Not bailing on NPR and a ramble on cronyism 

I may be disappointed in NPR but I'm still a fan. I appreciated that my local station aired the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with AG Gonzales today. I was doing busy work at work, so was able to listen in. Something Nina Totenberg said about being reminded of the old "Who put 8 tomatoes in that itty-bitty can" commercial made me laugh out loud. She and Neil "Talk of the Nation" Conan did the trademark low-key commentary.

The closer we get to a having a new president, the fainter my rage at Bush becomes, but I'm glad Patrick Leahy doesn't seem to feel that way. We've seen all kinds of abuses of power, but the cronyism appears as a thread through it all. Hey, I'm a Democrat in Chicago; I know how this stuff works, but we've crossed the line here. From Gonzales to Heckova Job Brownie to trying to get Harriet Miers appointed to the Supreme Court. The U.S. Attorney firings and replacements are a little different wrinkle on the same theme. Not too far from the theme are some regulatory appointments you don't hear much about. This administration is putting representatives of his famous business base in key watchdog positions: a mining exec as head of the Mining Safety and Health Administration, and a manufacturing group exec into the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Don't you think the increasingly insulated circle of trusted Bush staff is all part of the same thing, too? He says he goes with the assessment of the generals on the ground, then replaces the generals who don't agree with him. Bob Woodward reported in his book, State of Denial, that Bush banned use of the phrase "insurgency" from meetings about Iraq. You're a 100% Bushie or you're wrong and gone or banished.

It's so discouraging. Somebody tell me a joke. Or chronoport me to 2009.

Later: Just one more thing before I nestle in with my movie (Gentleman's Agreement). By stringing some of the Bush administration's misdeeds into a cronyism theme, I don't mean to say it's merely cronyism, or to minimize some of the awful things his two terms have come to stand for: imperialism, wadding up the constitution and Geneva Convention and tossing them in the wastebasket, all kinds of horrid actions that make me ashamed of my country. He doesn't fit into the crony scheme as the boss, not like either of the Mayors Daley, and not like Nixon. He's a beneficiary of the patronage system, more in the category ol' Brownie the FEMA guy or Harriet Miers -- but with figurehead status like Junior Soprano when Tony was street boss. I'm not sure we'll know the whole truth as soon as we'd like to, but I do think my grandchildren's American history books won't equivocate when they tell about about the power-driven puppeteers or unofficial regents of the Bush years, Cheney and Rove.

Coolest, crudest, cutest 

and most inventive and original author website I think I've ever seen. Via BoingBoing.

Supposed to be the news: Disappointed in NPR reporting error 

Maybe it's a small thing, but it still bothered me to see NPR get a fact wrong in its story yesterday on the blogger code.

The report stated it was Kathy Sierra's call for a bloggers code of conduct that prompted the posts and comments that frightened her. If you've followed the saga, you know that the code was not called for by Kathy -- in fact she's said she doubts a code will do any good -- and discussion of the code was a consequence of the objectionable posts, not the impetus.

It reminded me of the way a biopic or historical screeenwriter might simplify an event to make it a better, tidier and easier-to-tell story. Except this is supposed to be news.

As a blogger, of course my first reaction was to think of all the MSM claims about sloppy reporting by blogs, about how only real journalists can be trusted to get the story straight. NPR's listeners and site visitors do trust NPR, and among them are bloggers who will comment on their facts. Here's what makes it not such a small matter: yesterday at least one blogger took the fact as a given and tried to build on it.

"... IT blogger Kathy Sierra recalled the violent response she received from readers (all presumably educated, rational people) when she called for a 'code of conduct' on her blog, which may be an indicator of the zeitgeist."

Next, it made me suspicious of reporting about topics I'm not as familiar with. Does the same misleading simplification happen all the time, and I'll never spot it?

I love NPR so I'm not contempuous of them, I'm just disappointed in them. If user comments were allowed on the story page, this would have cleared this in a minute or two. I'm sure it would be scary for them to open up to "factchecking your ass" mode, but I'd think better of them for it.