c'est la vie

Media of Interest

2006-07-06T09:02:00.000-04:00

So, I read this post over on Shannan's blog (it's the third item down), and it got me thinking. So, I went to post a response but, being verbose, I ended up with essentially an entire post in her comment box. Deciding that wasn't a nice thing to do, I came over here to post it.

The following is in response to the questions: Did the media foul up in the coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey investigation? Should the media have covered the declaration by the police that the parents were suspects? Was Mrs. Ramsey contradictory in what she wanted from the press? etc.

I tend to think that someone being declared a suspect in a murder investigation is news. It's the police saying "We think this person maybe did it."

So in that sense, I have to agree with the fellow who pointed out that she was contradicting herself.

Was the media too relentless in their coverage of the parents after they were termed suspects?

I don't know, because I was two weeks past 11 years old the day the girl was murdered.

I guess it's possible it was too relentless, if it went ahead hammer-and-tongs on the presumption that the parents were, in fact, guilty. I'm too young to know if they did or not.

It's also possible that the public heard one thing and assumed another. If we're not deliberately creating that false impression, I'm not sure that's something the media should be bothered with a whole lot beyond removing its most obvious causes.

And then there's that term, "person of interest." Our author says that it was adopted by newspapers to do the vocabulary hopscotch past the term "suspect." As far as I've read, and as I've seen it used in many, many news stories in the last few years, that term is used mostly by law enforcement. My understanding was that the Atlanta bombing fiasco gave cops the liability jitters and pushed them away from suspect.

Ah yes, a quick Google points to this AJR article, and this St. Pete Times article, the author quotes an officer referring to it as the "Richard Jewell rule."

The articles indicate that the term seems to be somewhat liability-based and somewhat let's-exclude-counsel based.

So, basically, I don't know about the Ramsey case, it's possible there was a lynch-mob mentality, but I'm too young to really know.

In other news, the professor seems to be markedly wrong about the "person of interest" term.

Independence

2006-07-04T07:51:00.000-04:00

Read this. Think about what it means.

The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Our Dying Industry

2006-06-29T14:01:00.000-04:00

If you don't leap under the nearest rock everytime the dismal-looking fate of today's large daily newspapers comes around you've probably heard that one reason people don't read dailies anymore is that they get the big news off of news channels on the TV and off of the internet.

Now one thing really irks me about that rationale. Today, just for kicks, I went through the text stories CNN had posted on its main page at 2 p.m. I didn't check the video links on the grounds that this computer doesn't handle that sort of thing well, I don't like to look at them, and they're mostly profiles and odd-ball news more than nationally significant headlines (Man owing child support busted at mom's wake, etc.), but I probably ought to mention that there were four of them.

Of the other nine articles at the top of the main page, four were directly lifted Associated Press stories and two were taken directly from Reuters. CNN reported four of the stories itself.

Now, granted the Reuters stuff was pretty much fluff -- Bono talking about how various rich countries do in giving to Africa and Britney Spears posing nude and pregnant -- but that fluff stuff takes manpower to report too, right along with hard news.

CNN covered flooding up my way itself, along with the Israeli raids into Gaza, which makes sense, because that stuff makes great video. There was also an article on a Guantanamo-related SCOTUS decision that carried a byline. It wasn't overtly commentary, or labeled as such, and an internet search for the author revealed only a kung fu dude from Canada. CNN's other story was on the Iranian missile situation and the lack of clarity on when Iran must reply the West's latest demands. It's second paragraph restated AP reports.

Also, across the top of the whole page was this banner:

It's ridiculous. Yes, they're clubbing us over the head. That's just plain embarrassing. But what's truly mortifying is that they're clubbing us over the head with our own news.

I'm taking this opportunity to suggest an embargo until midnight on most news. Emergencies with health and welfare implications should be excepted, of course, but by and large there's no reason that if they want to break the news first they can't report it first.

Now, I know, without knowing in exactly which ways, that this solution is too simplistic. But maybe y'all have some suggestions. I'm pretty sure it's an idea on the right track, if not the perfect solution.

How high's the water, Momma?

2006-06-28T09:20:00.000-04:00

What with all this rain lately, I guess Portland's up for another bath.

I don't know who paved what to screw with our hydrograph, but it surely does tick me off.

Cameron's clearing out of Danville, but the roads up there are screwed up beyond belief, I hear.

Good luck to all in the trying times ahead.

Seeger and Springsteen

2006-06-27T09:27:00.000-04:00

So, I took Fonveille's advice and bought the boss' latest CD. It's awesome. If you like it, you might look at Doc Watson.

That is all.

Mr. Delp

2006-06-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

E.H., my good friend from home, agreed to let me use the picture above, which was snapped Friday, so long as I made sure to mention in here how envious I was of him for being able to go fishing while I was stuck at work.

The man in the picture is Mr. Hiram Delp. He's E.H.'s grandfather and a really awesome guy.

He takes E.H. and me fishing on the Delaware a few times each summer. He's been at it a long time and knows exactly what he's doing, which is another way of saying that he fishes circles around us.

He's also just a really, really nice guy who's always got a smile and a friendly word.

So, Mr. Delp being so awesome and all, when E.H. told me he had pictures from his fishing trip, I really thought I ought to put this up.

On Athletic Competitions

2006-06-22T12:20:00.000-04:00

Ghana can't touch me. So they knocked the U.S. - a team many thought could make a deep run - out of the World Cup. Guess what. I don't care.

That's because Carolina's headed to the finals of the College World Series. The boys in light blue beat Cal State Fullerton 6-5 yesterday evening, which means that we (I know - I'm not on the team, but humor me) now will compete for the national title against the winner of tonight's Rice vs. Oregon State game.

There are only two kinds of athletics I really care about to any great extent: baseball and those in which UNC participates. This combines both, which rocks. Considering how excited I get about this event, it's little wonder that I consider the events described in this letter to the DTH editor to be a disgrace, but it still gets me steamed.

True Allegiance to the Almighty Dollar

2006-06-21T12:36:00.000-04:00

So I was reading the Tuck/Johnson project while thinking about writing a blog entry about yet another topic I am highly unqualified to speculate about, the future of the newspaper industry.

But, before I could get down to business, my eye was caught by two ads on the page. It's worth noting that these ads aren't the direct doing of the Worry crew, but appear to have been placed by an outside agency. Still, I love this pair for their unabashed commercialism.

If there's a better visual representation of the Yankee entrepreneurial spirit, I have yet to see it.

Assorted Miscellany

2006-06-20T12:35:00.000-04:00

So, the homage to the Delaware (longest free-flowing river in the U.S., baby) got me thinking about other relatively meaningless events.

Aside from the river, one of the most beautiful things in my life right now is UNC's standing atop the bracket in the College World Series in Omaha, Neb. This graphic from the DTH is fairly helpful for those unfamiliar with the competition, among whom I count myself. At any rate, I missed yesterday's action because I got called up to Penna. to cover a school board meeting. It wasn't so awful, though, because we don't play again until tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to the Clemson/CSF match up tonight though.

Oh, and by the way, back in the day those school board meetings were really interesting; a guy once threatened to bite another guy's nose off, and a different guy threatened to break into a file cabinet to get personnel records. Still, I now have four stories have to clip. I've decided to clip each one because I have a new filing system for my notes designed to prevent them from drowning me when they accumulate. I'm very proud of myself.

Hip to Trendy to Passe

2006-06-20T09:30:00.000-04:00

So I've been surfing the Internet and perusing messenger buddy profiles a lot lately, what with summer bringing an end to papers, sleep-deprivation and the DTH. Along my electronic journeys I've noticed that a lot of people I know are throwing up blogs as a way to keep in touch with far-flung familiars. Just off the top of my head there's the Tuck/Johnson collaborative, Boss 1's Va. adventures, Boss 2's blog and, of course, the account of the exploits in the far orient of that inveterate blogger Mr. Dillard.

Since just about every third person I know from Carolina is doing it, I've finally said to myself, "What the hell, Ted. Sure, blogs weren't around in the 1950's, but neither was New Coke, and look how well that turned out." Armed with such iron-clad logic as this I now step boldly into the world of actually updated summer blogs. I'm sure this will push the practice, which has already slipped from cutting-edge to merely trendy, all the way to "so last year." Well, plaid flannel is also "so last (50) year(s)," so, as I said to myself, what the hell.

Given the historically sporadic nature of this blog (not that I'm promising to now post on a set schedule, mind you), I hope that my readers (both of you) will permit me to use this post to offer a brief update on my life so that future posts might be at least marginally intelligible.

So anyway, I'm back in the gig at Princeton and I'm stringing on the side for The (Easton, Penna.) Express-Times. Generally speaking I'm going to avoid writing about work, because most people probably don't care about municipal meetings or my secretarial adventures. But my jobs mean that I expend a lot of time, gas and profanity moving between my parents' houses. They're separated by about 70 miles of roadway, much of it running through New Jersey's much-denigrated traffic. I don't know exactly who's been denigrating it, but they're falling down on the job, because while it's already much-denigrated, it's not carped about even a quarter as much as it ought to be.

I have to say that the Delaware River, which I drive along and across often in the course of my travel adventures, is the one of the most consistently beautiful pieces of the earth. This morning at 6 a.m. I was driving along Riverton Road toward Riverton. The road sits on a narrow ledge below a sheer rock face that is covered in summer with vine-like vegetation and in winter with frozen waterfalls formed by water seeping down the rock. This morning on my right the vegetation was verdant from the storms that passed through last night and the rock was dark and slick. To my left was a drop off down to the river, which was fairly high but not muddy. The entire scene was shrouded by the fog that made the entire first half of my journey this morning a slow, stressful crapshoot. As a result of the mist, I could see maybe 60 feet in front, 20 feet up and about halfway across the river; I was in a world of my own with nothing but river, road and cliff. There was no sky, no traffic, no Jersey bank cluttered with boats. It was beautiful.

So the road's the beast and the river's the beauty. I don't know what that makes me, but I forgot to pack a lunch today and I'm already hungry. I guess that makes me S.O.L.

Oh well.

Another Year Completed

2006-04-30T17:07:00.000-04:00

Summer is again upon me, and with it comes the usual mix of euphoria and melancholy. The beauty in the trees, in the world, makes me think of all that could be before me; I think of possibilities half examined in my mind, of dreams, of going home, and of glories I may well never taste.
But in the same breath I am sad, because with summer comes the dispersal of friends and colleagues to the next stages of their lives. In college, we at the Daily Tar Heel have been at the top of our game. If anyone said they put out a better college paper, we could dispute it without any fear of being thought pretentious.
Now it's time for another group of us to step away. Some of those people will go on to be at the top of the real journalism game, we are, after all, a good paper. But others won't, that's just the way these things work. For some people, the Daily Tar Heel will be the peak.
And so I say good by. I don't pretend that I'm going to keep in touch because I won't. All I do is tell them to have a good life, and think to myself that if all of us are lucky we'll end up together on the Golden Shore.
It is very, very odd indeed to be thinking, seconds apart, of wonderful people I will never again incarnate see and Roseto cook outs, of the worn gray-brown dirt path, of the smell of woodsmoke, and endless salads and going fishing with friends.
To have the two images in my head is kind of disturbing, and it makes me a little restless, is all.

Reflections for my Final Weeks in Carolina

2005-05-01T15:35:00.000-04:00

It's not that we ever really had winter here in North Carolina, but the fact that summer's almost here excites me tremendously. The deciduous trees have their foliage out and even the homeliest of scenes looks glorious, the whether is great, and since final exams are upon us, life is deliciously slow. I've been spending time with friends I barely saw during the school year. It's 2 a.m. and we're going to walk up town for Mexican food they said. During the school year I would have been just getting home, headed for bed, dreading my personal reveille to go run the desk or listen to some dolt babble about western civilization or oral communication. Now all I said was, I'll come too.

We got our food. I got a hug from a pretty girl. One of them tried to do chin ups on a gate and the other babbled incessantly. It was a beautiful thing.

When it was time for me to decide where I was going to spend my collegiate years, it seemed like such a close decision. I mean sure, that one school was close but still excellent, offering a great education in a place I would feel eminently comfortable and that other one had a decent journalism program and was in the hills near better fishing and all of the folks were really friendly. Even with all of that though, I can't believe how close a choice that should have been so obvious was. I should have seen more than the few facts on which I based my decision.

There's no disputing that the large size of this university has allowed me to fit in better, that the one school would have been too close and therefore not enough of a challenging experience or that the one in the hills was probably too small and elitist. But I should have seen all of the other things that make me love this school. I should have seen the camaraderie at the paper; I should have seen the camaraderie on my hall. I should have seen the way the University functions together seamlessly in spite of its giant size and divergent souls. I should have seen how great my instructors would be. I know that some of them are still only grad students and that some people use this to criticize large schools like this one. I find these instructor's classes to often be the most educational. It's not as though entering grad school put some sort of mental handicap on you that only evaporates with the bestowal of a PhD; nor does the PhD bestow a gift of great teaching skill.

Instead, these are the instructors who best identify with me and understand the perspective with which I am viewing the information that is presented to me. As a result, I believe, they often are the instructors from whom I most firmly grasp the lesson. Indeed, all but the greenest of grad students is so thoroughly immersed in his subject matter (they are prepping for comps after all) that any insinuation of insufficiency is ludicrous. Granted, some of the T.A.'s may be insufferably green, but any of them in charge of a class has been, in my experience, on par with or above the average professor.

But I digress. I started this entry to talk about how lovely Carolina is: the sun, the leaves, the bricks, my roommate playing guitar, the lovely people, the slow living and the sky. Most of all the sky. The sky is so different. In Pennsylvania, I expect ominous gray from November to April, except for the blinding days when the sun streams ceaselessly and impotently upon the cold, harsh snow. Then I expect it to be a variety of weather, some good, and some bad. Here, almost each day, the sky is visible; most days it doesn't have a cloud in it. Today for example. This is the sort of whether I lived for in Pennsylvania, except now it's practically every day.

I'm anxious to start the summer, to see friends, to make some dough, to catch some fish, to watch the fireworks at the Big Time and to cook out with my family and the dog; but I'm also going to miss so many things here that I'm looking forward to summer with less eagerness than the pure glee with which I always was able to regard it from the dull prison of school.

Expanding My Horizons

2005-04-25T02:26:00.000-04:00

I have never put my thoughts down in so public a way before and to be frank, I've no intention of putting anything terribly personal out into public. Still, it's good to be able to take a break from writing like an automoton for the DTH and just write for the hell of it every once in a while. I'm hoping this will be an interesting experiment, or if not interesting, at least not terrible and terribly angst-filled to the point of becoming a liability.

At any rate, I hope to just record a little bit about my day-to-day life and maybe a few of my thoughts. Nothing too deep or political though, and certainly nothing Pepys-esque. Nope, nothing special; I'm just going to have a nice little digital notepad so that when I get to three weeks from now I can look back and think, "Gosh! How far I have come!" If you don't like what I write here, I don't really care, except that you've got issues. The only things that make it to this journal are the most inane, the most purely inconsequential of my thoughts.

Let it be on that note that we commence.