look left and look right carefully.
The quote of the day:
Why a newspaper apologized to the Chiquita Banana corporation after publishing some stories about the company's business practices that turned out to be false: "The stories were based on stolen voicemail."
Running news:
5.3 miles, at least 1 of which was walking again. Clearly, I have to learn to deal with the heat or wake up earlier.
Woodward and Bernstein relied on unnamed sources for a lot of their scoops. Their sources were scared; what they were uncovering went straight to the top. The reason Woodward and Bernstein got away with it is because, as it turned out, they were right.
Nowadays it is unimportant as to whether you're right or not; it is merely important to be first. And preferably as scandal-mongering as possible. And yes, I'm referring to the whole Kenneth Starr/Whitewater/Monica thing, but this dictum also covers Stephen Glass, whose articles for The New Republic and others have been exposed as phony, as well as that columnist for the Boston Globe. They had good, sensational stuff, and it didn't bother them--or their publishers--in the slightest that what they wrote was totally phony, until they were exposed.
We've had half-truths, outright lies, and smears thrown at us for the past 6 or 7 years that the press has lapped up in an attempt to recreate the great Watergate hunt of years gone by. Because we all know that they're dirty, that where there's smoke, there's fire. Never mind that millions of dollars in investigation hasn't shown one bit of fire yet--if you keep going at it, they're find something, right?
Salon magazine done a fine job of exposing the actual right-wing conspiracy of multimillionaire Richard Scaife.
There are some well-informed people on the Well--such as Jack King of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers--who have been analyzing Starr's tactics and the entire Whitewater investigation itself, and they've done a kick-butt job of interjecting a well-informed Devil's Advocate position of "There's no there there." And they remind me that we ought to be looking at the real dirty stuff, like campaign finance and Clinton's dealings with China. (Anybody else's skin been crawling the last week? "One billion consumers armed with nukes, or a couple hundred dissenters who are just going to make trouble anyhow. Easy choice, eh?")
And when I read articles that bury the important facts on paragraph 12 or have totally misleading headlines, I think of the book Fools For Scandal by Gene Lyons, which details quite well how the media has gone out of its way to distort facts and events in order to bring down a President.
How many times have we heard that "indictments are just around the corner"? How many times have we heard that there's been obstruction of justice, only to get a (small-print) retraction--if even that--a few days or weeks later that there was no such thing? It's crap, A through Z, but the feeding frenzy has been too lucrative for anyone to call a halt to it.
Because everyone wants to say that they got the smoking gun. Even though there's no smoke. And no gun. Alternative sources of news--and analysis of news--have never been more important.
Yesterday Darin and I went to see Dr. Dolittle. Here's Darin's one-sentence review, whispered to me during the movie: "Does it seem to you like there have been all these movies recently that are more like outlines for movies than the real thing?"
In other words: Don't bother.
Before the movie, we went to the In N' Out Burger at the AMC Burbank. I haven't had a Double Double for over 6 months now; I figured I was due. It was tasty. I enjoyed it mightily.
After the movie we went home and Darin began complaining of a stomachache. He lay on the couch upstairs and watched TV. I went downstairs and lay down.
4 hours later, I stumbled out of bed, feeling extremely nauseous. I went upstairs and discovered that Darin had also slept for 4 hours and he was feeling awful too. I said to him, "It's been 6 months since my last Double Double, it may be 6 months until my next one." And I ain't never going to the one by the AMC theatres again.
Darin made a small pot of spaghetti and I had a tiny amount. Eating was not high on my priority list. We went to bed at 11 and I dropped off almost immediately.
I rented The Parallax View today, thinking to take advantage of my interest in paranoid 70s movies. Alas, The Parallax View is not a very good movie. I turned it off about two-thirds of the way through, something which it's rare for me to do. It's even rarer to turn off a movie when the lead character (Warren Beatty) has been set up as the assassin, but I was so thoroughly bored I couldn't have cared less.
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