News Cut: June 23, 2008 Archive

George Carlin, 1937-2008

Posted at 7:31 AM on June 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Icons

This is probably a generational thing on my part (As a colleague reminded me last week when we were discussing Steve Martin and she informed me he used to do stand-up played banjo), but I like to think you can grab any 5 people you run across today and talk for an hour about George Carlin, who died on Sunday at 71.

Entertainment Weekly said Carlin "emerged in the 1970s with a style much more reflective of the times, pushing into more sensitive areas of social observation and language, a favorite topic of his over the years. Most notably, his recorded routine 'Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television'' became the center of a landmark Supreme Court case.'

Carlin, it's fair to say, pushed the boundaries. Nothing was off-limits, as this rant on religion once showed:

The Divine Plan. Long time ago, God made a Divine Plan. Gave it a lot of thought, decided it was a good plan, put it into practice. And for billions and billions of years, the Divine Plan has been doing just fine. Now, you come along, and pray for something. Well suppose the thing you want isn't in God's Divine Plan? What do you want Him to do? Change His plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a Divine Plan. What's the use of being God if every run-down shmuck with a two-dollar prayerbook can come along and **** up Your Plan?

For baby-boomers, though, Carlin was troubling to us in his age. It wasn't for anything he said -- or didn't -- it was for what he'd become: a elderly curmudgeon. As a young comedian, he was a refreshing poke in the eye to The Establishment. In his age, he'd become another cranky old man who wanted kids off his lawn. He was still funny, but when we were young, he seemed to be making fun of someone else -- The Man, perhaps. As we aged, he was making fun of us.

(Strong language warning in this video)

It was a heck of a run.

Here's a neat slideshow from the New York Times. As you watch it, you'll want to poke someone near you and tell them your favorite George Carlin bit. Feel free to share it below. (But keep it clean!)

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Broken levees let racially-charged rhetoric flow

Posted at 11:29 AM on June 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (22 Comments)

Are Midwesterners simply better than people in other parts of the country? Do we work harder? Are we less reliant on others for help when we need it? Are our values more aligned with the American ethic?

Today's Star Tribune "letter of the day" seems to think so. Writer Jeffrey Seyfert of Farmington compares Hurricane Katrina in 2004 with the flooding in Iowa and sections of Minnesota last week.

There is historic flooding involving five Midwestern states; Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. Where are the news anchors reporting from the bridges asking where is the federal government and when are they coming to the rescue, as they did back during Hurricane Katrina?

The reason you don't see them is it doesn't fit the template. It doesn't fit the template that the federal government is supposed to be omnipresent in our lives and that self-reliance and self-responsibility are mere clichés of days long ago.

The difference is our fellow Midwesterners are picking themselves off the ground, brushing themselves off, and getting to work. Their first instinct is not to blame government; their first instinct is to help each other out and try to put their lives back together.

The first instinct of the victims in both cases, of course, was to get to high ground, which both did. And then wait for help. In the Midwest last week, police from Minneapolis helped out, the Red Cross in the Twin Cities sent a dozen or so workers to assist. In Louisiana, the Red Cross was kept out of New Orleans for several days.

Syefert's letter could be dismissed if it weren't for the fact it's part of a growing chorus in the Midwest: black people got help in 2004, and the mostly white Midwesterns can't catch a break.

Today, the Chicago Tribune profiled the growing sentiment in the Heartland:

"Where is all the fundraising that Katrina victims had?" Ben Creelman asked, a disgusted tone seeping into his voice. "Is it because we're not from the Deep South? Is it because we're from the Midwest?"

Creelman didn't put it in so many words, but his message was clear. The poor, mostly African American residents of New Orleans' 9th Ward inspired a charitable outpouring not seen since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The flooded farms of the central Midwest, meanwhile, just can't catch a break.

It gets worse. One man, sandbagging in Columbus Junction, Iowa said "even the Hispanics" were sandbagging, while pointing out that African Americans weren't.

(Update Tues)

On the St. Louis Post Dispatch Web site, a reader from Iowa writes:

Thousands have volunteered, first with sandbagging, then with cleanup and a lot of them are from out of state. Some of the people who were flooded out were not let into their homes because it was unsafe and of course they were upset but I haven't seen anyone wandering the streets yelling "Da gobernment owes us".

And on the Never Yet Melted blog, this synopsis:

Katrina has become a metaphor for many things beyond natural disaster, including governmental and individual incompetence (depending on your point of view). In Iowa there is a 500 year flood, but the people are not paralyzed, whining, or looting. There will be no massive relief effort from around the world, and nobody will step up to help Iowans except for other Iowans. Yet years from now, there will be no Iowans still in FEMA camps.

Nobody will step up to help Iowans? We'll let that slide for now.

As for the government's response, one difference in the Midwest is that there was one. At least $2 billion in federal aid is expected in the flooded area. Gov. Pawlenty toured Mower, Houston and Freeborn counties last week, declared it a disaster area, and triggered a review for FEMA help.
President Bush toured the area last week and promised plenty of federal help.

Thousands of acres of farmland has been lost to crops this year, and disaster payments to farmers will help cushion some of the blow.

Of course, the people of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois showed a resiliency in their crisis. Their recovery, however, was a team effort.

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Without pregnancy pact, what's the teen birth story?

Posted at 2:18 PM on June 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

It was a heck of a story, it just may not be true.

Last week Time Magazine got the talk shows buzzing when it quoted Joseph Sullivan, the principal of a Gloucester, Mass. high school, saying that the reason 17 girls were pregnant is that they'd made a pact:

By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.

Today, Gloucester officials held a meeting on the situation and then announced there is no proof such a pact exists. Curiously, Sullivan wasn't invited to the meeting.

But it appears the "pact" story didn't originate there, but with the Gloucester Daily Times, whose editor, Ray Lamont writes:

Through stories and editorials, we have occasionally noted that at least some of the 18 girls who became pregnant this past school year did so intentionally, with the idea that it might be "cool" to "become moms" and raise the babies together. Could that be considered some sort of informal "pact"? Maybe. It depends on how formally one defines that word. But one thing has become certain over the past two days -- that's the fact that "pact" can certainly be a magic word. As soon as Time magazine reported the presence of a "pregnancy pact" -- as its headline blared in its online edition Thursday -- this story, which had already sparked local and some national talk about teen pregnancy and the distribution of contraceptives in schools, exploded worldwide.

The Gloucester paper reported in March that many of the girls who became preganant this year appeared to do it on purpose.

Lamont thinks everybody missed the story: that none of the girls dropped out of school, thanks in large measure to a now overcrowded (and certainly controversial) day care center at the school.

Even with the high number of pregnancies at the 1,200-student high school, the teen pregnancy rate is about 3 percent, not far from the 2.7% teen pregnancy rate reported in that city in 2006.

In Minnesota, according to statistics released by the Minnesota Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Prevention & Parenting, Minnesota's teen birthrate in 2006 (the latest year for which statistics seem to be available) was 4.9 %.

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KSTP and the News Council

Posted at 2:15 PM on June 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Media

Following up on a couple of posts last week. When I was live-blogging the Minnesota News Council hearings (here and here), a commenter asked why KSTP wasn't at the council hearing to defend one of its stories.

The answer came today:

We traditionally do not participate in the news council. Our news department has more than a hundred journalists with hundreds of years of experience. Long before the news council was created, KSTP had a history of credible and ethical reporting. We continue to have the highest ethical standards for all of our stories.

Thank you,
Lindsay Radford

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St. Paul stack to be blown up

Posted at 2:28 PM on June 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)

.... or down...

Xcel Energy announced today it's going to implode the big smokestack at its High Bridge generating plant on Saturday morning. The stack has been one of the skyline features of St. Paul since 1923. It isn't needed anymore because the plant no longer burns coal.

The news will disappoint a few people. St. Paul Real Estate blog writer Teresa Boardman, for example, wrote eloquently on the subject last fall:

Why would I care about a smokestack? Why not? We preserve grain elevators and tiny homes that were built in the mid 1800's why would we demolish a landmark? The stack is 556 feet tall and can be seen for miles. It is also a home for the peregrine falcons.

Peregrine falcons are most at home high in the sky, where they "skydive" for prey. By installing nest boxes at a height of 300- 600 feet above the ground, they created an environment similar to the high cliffs they prefer.

Millions of dollars were used to save, move and preserve the Cape Hatteras Light house, and it does not look all that different from our smokestack. With a little paint we could achieve the same effect.

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How NBC got beat on the Russert story

Posted at 3:38 PM on June 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Media

How did the New York Times and other news organizations beat NBC in reporting the death of Tim Russert earlier this month? A staffer for a Twin Cities company with whom NBC contracts to maintain its Web site. According to the Times, the unidentified employee of Internet Broadcasting Systems in Mendota Heights heard about Russert's death and updated Russert's Wikipedia entry.

Looking at the detailed records of editing changes recorded by Wikipedia, it quickly emerged that the changes came from Internet Broadcasting Services, a company in St. Paul, Minn., that provides Web services to a variety of companies, including local NBC TV stations.

An I.B.S. spokeswoman said on Friday that "a junior-level employee made updates to the Wikipedia page upon learning of Mr. Russert's passing, thinking it was public record." She added that the company had "taken the necessary measures with the employee and apologized to NBC." NBC News said it was told the employee was fired.

Eleven minutes later, someone else at IBS deleted the entry, but by then it was too late. The news was out before NBC could announce it.

The blog, Silicon Alley Insider says the employee may have been suspended rather than fired, but nonetheless sees a corporate conspiracy at work.

It's one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer's death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It's another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record to appease an upset client, which is what someone at IBS apparently did.

A bigger lesson here is the value of the new landscape for breaking news. Wikipedia and Twitter appear to be as capable -- and perhaps more so -- of delivering news to a large number of people as the large media companies who may wish to sit on it. I posted Russert's death at 2:33 that day. And I wasn't even the first since I prepped a News Cut entry first. It had circulated for 40 minutes before Tom Brokaw did a special report on NBC.

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The story behind 'the catch.'

Posted at 4:04 PM on June 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Marketing and advertising

There have been a fair number of spectacular photographs and videos of late that have been found to be fake, and some of those who huddled in the News Cut cubicle cried "foul" when they watched this one 8 or 9 times today. (Chris Dall of the Bleacher Bums called it first.)

The video is -- as they say -- sweeping the Internet today.

Alas, it's fake. It's an ad for Gatorade.

But there is no mention of it anywhere. How does Gatorade benefit from the ad? Watch again.

Says shootonline.com

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The reluctant teacher of the year

Posted at 5:50 PM on June 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Schools

Of all the "teachers of the year" who've been named since I moved to Minnesota in the last century, Carleen Gulstad stood out more than any other, mostly because of the credit she gave her brother at the luncheon honoring her last month. Her brother killed himself when she was 15.

"He was an amazing teacher for me, and taught me about the glaciers and lakes and rocks and all that," Gulstad said. "He took me for walks. He taught me to read, he taught me to love music. And I wanted to carry on his work in teaching. And also, he was a guy that needed somebody to be there for him. And I wanted to be that teacher, to be there for some other kids."

"Because he was the kind of kid who struggled (with depression) and because he was a loner, I think about those kind of kids a lot. So a part of my teaching is to reach out to those kids, too, and to let them know that there's somebody there for them," she told MPR's Gary Eichten the next day.

Gulstad has resigned her title "for personal reasons."

During her appearance on MPR's Midday, Gulstad seemed reluctant to talk about the politics that surrounds teaching. Questioned by a listener, she shied away -- mostly -- from the question of teacher salaries, and put emphasis instead on mentoring programs for teachers, saying that young teachers leave the profession because they feel alone.

She also displayed a neat insight into kids. "Kids are kids," she said, "but now they're developing in a world that's moving faster than ever."

A replacement will be named soon. Presumably they'll come from the other finalists: Joe Beattie of Hastings High School; Rose Regan, Pine Bend Elementary School; Diane Weiher, Lake Harriet Community School; John Bade, Northfield Middle School; Julie Buryska, Wilson Elementary School (Northfield) ; Gordon Westendorf, Proctor High School; Steve Brehmer, Mayo High School; Lynne Meyer, Greenleaf Elementary School (Rosemount area) and Derek Olson, Afton-Lakeland Elementary School.

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