Entries associated with the tag "John Kass":

It's a time to worry.

As if it didn't have enough problems already, the American press is facing an election-year crisis. Long kept afloat  by peddling shock, distortion, and outright calumny about our finest public servants, it now must ask itself: who's going to buy newspapers that suck up to both candidates?

Just today I find John Kass of the Tribune labeling Barack Obama "the gentle faun of American politics, supported for years by a compliant, yearning media eager to portray him as a reformer." And Arianna Huffington at huffingtonpost.com fretting about "the mainstream media's ongoing membership in the John McCain Protection Society." Says Huffington, "Every time McCain screws up, the media jump all over themselves to make it better, as if grandpa had said something embarrassing at the dinner table and it needed to be smoothed over as quickly as possible."

Mind you, a presidential showdown between Bambi and Grandpa Walton figures to be a classic, especially if Bambi's running mate is Scarlett O'Hara (Maureen Dowd in the Tuesday NYT), and Zeb Walton's is Mary Poppins (Dowd again.) But, face it, both Kass and Huffington have a point. What if it's more than a point -- what if they're basically right? Well, rest assured that Kass is no acolyte of Obama's, or Huffington of McCain's. They've put us on notice --  not that this fall's coverage will be long on rainbows and bluebirds and short on grit, but that the campaign itself conceivably could be lost in the cut and slash of media waging a civil war.

As someone said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." So there isn't much time to get this right. The legend of Katie Hamilton is closing fast.

Hamilton is the Tribune intern who starred in the take-that-Sam-Zell video that recently won a Sun-Times contest. After the Sun-Times ran a big story singing her praises, the Tribune gleefully revealed what was up. I posted an item on this blog trying to give credit to the actual schemers behind the caper, John Kass did the same thing and went into more detail in his Tribune column, and there were other efforts here and there to tell the tale and get the facts right. But on Sunday America's paper of record, the New York Times, ran a short piece in its baseball preview section (but not posted online, apparently) that said:

"With Sam Zell flirting with a new name for Wrigley Field, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a contest encouraging fans to produce music videos in protest. The winner was Katie Hamilton, a student at the University of Illinois and a Chicago Tribune intern, who rewrote the lyrics to the 1984 Twisted Sister anthem, 'We're Not Gonna Take It.'" 

I guess this is what we all want to believe, and in the long run it may be what we all will. Says Hamilton, "That's definitely how it's come across -- that I concocted it and I ran with it. I wish I had." By her own admission, Hamilton didn't write a word -- "and I feel kind of bad because it's my face on the thing and it's Kevin who put together the gang." That's feature writer Kevin Pang, who by Hamilton's account got together with reporter James Janega and some other Tribune musical talent "and jammed and came up with the lyrics."

Hamilton was chosen to front the stunt because nobody at the Sun-Times would know who she was, and when you watch the video you'll see her happily strutting her stuff in front of the camera. "It was awesome," she says. No legend's necessary.

Media Matters for America, has just done something herculean and, I suppose, useful -- it scoured the nation's op-ed pages, counted noses, and reached a conclusion it hadn't been alone in suspecting: "In paper after paper, state after state, and region after region, conservative syndicated columnists get more space than their progressive counterparts."

Media Matters' inventory of 1,377 dailies -- 96 percent of all there are, it says -- led it to 201 syndicated columnists. And though it categorized 79 of them as "progressives," 75 as "conservatives," and 47 as "centrists," it advised: "The truth is that conservatives have a clear and unmistakable advantage. Conservative columnists appear in more papers than progressive columnists do, and conservatives reach more readers." Here are the numbers: 60 percent of the dailies publish more conservatives, 20 percent publish more progressives, and 20 percent strike an even balance. When columnists are multiplied by circulation to get an abstract figure that this survey calls the "total ideological circulation," that TIC is 48 percent conservative, 38 percent progressive, and 16 percent centrist.

Media Matters identifies itself as a "Web-based, not-for-profit . . . progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." I wouldn't expect an outfit that's happy to label itself to have a problem with labeling everyone else -- though Media Matters says it tried to do this as objectively as possible, whenever possible choosing the pigeonhole chosen by a columnist's own syndicate in its promotionals. 

But still . . . Nat Hentoff, progressive? Hentoff actually rates a qualifying footnote that concedes "he holds conservative stands on a few issues, including abortion [but] he is progressive on most issues." Steve Chapman, conservative? Actually, Chapman's a libertarian, and -- for whatever it signifies for his place on the ideological spectrum -- as fierce a critic of the war in Iraq as you'll find. Pat Buchanan, conservative? Well, he is, of course, but he despises the war too. Maureen Dowd, progressive? No, she's snarky. She doesn't care whose head she bites. Garrison Keillor, progressive? He's a humorist, and I'm not sure humorists believe in progress. Do you think Keillor thinks Lake Wobegon has a prayer of becoming a place where the kids don't grow up and leave?  Hah -- not even if Nissan builds a plant there. Bill O'Reilly, conservative? Try nitwit.

Media Matters has broken down its findings by states, so let's look at Illinois.  It's the same story: "Illinois Op-Ed Pages Dominated by Right" says the report. The Media Matters survey was taken from mid-2006 to mid-2007, and when it reports that 87 percent of the Sun-Times's op-ed voices are conservative, it's obviously missing  the paper's recent Road to Damascus conversion to old-fashioned liberalism -- strike that, progressivism. One of the survey's big failings, in my eyes, is its failure to take local columnists into account. Carol Marin wasn't counted. Dennis Byrne wasn't counted. Neil Steinberg wasn't counted -- I dare them to put him into one of their categories anyway. In Chicago, around Illinois, and all across the land the local news columnists weren't counted -- sharp populists like Bill McClellan at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Phil Kadner at the Daily Southtown, Mark Brown at the Sun-Times.

Then there's John Kass at the Tribune. You might think of Kass as a conservative, but you'd be wrong. He's conservative on a dozen issues that no one reads him for. But like every local news columnist anywhere worth his or her salt, he stands for cleaning up the mess in City Hall. He believes in honest government. So he's a progressive. 

Needless to say, Media Matters had no place for Roger Ebert. Yet a couple of days ago Forbes named him America's most influential pundit. "Unlike political pundits who bring a liberal or conservative voice to the table," Forbes explained, "his strong opinions are generally confined to individual movies. Hence, he's not drawing cheers from half the population and jeers from the other half." Don't sound naive, Forbes. Ebert's a liberal -- a smart, open-minded, eloquent liberal -- and by writing about movies he's managed to write about everything on his mind. A survey that weighs Oliver North and Ann Coulter on the one hand but not Ebert on the other didn't go about its business quite right.

From a news release e-mailed Tuesday:

Roland S. Martin joins Essence Magazine

Award-winning journalist joins Essence as special correspondent; launches new blog on Essence.com.

(August 7, 2007) New York, NY-Award-winning journalist and CNN contributor, Roland S. Martin, will launch his new blog on essence.com today with the notorious question, "Is Obama Black Enough?" Martin will post to the site, the online home of ESSENCE, the preeminent lifestyle magazine for African-American women, twice daily and will cover a myriad of issues including politics, race, religion, relationships, parenting, and more.

 --

To: Campaign Headquarters

Re: Our candidate’s current 8.4%

The Problem: We’re sucking exhaust fumes.

The Solution: It’s time to step on the gas.

The Opportunity: 90,700.

That's the number I came up with when I googled “Obama” and “black enough.” As in “Is Obama black enough?” It’s a big number. It tells us people are asking, “Is Obama black enough?”

Our job: To define the answer.

From the looks of it, about 80 percent of the people asking “Is Obama black enough” are reporters with deadlines. For instance, Dennis Byrne has raised the topic, and so have John Kass and Leonard Pitts, and Clarence Page and Dawn Turner Trice, to name just a few celebrated columnists at the Chicago Tribune. Lynn Sweet’s been on it at the Sun-Times and just the other day Mary Mitchell upped the ante with a front-page story asking if Michelle Obama is black enough.

Now Roland Martin, former editor of the Chicago Defender, has joined the fray.

Remember, reporters are important agenda setters. If enough newspapers in enough towns hammer away at the same question, sooner or later some people will begin to think it could be important. That’s what we’re beginning to see with “Is Obama black enough?” Our push polls show that when voters are called at home on Sunday evening and asked these questions --

“When you vote for president do you look first for the candidate who is exactly black enough?”
“How important is it to you to elect a president who is exactly black enough even if his policies put the nation in imminent peril of conquest by jihadist hordes?”
“Do you think electing a white president sends the wrong kind of signal to the rest of the world no matter how wise and resolute that white president is?”

-- it turns out there’s an undercurrent of surly discontent we can tap into.

But we’ve got to get out ahead of the curve on this one. The candidate needs to remind voters of what a long hard road America has traveled since he was a happy, barefoot boy in the 50s with a stay-at-home mom.

And then 1960! What a proud time to be an American! “Americans didn’t elect John F. Kennedy president because he was just a little bit Catholic,” the candidate will say. “Any more than Americans elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he was just a little bit crippled.

“An America that advances by half steps is not the America I know and love, nor is it the America the world fears and envies and respects. Do we want to send the world the message that the only kind of black man it is willing to elect president is someone many say is not black enough!

“I personally find that idea deeply offensive. And I find it astonishing that the junior senator from Illinois is willing to send such a message.

“I will not be party to it. Americans, show the world what we're made of. Elect a black-enough black or none at all!”

And etc.

This message will resonate especially well among southern white voters who used to be Democrats but have migrated in recent years to the party of Lincoln. It will also find favor among northern black nationalists. These two blocs could form the basis of a grassroots coalition that will make this candidacy the talk of Sunday morning television.

“Some say the bell tolls for America. I say freedom rings.” (Good line. Work into speeches.)

Ron Santo’s latest rejection by baseball’s Veterans Committee reminded me of how much I admired Rick Morrissey’s recent column anticipating Santo’s disappointment. “In a strange, very selfish way,” Morrissey wrote in the Tribune on February 21, “we might all be a little better off if Santo doesn’t make the Hall of Fame next week. I know that sounds horrible. But for many of us, it’s not such a bad thing to witness again how a good man responds to defeat.” Morrissey’s homage to Santo’s courage and resiliency wasn’t simply elegant, it was intelligent -- the work of a writer who'd found a subtler, more original way of thinking about a familiar topic.

I had a similar reaction a couple days later to John Kass’s last column on Mayor Daley before Daley’s reelection. Kass can write about Daley in his sleep, but this wry tribute to our LaSalle Street Putin was thought through. “The comic antics at the Cook County Board, with the media punching bag named President Todd Stroger, reinforced City Hall’s subliminal message: Without Daley, all is lost,” wrote Kass, putting into his own words an idea I'll give you in mine: in a city of warlords, many of whom, like Stroger, inherited power by permission of their clans, Daley runs as the warlord who guards the city against the clans. As Kass noted about what he called Daley's "ruthless" reign, that’s how the people, the real-estate interests, and the media like it. Certainly the warlords do.

And then there was the column by Cathleen Falsani in the Sun-Times February 23.  It began on a note I normally find obnoxious—the reporter insincerely asserting his or her own timidity in order to underscore the bravado of someone else. But in this case Falsani told us “I’m a coward” as a prelude to writing about a coward, someone whose psychology Falsani wanted to tease out: Sister Blanche, the “nervous poodle of a woman” in Dialogues of the Carmelites who, like the other Carmelites, loses her head at the end of the opera. Sister Blanche returns to the convent “just in time to be beheaded,” and Falsani wondered why. Maybe she was terrified “of breaking a vow,” maybe it was “her fear of life” if she were left behind, alone. The idea that Sister Blanche suddenly found her courage at the last minute is the trite possibility I admire Falsani for not even considering.

On other fronts . . . In Tuesday's Sun-Times Richard Roeper wrote about meeting Al Gore at the Oscars. Roeper asked Gore if he might have won in 2000 if he’d been as engaging on the campaign trail as he is in An Inconvenient Truth. “To his credit," wrote Roeper, "Gore doesn’t duck the question or deny its validity, but says he couldn’t linger on the past and had to focus on the here and now.” That's not ducking? Roeper may have more to learn about the awesome magic trick where a politician fills a notebook right before your eyes but when you look inside it’s empty.

Newspaper readers might be diminishing in number, but they’re not getting any less inquisitive or ornery. In September I heard from Chicagoan Frank Palmer, a frequent correspondent. "The nation’s press," he wrote, "was up in arms when the Sudanese arrested a Yank reporter for the Trib." This was Paul Salopek, who spent over a month as a prisoner in Sudan, where he was accused of spying. "Freedom of the press is a universal principle," Palmer continued. "Every government should be held to it. Well, almost every government. It turns out that the U.S. military has been holding an AP photographer for FIVE MONTHS. No charges have been filed. Want to bet that the printer’s ink spilled over this case won’t be a fraction of that spilled over the earlier one?" I didn’t take the bet.

Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi Sunni, was arrested April 12 by U.S. marines in Ramadi, and he’s been a prisoner since – at this point over 11 months. The U.S. military in Iraq has told journalists that Hussein's been linked to al Qaeda members and to Iraqi insurgents. The Associated Press lobbied quietly on his behalf until September, when the exasperated wire service went public. "Bilal Hussein has been held in volation of Iraqi law and in disregard to the Geneva Conventions," AP CEO Tom Curley said in a statement. "He must be charged under the Iraqi system or released immediately."

The December-January issue of the American Journalism Review carries a ten-page story on Hussein. In it, Curley’s quoted as saying the AP has tried to investigate every specific claim the military has made against its photographer and found them to be "false or total exaggerations." Says Curley, "I have no problem saying the Pentagon lied to us more than once."

AJR is a trade magazine. There was a flurry of coverage in the popular press after the AP brought Hussein to the public’s attention, but he hasn’t gotten much attention since -- though as long as the AP is working on his behalf it can hardly be said the media have forgotten him. (To keep up with the coverage, visit the Web site the AP has established for Hussein.) AP spokesperson Linda Wagner says, "Some blogs, such as Daily Kos, have referenced the situation recently, and a number of year-end stories about the dangers of being a journalist have mentioned Bilal's detention."

What about the Tribune, which was rightly preoccupied with Salopek last summer? It published a toughly worded editorial on September 21. "America is in Iraq to help foster a democratic system and the rule of law," it concluded. "That means Hussein deserves to see the evidence against him and respond to the charges. If he was using a press pass as a cover to help terrorists, bring that out in a fair trial. Otherwise, free him." According to the Tribune’s archives, the paper hasn’t mentioned Hussein since.

But newspapers can’t write about everything -- that's why it's so easy to accuse them of sins of omission. Tribune reader Robert Pruter of Elmhurst is grumpy because he caught columnist John Kass writing something that in his eyes was not only nasty but dead wrong. On December 22 Kass’s subject was Barack Obama, and he said this: "He’s a decent fellow and I like him. He might make a fine liberal president someday. And though I disagree with him on policy, I’d bet my White Sox tickets that his wife, Michelle, won’t keep 800 secret FBI files of their political enemies hidden in some White House bedroom."

Pruter recognized this as a shot at Obama's competition, Hillary Clinton. Hundreds of FBI files of Republicans turned up in the White House early in the Clinton presidency, and word was that the president’s wife had ordered them brought in. But in the end the office of the independent counsel concluded that a low-level White House aide had requested the files on his own authority because he mistakenly thought they were on people who still worked at the White House and had to be cleared for access.

"Filegate," as it was called, obsessed President Clinton’s critics, including independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward would write, "[Starr] also would proceed with the FBI files probe. Again, Clinton was absolved. His staff had written a 400-page memo showing that they had no evidence tying Clinton to the files. Why continue? ‘My order says I have to focus on Anthony Marceca and others!’ Starr said in protest, referring to the Army detailee who had worked updating FBI files collected by the White House.... He had a duty." Robert Ray, who was Starr’s successor, shut the investigation down.

Pruter e-mailed Kass to tell him he was "appalled" by the column and to walk him through the facts. Pruter wrote editor Ann Marie Lipinski, whom he mistakenly referred to as the publisher, about Kass, advising her "to terminate his employment." Leaving no stone unturned, he also e-mailed the Tribune's public editor.

He says no one at the Tribune got back to him. The column was left to speak for itself in the Tribune archives, mainly about Kass's dislike of the Clintons.

John Kass has a theory about Barack Obama and why everyone likes him. "It's as if writers are helplessly channeling the brilliant Obama/Daley media crisis manager David Axelrod, who is using secret powers to enter their minds from afar," writes the Tribune columist.

That could be. I have another theory. Axelrod used to manage the late senator Paul Simon's campaigns. I think Axelrod has sent Obama Simon's Christmas card list. I used to get a card every year from the Simons, whom I didn't know. This year for the first time I got a card -- a "Happy Holidays" card -- from the Obamas, whom I don't know.

But their card is a little different. Unless memory fails, Senator Simon didn't send out cards featuring a family portrait by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Or if he did, he kept the photo credit to himself. Whereas the Obamas' card says "Photo by: Annie Leibovitz" on the back, right above "Authorized and paid for by Obama 2010, Inc." (On Daily Kos right now there's a discussion about how it measures up to the portraits on Christmas cards from John Edwards and the Clintons.) The photo appears to be an outtake from this shoot for Men's Vogue, which raised some eyebrows when it accompanied a profile by Jacob Weisberg earlier this year.

It's one thing to get called out for a tricky little real estate deal with Tony Rezko--at some point Obama was obliged to show he's a true man of his state and knows his shenanigans as well as the next pol. But a Christmas card by Annie Leibovitz? I wondered if I wasn't actually looking at a rather crafty dirty trick perpetrated by political enemies conniving to paint him as something of a snob. Surely Obama himself would never announce to every constituent he sends a holiday card to that he's too good for the hard-working yeoman photographers of Illinois.

Or ıs he runnıng as the junior senator from Vogue? (Who, incidentally, figures to run strong in the neighboring state of Vanity Fair?)