Completely Unnecessary

Roxana Saberi, a 31-year-old American reporter, has been arrested in Iran on charges of ‘illegal’ reporting and is being detained in an undisclosed location.

Scary stuff, but perhaps some key facts from Saberi’s distinguished resume can help assuage our fears.

A former Miss North Dakota, who’s been working in Iran as a freelance reporter, is being detained in undisclosed location there.

And that’s the actual lede from the story running on MediaBistro’s TVNewser.

We don’t learn until the second paragraph that Saberi has ‘reported for NPR, “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”, and Fox News Channel, among others as the [three-year] Tehran bureau chief for Feature Story News.’

But I can’t just blame MediaBistro (though delivering it to my inbox made an impression), as a number of news orgs have decided that Ms Saberi’s 12-year-old pageantry trumps her professional resume.

The original NPR story doesn’t mention the 1997 Miss North Dakota win until the seventh par and as part of her biography. Yet every other iteration I’ve found of the original story leads with this pretty irrelevant piece of information.

To give MediaBistro its due, at least they included a useful headline with her current profession: ‘American Reporter Detained in Iran’. North Dakota’s KFYR and Radio Free Europe cut right to the chase with, ‘Former Miss Dakota Arrested/Detained in Iran,’ respectively.

But perhaps it’s all NPR’s fault for posting her winning pageant photo in the first place, since it keeps popping up.

It appears that Saberi was initially arrested for buying a bottle of wine (which may or may not have been an excuse for the arrest), and is now being held for news gathering after her journalist credentials were revoked by the country in 2006. Iran is now discussing her detainment with the press, which is an improvement.

National and international news orgs have also found more pictures of Ms Saberi, which possibly accounts for the decreasing importance of her pageant title.

Yet, somehow I don’t think a male freelancer arrested in Iran (where, coincidentally, he was also finishing up his Masters in Iranian studies and international relations, as well as completing a book on Iranian culture) would be described as ‘Former All-State Quarterback’ by multiple news outlets.

I sincerely hope Ms Saberi is allowed to return to her studies soon.

And let her example serve as a reminder to women everywhere: burn every picture from your pageant/cheerleading/whatever days if you plan on being in the public sphere in any way, as they will almost assuredly appear in every story about you, no matter how irrelevant to the subject matter.

(I just hope no one ever gets a hold of my Academic Decathlon Swimsuit Competition photos! Embarrassing!)

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If the Senate removes Blago from office, it’s really going to put a damper on my afternoon crazy schedule.

Blagojevich’s latest presser consisted largely of cowboy metaphors, the governor arguing that the Senate impeachment trial was similar to an Old West hanging. (If there’s video up later, I’ll try to post it because you actually need to hear how long and how hard he flogged his simile.)

The main thrust of his prepared (?) remarks was that he was prevented from calling witnesses and from challenging the charges. Blagojevich demanded his ‘constitutional right’ to a fair trial.

If they can do this to a governor, they can do this to any citizen in Illinois.

Except, of course, ‘they’ can’t because his impeachment trial is a political procedure, not a criminal procedure.

Insanely, he took questions and the first one pressed him on exactly that point. Blago ducked and weaved, but didn’t manage to have an answer, except to demand again a fair trial.

He hit his stride late in the question period, claiming that he is being targeted by lawmakers who view him as an impediment to their cynical tax rise on the people of Illinois. He argued that if the people if the state allow him to go down like this, it will have a chilling effect on future governors actions vs the legislature.

Rod is the only thing standing between us and our other elected officials (and their 66% tax hike).

Um.

Oh yeah, he also called upon Illinois newspapers to help his cause for a ‘fair’ trial. He urged the Chicago Tribune, in particular, to lead the charge, citing the Tribune’s Supreme Court case against ‘Minnesota mobsters’ and other crooks.

This man’s irony gauge needs a lot of adjusting.

Speaking of the Tribune, they have some good quotes I didn’t catch all of:

Ending his 43-minute interview, Blagojevich likened the current drama surrounding him “to a 21st Century Frank Capra movie… how the good guy was up against the establishment… But he stood firm for the people. That’s what this is about.”

Obviously.

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It’s a testament to how nerdy I am that this just completely made my day:

At 9:46 a.m., another reporter walked into the press office.

“Good morning,” [Deputy Press Secretary Bill] Burton said.

“I came to introduce myself,” the woman said. “I’m Helen Thomas.”

Other notes from President Obama’s first day are here.

Twenty four hours….. now.

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Minneapolis’ Star Tribune declared bankruptcy last night.

This is just the latest in the series, but demonstrates just how tough it is for papers these days.

The Strib has presumably been getting a boost from the Franken/Coleman debacle, but despite scanning every single challenged ballot, its web traffic is just not filling the ad gap.

Like most newspapers, the Star Tribune has experienced a sharp decline in print advertising. Its earnings before interest, taxes and debt payments were about $26 million in 2008, down from about $59 million in 2007 and $115 million in 2004.

Yikes.

The article also notes the recent purchase of the paper by private equity group,  Avista Capital Partners. Such fiscally-minded groups have generally not been as apt as family-owned companies to take a loss on their newsmaking, whilst balancing the books with other, more lucrative ventures.

In other bankruptcy-plagued news, the Chicago Tribune tried its damnedest this week to cut costs and produce a product someone wants to purchase.

In addition to last week’s re-redesign (which I’ll address in a minute), the Trib is now producing its single-copy paper as a tabloid, leaving its broadsheet to subscribing customers. [announcement and print version]

It’s unclear if readers will adopt/adapt to the latest Tribune change. After all, the Tribune’s truncated broadsheet isn’t some Age-sized behemoth. The change may also acclimate readers to the tabloid format, perhaps making them more likely to pick up the Sun Times, which is 25c less. Finally, given the new format, why would readers not pick up the Red Eye, which provides Tribune content in a tabloid format and is also free?

The Tribune presents these as positive changes, but - the aesthetic and cultural (elitist?!?)  impacts of a tabloid Tribune aside - the printing of two separate editions seems scattered. It makes the paper seem as though they’re scrambling, which, of course, they are.

I was going to say that a brave face, a la the NYT, might be a better approach. Then again, they may merely be trying anything to stay afloat at this point.

I do have some commendation for the Tribune, though. They redesigned their redesign this week (late last week?) and included a helpful pull out about it in the new edition. There was some PR-speak, but the Trib addressed some reader complaints head-on, saying of one aspect, ‘Yeah, we hated it too. It’s gone.’ (Not sure if that’s a direct quote.)

While there are still lots of things I hate about the redesign - such as the horrible Page 3, over-arting in most sections and the ed/op-ed in the back of the Business section - staying in communication with subscribers is the best possible way to keep your base.

Their (mostly) honest assessment of their work makes me more inclined to keep reading the Tribune than anything else they’ve done this year.

And that is what passes for an ‘attaboy’ in this media market.

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I don’t read the Huffington Post very often. Despite their sometimes informative content, they often resort to tacky, lefty-Drudge headlines.

Ironically, I had clicked over to HuffPo for an article on why the online mag can’t replace the NYT.

(Oh, and speaking of which, the NYT took umbrage with the Atlantic article I quoted yesterday. Perhaps rumors of her death have been greatly exaggerated - or NYT’s communications dept has a vested interest in not appearing vulnerable. Updated: Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan takes a crack at the latter point.)

Anyway, the Huffington Post would like you to know that Africans are backwards, barbarous freaks:

The actual story explains that Obama’s grandmother wanted to bring a spear and shield amongst other gifts for her grandson on the occasion of his inauguration. It’s unclear from the article if she’ll check it, but it seems likely that she fears it being damaged during the flight and wanted to carry it on.

“But I have been told that due to security reasons I will not be allowed to board a plane with it,” she explained.

Hopefully, she and the airline can work out a compromise. (God, I’d love to see what today’s TSA would do with my grandmother; she packed everything… She also used to pack up all the bread rolls from the restaurant table into her purse, but that’s a separate issue.)

Needless to say, I did not click through to ‘Read HuffPost’s Inauguration BigNews Page’.

I made an angry noise and took a screen capture.

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[Updated below]

Just a month ago, Detroit’s two dailies, the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, announced they would reduce home delivery to just three days a week. Except the mildly profitable Thursday, Friday and Sunday editions, non-delivery days will see truncated content.

This month’s Atlantic examines the plight of the NYT, and sketches out doomsday scenarios for the paper. The upshot? Though unlikely, the NYT’s paper edition could fold as soon as May 2009.

These cutbacks and death of the newspaper nightmares, however, pale in comparison to the actual and sudden death of Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer.

Reporters and newsroom staff were told to gather for an announcement midday on Friday where they were told that the P-I would be put up for sale by parent company, The Hearst Corp.

The chances of a buyer for the troubled paper are extremely low, and no one really sees a print edition remaining on the table if one did emerge.

For all intents and purposes, staff were told that the 146-year old paper will cease production within 60 days.

Many are discussing the move from paper editions to online editions, but it seems unlikely that web-based newspapers will be able to generate the amount of content (and more importantly, the quality of content) delivered by today’s newspapers.

The P-I’s article on its demise notes that a web edition of the paper would not be able to maintain the staff of the print edition. Hirschorn’s Atlantic article estimates that a web-only NYT would be forced to cut staff by 80%.

Outside of media professionals, few are making a fuss:

If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands. The story from Beijing that pops up in my Google alert could have come from anywhere. As news resources are stretched and shared, it can often appear anywhere as well: a Los Angeles Times piece will show up in TheWashington Post, or vice versa.

That’s from the Hirschorn article, which I highly recommend. Also recommended is Eli Sanders’ evocative and sad posting on the P-I’s demise over at The Stranger.

There are many legitimate complaints about today’s newspapers (and god knows if you read this blog, you’ve heard many of them - and probably some illegitimate ones, too), but I would argue that they retain importance for our culture.

Without waxing overly romantic, newspapers provide us with a tangible, tactile record of our experiences. Holding the front page on November 5, 2008 is something no screen capture can replace. And while I get much of my news from the internet these days, reading the paper with a cup of coffee is a friendly, subtly comforting experience.

Newspapers have dug themselves some serious holes, many of which are destined to become graves in the current financial environment. The P-I is the first in what I fear will be a long line of papers to fold this year.

Best of luck to the staff and families of the P-I.

Update: The NYT’s communications dept takes issue with Hirschorn’s assessment.

Update II: Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan pushes back against the NYT’s letter, including some analysis of the NYT’s financial situation. Gawker also notes that the NYT’s online component would have to increase traffic sevenfold to survive without its print component. It already has the fifth highest traffic in the interwebs, so that kind of a jump seems unlikely, if nigh impossible.

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I really thought that women politicians had provided the media with enough fodder during the unending election cycle.

But now, with Thanksgiving over, the media have nothing to look forward to until Sarah Palin’s inevitable mangling of the Christmas season.

Luckily, one scrappy woman has stepped in to plug the gap in the news hole - Patti Blagojevich.

Let me state - again - that it appears the Mrs Blagojevich was part of the criminal conspiracy her husband is alleged to have masterminded.

But let’s take a trip through the last 24 hours of Patti in the media, shall we?

The Chicago Sun Times skipped the insinuation and just got straight to the point:

My three dailies  - NYT, Chicago Tribune and The Age - ran various permutations of the same Lady Macbeth story, along with flattering photos:

I like that last one from the Trib especially. It’s a nice companion to the Blago Rats! photo from the Sun Times.

There are, of course, nuggets from all the stories. What I really love is that, aside from the AP story where the author is unclear - women journo’s were assigned the task of gender-ripping Mrs Blagojevich.

The NYT:

In the 76-page federal complaint, Ms. Blagojevich appears to be an influential and demanding partner to her husband’s schemes…
…
And, in a blast of vulgar language, Ms. Blagojevich eggs on her husband when he reportedly threatens to prevent the Tribune Company from selling the Chicago Cubs…
…
The Web site for the governor’s office says that in addition to raising the couple’s two daughters, Ms. Blagojevich occupies herself with typical first lady issues: raising awareness on children’s health, food allergies and literacy, and starting the State Beautification Initiative, which planted native wildflowers along state roads.
…
Ms. Mell’s spokeswoman, Leah Cunningham Pouw, said her own impression of Ms. Blagojevich was that “she is extremely dedicated to her kids,” adding: “I’ve seen her laughing and playing with them. She’s funny; she’s light. When you go in their house, there’s pictures of their drawings posted on the stairwell.”

So, instead of being a typical first lady; she’s a schemer and a corrupter. Does this really come as a surprise? Her husband was supposed to be occupying himself with typical gubernatorial issues: governing and not engaging in corrupt fuckwittery.

That didn’t work out so well, so why are we holding Patti to a different standard? Isn’t it enough that she’s corrupt? Why does she have to be lady-corrupt?

And the only method of defending her alleged co-corruption is, of course, to talk about how good she is with her kids.

Right.

And from The Age (AP):

And in the 78-page criminal complaint against him, his 43-year-old wife emerged as a woman who schemed to cash in on her husband’s job and punish those who got in her way
….
Patti Blagojevich appeared to be a woman who knew her priorities and would not let working at her real estate brokerage firm interfere with raising the couple’s two small daughters.

She apparently was not that kind of woman, though. [The bold and italics are mine - the only way I could convey my reaction to that word, which consisted of nearly spitting up.]

Though I do start to understand how hard it is to capture the full background in crisis reporting. Check out this random nugget of reporting from the AP (printed in The Age):

[Dick Mell] was a powerful Chicago alderman who held a fundraiser in the late 1980s. Hoping to drum up business for his practice, Rod Blagojevich - then a young lawyer - attended and met Patti Mell. The two married in 1990.

What? Dick Mell is still a powerful Chicago alderman. I saw him crapping on and on at the Council meeting just last week. I guess that’s the three sentence history of the situation, but it makes about zero sense.

Anyway, by the time all this is said and done it will be all Patti’s fault. And it will be revealed that she killed some lady’s cats.

Cuz that’s how bitches do.

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All right, Chicago Tribune. I was going to write about your Patti Blagojevich/Lady Macbeth article anyway, but her appearance on your homepage has hurried it up a few hours.

Look, I know that people are suddenly visiting chicagotribune.com, so you want to keep those pageviews up. But don’t let the twin shocks of bankruptcy and unexpected relevance go to your head.

Because this is inappropriate:

Lady Macbeth, as you will no doubt recall from Mr Johnson’s English Lit class, is the devil woman who convinces her husband to murder the king, paving the way for his own ascension.

Lady Macbeth doesn’t merely profit from her husband’s rise, she actively corrupts him.

Which is not to say that Patti Blagojevich’s hands are clean. It appears that she was in on the criminal conspiracy, and charges should follow if they are merited. I don’t believe she should get a free ride because her husband is (likely) going to jail and they’ve got kids. Do the crime, do the time.

However! Let’s take a quick look at how we’re covering Mrs Blago’s not-even-alleged-at-this-point crimes.

An unflattering portrait depicting Illinois First Lady Patricia Blagojevich as a modern-day Lady Macbeth who plotted against her husband’s perceived enemies and backed his corrupt schemes emerged in court documents connected to the governor’s arrest Tuesday.

It appears that Patti’s ‘crimes’ so far consist of conduct unbecoming a lady. The Tribune article describes her ‘alleged ambitions and brashness‘ and the ‘obscenity-filled tirade‘ she ‘unleashed’ in support of firing Tribune employees.

That ‘obscenity-filled tirade’ consists of saying ‘fuck’ twice and ’shit’ once. Perhaps not language fit for high society, but certainly language I use in my home when I assume the feds aren’t listening. (And, from the transcript, language that appears par for the course in the Blagojevich household.)

But what really stirs my cauldron is the negative depictions of Patti herself.

For Rod, ambition has not been described as the problem, but rather as a motivator for the corruption he (allegedly) perpetrated. For Patti, the mere act of having ambition is modified with ‘alleged’ - as though that were her crime.

And, of course, we have the word ‘brash’, which has been used time and time again to describe the grating brassiness of women who step out of line.

Should the good governor’s wife should have knitted merrily whilst her husband cooked up the schemes?

From a legal standpoint, it appears so! But for the daughter of Chicago political boss, Dick Mell, not [bleeping] likely.

If she deserves it - and it looks as though she does - let’s try Patti Blagojevich in the courts. But let’s not use insulting literary metaphors to punish a woman for her unladylike ambition and language choice.

[Ed. note- I took the wrong spelling of Patricia Blagojevich's nickname. I've fixed it, and regret the (all-too-common) errors in my spelling.]

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I know this is a bit thin, given my shabby posting record these last couple weeks, but whatevs…

I cooked an entire Thanksgiving dinner, I’ll have you know.

My cranberry sauce was great (it was just standard cranberry sauce). I also soaked figs in tea for multiple hours. And then roasted them. Something to behold, my friends.

Something to behold.

Anyhoo - having been away from Chicago for, like, years, I got out of the habit of reading The Onion, but this week’s main headline is definitely worth it:

Blue Angels Hold First-Ever Open Tryouts
87 Dead, 243 Injured in Day 1 of Weeklong Event

And my favorite part:

“Mark my words—I’m going to be a Blue Angel if it’s the last thing I do.”

And this Sunday, that dream came true for an incredible 43 seconds, as [Harold] Enderby got the chance to fly the famed Blue Angels’ F/A-18 Hornet directly into the tarmac during the first day of the Navy’s most dramatic—and colorful—audition program ever.

I often can’t get though reading things I find funny out loud - but I nearly lost my mind trying to read that.

In other news, it’s cold.

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I’m sure you’ve seen this video already, but here’s your near-VP blithely taking the media’s questions whilst turkeys are slaughtered behind her.

The irony - because, of course, Palin loves the unusual murder of animals - is that she was at the turkey farm to pardon one of the other turkeys.

And now, watch his brothers die as Palin craps on and on.

(Actually, don’t listen to her because reading MSNBC’s totally hilarious/unprofessional captions is the best part.)

The media critic in me wants to chide MSNBC for their lack of gravitas (and especially the ‘fowls’ pun), but, aw screw it, it’s the holidays!

Consider yourself pardoned, MSNBC!

Poor Sarah Palin. Just can’t catch a break from herself.

h/t Wonkette (though it’s everywhere now)

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