Boy, did the "National Review" blow it! They printed this by mistake. Media notes from Howard Kurtz.
Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who drew fire for religious remarks suggesting that the fight against Islam is a war on Satan, was a "wacko." What's more, "General Boykin is manifestly insubordinate, and should be sacked. Yesterday."
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Local TV News: Now Part of Sales?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 3, 2003; Page C01
At the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., the pitch was perfectly clear.
To be interviewed by one of its news anchors -- an "exclusive two to two and a half minute segment" -- required only a "weekly investment" of $500, according to a sales flier for the program. Or $2,000 for the month.
"Absolutely -- guilty as charged," says Dan Modisett, general manager of WLBT-TV. And the only reason he ended the practice after several months is that "it was too much effort for really not enough financial gain."
Charging for interviews, it turns out, may be more widespread than commonly thought. The Post reported last month that WFLA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Tampa, was charging $2,500 for four- to six-minute segments on its morning show. Station executives defended the practice by saying that "Daytime" is an entertainment program that is separate from the news division.
On "Midday Mississippi," however, the interviews were conducted by WLBT's news team.
"We had the sales department go out with appropriate topics the news department would like to have -- someone who could come on and do an exercise segment or a segment on finance," Modisett says of the endeavor, which began last fall. "In practice, it didn't turn out very well." The advertising nature of the segments was disclosed in "opening and closing billboards," he says.
The station, one of 15 network affiliates owned by South Carolina-based Liberty Corp., came to feel "uncomfortable" with the practice, Modisett says -- not because of ethical qualms but because there was "not a lot of payoff in revenue or content."
Nor is the practice limited to earth. Sky Radio Network, which provides programming for several airlines, charges guests as much as $5,900 for interviews, according to the New York Times.
The Pre-Campaign Book
Just what was Walter Shapiro thinking, writing a book about the 2004 campaign before a single vote has been cast?
"Only at this early stage," says the USA Today columnist, "can you get access to the candidates to get the revealing moments that indicate something beyond the political spin of the day."
The result is "One-Car Caravan," in which Shapiro shudders as John Kerry handles a ringing cell phone while piloting a small plane in New Hampshire. The author also watches as Kerry checks on his dying mother.
As a veteran of the press pack, Shapiro admits in the book, which hits bookstores Tuesday, that in 2000 he "was gulled by Bush's bland public pronouncements and his moderate record as Texas governor into badly misreading the far-reaching extent of his unswerving conservatism." And in 1992, "I was so impressed by Clinton's wildly improvisational style that I failed to foresee" the "debilitating chaos that marred his first years in the White House."
The problem, he says in an interview, is that the press is "too literal" in covering the candidates, too "wedded to the what-happened-yesterday news cycle: Has Howard Dean changed his position on Medicare? Does General Clark think he should have voted for the $87 billion for Iraq?"
What's needed, says Shapiro, is for journalists to make "imaginative leaps about what these candidates would be like as president" -- though he knows that would bring criticism about too much speculation and psychobabble.
For example, Shapiro describes Dean denying on CNN what he'd already told the author in a taped conversation, that he would fight all the way to the convention even if he had lost. "This tiny episode left me feeling unsettled about the candidate I probably agree with the most on the issues," Shapiro writes.
There was one other thought behind the 14-month project: "Campaign books don't sell." That's because "they come out when readers already know the story line." The jury is out, of course, on who will buy such a book two months before the Iowa caucuses.
Misfire
The National Review editorial had all the subtlety of a hand grenade. Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who drew fire for religious remarks suggesting that the fight against Islam is a war on Satan, was a "wacko." What's more, "General Boykin is manifestly insubordinate, and should be sacked. Yesterday."
Or not. That was a draft editorial which, after a disagreement among the editors, was supposed to be pulled -- but, due to a production error, wasn't.
"It was a terrible error," says Editor Rich Lowry. "We couldn't believe it when we saw it and knew we'd take some journalistic sniping over it, justifiably. . . . It was a mistake on par with the New York Post running an editorial explaining why the Yankees had lost to the Red Sox."
Missing Footage
Filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who was part of Artists United to Win Without War, makes no secret of his opposition to the Iraq conflict.
But he says he set out to make a fair documentary contrasting news clips of Bush administration officials with interviews of intelligence experts and others. All the networks gave Greenwald permission to use interview footage -- except for Fox News, which would not grant approval for two excerpts involving national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
"I'm not a conspiracy theorist," says Greenwald, but perhaps Fox "is trying to protect her."
Fox Vice President Dianne Brandi says the reason was simple: "I never heard of him. It could have been some fly-by-night organization for all I know. . . . We don't spend a lot of time supplying footage" to outsiders.
Greenwald's film will be sold over the Internet and screened around the country, including tonight at the International Spy Museum, in a showing sponsored by MoveOn.org and the new liberal think tank Center for American Progress.
Swastika Story
Some liberal critics are accusing the mainstream media of refusing to write about the Bush family's Nazi connection.
Many media outlets, including The Washington Post, have "repeatedly declined to investigate" the matter, writes John Buchanan of the New Hampshire Gazette, the first to report on newly declassified government documents.
The Associated Press picked up the story that Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather, was a director of a New York bank seized by federal authorities over ties to a German industrialist who helped finance Adolf Hitler's rise. "The documents do not show any evidence Bush directly aided that effort," the AP reports.
Buchanan says he called journalists at Newsweek, Time, the Wall Street Journal and other outlets -- in one case threatening to give a columnist's name to Congress for refusing to report on the story -- but that they joined the "cover-up."
Is this an interesting historical footnote that deserves wider exposure? Probably. But should the president be tarred with what the late senator, who's been dead for three decades, did or failed to do before World War II? "Imputing Nazi sympathies to the president or his family ought to be beneath his adversaries," writes Bush critic Joe Conason in the New York Observer.
Non-Answer
The moment Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times finished her query at last week's news conference, President Bush dismissed it as a "trick question" and refused to answer.
The alleged trickery: "Can you promise a year from now that you will have reduced the number of troops in Iraq?"
Says Bumiller: "I wasn't trying to catch him on something. I was trying to make news. I was trying to elicit something that would make a good lead."
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