Blather

I'm on TV! I'm on TV! I'm... Wait. I'm Not on TV.

Ashleigh Banfield, who I used to take a childish delight in poking with a stick back when we were all hot and bothered about Afghanistan, is apparently washed up at NBC, where she has been toiling invisibly for some time. Her representatives are said to be exploring exciting possibilities in syndication. Circle gets the square!

No, Please, You Go Straight To Hell First, My Friend

The New York Times pulls off a neat trick with this dispatch on a Finn who's offering fellow Finns lessons on how to get mad. (Anger is apparently highly un-Finnish.) The guy's had almost no takers, which in the normal course of things would suggest a non-story. The NYT imaginatively claims that the lack of response is actually proof of how anger-averse Finns are, and makes it one of the hooks on which its piece hangs. I'm woozy with admiration for this technique, which somebody (okay, it's me) has dubbed the "circular self-confirming non-confirmation." Requires NYT login and password, which would undoubtedly make my blood boil if I weren't part-Finnish.

Still Standing

The Gate's Mark Morford, whose capacity for colorful outrage continues to be a beautiful thing, wonders: Where is the retribution that San Francisco has coming if gay marriage is such an affront to the cosmos? (He also adds an interesting dimension to the debate over Biblical infallibility: Oh, and while we're at it, God also really hates shrimp. Maybe you didn't know. Shrimp are evil, as are all shrimp eaters. Clams, too. Hey, it's in the Bible. You can look it up. Why the Right is attacking homosexuals in love and not, say, Red Lobster, remains a mystery.)

From The Copy Desk

Print journalism has a long, inglorious history of tin-eared changes rendered by copy desks, resulting in embarrassed writers left to protest (usually to little effect) that what got printed really, really, really isn't what they meant. (If Blather had a copy desk, by the way, those three reallys would have become one, which would be technically correct but less zippy. This is one of the reasons why Blather doesn't have a copy desk.) My favorite of these stories -- maybe apocryphal, but hey, who cares -- involves the Newsweek writer who described an upscale women's school as "tony Bennett College," and sent the story off, proud of his little pun. The copy desk upper-cased the "t," which resulted in a reference to "Tony Bennett College." Here's the latest example, from L.A. Observed: The LA Times' Mark Swed calls the Richard Straus opera "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" an "incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean," meaning that it's a work which comes down exuberantly on the side of life in the great cosmic debate. The phrase ends up in the paper as -- wait for it -- "an incomparably glorious and goofy anti-abortion paean." Swed is understandably steamed, and demands a correction. He gets two. Footnote: As of this writing, the original (i.e., bad and erroneous) version remains on the LAT website, right next to an explanatory note.

Live Death

LAPD officers shot and killed a robbery suspect on live local TV yesterday, after a 90-minute chase that was itself broadcast live. The deck of this LA Times piece notes wanly that the incident "revives debate over broadcast of police pursuits." But the tut-tutting doesn't really wash, for at least three reasons. One: I live about half a mile from where the shooting took place, and the amount of increased debate it's fueled has been -- Oh, wait: None. (Note to the LAT: Writing a deck that refers to "debate" does not itself constitute debate.) Two: The broadcast was actually, on its own disturbing terms, a home run for local stations, because it gave viewers exactly what the stations yearn for every time they air live coverage of police chases -- actual death, live on TV. (Come on, if that isn't what they're hoping for, please tell me what is. Either some poor pedestrian gets mashed into guacamole or the malefactor himself crashes, or better yet, goes out in a hail of bullets.) Three: The LAT acts in effect as an adjunct, even an amplifier to the local stations, offering a sidebar link to KTLA footage of the shooting. The KTLA stream, by the way, makes you sit through a commercial before you get to the footage. This goes beyond disingenuousness into some realm of quasi-journalistic shame that's so creepy I hardly know where to begin disapproving of it.

Back to You, Becky!

The Christian Science Monitor blows the lid off the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, writing in its ultra-hep Living section that the dogs in the show are "pampered." This is an angle which is so minty fresh that no one has used it for an entire year, since the last Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. For bonus points, the Monitor slugs its piece -- wait for it... yes! -- "This Place Has Really Gone to the Dogs." Yowtch.

Curse You For Your Unflappable Imperturbability, George Bush!

This is pretty wonderful: The official White House transcript of an exchange between the president and pool reporters during a visit to the Nothin' Fancy Cafe in Roswell, NM. It shows Bush to be both funnier and more adept at flustering the press than I'd previously had reason to suspect. I'm not saying these are good things, just that they're surprising. Best bit:

REPORTER: But Mr. President --

THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady's business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?

REPORTER (visibly cowed): Yes.

(Via Tim Porter's First Draft.)

And Here's a Happy Little GuyYAAAAAAUUUGGGHHH GETHIMOFFME GETHIMOFF!!! OH MY GOD HE'S GOT MY NOSE!!! HELP!!! HELLLLLLLPPP!!! HE'S KILLING ME!!! HELLPPPP!!!! HELLLPPPP!!!

Things have been a little quiet here at Blather HQ recently, but all of us -- and that includes not just the kids in the office but Stan and Al and Leo and all the guys down at Regional Distribution -- want to wish you a happy and safe and healthy holiday season. And to mark the sacred nature of the occasion, here's a story about a local TV reporter being viciously attacked by a reindeer.

See you in '04!

Oh, I'm Just in a Mood Today, That's All

The LA Times achieves a near-apotheosis of popcult cliche in slugging a piece about the Michael Jackson mess "A Perfect Media Storm." The really chilling part, though, comes a little further down when USC journalism professor Martin Kaplan gushes that "This is Laci Peterson and shark attacks and Kobe Bryant put together," neatly triangulating that perfect little spot in the Zeitgeist where the anguished ghost of Edward R. Murrow is doomed to spend all eternity, chain-smoking and muttering darkly about what jackasses his professional heirs have become.

Oh, Shut Up

David Blaine reportedly broke into tears on his release from a Plexiglass cube suspended over the Thames embankment, telling reporters: "This has been one of the most important experiences of my life." The reporters started to ask followup questions, then stopped, stared into the middle distance, blinked repeatedly, looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, started to speak again, stopped, wetted their lips with their tongues, paused, scratched absently at their scalps with their pencils, looked at each other again, shrugged, then drifted away to their cars, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when their lives had turned so awful and empty and sad.

See, This Is What Happens When You RIF All the Copy Editors

Actual unretouched early hed from CBSnews.com.

Corrected version.

(Thanks and a tip of the Blather chef's hat to Jessi Buchanan.)

Read My Arm

Why do I get the feeling this photo caption was for internal use only, and somebody pushed the button without reading all the way through? (Via Anil Dash.)

Update, 6:15 pm: As I figured it might be, the original version of this caption has been taken down. Here's what it looked like.

Would Anybody Mind If I Put the News On? (Pt. 44)

It now seems like we have an answer to the question: "Is there any depth to which the new chuckle-happy CNN won't sink?" (Answer: No.) Reporting this story, about a British study into the flavor variations resulting from various thicknesses of sliced cheese, Headline News actually had sparkly-eyed anchorbabe Linda Stouffer say by way of intro: "It all depends on how you cut the cheese." Stouffer seemed blissfully unaware of the gag, which suggests that either a) she has never heard the expression, or b) she has, but the words that escape her mouth do so unmediated by any interaction with her brain. In the subsequent two-shot of the anchor desk, co-anchor Chuck Roberts briefly flashed an expression of the deepest existential pain, like a man who has found himself trapped in a remunerative nightmare from which he can never fully awake, then went to commercial.

More Fun With Wire Services!

I'm not sure UPI is approaching the issue of papal mortality with the respect it deserves. Exhibit A: This piece (which is actually pretty interesting) about the protocol that attends the death of the pope. A ritual that's been abandoned in recent years is the one in which the Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church taps the late pontiff on the forehead three times with a small hammer to ascertain if he's actually dead. UPI's headline: "Dead Pope Will Not Be Hammered." (The second part of this discontinued ceremony, by the way, is the one in which the Chamberlain "[shouts the pope's] family name close to his ear." I swear I'm not making this up. Congratulations to UPI, at least, for not slugging their dispatch "Dead Pope Will Not Be Yelled At.")

Thanks to artist/social commentator/provocateur Jessi Buchanan for the link.

The Role of the Copy Editor in Headline

Today's New York Times takes a look at the contentious issue of editorial oversight in journalist-written blogs. It's a good, dutiful piece, but man, did they miss a bet by not featuring Mark Morford's magnificent Morning Fix, a three-times-weekly e-mail newsletter which is certainly blog-like and is published under the otherwise respectable auspices of the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's Morford cheerfully fabricating a comment from the publisher of Madonna's new children's book:

...If you absolutely and insidiously drown the goddamn markets of 100 countries with a million goddamn copies of this insidious little lame-ass book along with a massive equally insidious PR campaign to ride it like a ten-dollar whore rides a Texas senator, you can somehow convince a benumbed public to shell out $19.95 for the mediocre thing, just to clear some goddamn space, just to get the thing out the the way of the sluggish progress of the collective unconscious...

And don't even get him started on Dick Cheney.

Morford's ability to spew stuff like this under the aegis of a major American daily is the envy of every journalist I know, or at least every one I know who reads him, which should be all of them. (And hey, how about that hep, literate NYT hed: "The Role of the Delete Key in Blog." Nice.)

Everything You Need to Know About Local TV News

"My background is local news, but I'm a journalist at heart."

-- Princell Hair, newly-named executive VP and general manager of CNN/US. (Via Romenesko.)

Behold The Shoes of Madge!

I'm not making this picture up. I mean, it isn't Photoshopped or anything. It's an actual screen grab from Yahoo News. And if you think about it, what else could it be? Who could make up a world in which an emptyheaded famehag like Madonna is so relentlessly newsworthy that any trite, meaningless, bubblebrained twaddle to escape her lips get reported as if it were a newly-discovered Dead Sea Scroll, and even her shoes get a closeup from Reuters? Her shoes. Any self-respecting novelist would spike a plotline like this.

Two Years After

She went to Fresh Kills with two other families about a week ago. The bugs were awful. She returned this past Friday. She brings flowers ? dahlias once, daisies another time. There's no good place to put them. She flings the stems into the expanse, hoping some of them find the right spot.

Heartbreaking stories of New Yorkers two years after 9/11, in The New York Times.

Ohhh, Okay, Now I Get It

Writing in Jane magazine (the "Sassy" of the new millenium), Jayson Blair finally offers a sane, sensible explanation for the shameful behavior that cost Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd their jobs and brought disgrace to the greatest newspaper on earth: He's a crazy nut! A pranskter! What, didn't you get it?... There goes his zany sense of humor again, with the joking and the kidding! Ah me... Good times, good times. Blair's modified mea culpa is the strongest to appear in a slick magazine aimed at young women since Francis Gary Powers' famous coerced confession in the pages of Russian Seventeen (June 1960).