Category Archives: News

Peter Jennings Dies at 67

Peter JenningsOf the three network news operations, I’ve always found ABC’s to be the most serious and comprehensive: I’ll never forget watching former “World News Tonight” anchor Frank Reynolds during the confusion that immediately followed the failed attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981. His mix of command and empathetic frustration was a model of adulthood for me; for a long time, well before the advent of cable and the sham of Fox News, I thought television anchors were men of honor, that they earned a level of respect on a nightly basis to which young people should aspire.

I felt that way about Reynolds’s successor, Peter Jennings, as well. He took over the nightly news duties in our household at about the time that I first started understanding that there was a world out there and that it worked in peculiar, foreign ways. My father and I would watch Jennings together every night, and as the anchor revealed the names of new countries and people to me, my father would explain their hidden back stories. I learned a lot from those evenings, both about what lay beyond our shores and what was so important about what lay within them. As a result, I always preferred Jennings’s urbane, worldly delivery over his rival broadcasters, by far. It didn’t bother me much when Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather left their posts earlier this year, but I felt heartbroken and despondent last night when I learned that Peter Jennings had died of lung cancer.

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Bad Company

Amid all of my relentless Apple boosterism, I still feel it important to periodically speak out about where the company is wrong and where it behaves maliciously, a self-appointed duty of which I have not been particularly conscientious, admittedly. But, if you’ve got any streak of blue-blooded American fight in you, not to mention a hint of that brand of indignant pride for the primacy of the First Amendment in Our Way of Life, then it’s difficult to ignore this putrid lawsuit that Apple Computer has filed against several online journalists publishing their work on, well, Apple-boosting Web sites.

What transpired was this: before this past January’s Macworld Expo, several highly accurate rumors about then unannounced Apple products appeared at the rumor-based Web site Think Secret. Wasting little time, Apple quickly filed a lawsuit against the publisher of Think Secret and other “unnamed individuals,” ostensibly to smoke out the rumor sources but, in effect, attempting to put a chill on rumor activity in Apple fandom at large. (This particular lawsuit also happens to be just the latest in several similar actions the company has taken to protect its proprietary rights.)

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Do I Have to Draw You a Map

MapsSetting aside this awful feeling for a moment: here are a few of my favorite electoral maps — from an information design perspective, not from an electoral math perspective — from this Election Day just past. It’s mildly interesting how the various news outlets and independent sources each tackled the challenge of visually assessing how the country voted. I say “mildly” because as a design problem, the electoral college is almost banal in its limitations. There are only so many ways you can show this data.

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Game, Set, Match

Not many of my friends seems to want to talk about the Kerry/Edwards loss in any great detail, and it makes me wonder if I’m the only one taking it as hard as I am. To be honest, I’m devastated, and furious and overcome with melancholy, and I’m not sure what to do with myself. It fills me with dread to consider what George W. Bush will do with a second term; I get physically ill when I consider the long-term damage that might be done by forty-eight more months of his diplomatic myopia, his economic irresponsibility, his craven Attorney General, and his retrograde Supreme Court appointees. It’s going to take some true grit not to succumb to complete despair over the next few days.

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Got Out the Vote

Vote KerryIn spite of all the tension coursing through me today, and in spite of all my previous bad-mouthing of John Kerry’s campaign performance in late summer, I think that I’m cautiously optimistic about his chances for winning this election today. I know there are something like thirty-three ways that the various electoral lots can add up to another bitter tie between Bush and Kerry, but I just don’t see that happening somehow. In my gut, I think there will be a relatively decisive victory, whether it’s for one side or the other. This is fueled in part by the early reports of immense voter turnout and the leaked mid-afternoon exit polls I’ve seen — crack for those of us who can’t bear the suspense. I’ll heed the cautions that early exit polls are tremendously unreliable, and I have little doubt that Bush supporters can still manage a clear late-inning victory, but right now, I’m just going to throw aside my rational self. I’ve been waiting four years to cast a ballot for a Democratic challenger and against George W. Bush; so I’m just going to enjoy the lingering sensation of that act for at least a few more hours.

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Ceci N’est Pas Un Opinion

DebateMuch to my dismay, news outlets and politically-oriented weblogs are continuing to devote time, words and breath to the fact that John Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney, vice president Dick Cheney’s daughter — who happens to be a lesbian — in the course of last night’s debate. You can find all of the details elsewhere, so I’m not going to detail them here. In my opinion, it’s much ado about nothing — Kerry’s reference was both respectful and relevant — and the brewing furor is yet another example of trumped-up indignation on the part of conservatives (however, I admit that even some of my pinko friends found it somewhat inappropriate).

As it happens, this incident is a good illustration of one of the reasons I find it so frustrating and stressful to watch the presidential debates, especially when George W. Bush is a participant.

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Bedtime Stories for Democrats

John KerryIn advance of tomorrow night’s first Presidential debate between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry, there’s a lot of talk going on right now about the reputation that the senator from Massachusetts has for ‘strong finishes.’ An article in today’s New York Times details Kerry’s history of coming to life in the final stretches his campaigns, most notably in his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1996 and in his unexpected resurgence against Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries earlier this year. If it happens, I’ll be delighted — I’ll be ecstatic — but at this point, in spite of the fact that I continue to pump modest amounts of money into the Democratic effort for a November victory (and so should you!), these tales strike me as bedtime stories whispered into the ears of frightful Democrats as they — as we — pray into the night.

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Putting the Dubya in AWOL

AWOLI watched Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes II piece on the renewed questionability of George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard this evening with great interest. Two quick things occurred to me: first, that it’s highly unlikely that the network would have allowed Dan Rather — who is synonymous with the credibility of their news organization, for better or worse — to lend his imprimatur to this report without being pretty confident that they were right on the facts. This is an important point, because CBS is notoriously weak-willed, having caved into Republican pressure on everything from a harmless Reagan made-for-TV movie to commercials from MoveOn.org. It means something when a lapdog like the Eye bites back.

The second thing I considered was that, hey, maybe the reason George W. Bush didn’t show up for duty is that he came across one of these discs in his mailbox back in 1969. Could be.

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The Hit Parade

John KerryOkay, the Kerry campaign had a terrible August, but let’s be clear: the recent Time and Newsweek polls were inaccurate in declaring a double-digit lead for President Bush. Doing a little bit of the kind of vetting that, disturbingly, few news outlets are willing to engage in, Rasmussen finds that the President’s bounce was a nontrivial but still manageable 4 to 5 percent. There’s still 57 days left, enough time to turn this around.

The consensus is that the Kerry-Edwards campaign has let Bush-Cheney define the debate over the past few weeks, and allowed Kerry’s fitness to lead to become the question. They hit first, which sucks, but it gives Kerry an opening to fight back and with great ferocity. I say, call Bush’s own competence into question by saying what everyone already knows loud and clear — Bush is an intellectual lightweight, who can barely grasp the enormity of what’s going on around him, and it’s this unsuitability for handling the weighty issues at hand that have led us so far astray.

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