Here’s how a definition gone wrong can lead to a debilitating public controversy. But hey, controversy drives traffic, so what the heck, right?
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It’s been a long time, but the New York Times is back in the business of pumping up the traffic to its Website with news about itself.
Predictably, once again, it is doing the news organization’s reputation more harm than good in the long run. Will they ever learn from their own history? The documents are right there under their noses.
The problem is, it might cost them a massive amount of corporate advertising to tell the truth, and they would lose a few Republican readers in the process.
An explanation is in order. You came to the right place for this one.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican political operative Karl Rove’s help for Sweden as it assists the Obama administration’s prosecution against WikiLeaks could be the latest example of the adage, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”
These days, Sweden and the Obama administration are apparently undertaking a political prosecution as audacious as the ones perpetrated by the notorious Bush Justice Department against Democrats across the Unites States.
The pending investigation and prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could criminalize many kinds of investigative news reporting about government affairs, not just the WikiLeaks disclosures that are embarrassing Sweden as well as the Bush and Obama administrations. Authorities in both countries are setting the stage with pre-indictment sex and spy smears against Assange, along with an Interpol manhunt.
“This has Karl’s signature all over it,” a reliable political source told select reporters in encouraging us to investigate Rove’s Swedish connection. “He must be very happy. He’s right back in the middle of it. He’s making himself valuable to his new friends, seeing the U.S. government doing just what he’d like — and screwing his opponents, big-time.”
How many stories does it take to make us understand and change?
Jesus and his disciples tried to warn people 2,000 years ago, but they could not understand.
People still do not get the message, although they worship him like a god, even George W. Bush.
The story of how human selfishness and greed threatens the survival of the species and the planet have been told for thousands of years, long before there was a Jesus, by word of mouth, on scrolls and carvings on rocks.
But now, armed with far more sophisticated knowledge of the planet and the human species and our behavior patterns, our psychology and sociology, the medium of our time is the film.
Inspired by everything they know about the universe, the earth and human kind, a number of film makers have tried to warn us. But for most of us, a movie is just another form of entertainment to go with our buttered popcorn and Coca-Cola. Interesting viewing, but unreal, with nothing important to say about us, our times or our future. Just another fantasy or fairy tale. And that is a mistake.
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
- Paul Newman as Luke, in Cool Hand Luke
“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
- John Muir
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
LITTLE RIVER CANYON – Sitting as quietly and patently as could be expected on such a quick, short trip to the mountain waterfalls around Mentone, Alabama over the weekend, I gazed until I knew the sun would soon disappear from view behind the treetops at one of the Littler River Falls overlooks.
In this preserved idyllic setting, I thought about my Cherokee ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years before the United States of America was a gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye. I thought of the men who killed the Cherokee too, and connected the dots in my mind to understand the modern descendants of those killers.
Is it possible that a grudge could linger from a human gene, and not just pass down from one generation to another through the culture?
I thought about the social and political problems in the world today, chiefly focusing on this country — and my native state.
There in that muted fall beauty, as muddled as the world has become today, my thoughts also turned to the Scotsman John Muir, an early American botanist, one of the first American naturalists and nature writers to roam from the hills of Scotland to New England, through Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately California by way of South America.
Revisiting the Bonfire of the Vanities Movie 20 Years Later
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
The year new journalist Tom Wolfe’s first novel The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987, I was mostly hanging out on the Southside of Birmingham reading books, magazines, and newspapers all day long every day at my shop called NewsBreak, the first newsstand-bookstore with a coffee bar in the city. I read a copy of Wolfe’s book sitting in that shop in between customers. There I spent a fair amount of time debating “new journalism” with the regular patrons, mostly the intelligentsia here who frequented the place not just for the coffee and the information for sale in print. It was the camaraderie and the conversation.
At that time I was in possession of two journalism degrees, and had worked for two Alabama newspapers, a weekly and a daily. I had begun to see the development of the corporate news business taking shape even then, but I really had not figured out how to write a national news story. That takes time and experience, something you can’t get working for a newspaper in Alabama. You have to get out.
In those days, there was no Books-A-Million, no Starbucks. There was no Internet or World Wide Web either. I wrote my share of free-lance stories in those three years for UPI, The Southsider and several magazines, including the old Southern Magazine put out by the Arkansas Writer’s Project that was bought out and killed by Time Inc. in 1989. The stories I reported then were pretty good, but not really good enough for New York.
I only took two vacations in the three years of my life consumed by that retail business. It was nearly a 24-7 operation. For one week I took off for the Gulf Coast, and for another week I took a trip to New York to pitch a book on George Wallace. The fighting little judge who became famous as a right-wing racist governor and candidate for president had just climbed his last political mountain in 1986, declaring that his fourth term would be his last.
I got to walk the streets and ride the subways and see the New York Wolfe wrote about in his story about the drama of ambition, social class, politics and racism — and raw corporate greed. The novel was originally conceived as a serial in the style of Charles Dickens’ writings, running in 27 installments in Rolling Stone magazine. A heavily revised version was published in book form and became a phenomenal bestseller.
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.
Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”
On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.
Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.
I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.
It’s too hot and humid to be outside in Alabamaland, so I may as well sit in the air conditioning and pontificate. It beats singing the blues.
The weather gal says it’s going to feel like 105 degrees today. Maybe more if you have to breath the bad air in LA, downtown Birmingham — or along the Gulf Coast.
It’s the Dog Days of Summer now. What’s a body to do?
Get online and check Facebook, of course.
To mark the day when Facebook acquired its 500 millionth user, the Washington Post dispatched a columnist to write bad things about it, calling it the “anti-social network.”
Obviously some in the newspaper business are still feeling the pinch of the Web, wondering how they lost control of the debate in this country.
Is BP Trying to Stop the Leak, or Capture the Oil Profits?
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
GULF SHORES, Ala. — You know that feeling you get when you flee a big city and head for the coast, sit down with a beer, and listen to the waves roll onto the beach. I don’t have to tell you this. You have most likely experienced that feeling when your heart beat and adrenaline production slow down. You relax.
I have been visiting the beaches of Gulf Shores on and off for 50 years back to the 1950s when my parents first took me on vacation here, long before there was a single high-rise condo on the beach. For a time in the 1980s, I even lived on West Beach while working for a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast. I spent a fair amount of time in a hammock there, lengthening my life by listening to those waves and spending some quality down time between the Gulf of Mexico and Little Lagoon.
Now as I walk these same beaches and see BP’s oil globlets in the surf and on the beaches, my heart is troubled like never before.
Ever since I got into environmental journalism in the 1980s, I have always maintained great hope that with the right kind of information in the press, the public can make democracy work — and save the planet too.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
