A pet peeve of a former journalist

As a retired newspaper reporter, there are few things that get under my skin more than the habit some journalists have of assuming they can read minds.

While listening to the news from NPR the other day, I heard a report from the BBC about the deteriorating situation in Venezuela. The report noted, among other things, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro believes allowing humanitarian aid from Colombia would pave the way for an American military invasion of his country.

Now, on its face, such reporting may seem straightforward enough. But here's the rub. The BBC does not know what Maduro believes, only what he claims to believe. Does he really believe an invasion is a serious threat? Or is that claim a cynical ploy to bolster his support by frightening his fellow Venezuelans? I don't know. You don't know. And neither does the BBC.

News organizations should report what they know to be true, not what they assume to be true. In this case, the BBC knew what Maduro said about the risk of invasion, but not whether Maduro actually believes what he said.

What politicians say and what they believe often are two very different things. Reporters covering a speech or a news conference know the former. They cannot possibly know the latter. Lest we forget: politicians lie. A lot. So stick to reporting the known (what was said) without making assumptions about the unknown (what's actually going on in a politician's mind).

Elizabeth Jane Cochran: you know her by a different name

There was a time when Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who was born on this date in 1864, was world-famous. Nowadays, many of us probably recognize her pen name, but we’re not sure why.

Nellie Bly lived only 57 years, but she packed an awful lot into that relatively short span, starting with her career as a crusading journalist.

As a young woman living in Pittsburgh with her mother, Bly wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Dispatch, complaining about a sexist column that had appeared in the newspaper. The paper gave her a job as a reporter and assigned her the pen name of Nellie Bly, from a song by Stephen Foster.

A biography of Bly on the web site of the PBS series American Experience says she initially wrote about poor working girls and the need to reform Pennsylvania’s divorce laws, but the editors reassigned her to cover flower shows and fashion. Bly convinced her bosses to send her to Mexico as a foreign correspondent, but when she returned to the paper they stuck her on the women's page once again.

Bly headed to New York, and after spending six months looking for work, she walked into the office of John Cockerill, managing editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

“In what was either a bold challenge or a veiled brush off, he asked that she write a story about the mentally ill housed at a large institution in New York City,” according to the American Experience web site. “She did, impersonating a mad person, and came back from Blackwell's Island 10 days later with stories of cruel beatings, ice cold baths and forced meals that included rancid butter.”

Her story “stirred the public and politicians and brought money and needed reforms to the institution,” the web site reports. It also marked the introduction of  “a new kind of undercover, investigative journalism.”

Bly went on to write about corruption, poverty, shady lobbyists and the improper treatment of female prisoners. When she went to Chicago in 1894 to cover a railroad strike, she was “the only reporter who told of the strike from the perspective of the strikers.” As her fame grew, she profiled boxer John L. Sullivan, suffragist Susan B. Anthony, and anarchist Emma Goldman.

As if that wasn’t enough for one lifetime, Bly’s greatest dance with celebrity was yet to come.

In 1889, while still in her 20s, Bly set out by ship, train and burro to circle the globe, with the goal of beating the fictional Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, which was first published in the 1870s. She met Verne at one stop along the way; completed the trip in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes; and was greeted by cheering crowds when she returned to New York.

At 30, Bly married a 70-year-old industrialist and ran the business after he died. When it went bankrupt, she returned to journalism. Bly was working for the New York Journal when she died of pneumonia in 1922.

How many centenarians can claim to have lived as full a life in 100 years as Bly did in 57?

Recalling Elijah Lovejoy, on his birthday

Unless you have ties to Maine, Missouri or Illinois, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Elijah Parish Lovejoy. I was unfamiliar with him before I moved to Maine. On this, his reputed birthday, here’s a quick look at why he should be better-known than he is. 

Lovejoy was born in Albion, Maine, on Nov. 9, 1802. (Some accounts  say Nov. 8.) After graduating from Waterville College (now Colby College) in Maine, he traveled to St. Louis to teach and write for local newspapers. Lovejoy became a newspaper editor and a minister, and in 1833, he began publishing a religious newspaper, the St. Louis Observer.

An abolitionist in a slave state, Lovejoy wrote anti-slavery editorials, and his office was broken into several times, When he did not let up, his home was burglarized and his press destroyed, according to a biography on the Colby College web site.

Lovejoy bought a second press and moved his paper to Alton, Illinois, where he began publishing the abolitionist Alton Observer. In 1837, his press was destroyed, so he bought a third one. That one was destroyed as well, so  he bought a fourth press. 

On Nov. 7, 1837, a mob descended on the warehouse containing Lovejoy’s press, set fire to the roof and shot Lovejoy five times, killing him. His death is not widely recalled today, but it galvanized the country at the time. John Quincy Adams said Lovejoy’s murder had created "a shock as of an earthquake throughout this continent, which will be felt in the most distant regions of the earth."

Lovejoy has gone down in history as America’s first martyr to freedom of the press. In 1952, Colby College created the Lovejoy Award, to preserve Lovejoy’s memory and honor what the college calls his legacy of journalistic “fearlessness and freedom.”

"And that's the way it is . . . ."

With 66 years under my belt, I'm willing to entertain the flattering possibility that six decades of life have deposited me at the tail end of middle age, rather than at the starting point of my senior years.

Still, I am feeling singularly old today. That's because I've been around long enough to remember what a big deal it was, on Sept. 2, 1963, when the CBS Evening News was extended from 15 to 30 minutes, making it the first half-hour network newscast in the country.

Now, of course, we have 24/7 "news" coverage on cable. This allows us to tune in at virtually any hour of the day or night to watch an endless rehashing of previously reported news stories, not to mention mountains of gossip, tripe and general weirdness posing as news.

Depending on the network, you might be treated to a hefty dose of spin, fabrication or propaganda, from the left or the right, instead of a simple reporting of the facts. Who can resist the cavalcade of mean-spirited egomaniacs who shout and scream at each other as they "discuss" current events on countless roundtable and interview programs?

Obviously viewers are much better-informed today than we were back in the 60s. I mean, a calm and authoritative Walter Cronkite telling us "that's the way it is" day after day? A newscaster so revered by his audience that he was known as the most trusted man in America? That's so 20th century.

Essay: Happy birthday to a journalistic icon

By Paul Carrier

God knows, it has made its share of mistakes. But the newspaper that was launched 165 years ago today remains an institution whose birthday is worth celebrating.

“The Gray Lady,” as The New York Times is sometimes called, has its faults, not the least of which is its inexcusable failure to run comic strips. (Okay, maybe that’s not the paper’s biggest deficiency, but it’s right up there in my book.)

The Times has been accused of bias over the years, with more validity in some cases than in others. Critics note, for example, that the paper was not sufficiently skeptical of the Bush Administration’s false claims about Iraq prior to the American invasion.

Then, too, there was the case of one Jayson Blair, a reporter whose problem wasn’t one-sided reporting but no-sided reporting. Blair was forced out in 2003 because he plagiarized material and even fabricated news stories.

But it was the Times that helped strengthen the foundation of a free press in a 1964 libel case, New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the U.S. Supreme Court effectively made it difficult for public figures to prove that they were libeled or defamed in news reports.

Seven years later, the Times and The Washington Post published revealing articles based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War. Government efforts to block continued publication of the stories worked their way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against the government.

When all is said and done, there is no denying the ultimate proof of the newspaper’s greatness. The New York Times has won 119 Pulitzer Prizes and citations. Weighing the paper's accomplishments and deficiencies, that certainly tilts the scales in its favor.

Essay: Fixing a fabled French frigate's fanciful "facts"

By Paull Carrier

Having worked as a newspaper reporter for three decades until I retired a few years ago, I’m not one for the media bashing that is so popular nowadays, particularly among ill-informed malcontents who use “mainstream media” as a pejorative term.

But I’m sympathetic to the oft-heard claim that people become suspicious of the media when they come across inaccurate news stories on topics they know something about. If “they” got things wrong about this, the thinking goes, how can I trust what “they” say about anything else?

In my experience, most reporters bend over backwards to get things right. But journalists, believe it or not, are human. This means two things. First, even top-notch reporters make mistakes despite their best efforts, for a whole host of reasons. Second, some journalists are more conscientious than others, just like people in any other profession.

All that being said, it is disconcerting to encounter inaccurate reporting, whatever the cause. Take the case of Hermione. No, not Hermione Granger. I’m talking about the frigate Hermione, which is a replica of the ship that carried Lafayette to America in 1780, during the American Revolution.

L’Hermione recently sailed across the Atlantic, with ports of call all along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. As I write this, she’s docked in Castine, Maine, with an upcoming stop scheduled in Nova Scotia before she returns to France.

The frigate’s American visit has generated a fair amount of news coverage, some of which contained historical inaccuracies. It has been reported, for example, that Lafayette bought or built L'Hermione for his journey, when in fact she was a French naval vessel.

Some news stories have implied that Lafayette’s voyage aboard L’Hermione marked his initial trip to America, which also is untrue. He first arrived in 1777 aboard La Victoire, joined the Continental Army, and later returned to France to seek additional support for the Revolution. He boarded L’Hermione to rejoin the Continental Army.

Perhaps the most egregious error I’ve seen in news stories states, or implies, that Lafayette came to America in 1780 with news that France finally had decided to assist the Revolution. In fact, France recognized the United States in 1778, and participated in unsuccessful joint Franco-American campaigns to capture Newport, R.I., in 1778 and Savannah, Ga., in 1779. When Lafayette returned from France aboard L’Hermione in 1780, he was carrying the glorious news that still more French aid was on the way, not that France was entering the war. And, no, Lafayette did not cram thousands of French troops and a fleet of ships aboard L'Hermione, as some news stories implied. The reinforcements arrived later.

In the grand scheme of things, these are relatively small errors in coverage of a relatively small event. I don’t read too much into it, or draw sweeping conclusions from it. Some of the news stories I read, or saw on TV, were entirely accurate. But whenever consumers of news spot errors in the reporting of news, it does give pause.

Listen carefully . . . this is what we used to call a "newspaper"

You know the print edition of the newspaper, that lumbering dinosaur that refuses to accept its own demise, is on the way out when I have to explain to the convenience-store clerk that the supplements to the Sunday papers -- arts, travel, money, comics, etc. -- are not separate newspapers and so should not be displayed and sold separately.

Judging by the expression on his face, he was quite startled and confused by this revelation. For show and tell next Sunday, I may bring a slide rule or an abacus to the store, to continue the clerk's education. Or maybe a strigil.

A language lover dies, and we are diminished by his passing

I had never heard of David Candow until NPR's Scott Simon offered the following tribute on a recent Weekend Edition Saturday. It caught my eye (or, to be more precise, my ear) because I worked in radio news when I was in college and for four years thereafter, before making the switch to newspaper journalism.

I realized, listening to Simon's radio essay, that the Canadian-born Candow was someone I wish I could have met, even though I was unaware of his very existence until it was too late. Here’s Simon’s tribute to this fellow language lover. There’s some solid advice here, for writers and broadcasters alike. 

_________

A man known around here as "The Host Whisperer" has died.

David Candow was 74. He was a slightly tubby man from Newfoundland with a sly smile and a soft voice. I wanted nothing to do with him.

David was a consultant, brought in to work with NPR hosts and reporters on writing and delivery. People who make their living on the air often distrust consultants. We figure they've been brought in by executives who have usually never recorded more than a voicemail message, and want all hosts to sound the same.

David had put actual programs on the CBC in a 35-year career there, and worked around the world. But he didn't try to impress with his experience. Instead, he said, "Let's just talk," and I came to learn that was how he saw the craft of broadcasting.

"Don't announce," he said. "Talk. Don't act. Be yourself. It's a very hard thing, eh?" he'd say. "To be yourself in front of all those people. But if you can be yourself, you'll sound like no one else, and people really hear what's real."

David had a few rules for writing, which he called "good ideas," because he knew journalists balk at rules. Over the years, I've found David Candow's advice as valuable as George Orwell's, with which it had a lot in common.

Be clear and conversational. Don't put long, multi-titled, hyphenated prefaces before names.

"Would you ask a friend," asked David, "'Have you seen the new movie by actor, producer and five-time-Academy Award nominee Brad Pitt?' You'd probably say, 'Have you seen the new Brad Pitt movie?'"

Don't say, "Composer Phillip Glass." Say, "Phillip Glass has written a new opera."

Give people credit, David said with a wry half-smile. "After all, they listen to you, don't they?"

Avoid dependent clauses, he advised, so people don't have to chase a sentence the way a cat tries to catch up with the end of a string.

Try to avoid words that end in i-n-g. All those extra letters and sounds slow a sentence. Say, "The Dodgers play tonight," not "are playing."

Say rain or snow, not precipitation. Avoid corporate and technical cliches, and if you begin to hear a word too much — bandwidth, curate, eclectic and robust are my current least-favorites — it's become a cliche; don't use it.

And like Orwell, David said, "Break any of these rules if it will help people remember what you say."

Great teachers don't just instruct us about craft, but remind why the craft is important. David Candow used to remind us, "One of the most compelling sounds for the human ear is the sound of another human voice talking about something they care about."

David Candow

"We have team coverage of the big storm"

Here in New England, TV stations love nothing more than a snow storm, or even a dusting of snow that hyperventilating meteorologists can inflate into a storm.

One of the highlights of this phenomenon is that local news anchors deck themselves out in colorful sweaters during storm coverage, apparently to create the illusion that they just raced in to the studio after shoveling out the station's parking lot.

Another highlight is a favorite of TV news directors whenever A Big Story breaks: team coverage. This involves sending multiple reporters to multiple locations to eat up 15 minutes of air time while providing 3 minutes of actual news.

We take you now to Apocalypse Center, where the team has geared up to report on The Big One.

Anchor sends it to Reporter No. 1 in Location No. 1.
"Thanks Biff. There’s a lot of snow out here, so if you have to go out, take it slow." (Repetitious blather in the same vein for another 5 minutes.)

Anchor sends it to Reporter No. 2 in Location No. 2.
"Thanks Biff. There’s a lot of snow out here, so if you have to go out, take it slow." (Repetitious blather in the same vein for another 5 minutes.)

Anchor sends it to Reporter No. 3 in Location No. 3.
"Thanks Biff. There’s a lot of snow out here, so if you have to go out, take it slow." (Repetitious blather in the same vein for another 5 minutes.)

Anchor sends it to Reporter No. 4 in Location No. 4.
"Thanks Biff. There’s a lot of snow out here, so if you have to go out, take it slow." (Repetitious blather in the same vein for another 5 minutes.)

Anchor: "We’ll be back with more after this."

Nutty Boston drivers, snooty R.I. diners & proud Portlanders

I don’t read Travel + Leisure magazine. But I’m always intrigued by its online rankings of various tourist destinations because, invariably, they seem kind of goofy.

Take the recent survey of America’s cities, which rated 35 of them in dozens of categories that ran the gamut from the attractiveness of the locals and the quality of cafes to hotel options and how "charming" the hometown accent is.

So how reliable are the rankings? Not very, if the results on driving ability are any indication. The magazine’s readers ranked Portland, Maine, No. 1 in that category. As a Maine resident, that struck me as sensible. But Boston, which is universally recognized as having the worst drivers in the known universe (and possibly beyond), placed 32nd out of 35 cities, according to visitors.

That means tourists are making the preposterous claim that three cities  - New York, San Juan and Miami - have drivers who are even more reckless and demented than those to be found careening through the streets and along the highways of Beantown. (As a Massachusetts native who went to college in Boston, I love the city more than I can say. But worse drivers somewhere else? Please!)

To their credit, Bostonians know they’re lousy drivers, although they don’t realize just how bad they are. Boston residents who took part in the magazine’s survey placed their city in 27th place, meaning they have deluded themselves into believing that the drivers are even worse in eight other cities on that list of 35.

Some of the rankings are on the money. For example, visitors placed Portland, Maine, in 6th place in the “proud of their city” ranking, and Portland residents were not far behind in their own evaluation of city pride. Visitors and residents alike also scored Portland very high in the “gay friendly” category. As a Maine resident, I can attest to the accuracy of both of those rankings. Deservedly, Portland also scored well in affordability, cleanliness, environmental friendliness, intelligence, family vacations, safety, microbrews, ice cream and pizza, among other categories.

But elsewhere in the survey, things took a predictably weird turn, and not only in the misguided belief that Boston’s drivers could be even worse than they are now.

In the fine-dining ranking, San Francisco, Providence, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, all fared better than New York, which placed fifth. No doubt there is fine dining to be had in each of the top four cities, but simply in terms of size, how could Providence (population 182,000) possibly have more high-end restaurants than New York, whose 8.3 million residents make it the largest city in the country?

And then there are the categories that are just plain silly, such as the attractiveness of each city’s residents. That surely varies from day to day depending on the weather, the season, how people are dressed, who is out and about and who happens to be doing the watching. For the record, San Francisco came in at No. 1, followed by Providence; Nashville; Portland, Maine; and Savannah.

As a former resident of Providence and a frequent visitor to Maine’s largest city, I’d have to say that the subjectivity of magazine readers may not be the most accurate way to evaluate who looks good where. Then again, how could anyone participate intelligently in a survey like this unless he or she had visited all 35 cities on the list? And what are the odds of that?

R.I.P., Jack Germond (1928-2013)

Jack Germond, a veteran political reporter, respected newspaper columnist and untelegenic TV commentator with a bald pate and a big belly, died earlier this week at 85. Germond, who covered politics for more than 50 years, was a journalist from the old school, and his passing reminds those of us who care about such things that the ranks grow ever thinner.

I met Germond while I was covering some long-forgotten story as a newspaper reporter in New Hampshire many years ago. We had a brief but pleasant conversation in which he struck me as tough and authoritative, but also gentlemanly and unaffected. It’s often been said that the people who are tops in any profession rarely display arrogance or an inflated ego, and Germond seemed to embody that in the world of journalism.

Here’s a link to Germond’s obituary from The Washington Post. It closes with this quote from Fat Man in a Middle Seat, one of his memoirs: 

"It turns out that I have not made the world safe for democracy. But I have always argued that newspapers should not have any civic purpose beyond telling readers what is happening. If the political system is rotting away, as seems to be the case, it is our job to report it but not to make the repairs — except perhaps on the editorial pages, where they seem to think all things are possible."

Dzhohkar Tsarnaev lands "on the cover of the Rollin' Stone"

America is outraged, positively beside itself with disgust, because Rolling Stone had the audacity to stick a photo of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhohkar Tsarnaev on its cover, in connection with an article that explores how a popular and promising young man became a terrorist. People are threatening to boycott stores they probably never frequent unless those businesses refuse to carry a magazine they probably never read. One guy is even urging folks to buy the magazine so they can burn it, like that's going to hurt Rolling Stone's bottom line. Where's Ray Bradbury when we need him?

As a Facebook friend of mine put it yesterday, “the image belies the words, and it's the image most people are reacting to and will remember. He's presented as some sort of post-modern rock god, Jim Morrison with explosives and chin fuzz.”
 
Perhaps. What I see in that photo is a seemingly detached and calculating young man whose blank look suggests he is devoid of empathy. Obviously others disagree. In any case, the story's about Tsarnaev so the cover features a photo of him. That's standard journalistic practice, folks. Maybe the magazine's art director should have tried a little harder to scare up a photo of Tsarnaev that shows the horns he's hiding under those curly locks.

What I find troublesome in all this is the venomous reaction to the cover from people who feel compelled to condemn whatever irritates them, without so much as a moment’s reflection. Thanks to the fact that the Internet allows us to mouth off instantly and anonymously, restraint has gone out the window, leaving us with arguments like these.

The cover glorifies Tsarnaev. Huh? The headline describes him as a “bomber” and the subhead labels him a “monster.” Where’s the glorification? Should we assume that everyone is illiterate these days, so all that really matters is the picture? Other news organizations have used this photo without being heaped with scorn. Why the selective outrage?

Tsarnaev is a terrorist. End of story. Have we lost all curiosity? Do we not want to know how a smart, American-educated kid who was well-liked by his peers could have gone so horribly wrong?

This shouldn't be on newsstands because it's offensive. Really? To whom? Who appointed these would-be censors to decide what I can and cannot buy? Do we still believe in freedom of speech and freedom of the press in this country, or are they as passé as privacy? I see mags for sale that I find offensive, but I don't claim to have the right to deny other people access to them.

Rolling Stone is just being provocative. Thanks to cable television and the Internet, many Americans have no understanding of what journalism, is, or should be. They have come to see it as some sort of twisted melding of Entertainment Tonight, talking heads on cable “news” shows, propaganda posted on Facebook by special-interest groups, and tweets that tackle every issue in 140 characters or less. So when a magazine does its job by seeking the roots of a horrific crime with a cover story that tries to dissect the birth of a despicable criminal, people react with cynicism and disbelief.

Rolling Stone is in it for the buck. This is one of my favorites, because it shows an abysmal ignorance of how the news business works. Yes, Rolling Stone is trying to make money. It's a business in a capitalistic society. But no, making money is not what gets reporters and editors to crawl out of bed in the morning. Corporate execs and writers may work for the same outfit, but I can assure you, as a former newspaper reporter, that bean counters and journalists have very different motives and priorities.

This is crap, so I won't read it. How do you know it's crap if you don't read it?

Bad guys should not grace the covers of prominent publications. As another Facebook friend posted yesterday: “Didn't Time magazine put Hitler on its cover back in the 1930s? Wasn't bin Laden on magazine covers? Charles Manson? I will boycott the stores that refuse to carry this issue of RS. It's the height of stupidity to be outraged by a magazine featuring a story on this guy and how he became a killer.”

I haven’t read the Rolling Stone story yet, so I don’t know if the magazine succeeded in explaining how Tsarnaev “fell into radical Islam and became a monster,” as the cover puts it. But I’ll give Rolling Stone credit for at least trying to answer a question all of us should be asking. And I’ll wait until I’ve read the damn thing before I grab a pitchfork and firebrand to charge the castle.

Minneapolis is 500 miles from St. Paul, right?

Maine Sunday Telegram map

Everyone makes mistakes. As a former newspaper reporter, I know that includes journalists who are racing the clock as they do battle with unforgiving deadlines.

Sometimes in journalism, as in life, errors are unavoidable, despite our best efforts. A reporter may have good reason to believe a piece of information is rock solid, only to learn later that it was a half-truth, or misleading without context, or fiction posing as fact.

But there are other times when mistakes are so amazingly stupid they become mind-boggling.

Such was the case Saturday night when the NBC Nightly News ran a story on that train that derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. You've probably seen footage of this catastrophe on TV. The train was carrying crude oil, and the derailment sparked explosions and fires that destroyed the center of the town, killing at least 20 people.

When the story first broke, NBC reported that Lac-Mégantic is about 185 miles from the U.S. border and that American firefighters had raced to the town to help out. As a Mainer who has visited Quebec many times, I heard alarm bells . . . 185 miles? The claim made no sense.

Plopping myself down at the computer, I determined within seconds that Lac-Mégantic is not 185 or 155 or 125 or even 75 miles from the border. It's 10 miles or so north of the Maine line. That fact is readily verifiable by anyone with Internet access; a good, old-fashioned atlas; or a highway map. And it explains why Maine communities sent firefighters to pitch in, which would have defied belief had it required a drive of some 200 miles or more.

When we, as consumers of news, catch ridiculous mistakes in stories that involve places or events we’re familiar with, an obvious question arises: How reliable are stories on topics that we know nothing about?

The long, strange, televised death of James Gandolfini

It’s not for me to question the tributes that have poured in since actor James Gandolfini died in Italy on Wednesday, because I’ve never seen The Sopranos, the HBO series for which he is most famous.

It may well be true that Gandolfini, whose death was tragic because of his talent and his age, was one of the greatest actors of his or any other generation. Gandolfini has been called a genius by some. He won three Emmy Awards for his portrayal of mob boss Tony Soprano. The guy obviously was a highly skilled actor whose loss is all the more unfortunate because he was only 51.

Still, the voracious 24-hour news cycle, which has an insatiable appetite for anything even vaguely resembling news, has accorded Gandolfini the kind of treatment that was once reserved for the passage of kings and presidents and popes. Cable news has filled a lot of air time with stories about Gandolfini’s demise, his legacy, the reflections of fellow actors, and his behavior and frame of mind in his final hours. Not to mention the cause of his death (a heart attack), the fact that his sister identified the body, the news that Gov. Chris Christie ordered flags lowered to half staff in New Jersey, and speculation about when the actor’s remains would return to the United States.

I don’t think it detracts from Gandolfini’s accomplishments to question whether such saturation coverage cheapens his untimely death and overstates its significance in the grand scheme of things. If everything that happens in the world garners the TV equivalent of a banner headline, then even a great actor’s passing becomes just another eye-catching prop to assure that cable “news” networks remain profitable.

Are newspapers becoming spineless?

Skulking around in parking garages to question the likes of Deep Throat, as Bob Woodward did in All the President’s Men, has its place in journalism, but one of the cornerstones of investigative reporting is the far more mundane practice of examining public records to glean useful information from them. 

I mention this because of a remarkable and, journalistically speaking, very sad turn of events here in Maine involving the Bangor Daily News, one of the state’s largest, most prominent newspapers. (Personal disclosure: I worked as a newspaper reporter for three decades, 22 of them in Maine, but I was never employed by the Bangor Daily News.) 

Here's what happened. On Tuesday, a bill that would make concealed weapon permit records private was referred to a committee of the Maine Legislature for review. On Wednesday, the BDN, as the Bangor newspaper is known in Maine, requested those records from police departments across the state. The newspaper indicated in writing that it had no intention of publicly identifying permit holders. 

“We believe the wholesale publication of permit holder information, as was done recently by a newspaper in New York, is irresponsible,” the newspaper said. “We intend to use this information about permits, along with other information sets we are gathering, to analyze possible correlations relevant to our reporting projects” on domestic violence, sexual assault and drug abuse. 

The request quickly came under attack from gun owners and their advocates, including Republican Gov. Paul LePage. Critics even used social media to urge readers to boycott BDN advertisers and cancel their newspaper subscriptions. 

On Friday, the BDN rescinded its push for the records, saying it was “disappointed with the reaction to our request, which we felt was with the best intentions to help study issues affecting Maine through an analysis of publicly available data . . . . The BDN regrets that its request for information may have been taken as a personal attack on concealed carry permit holders, some of whom work at the BDN.” 

So, instead of sticking to its guns by continuing to demand information that is public under state law, the newspaper caved to its opponents. And it did so with amazing haste, backing down within approximately 48 hours of having made its initial request. 

I don’t claim to know what motivated the withdrawal, beyond what the BDN has said publicly, but the decision raises disconcerting questions. As the newspaper industry struggles to remain sufficiently profitable in an era of dramatic circulation and advertising losses, is a preoccupation with the bottom line leading newspapers to placate critics, by trying to please all of the people all of the time? And will that rob newspapers of their backbone?

When I suggested on a Facebook thread yesterday that we have to wonder about the health of our democracy when news organizations are intimidated for requesting public records, someone posted this response: "I think we also need to worry when powerful media organizations bow to economic blackmail."

Hubris, Angus King, and me

I finally got my allotted 15 minutes of fame this week, but this isn’t really about me. It’s about the hubris that so often consumes politicians who come to believe that established rules of conduct do not apply to them.

First, a bit of background. The Maine Sunday Telegram, a newspaper for which I once worked, ran a lengthy profile on Sept. 23 of Angus King, a popular former Maine governor who is now running for the U.S. Senate. I covered King during his years as governor, and when the reporter who was writing the profile asked me to share some observations about the King years, a couple of things that I told him ended up in the story.

One was that the always upbeat King “made Mainers feel good about being Mainers” during his eight years as governor, from 1995 through 2002. The other was that King "could be thin-skinned and controlling behind the scenes, but the public didn’t see that side of him, so it didn’t figure into voters’ attitudes.”

After the Telegram ran the profile, King posted the story on his campaign’s web site. Sort of. It turns out there was some amazing legerdemain involved. Without any acknowledgement of what it was doing, the campaign axed entire chunks of the article, including my quote about King being thin-skinned, to produce a sanitized and badly butchered profile that was more to King’s liking.

This wasn’t just a case of snipping a word here and a phrase there, which would have been bad enough. All told, the campaign shortened or killed more than two dozen paragraphs, including references to the fact that King originally is from Virginia. The campaign’s explanation? The story was too long.

Now, this is not at all analogous to a movie trailer that quotes one sentence from a review, or a blurb on a book jacket that does the same thing. In both of those cases, it’s clear that the quotes are just that - individual quotes pulled from a longer document. No one watching a trailer or reading a book jacket will be deceived into believing he’s looking at the full movie review or book review.

Yet that’s precisely the trick that the King campaign pulled. Or tried to. The campaign redacted a large portion of the profile and then posted what was left as if it was the original story. The truth quickly came to light when the news media exposed what King had done, which made him look not only slippery but . . . thin-skinned and controlling.

All of which offers yet another reminder that any pol who spends enough time in the limelight runs the risk of being infected with an insidious disease for which there is no known cure: chutzpah.

Ann Curry and the cult of personality in TV news

No one really understands a profession, trade or craft unless he or she has practiced it. This certainly is true of the newspaper business, in which I spent three decades as a reporter for four different newspapers before retiring a few years ago.

There is, I think, a public misconception that reporting is reporting, regardless of the medium. But within journalism itself, people draw distinctions based on where they work. Newspaper reporters sometimes look down their noses at TV types because the latter can seem shallow, glib, ill-informed and overly preoccupied with “visuals." I assume some TV journalists view newspaper reporters as stodgy, self-important bores who take forever to write a story.

Such stereotypes can be misleading; there are fine journalists in all media. But there clearly is a more superficial, celebrity-oriented culture in television news than in the newspaper business. There is no cult of personality among ink-stained wretches, yet glorifying the self is part and parcel of television journalism.

This hit home yet again when I read a Huffington Post story about a Ladies Home Journal interview with Ann Curry, who was canned recently as a co-host of NBC’s Today show. According to HuffPost, Curry had this to say about some of her wardrobe decisions while she was on Today: 

"One day I wore a multicolored dress and someone asked if I was trying to be Toucan Sam. But I chose it because I thought, This will perk up America. I'm encouraged by my bosses to wear these ridiculously high-heeled shoes because women say, 'I love your shoes!' So if it makes women happy, I'll wear them. But I'm still going to be me... I've tried to wear clogs and flats on TV and it hasn't gone well with my bosses."

Curry went on to offer these thoughts about her personal appearance:

"I've decided not to buy into the idea that I want to stop aging. My wrinkles connect me to my family, to my ancestors and to my future. This is how my father looked when he was my age. I've got cellulite because it runs in my family. I've got gray hair because I won't dye it."

Now, I realize that TV, unlike newspapers, is a visual medium, so how people look when they appear on it is important. That being said, I seriously doubt that Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The New York Times, will ever discuss her shoes during an interview about her job. Or, for that matter, cellulite. Or wrinkles. Or the color of her hair. And therein lies a key difference.

Saying farewell to Helen Gurley Brown, creator of the Cosmo girl

Buried deep in The New York Times' lengthy and witty obituary of former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, who died on Monday, is the fact that Brown had “much restoration work done” over the years, including “a nose job, breast augmentation, face-lifts, eye lifts and injections of silicone and fat into her face to keep wrinkles at bay, among other procedures.” That explains the last sentence in the obit’s "lede," or first paragraph:

Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of Sex and the Single Girl shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but also thoroughly enjoyed it — and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more — died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.

Why do journalists risk getting caught in a lie?

Jonah Lehrer

I’m not naive about these things. I know there are reporters out there who make things up. It was only nine years ago, after all, that Jayson Blair resigned from The New York Times after his plagiarism and fabrications came to light.

Still, as a former newspaperman who spent three decades as a reporter and never met a fabricator during all that time, I’m amazed whenever a new case of such journalistic malfeasance comes to light.

Enter Jonah Lehrer, formerly of The New Yorker.

Lehrer recently resigned as a staff writer at that storied publication after admitting that he attributed phony quotes to Bob Dylan in a nonfiction book entitled Imagine. The problem came to light when Michael Moynihan of Tablet, an online magazine, questioned Lehrer about unverifiable Dylan quotes in Lehrer’s book.

“The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes," Lehrer eventually admitted in a statement. “But I told Mr. Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said.”

Putting aside the “unintentional misquotations” and the “improper combinations” of real quotes, Lehrer admitted that some of the Dylan quotes in his book “did not exist.” That means he made them up, pure and simple.

One would hope a nonfiction writer would be ethical enough not to even consider such a thing, never mind go through with it. Beyond that, though, there are far more practical considerations that should have persuaded Lehrer to abandon the idea as soon as he cooked it up.

Put simply, the risks are too great.

What if Dylan, or someone close to him, stumbled upon the book and discovered the fabrications? What if a musicologist tried to document the quotes? Or a Dylan biographer? And what if (as actually happened) another journalist started poking around?

When Moynihan, a self-described "Dylan obsessive," could not document Lehrer's Dylan quotes, he asked Lehrer about them. Lehrer lied. So Moynihan dug deeper by getting in touch with Dylan's managers to see if they really had given Lehrer access to interview footage, as Lehrer claimed. "They told me that they were unfamiliar with Lehrer, had never read his book,” and could not corroborate the other sources that Lehrer cited, Moynihan wrote.

“Confronted with this,’ Moynihan wrote, “Lehrer admitted that he had invented it.”

Lies beget lies, and a liar digs himself an ever-deeper hole even as he tries to extricate himself from it. Sure, lying is wrong, which should be reason enough for journalists not to do it. But on a more selfish and practical level, it’s also foolish, simply because of the high risk of getting caught.

When journalists lose their way

Even before I retired from the newspaper business after some three decades as a reporter, I could see that journalism was taking some unfortunate turns.

As budgets shrank and belts tightened, newspapers placed less emphasis on hard news, including the coverage of state government, which was my beat for almost all of my career. This was troublesome because the meaningful action in politics - the stuff that most keenly affects people’s day-to-day lives - usually takes place in state capitals, not in Washington. (Health-care reform being an obvious exception.) Fewer state house reporters means less oversight, making it easier for politicians to engage in the sneaky shenanigans they so love, with less risk of exposure.

Then there was the dawn of the Internet, which ushered in newspaper web sites and a resulting sense of urgency to get the news out fast. Gone were the good old days when newspaper reporters took pride in taking the time to thoroughly report a story before writing it, setting us apart from headline-oriented radio and TV newscasts. Posting constant updates online became the norm, even if such snippets of news turned out to be shallow and incomplete. I understood the need for this, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. 

Even when the outlook seemed especially bleak, though, it never occurred to me back then that I’d live to see a development that has further undermined the old-school journalism I knew and loved. Amazingly, it turns out some prominent and reputable news organizations are now doing something no self-respecting reporter would have considered doing back in the day: allowing sources to screen their own quotes before they appear in print.

This practice, which is coming under belated scrutiny, is known as “quote approval” in journalistic circles. It turns out many reporters covering the presidential campaign, for example, allow sources to edit their own quotes. Some of the news organizations that have agreed to this include Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reuters, The Huffington Post and even The New York Times.

As a result, New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters wrote recently, “quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.”

Back when the world was young, part of my job was to make sure that I always got quotes right. If, after the fact, an angry source was embarrassed by his own remarks as they appeared in the newspaper, that was his problem, not mine, so long as I had not misquoted him or taken his remarks out of context.

My sources probably would have changed quotes more than 50 percent of the time if given half a chance. Usually, that was because they did not express themselves as well as they would have liked. At other times, they deluded themselves into believing that they never actually said whatever moronic thing they had, in fact, told me.

That’s why "quote approval" is such a stupid journalistic innovation - it robs news stories of their spontaneity, color, punch and honesty.

Here's a hypothetical example. Let's suppose a state legislator called a governor "ignorant and dangerous" while being interviewed by a reporter who wanted to use that quote but had to run it by the legislator first. Once the legislator saw himself about to be quoted using such blunt language, he might nix the quote and substitute softer language, even though the original quote was an accurate reflection of what he said and what he believes.

So the quote falls by the wayside, the story gets watered down, the reporter becomes frustrated and the reader loses out. The only winner here is the source. That's not how journalism is supposed to work, and it's why this concept is remarkably, inexcusably and dangerously . . . stupid.