Return to Bed Bugs, NYT & Thin-Skinned Columnists

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

When last we met, NY Times columnist Bret Stephens was being mocked on the Internet for complaining rather publicly about Dr. David Karpf, a relatively unknown associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University making a mostly unseen joke comparing Stephens to the crop of bed bugs found in the Times’ newsroom.

Don’t know this story? Follow the link above back to my previous post to catch up.  It’s ok. We’ll wait.

So at this point we have a ticked off columnist for one of the most important papers in the country and a professor behaving analytically.

And then I saw this tweet from Mike Godwin (yes, that’s the Godwin of Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies…)

Bret Stephens was so irate  that he wrote a whole column for the Times essentially comparing Karpf’s bed bug joke to the Holocaust. And it is worth remembering that no one would have ever noticed Karpf’s joke had Stephens not blown it up.

Lehigh journalism professor Jeremy Littau was surprised the Times let Stephens take out his anger at Karpf with his column:

Washington Post columnist (and international affairs professor) Dan Drezner had a thoughtful critique of Stephens behavior:

The lesson the Stephens just hasn’t seemed to learn is that although he has a big, big pulpit, he cannot beat up on lower figures without impunity now. Here is how Dr. Karpf responded through a commentary on Esquire’s site:

I think my favorite comment on the whole affair game from TCU’s Dr. Emily Farris:

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Media Twitter: On Bed Bugs, the NYT and thin-skinned columnists

Posted on August 28, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

Updated 8/28/19

It all started with a story on Slate Monday noting that several locations in the New York Times building were infested with bed bugs. This led to the following tweet from NY Times visual journalism director Stuart Thompson:

“Breaking – there are bedbugs in the NYT newsroom

-Stuart A. Thompson (@staurtathompson) August 26, 2019″ (since deleted)

 

Later on Monday, Dave Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, used this news to poke fun at conservative Pulitzer Prize winning NYT columnist Bret Stephens.

Initially it achieved something like 9 likes and no shares. Pretty small by Twitter standards.  By comparison, my tweet that same day complaining about academics making poor choices about Reply All on e-mail attracted 24 likes and 1 retweet.

But then Bret Stephens did something foolish – he publicized Dr. Karpf’s tweet by an e-mail to Karpf, CCed to the George Washington provost:

Karpf, writing in Esquire, notes the irony of Stephens’ comments:

The irony, of course, is that Bret Stephens regularly pens columns decrying the culture of “safe spaces” on college campuses. He once wrote a column titled “Free Speech and the Necessity of Discomfort.” (Discomfort for thee, but not for me, it would seem…)

In that column, based on a speech Stephens gave at the University of Michigan last year, he wrote:

In other words, if we aren’t making our readers uncomfortable every day, we aren’t doing our job. There’s an old saying that the role of the journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but the saying is wrong. The role of the journalist is to afflict, period….

The truth may set you free, but first it is going to tick you (or at least a lot of other people) off.

And this wasn’t the only time:

In other words, Stephens is fine with journalists like himself making people uncomfortable, but not with other people making him uncomfortable.

Stephens followed up his e-mail with a visit to MSNBC the following morning:

Umm, I’m not a columnist or academic of national stature, but as a general rule when you send an e-mail to an academic complaining about him or her and then copy it to their boss, you are almost always trying to get the academic in some kind of professional trouble.

In the end, Stephens’ e-mail really didn’t hurt Karpf, but it did bring a lot of unwanted attention to Stephens. London’s Guardian newspaper ran a major story about it, as did the  Washington Post:

And as the Post’s Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Kathleen Parker points out, readers have called her far worse things then a “bedbug.”  In fact, there was a whole genre of Twitter posts today from women and people of color listing worse things they had been called online. Consider the following thread:

I’m not going to post the actual insults, but if you follow the above tweet, you’ll probably wish you hadn’t looked.

Karpf says he has little to fear from Stephens:

I am a tenured academic, with the support of my university of administration and my disciplinary peers. I am also, like Stephens, a white guy. If either of us was a woman or person of color, we would endure far worse insults online every day. My life will go on and so will his. He will have a new nickname that he doesn’t care for; I will have some new Twitter followers who will soon learn that I am less funny than they had hoped.

Perhaps the one who has been hurt the most by Stephens’ e-mail is… Stephens, who announced today that he was leaving Twitter:

Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Dr. Karpf was at Georgetown University. He is actually at George Washington University.

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Everything can be Explained by Hamilton: Politicians and Media, Then and Now

Posted on August 27, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

People who say we’ve never had politics before like we do today are just ignoring history.  At least Mike Pence isn’t shooting at Jack Lew. John Adams was a great patriot, but, man, did he have a thin skin.

Speaking of Aaron Burr, sir…

I know that this has very little to do with our media, but maybe I can make a claim toward the musical Hamilton?

 

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Media Twitter: Digital Detox, Fancy Phones, Creepy Speakers, and Facebook 51

Posted on August 23, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

I have my classroom media literacy students do an electronic media cleanse as their first homework each semester. And they just need to make it for a day.

A couple of stories  today about both iPhones and Androids:

Smart speakers are the creepiest. Do you really trust giant corporations to be listening to every word, every sound… coming out of where you live? Not me.

So there was a joke group set up on Facebook to have a giant crowd of folks storm the gates at secretive Air Force base Area 51. But what if some people actually show up?

And finally, your Distracted Boyfriend meme of the day:

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Media Twitter: Candidate playlists, digital history & one more distracted boyfriend meme

Posted on August 20, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

Going to try to get back to blogging on a more regular basis this fall.  On days I don’t have essay posts, I’m going to share some of the media issue Twitter posts that might have scrolled by your feed.  Let me know if you find these interesting/useful.

-REH

A great look at what can be done with multimedia reporting.  Doing online what you can do best online.  Really cool story.

How are historians supposed to cope with the digital world? Here’s one example from artist Gordon McAlpin whose masters project looked at the history of the transition from silent to sound movies.

And finally, one more Distracted Boyfriend meme…

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Viacom and CBS, following years of drama, finally to reunite

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

Tweet from CNN entertainment and media reporter

CBS and Viacom may finally be getting back together again after a lengthy on-again, off-again relationship.

Although they are currently two separate corporations with separate stocks, the ownership and management of the two companies heavily overlap. CBS owns the CBS broadcast network, half of the CW broadcast network, a number of television production companies, approximately thirty broadcast television stations, and the Simon & Schuster publishing group. Viacom owns the movie studio Paramount and numerous cable channels, including Comedy Central, BET, and the various MTV and Nickelodeon channels.

Viacom had begun in the 1960s as a small film production unit within CBS. Later, in 1971, the federal government became concerned that the broadcast networks were becoming too powerful, so it forced them to sell their content production units. (Can you imagine that today?) As an independent company, Viacom grew into a major producer of cable television programming; its products included MTV and Nickelodeon.

In 1987, theater owner Sumner Redstone bought Viacom. Under Redstone’s leadership, the company became a dominant media corporation in the 1990s. Finally, Viacom bought CBS in 1999, the television network that had given birth to it decades before.

But then, in 2005, Viacom and CBS split back into two separate corporations with separate stocks being traded. So they are no longer a single Big Media company, right? Well, sort of. In recent years, Sumner Redstone and his daughter Shari have been battling over control of the company. Sumner is now in his 90s and in failing health, so Shari has been more firmly in control. But the story over the possible remerger of the two companies has been as much a family soap opera as a business narrative.

Since 2018, however, the companies have been dancing back and forth, considering becoming one company once again. The issues surrounding this deal seem to be largely one of how much one company would be willing to pay for the other, and who would be the management after the merger. In 2018, CBS had revenue of $15 billion from cable networks, local media, publishing, and the various CBS broadcast properties.  Viacom had revenue of $13.8 billion including Paramount Pictures and a wide range of cable networks, most prominently the MTV family of youth-oriented channels.

Complicating matters  were the problems of CBS’s former chairman Les Moonves, who was forced out of the company by multiple charges of sexual harassment. Moonves was fired in September of 2018, following a pair of articles by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker alleging that that Moonves had sexually harassed at least a dozen separate women.

So, with all that background, what’s going to happen with this likely merger?

  • One of the major objectives of the merger is to get the two companies into a better position to compete in the cord-cutting, streaming world of the Fox-enhanced Disney behemoth, Comcast, AT&T/WarnerMedia and Netflix.
  • Sheri Redstone, daughter of Viacom mogul Sumner Redstone, will become chair of the combined company and become one of the most powerful women in the media industry. Reuniting the two companies has been a goal for Ms. Redstone for at least three years.
  • The ViacomCBS merger, with an estimated value $11 billion, is pretty small compared to AT&T’s $80 billion acquisition of WarnerMedia and Disney’s $71.3 billion purchase of most of the entertainment business of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.
  • But despite all the talk about what this will mean to the two companies, Brian Steinberg, writing for Variety, points out:

    “The new ViacomCBS looks much like the old one, where Sumner Redstone served as chairman of a company that essentially had two parts: Tom Freston ran cable operations while Leslie Moonves supervised CBS assets. The new version of the company will install Redstone’s daughter Shari as chairman, but leaves some questions about whether the combination will be able to maximize its efforts with the assignments given to Bakish and Ianniello.”

If I really wanted to go nuts on this blog post, I could make a pretty compelling analogy with the relationship between director/choreographer Bob Fosse and dancer/actress Gwen Verdon as portrayed in the recent FX mini series that I finally got around to watching this week. But I will leave that as an exercise for the reader…

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Newspapers and News in the News

Posted on August 1, 2019 by Ralph Hanson
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Everyone’s Gone to the Movies – Summer 2019

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

  • Want something more to think about RE: live v. animation
    The short Piper won best animated film Oscar.  Style looks a lot like Lion King.(And yes, I know, everything in Piper was animated.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTjHEyEAlsc

  • Cats musical movie now has trailer
    I strongly suspect some of the people involved with this movie were on hallucinogens while they were working on it. But it still seems oddly compelling.

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe) – Newspaper Edition

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Ralph Hanson
  • Is GateHouse poised to own 1 in 6 of America’s newspapers?
    Looks like it.  GateHouse is reportedly in talks to purchase Gannett, which would combine the nation’s two largest newspaper chains.  Then new company would control 254 dailies and hundreds of weeklies. (Nieman Lab)
  • Are newspapers still newspapers when they go all-digital?
    • Pittsburgh Post-Gazette planning to cease paper publication, go exclusively digital
      The leading Pittsburgh, PA paper is reportedly poised to cease all print operations and operate exclusively online. This would appear to be more of a cost-cutting decision than one focused on meeting subscribers’ needs. (Pittsburgh Current)
    • Chicago Defender, iconic African American newspaper has gone all-digital
      As of July 11th, the 114-year-ld black newspaper is no longer being printed in physical form.  The paper’s legacy includes “driving the Great Migration of African Americans to Chicago from the South and bolstering the black electorate as a key constituency in national politics.” (Chicago Sun Times)
  • How can the Washington Post get rid of cookies and still be able to study their readers?
    By moving their tracking in-house instead of making use of third-party cookies and tracking data (think Facebook and Google), The Post and publications that license their technology can deal better with both effective targeting and maintaining reader privacy.  (Although not mentioned in this article, I would guess that this new tech is one of the big outcomes of having the paper owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.) (Digiday)
  • Why is Starbucks going to stop selling newspapers in September?
    Because customers just “borrow” them off the rack without paying for them.  In short, everybody steals the newspapers, so there’s no money to be made from selling them. Hmmm… think I’ve heard something like this before. (NY Post)
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Travels with Putt Putt: Mountain High, Valley Low

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

I don’t generally name my cars, and I don’t really set out to name my motorcycles, but it seems like over the past decade most of the motorcycles I’ve owned have somehow let me know what they wanted to be called. This year all my motorcycling is being done on a Suzuki DR650, AKA Putt Putt.  This is the final installment of the story of Putt Putt’s and my trip to the canyon country of Utah.

With our visit to Zion National Park complete, it was time for my traveling companion Howard and me to turn our bikes back east.  There were still parks to visit, but the road would now be inevitably leading us back home.

We spent the night at a rustic, remote motel outside of Hatch, Utah, that was just one of several family run accommodations that turned out to be great choices. The Riverside Ranch RV Park Motel & Campground was old school, but neat and clean.  And there was a porch outside that let a person sit, sip bourbon, and enjoy the sunset.

There was also a restaurant across the parking lot with the enticing sign of “Restaurant” above.  I suppose there was a name for it on the menu… But the food was an interesting twist on New Mexican food. And it was dark enough after the late sunset to be able to see the Milky Way spread across the sky.

Simple pleasures are the order of the day at The Riverside Ranch, etc.

Breakfast offerings were pretty slim at The Riverside, so the next morning we rode on to Bryce Canyon Pines for eggs and homemade corned beef hash.  Much better than cold cereal and toast. It occurred to me that while making a go of it in the restaurant trade is always tough, it must be a particular challenge in such a remote place that depends so much on seasonal visitors.

As much as I loved our visit to Zion, I liked our time at Bryce Canyon National Park much more.  While still a busy park, it was much less crowded than the better known Zion.  While shuttle busses were an option, we were still allowed to ride the bikes out to the many overlooks and trails.

What a spectacular collection of canyons, amphitheaters, fins and hoodoos.  What’s a hoodoo? Think of giant sandstone columns topped with a harder-rock cap that keeps the top from eroding away. Some of the most dramatic and most iconically Utahan landscapes of the trip.  (A ruder person than me could make a crude analogy of what these valleys looked like, but I shall take the high rode here and not mention it. Those of you of the proper (or improper) frame of mind can figure it out for yourselves…)

An overlook full of hoodoos.

One of the endless views from Bryce.

There was debate over what these chirping bugs were.  One parking lot attendant suggested they were pine beetles, but there were also a lot of cicadas visible.  Any entomologist readers with an ID for us?

After leaving Bryce, we had a lot of miles to go across riding backroads, including the amazing Utah Highway 12.

We found time for a brief stop at the Capitol Reef National Park visitors center, but there will need to be a return visit there, along with the missed Cedar Breaks National Monument.

Utah Highway 12 descends off the mesa.

Our final stop for the day was at Colorado National Monument, just shy of our Grand Junction, Colorado destination. From there, it was back to our hotel. In the morning, I would head east across the Rockies home to Kearney, Nebraska, and Howard would head southeast back to Texas.

We had five great days of riding in Utah, but we still have unfinished business in the state. We skipped Arches National Park because of the crowds, we missed going into the Needles Unit of Canyonlands National Park, and we had to skip completely Cedar Breaks National Monument.

And there were a lot of interesting dirt roads that got bypassed because I had street tires on Putt Putt.

Three years ago I wrote about our ride up to Hyder, Alaska, saying that the trip was a mountaintop experience, not a part of a bucket list. As I wrote then:

The most important reason for this not being a bucket list trip, however, is because this isn’t something I’m checking off.  It will be something that stays with me for a long time to come.  I still think about a backpacking trip I took with my older brother more than 35 years ago. It’s still with me. And I hope that I haven’t left these beautiful areas behind forever.  I want to come back to see the mainland of Alaska, and Canada’s Northwest Territories, and…. It’s not a check box, it’s an introduction.

Mountain high, valley low, this has been a great trip, but it has only lengthened my list of places to go, not checked any off my list.

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