Kevin Allman

Crediting cartoonists

Matt Bors has an interesting item about The New York Times and its policy regarding editorial cartoonists: it seems the paper Photoshops out their signatures before running them in the paper. I'd never heard of such a thing, but commenters on his blog say that it's not a policy exclusive to the Times. Matt notes that many of the cartoonists have won Pulitzers for their drawing, and asks:

Would a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist be asked to put up with this level of ineptitude and insulting treatment of their craft?

I agree with him, but I'll bet that the Times (and other publications) consider editorial cartoons to be the equivalent of photographs or graphics rather than columns, and graphic elements take a standard credit line instead of a signature.

Nevertheless, I'd say that the artist's signature is an element of the drawing and shouldn't be retouched out of existence, any more than an element in a photograph should be retouched.

I wonder if they'd do it to, say, a Hirschfeld?

Kudos to some Louisiana reporters

South Louisiana has always had some much better reporters and media than one would expect (or, some would argue, much better than it deserves). The collective bullshit detector of the populace is strong and finely tuned, and it's reflected in both the print and electronic media (well, in a lot of cases).

As the quality of local TV news around the country has gone down the toilet, WWL-TV has managed to hold the line with truly solid local journalism. Lately the station's Lee Zurik has been a total rock star pit bull, from his exposé of how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is stuffing local levees with shredded friggin' newspaper, to last night's exposé of a certain buffoonish public service commissioner and how a huge share of his campaign contributions come from the very agencies he's sworn to regulate. The Mosquito Coast has a nice tribute to Zurik here; it's well-deserved.

And the Independent Weekly in Lafayette, La., is way ahead of the game with this week's cover story on Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and how his much-vaunted ethics and transparency campaign is concealing something very different. Written by Jeremy Alford, it's the piece that the national media are going to be revisiting in future months and years when they stop speculating about a possible Jindal vice-presidency and swooning about his star turn on Jay Leno's couch.

Saints owner Tom Benson buys WVUE Fox 8. Hel-lo, sports department!

Dave Walker of The Times-Picayune broke the news this morning that Tom Benson, the very interesting owner of the New Orleans Saints, is buying WVUE-TV, the New Orleans Fox affiliate. (See a photo here.) One commenter/wag on the newspaper website wanted to know:

Will he move the TV Station to San Antonio if the state won't build him a new retractable roof studio?

Beyond the jokes, this means that Fox 8 will be the only locally-owned station in New Orleans, which is, on the face of it, a good thing. But the potential for conflict of interest (and Benson's often-mercurial relationship with the press) made me wonder what, if any, guarantees were being offered to the station's journalists when it came to covering the Black and Gold.

I emailed WVUE sports director Eric Richey and asked him:

- Have you been given any guarantee of editorial independence when it comes to covering the Saints and the Hornets?

- Do you foresee any conflicts of interest?

Eric wrote back:

Thanks for your interest, you're right, quite an interesting day for all of us here at Fox 8. Our News Director Mimi Strawn has told us to direct all questions concerning the sale to our GM Vanessa Oubre.  We should all know more in the coming months. If you watch our website now, the latest news has a one-on-one interview with anchor John Snell and Tom Benson that might help.

I watched the interview, and Benson assured Snell he expected the WVUE news team to do their jobs without consideration for the team...but it's a fascinating potential conflict of interest, and I'd be curious to see what the sports department's take on things would be should the team go -- oh, say -- 2-6 late in the fall. (Not that that would ever happen.)

The Portland Tribune and KPTV: why no conflict-of-interest disclosure?

KPTV-TV, Portland's Fox affiliate, covered the ch-ch-changes at the Portland Tribune in a nice story that put a pleasant-as-possible spin on the paper's scaling-back of its print edition:

The Tribune described this move as freeing its staff up to post more news online and eliminate some of the –- environmentally and economically -- wasteful paper product.

On Monday, the newspaper will launch a daily online paper at portlandtribune.com.

The paper's president said the strategic move will make the paper more environmentally friendly.

He also said that it will allow the paper to cover breaking news like never before.

The changes come at a difficult time financially for the print industry.

"The cost of newsprint has gone up 21 cents since Dec. 1 of last year. What we're trying to do is manage the publishing side and online side in a robust economic way," Portland Tribune President Steve Clark said.

Clark said the company is laying off six employees with the changes.

Sweet, sympathetic, and a bit PR-ish -- but howcum no mention of the fact that the Trib and KPTV are partners? The paper and the TV station have paired up on stories before, and the partnership was (responsibly) mentioned in Clark's original letter. In the past, that disclosure's been boilerplate in other stories that have run on KPTV about the Trib.

It's basic conflict-of-interest, freshman J-school stuff. But in this particular case, it just didn't seem worth mentioning at KPTV.

Sic, sic, sic

Notes from the US presidential campaign trail:

Asked who she'd go out with on a date -- with any celebrity, living or dead -- and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton chose . . . a Republican.

Her fantasy date would be with President Abraham Lincoln, Clinton said in an interview being published in the People magazine hitting newsstands Friday.

The question: "If your husband gave you a pass for one night and you could go on a date with any celeb, alive or dead, who would it be?"

Clinton's answer: "That's such a dangerous question! How about Abraham Lincoln?"

Another surprising tidbit: Despite the 19-hour days she puts in on the trail, she's apparently never heard of the energy drink Red Bull. Asked if she's ever had one, she replied, "No. What is it?"

Clinton, D-N.Y., also equivocates on a few either-or questions: She refused to choose between comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, said she likes both wine and beer, and wouldn't select either "American Idol" or "Dancing With the Stars"; she said her mother -- who lives with the Clintons -- keeps her up to speed on both programs.

She did, however, choose Weight Watchers over the South Beach Diet -- but didn't elaborate on her own eating habits.

Except this didn't appear in People magazine. It appeared on ABC News' website.

ABC News.

I'm coming around to the school of thought that the D.C. media aren't as infuriatingly shallow and insular as they appear to be; they're genuinely sick, sick in the way an alcoholic or a drug abuser knows he or she is sick, but feels powerless to repeat a destructive compulsion.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: the video

Journalist Harry Allen has uncovered a fascinating piece of the Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer puzzle: a video that seems to be a promotional vehicle for her now-discredited memoir Love and Consequences:

These days, publishers often commission promo videos to be posted on MySpace or YouTube; I don't know if they really help sales, but they're cheap to produce and they can't hurt. As Harry explains:

It seems to have been shot as part of a companion “electronic press kit,” or EPK, for the disgraced author’s quickly-canceled book tour and publicity campaign. (In the wake of the outrageous controversy, Riverhead recalled all of the 19,000 copies of Love and Consequences it had previously shipped, from a 24,000 total copies printed, the sum of which were then certainly pulped.)

Harry's shrewd, funny analysis of the video is well worth reading (and you've got to see the picture of Sister Souljones' high school graduation pic to believe it), but I'm not sure the vid was shot in South Central L.A., as he hypothesizes. It's certainly not Eugene, Ore. -- the palm trees in the background are pure L.A. -- but the tract houses in the background are more Brady Bunch than Watts (check the spiffy landscaping and the lack of bars on the windows).

The biggest "tell" in the whole thing, though, is the fact that Jones/Seltzer just sits there for all 10 minutes of the video. I've seen a lot of these publishers' promos, and they usually involve an author walking around, telling stories from their memoirs on the sites where the stories occurred.

Jones/Seltzer couldn't walk around and bring her story to life -- because it was an easily disprovable pack of lies. No street corner locations where she dealt rock; no battered-but-humble family home where "Big Mama" dished out neckbones and homespun wisdom in equal measure. So she just sits there like she was being interviewed on the Today show, a white woman in front of some well-kept houses, talking in vague generalities about education and "potential" and inspiration.

It makes me wonder what it would take for Riverhead to have smelled a rat in this story -- or, indeed, in how much denial the publisher was willing to engage not to smell a rat.

This year's White House Correspondents' Dinner: now with extra breasts

This weekend brought the annual White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner, where the press gathers to yuk it up with the people they're supposed to be covering. Frank James of the Chicago Tribune provides a wrapup that's as good, or at least as typical, as any. Not that he's deaf to the criticisms of press whoredom:

There's been much talk in recent years of how the White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner has perhaps outlived its usefulness.

But there's probably something to be said for an event that may be of the world's greatest flesh-and-blood mash-ups. That, for no other reason, probably argues for its continued existence....

Everywhere you turn, there's someone who used to make headlines, is making them now or will be. It's one of the biggest parades of the fabulously wealthy and famous you're ever likely to see. Where else outside Hollywood can you see Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, Martha Stewart, Marcia Cross and the Jonas Brothers gliding by your table?

Yeah.

Anyway, The New York Times now refuses to confuse journalistic ethics with a Comedy Central roast (the paper refuses to buy a table at the charade any longer), and the general reaction at the D.C. lunch table seemed to be: Too good to sit with us? Who the hell does she think SHE is?.

James makes a point of quoting this year's emcee, Craig Ferguson, who faux-twitted the Times in the roomful of twits:

"Oh, the New York Times. The New York Times unfortunately did not buy a table. They felt, I just want to make sure I got this right, they felt this event undercut the credibility of the press. It's funny. You see, I thought that Jayson Blair and Judi Miller took care of that."

(Ferguson got one of his biggest laughs at this point.)

"...Well, let me try this, shut the hell up New York Times, you sanctimonious, whining jerks. Look for my good review there coming up soon. I'm guessing Monday morning. 'He's a star.'

Actually, that wasn't just Ferguson's opinion. He tapped into a sentiment held by journalists in the room who thought the NYT might be missing the ethical forest for the trees on this one. Also, what does that make the rest of us, stenographers for the administration? (I know I'm inviting trouble with that question. As the president might say "Bring it on.")

That sound you hear is Craig Ferguson's sarcasm whizzing right over Frank James' head.

You can enjoy James's stenography -- along with photos of Pamela Anderson, Karl Rove talking to Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas, George Bush standing on a chair ("This got a lot of laughs and applause") and Colin Powell pointing at Jenny McCarthy's chichis -- on the Tribune's website.

Delicious plagiarism

Sometimes larceny is more comical than outrageous:

This past Sunday, Lauren Handel, an eagle-eyed attorney from New York, was searching for a specific recipe from Giada DeLaurentiis, a chef on the Food Network. Yet whenever she Googled the different ingredients in the recipe, the oddest thing happened: not only did the Food Network's site come up, as expected, but so did John McCain's campaign site.

On a section of McCain's site called "Cindy's Recipes," you can find seven recipes attributed to Cindy McCain, each with the heading "McCain Family Recipe." Ms. Handel quickly realized that some of the "McCain Family Recipes," were in fact, word-for-word copies of recipes on the Food Network site.

(The campaign has already yanked down the recipe pages.)

I couldn't care less about the people and the politics involved, but I thought it would be instructive to see what the campaign changed when they ripped off the recipes. It wasn't much -- a straight cut-and-paste job -- but there were a couple of differences.

The McCain treasured family recipe for "Farfalle Pasta with Turkey Sausage, Peas, and Mushrooms", for instance, is identical to Giada DeLaurentiis' for "Farfalle with Turkey Sausage, Peas and Mushrooms" -- except for two changes, the first of which is in the title (I suppose the campaign worker found 'farfalle' to be too esoteric and modified it with 'pasta'). But the big change came in the cheese:

DeLaurentis: "1/2 cup freshly grated Grana Padano cheese"

McCain: "1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese"

Was Parmesan somehow more "all-American" than Grana Padano? If so, why would you go for farfalle in the first place when Paula Deen alone has half-a-dozen recipes for macaroni and cheese?

My mom has an index-card box full of treasured family recipes, but they involve Thanksgiving casseroles and fruit pies, not "Ahi Tuna with Napa Cabbage Salad" or "Passion Fruit Mousse" -- a preparation that requires not only kiwis, but a blowtorch.

Are kiwis and a blowtorch part of anyone's treasured family recipes? My family's secret ingredients were more along the lines of Hidden Valley Ranch powder and a can of Durkee's french-fried onions.

And if a campaign worker was straining for the common, woman-of-the-people touch, why muck around with Santa Barbara cuisine when it would be just as easy to rip off Paula Deen's Hobo Hamburgers or Sandra Lee's Fountain Dogs?

Margaret Jones' Diaries: Publishers Weekly gets it

Brava to Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, who takes a gimlet-eyed look at the Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer debacle and concludes that the publishing industry owes more to its consumers than a million little excuses and a "mistakes were made" shrug:

...I also think it's time we, as an industry, checked on another set of facts: that there are a lot of potential liars looking for book deals, that the reality show–obsessed public has upped the ante for more and more outrageous “real stories” that we may be all too anxious to provide and, not incidentally, that we're losing credibility with our audience with every scandal....

But publishing remains its old credulous self, falling back on bromides about “trusting the author” and “the smell test,” and the argument that being more inquisitive would be too expensive. And while it's true that these disasters are only a small fraction of the good, well-researched memoirs we publish every year, they have a lasting and perhaps cumulative impact. In these post-Frey, Google-able times, being more, not less, skeptical is not only the right thing to do, it's the expedient thing: you can bet that a mistake or misrepresentation is going to be discovered, sooner or later—so why not protect yourself in advance from the inevitable pillorying? I think we can all agree that the one thing the book business doesn't need right now is less faith from readers.

Nelson has written a terrific, thoughtful essay, rich in common sense and basic decency, and the whole thing is well worth reading.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: truthiness and beauty

You'd think there couldn't be a new angle on the Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer story, but then again, you probably haven't met the woman's former literature professor, Gordon Sayre of the University of Oregon in Eugene. Professor Sayre remembers Mama in this morning's Eugene Register-Guard:

In 2001 Peggy Seltzer, aka Margaret Jones, was a student in my course on Native American literature. We kept in touch from time to time, and last month I received an advance copy of her book Love and Consequences....

When early on the morning of March 4 I went out to get the newspaper and learned that I had read a novel, not a memoir, I was neither angry nor disappointed. If Peggy’s assertion that she had spent part of her childhood on the Quinault reservation was untrue, if the paper she had written about this experience was based on false premises, at least it was backed up by enough research to be convincing.

Lord have mercy. As Kate Coe puts it on Fishbowl LA:

There's a moral assertion--lying is okay, provided you're good at it. Or else, a professor of Native American literature knows little or nothing about the lives of actual Native Americans.

What says Professor Sayre (who teaches a course called "Early American Ethnic Autobiography")?

Every memoir or autobiography is an individual’s fashioning of his or her life, directed toward that individual’s conception of audience. The more intimate or psychological the events recounted — of childhood trauma, of addiction, of religious conversion, or even of racial identity — the more ludicrous it is for readers to insist upon documentary truth.

Actually, 'ludicrous' is when a literature professor prefers documentary truthiness to documentary truth. What kind of education are those U of O kids getting for their parents' money, anyway?

Despite his defensiveness, I'm sure Sayre knows the difference, at least at some level. Even the most fusspot of critics wouldn't be hanging Seltzer out to dry if she had simply misremembered a fact or two: misidentifying a Tercel as a Corolla, or setting a scene in 1988 when it was 1989, or calling the neighbor lady Miss Mary Jane when she was Miss Martha Joan. Jones/Seltzer, of course, did none of those things; she constructed a story and a persona that was nothing but a lie...a distinction that's obvious to nearly everyone but Professor Sayre:

[I]t is no accident that the notorious recent memoirists J.T. Leroy and James Frey also wrote accounts of lives on the margins of society, feeding readers’ lurid curiosities or morbid fascinations.

JT LeRoy wasn't a memoirist, but Sayre's already said that he doesn't know, or care, about the difference;  using his yardstick,The Diary of Anne Frank could've been a fictional account written by Jackie Collins, and as long as Jackie got the sound of the jackboots right, who dare insist on 'documentary truth'?

Sayre's essay, though, is a good reminder that fabulists don't work in a vacuum; for every habitual liar, there's a habitual lie-ee, someone who listens and believes and rationalizes and, when the truth eventually emerges, enters into the role of enabler.

How much did Professor Sayre believe Peggy Seltzer? Enough to thank her in the acknowledgements of his book The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero (hat tip, again, Kate Coe) -- a detail he left out of his Register-Guard essay:

...and Peggy Seltzer of the Quinault nation alerted me to the annual ride of the Sioux and inspired my teaching of Native American literature at Oregon.

I can see why he wouldn't want to brag about that. What I can't see is why he'd write an admiring newspaper essay about the woman, all these years later. (See: enabler.)

Beauty is truthiness, truthiness beauty; that is all ye know in Professor Sayre's class, and all ye need to know. Seltzer seemed to learn that very well, but it didn't serve her well in the end, of course, since the real world and Professor Gordon Sayre's class at the University of Oregon are two very different things...and thank God for that.