon seeing us mourn is to “get in our faces” (a phrase that our president once strangely used) — they really cannot be entrusted with any power. They really would do away with us if given the chance.
Breitbart was the George Patton of the right side of the blogosphere. Patton’s Third Army captured more enemy prisoners and liberated more territory in less time than any army in history. Patton was highly controversial while doing so, with a U.S. letter-writing campaign to get Patton fired after one of his two soldier-slapping incidents. Someone once said that wars are won on the road, and Breitbart would appear on whatever media outlet would have him, even those unsympathetic to conservative points of view.
I think conservatives loved Breitbart not just because he expressed the right ideas, but because he expressed them ferociously and fearlessly, similar to Rush Limbaugh. His goal was not merely to outdebate, but to nuke his opponents. A lot of people like to say they don’t care what others think of them. Not only did he not care, but he didn’t care about the sensibilities of those he offended by blasting them for their wrong ideas or viewpoints.
That last paragraph could also explain the lurching popularity of Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. But Breitbart was more socially liberal, or libertarian, than Santorum, and from his friends it appears that Breitbart lived his life better (he leaves a wife and four children) than Gingrich. I don’t know if Breitbart ever met Ronald Reagan before Reagan’s Alzheimer’s Disease disabled him in the 1990s, but wouldn’t you have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation?
Breitbart’s death came in the same week as Limbaugh’s making a public apology for comparing the Georgetown University law school student who testified before Congressional Democrats to a slut. Breitbart was in the process of being sued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture official whose speech Breitbart’s website selectively edited. And Breitbart was, shall we say, less than complimentary about Ted Kennedy on the day of Kennedy’s death. (Which someone repeated on Twitter, to which I replied that Breitbart was responsible for one fewer death than Kennedy, which led to an accusation that I was stuck in the ’60s. To quote Taranto, Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment.) When a commentator goes off the deep end or repeats inaccuracies, he impugns his own credibility and takes attention away from what he’s arguing for or against.
How you feel about Breitbart depends on how important you feel the battle between conservative and liberal values is — if what’s happening now is really a cultural war, or just the latest shifting political winds. You need not think Limbaugh used appropriate language to question why a college affiliated with a church that opposes artificial birth control (because some forms cause what those who believe life begins at conception would consider to be abortion) should be required to provide its students with contraception. You need not believe Breitbart never went too far to believe that this country is moving in the profoundly wrong direction with Barack Obama in the White House and his amen corps in government, the entertainment world and the news media cheering on every move of Obama and his supporters, and using far worse language to describe their opponents. (Look up Bill Maher’s description of Sarah Palin. I’m not going to repeat it.)
We’ve seen that here in Wisconsin with a governor trying to install fiscal discipline in a state that has not known fiscal discipline in decades. And his reward is an attempted coup d’état, which remains the best description of the recall movements of last and this year (possibly the stupidest thing that has happened in Wisconsin politics in the history of this state), along with a politically motivated John Doe investigation. (Not to mention a Madison talk show host who wasn’t exactly complimentary about Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, though he did apologize.) As I’ve said here numerous times, politics is a zero-sum game — one side wins, the other loses — and if a war is taking place between the left and the right, you had better win.
… became an avid conservative and advocate for America’s constitutional order — which he rightly believed was the one thing that guaranteed our freedom.
The Los Angeles Times described him as a “Hollywood-hating, mainstream-media-loathing conservative.” Well, not really. Breitbart loved Hollywood and its grand traditions. In conversation, he often mentioned how much he respected and loved his father-in-law, the talented comic actor Orson Bean.
What he didn’t like was that Hollywood had been seized by a kind of leftist groupthink that permeated everything from its screenplays to its selection of actors. He hated leftist cant, regarding it as lazy.
As for the mainstream media, he didn’t loathe it so much as get angry at the left-wing, agenda-driven journalism it practiced. Even so, he was a frequent guest on “mainstream” TV and radio, and loved the news.
He was among the first to take the Tea Party seriously, and worked nonstop to advocate its back-to-basics brand of bedrock conservatism. As the huge media flaps over former Rep. Andrew Weiner, Acorn and Shirley Sherrod show, he loved to puncture the powerful and hypocritical — and that included Republicans.
I love my job. I love fighting for what I believe in. I love having fun while doing it. I love reporting stories that the Complex refuses to report. I love fighting back, I love finding allies, and—famously—I enjoy making enemies…. Three years ago, I was a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a popular website…. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in…. I’ve lost friends, sure…. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands—who knows?—of allies.
At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep well at night.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 