All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

Coming home, and a shout-out to a friend

Film/TV, Politics, Religion, , , , , , , ,

It’s been about two weeks since my last post. In that time I’ve flown from Beirut to Anchorage, Alaska, then to Wichita, Kansas, and — just tonight — back home to New York, where I have finally and mercifully landed at last. (I will spend a few brief days in Boston starting tomorrow, but will return shortly thereafter to recommence my life as a relatively stationary man. And for that I am, at least for this moment, enormously happy.)

Onward, then. One of my very best friends, Sam Diaz-Littauer, recently produced a video commemorating the recent Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Sam flew from Geneva, where he’s currently based, to Rio de Janeiro to take part in activism on behalf of the “Major Group for Children and Youth.” After leaving the conference with a palpable sense of disappointment in the lack of progress achieved, Sam created the aforementioned 5-minute video, titled “Something To Believe In,” which was released on August 12th (International Youth Day).

He asked me to pass along this statement for more context:

Something to Believe In: MGCY Rio+20 Declaration Video
Celebrating International Youth Day, 12 August 2012

Today we celebrate International Youth Day. Today we celebrate our generation. Today we celebrate you and me.

The Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY) is the voice of young people in the UN sustainability negotiations, active participants in the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. Through negotiating, demonstrating, and participating in local initiatives, we shared our vision of the future and the actions needed to achieve this.

Despite our disappointment in the outcome of Rio+20, we remain committed to the process of achieving a sustainable future, for our generation and for those to come. We need you to help make this a reality.

This is our declaration.

We believe that youth can move the world. Our time is now. Today let us inspire our generation. Share this message and celebrate with us as we create the world.

If you would like to read more about the MGCY’s involvement in Rio+20, visit our website at www.uncsdchildrenyouth.org or download our Youth Blast Report. Our MGCY Rio+20 Report is coming soon!

Sam is an extremely gifted filmmaker, and one whose talent behind the camera I only fully understood after an absolutely catastrophic attempt of my own, during my university years, at donning the director’s hat for a year-long project. (The bloody remains of my cinematic career are still spattered all over the proverbial cutting-room floor, where the contents of my finished product should have remained as well. Alas, they escaped to the campus “big screen,” to the bemusement of somewhere between 1,000-2,000 very confused moviegoers and undergraduate peers. I distinctly recall slinking down the back alleyways of campus with my brother after the premiere, avoiding all interaction with familiar faces. But I digress.)

While I cannot, without doing significant further research, personally endorse the platform of the MGCY or any of the other organizations referenced above (and this, equally definitively, should not be taken to mean I reject them either), I can emphatically recommend keeping a close eye on this, and whatever else Sam continues to produce, film, edit, or otherwise tinker with over the course of what I know will be a long and always-fascinating career devoted to bending the lines separating the arts, philosophy, and theology towards some sort of intellectual and emotional synthesis.

Sam’s idealism and unvarnished passion have always been, and continue to be, the yin to my yang of detached cynicism. It is this very juxtaposition — a word that has more meaning for him than for most, if I may be so cryptic — that has caused perhaps more heated arguments between us than anything else. And yet it is these very same qualities that I most admire in him: it is, indeed, quite probable that my impassioned entreaties to “be realistic,” to “stop living in the clouds,” if he were ever to heed them in their entirety, would represent to me a tragedy far surpassing the ruins of my teenage cinematic ambitions.

That Sam may in fact possess certain compromising videotapes of me acting badly in horrendous films he never completed has, I assure you, no relevance to this post.

Anyway, without further ado:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/47381594]
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Oh, and speaking of sports…

Sports, , , ,

…I have to gloat about the only thing going right for my first love, the Boston Red Sox, this year:

Ten years ago, when the Boston Red Sox were sold to a trio of out-of-staters, the new owners signed a contract with state Attorney General Tom Reilly, promising to raise $20 million for area charities over 10 years. Soon after acquiring the team in February 2002, they established the Red Sox Foundation to fulfill that duty.

A report released Monday by the foundation reveals that it has donated more than twice that amount — a total of $52 million to charitable programs in the past decade — making the Red Sox by far the most charitable team in Major League Baseball.

The report offers a rare bit of good news for a team that has struggled all season, hovering at or near last place in the AL East standings.

Very rare indeed.

On sportswriting and sportswriters

Media, Sports, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nicholas Dawidoff admires how the very best sportswriters manage to wring meaning out of what is, ultimately, a triviality:

When writing about sports, you have to learn to navigate an odd literary predicament: Your audience often already knows the outcome before it starts reading. An editor at Sports Illustrated once advised me that the art of the work rested in telling people who already know what happened a story so compelling that they forget everything and, at the end, wish they’d been there. Not every writer can chance upon a famous athlete’s last game, as John Updike did for his peerless profile of Ted Williams. We won’t all encounter a young basketball player so committed to developing a sense of where he is on the court that he practices dribbling around lines of chairs with makeshift blinders in eyeglass frames (see John McPhee on Bill Bradley). But this editor helped me to regard sports as a parallel world full of little climaxes and telling details, just waiting for you to make the most of them…

Athletes, after all, are characters to a sportswriter, just as family members must be to a memoirist. You are responsible for them in full, and it’s particularly important to remember what brought you to them in the first place. What writers like Mr. Angell, A. J. Liebling, John McPhee, George Plimpton and the great Red Smith, as well as Sports Illustrated writers like Roy Blount, Robert Creamer, Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, Ron Fimrite, Steve Wulf and — too many to mention! — share is the essence of good sportswriting: empathy. The appreciation of others is, for most, the reason to watch games, and it happens to be a noble human quality. Where too much recent American literature is less concerned with any search for meaning than the preening desire to be admired, really good sportswriting is grounded in curiosity and revelation, an enthusiast’s notes. And while few authors can compete with the reality, a writer can deepen it, preserve what happened and then mine it for the deeper human qualities at play that are the essence of lasting writing.

Meanwhile, Sebastian Stockman — who whiles away considerable column space on a very strange and only marginally germane tangent regarding the prevalence of Nazi references in sportswriting — bemoans the trade’s overarching lack of a wider societal perspective:

But no, Murray and Deford possess a self-awareness about their professions that Feinstein does not. That is, that the most interesting stuff in the sports world has to do with its stories, not its scores.

I would like to say that all sports fans know that, but we do not. For evidence, I turn to the letters page of the July 30 Sports Illustrated. One C. Fred Bergsten from Annandale, Va. has written in to respond to a book excerpt the magazine ran on that 1992 Dream Team. Here’s the letter:

With all the hype of the 20th anniversary of the Dream Team… most fans are forgetting that there were two squads, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, that could have given the Dream Team a run for its money had their countries not dissolved just before the Barcelona Games. The Soviets were the defending gold medalist from the 1988 Games, and Yugoslavia was the ’90 FIBA world champion. It is a tragedy that colossal matchups among the three basketball superpowers never occurred in ’92.

Yes, the tragedy of the Yugoslavian civil war was not Srebrenica, it was that the reigning FIBA champs didn’t get a shot at the Dream Team.

Personally, I harbor a fairly schizophrenic view of sportswriting. On the one hand, much of it — the stuff I tend to read, anyway — represents the worst kind of writing. In fact, one can say there is an almost inverse relationship between what people broadly consider good sportswriting and what they consider good journalism. In good sportswriting, heroes are continually made of men and women who pursue an irrefutably trivial career. In good journalism, even the best characters invariably have their flaws, or else all credibility of the writer is lost. In good sportswriting, the sporting events themselves are made into epic, and epoch-defining, moments in history. In good journalism, even the most classic drama is eventually dissected into digestible, often technical and highly detailed, pieces.

In short, there is a patent ridiculousness to sportswriting, and it is this quality that both draws me in and repulses me simultaneously. A sportswriter is, to me, someone who interprets the adage “the pen is mightier than the sword” as an unqualified exhortation to somehow combine the two. I inwardly mock these journalists’ labored metaphors but, in moments of glory for a team I happen to follow, feel inspired to ascend those very same mountains of linguistic bling bling myself. And in the meantime, I won’t feel guilty about reading them either.

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The death of literary criticism?

Books, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Slate‘s Jacob Silverman is worried about the Internet literary community’s impact on critics’ ability to be honest:

Reviewers shouldn’t be recommendation machines, yet we have settled for that role, in part because the solicitous communalism of Twitter encourages it. Our virtue over the algorithms of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and the amateurism (some of it quite good and useful) of sites like GoodReads, is that we are professionals with shaded, informed opinions. We are paid to be skeptical, even pugilistic, so that our enthusiasms count for more when they’re well earned. Today’s reviewers tend to lionize the old talk-show dustups between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal or Noam Chomsky (the videos are on YouTube), but they’re unwilling to engage in that kind of intellectual combat themselves. They praise the bellicosity of Norman Mailer and Pauline Kael, but mostly from afar. Mailer and Kael are your rebellious high school friends: objects of worship, perhaps, but not emulation. After all, it’s all so messy, and someone might get hurt.

Instead, cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments. As if mirroring the surrounding culture, biting criticism has become synonymous with offense; everything is personal—one’s affection for a book is interchangeable with one’s feelings about its author as a person. Critics gush in anticipation for books they haven’t yet read; they <3 so-and-so writer, tagging the author’s Twitter handle so that he or she knows it, too; they exhaust themselves with outbursts of all-caps praise, because that’s how you boost your follower count and affirm your place in the back-slapping community that is the literary web. And, of course, critics, most of them freelance and hungry for work, want to appeal to fans and readers as well; so to connect with them, they must become them.

Not that there aren’t exceptions.

A quote and a photo to hail the start of the weekend

French, Humor, Miscellaneous, Politics, , , , , ,

From yesterday’s Le Monde:

Je viens d’acheter du poulet et ma voiture sent l’odeur de la liberté.

This was spoken by “Steve” during an interview with Mike Huckabee, just after eating at Chick-Fil-A to protest the backlash against the food chain for its president’s stance against same-sex marriage.

And on a completely unrelated note, here is your weekend picture, taken today at Zaitunay Bay in Beirut.

Journalism and the National Narrative

Media, Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,

The New Republic‘s Amy Sullivan is upset over Joan Juliet Buck’s new essay for Newsweek, titled “Mrs. Assad Duped Me,” which details the circumstances surrounding Buck’s glowing and ill-timed interview of Bashar al-Assad’s glamorous British-born and -educated wife, Asma, for Vogue in December 2010.

Sullivan’s takeaway:

But to read Buck’s account that way, to assume that anyone could have found themselves in her shoes, would be an insult to most journalists. Unless Buck omitted a boatload of admirable details about Mrs. Assad in this current piece or only recognized the creepiness of her visit to Syria in hindsight, she most certainly was not duped. She knowingly wrote a glowing profile—“the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies”—about the wife of a murderous tyrant…

Again, call me crazy, but Vogue had an opportunity here to run a killer story and to avoid becoming morally bankrupt. A report from inside Syria, inside the dictator’s home, on the eve of the Arab Spring? What editor wouldn’t run that blockbuster in a heartbeat over a strained puff piece about a pretty dictator’s wife? That view of power isn’t glamorous. But it’s honest.

Buck’s account, to which Sullivan is referring, is remarkably self-serving. Here’s one representative passage:

I should have said no right then.

I said yes.

It was an assignment. I was curious. That’s why I’d become a writer. Vogue wanted a description of the good-looking first lady of a questionable country; I wanted to see the cradle of civilization. Syria gave off a toxic aura. But what was the worst that could happen? I would write a piece for Vogue that missed the deeper truth about its subject. I had learned long ago that the only person I could ever be truthful about was myself.

I didn’t know I was going to meet a murderer.

But I think there are two things going on here simultaneously. One is fairly obvious, and the other less so. Firstly, Buck’s account is fairly transparently attempting to contain the (likely permanent) damage done to her journalistic reputation by her stenographic paean to the complicit wife of a brutal dictator. And no, I don’t mean “brutal dictator” in the even more obvious sense that it’s taken on since the onset of the Arab Spring, but even from long before. Describing him, rather generously, as an ophthalmologist and publishing pictures of him playing with his children doesn’t change the fact that Bashar al-Assad engaged in brutal, heavyhanded, oppressive tactics long before Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in Tunisia.

And Buck really does try to have it both ways. She simultaneously feigns utter naïveté — describing how Bashar al-Assad showed her his many cameras (“he didn’t strike me as much of a monster”) and later anguishing over Asma’s role in the brutal suppression of Syrian protesters (“Through 2011, I wondered about Asma al-Assad, the woman who cared so much about the youth of Syria. How could she not know what was happening?”) — even while casually analyzing the country’s political intricacies (“Damascus was home base for Hizbullah and Hamas; Syria was close to Iran. But these alliances also made Syria a viable interlocutor for the West, even a potential conduit to peace in the Middle East.”).

But the second element of this scenario, and the dynamic I find far more interesting, is Sullivan’s harsh critique of Buck’s self-described ignorance. If Buck’s self-justifying explanation represents an ill-conceived, long-shot effort to shield herself from the onslaught of public criticism, Sullivan’s comments are the mirror image: just another few extremely convenient and risk-free paragraphs to add to the mountain of condemnation for Buck.

I’m interested in the “risk-free” aspect. There is a curious dynamic at play, one that has been percolating in fits and starts ever since the Arab Spring began. Like it or not, those of us living in Western nations have had to wrestle with the uncomfortable fact that the dictators whose newly emboldened populations are now intent on eliminating their rule were, for all intents and purposes, strong allies of ours. This is true across North America and Western Europe, and the guilty parties are not few.

All it takes is a routine Google search to reveal a small library of photos of a smiling Colonel Muammar Qaddafi shaking hands, or otherwise interacting, with various European and American heads of government. The same can be said of Hosni Mubarak and others. This has made Middle Eastern leaders’ rapid transitions from ally — “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,” Hillary Clinton famously said in 2009 — to brutal, repressive tyrant an especially awkward journey for their Western interlocutors.

But fortunately for our heads of state, the vacuum of reliable allies left by the forced departure of Arab dictators has been ably filled by an even more pliable replacement: the American news media. Nothing comes as easily as adherence to the National Narrative.

And this is what really irks me about Amy Sullivan’s high-minded putdown of Joan Juliet Buck. It is perhaps true that the Vogue columnist should have thought twice about running such an unqualified puff piece. It is also true, however, that this bears repeating for the entirety of the American press corps, whose largely mute acquiescence to decades of American alliances with cruel and brutal dictators was bizarrely abrogated the very moment those same leaders became personae non gratae to the Obama administration.

This is not to say that these alliances have not served their purposes at times. We live in a messy world; messy alliances are practically inevitable. But Buck’s case of bad timing is still, in some ways, a more honest journalistic effort than the 180-degree turn perfectly executed by the bulk of the American press without so much as a blink of the eye.

As George Orwell famously wrote, “We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.”

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Journalism done right, and writing done wrong

Books, Media, Politics, , , , , , ,

First, for the good journalism, which I will quote at length (think of it as a counterexample to yesterday’s post about Jake Tapper’s misconception of media fairness):

Does any journalist who is not an overt shill for the right actually believe that Republicans are pushing voter ID laws because they’re concerned about voter fraud?

No, of course not.

And for good reason. Voter fraud simply isn’t a problem in this country. Studies have definitively debunked the voter fraud myth time and again.

In Pennsyvlania, which just adopted a tremendously restrictive photo-ID law that could disenfranchise 1 in 10 voters, state officials conceded they have no evidence of voter fraud, nor any reason to believe it could become a problem…

And the pursuit of this goal ostensibly in the name of voter fraud is an outrageous deception that only works if the press is too timid to call it what it really is.

For reporters to treat this issue like just another political squabble is journalistic malpractice. Indeed, relating the debate in value-neutral he-said-she-said language is actively helping spread the lie. After all, calling for someone to show ID before voting doesn’t sound pernicious to most people, even though it is. And raising the bogus issue of voter fraud at all stokes fear. “Even if you say there is no fraud, all people hear is ‘fraud fraud fraud’,” said Lawrence Norden, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Think about it. If you were covering elections in another country, and one political party was actively trying to limit voting in the name of a problem that objectively didn’t exist, would you hesitate for a moment to call out that tactic — and question that party’s legitimacy? Hardly.

Modern American journalists strive for impartiality, but there is a limit. Mainstream journalists shouldn’t be afraid of being accused of taking sides when what they’re doing is standing up for basic constitutional rights. Indeed, the greater danger is that readers condemn them — or even worse, stop paying attention to them — for having no convictions at all, and no moral compass.

The GOP has taken increasingly radical positions, confident that the media’s aversion to taking sides will protect it from too much negative coverage. But failing to call out the voter ID push is like covering the civil rights movements and treating “separate but equal” as if it was said with sincerity.

And now, for the bad writing (on the part of Lehrer, not Moynihan):

Yesterday, Lehrer finally confessed that he has never met or corresponded with Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s manager; he has never seen an unexpurgated version of Dylan’s interview for No Direction Home, something he offered up to stymie my search; that a missing quote he claimed could be found in an episode of Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” cannot, in fact, be found there; and that a 1995 radio interview, supposedly available in a printed collection of Dylan interviews called The Fiddler Now Upspoke, also didn’t exist. When, three weeks after our first contact, I asked Lehrer to explain his deceptions, he responded, for the first time in our communication, forthrightly: “I couldn’t find the original sources,” he said. “I panicked. And I’m deeply sorry for lying.”

I don’t join the stampede of writers and journalists jumping up and down on Jonah Lehrer’s grave out of a barely concealed sense of schadenfreude. The amount of pressure and panic that he must have felt in order to do this had to have been immense. That doesn’t excuse it. But it certainly isn’t cause for celebration by anyone else either.

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Capturing sound at the Olympics

Sports, , , , , , ,

Microphones

The Atlantic ran a fascinating piece a couple weeks ago (seems I’m behind on everything these last few days) on the advanced sound engineering that’s been implemented for the London Olympics:

For the London Olympics, Baxter will deploy 350 mixers, 600 sound technicians, and 4,000 microphones at the London Olympics. Using all the modern sound technology they can get their hands on, they’ll shape your experience to sound like a lucid dream, a movie, of the real thing.

Let’s take archery. “After hearing the coverage in Barcelona at the ’92 Olympics, there were things that were missing. The easy things were there. The thud and the impact of the target — that’s a no brainer — and a little bit of the athlete as they’re getting ready,” Baxter says.

“But, it probably goes back to the movie Robin Hood, I have a memory of the sound and I have an expectation. So I was going, ‘What would be really really cool in archery to take it up a notch?’ And the obvious thing was the sound of the arrow going through the air to the target. The pfft-pfft-pfft type of sound. So we looked at this little thing, a boundary microphone, that would lay flat, it was flatter than a pack of cigarettes, and I put a little windshield on it, and I put it on the ground between the athlete and the target and it completely opened up the sound to something completely different.”

This is pretty impressive, but it’s the bit at the end that strayed a little too close to 2008 Olympics-style manipulation:

“In Atlanta, one of my biggest problems was rowing. Rowing is a two-kilometer course. They have 4 chaseboats following the rowers and they have a helicopter. That’s what they need to deliver the visual coverage of it,” Baxter explains. “But the chaseboats and the helicopter just completely wash out the sound. No matter how good the microphones are, you cannot capture and reach and isolate sound the way you do visually. But people have expectations. If you see the rowers, they have a sound they are expecting. So what do we do?”

Well, they made up the rowing noises and played them during the broadcast of the event, like a particularly strange electronic music show.

“That afternoon we went out on a canoe with a couple of rowers recorded stereo samples of the different type of effects that would be somewhat typical of an event,” Baxter recalls. “And then we loaded those recordings into a sampler and played them back to cover the shots of the boats.”

It’s one thing to enhance the actually existing sound during an event to enable TV viewers to hear things that couldn’t be picked up in person at the stadium or arena. It’s quite another to fabricate the sound entirely from preexisting recordings. Alexis Madrigal wraps up his piece with the following (grammatically confused) thought:

But how bright is the line that separates factual audio from fictional audio a bit thinner and more porous than we’d like? If we want hyperreality as an end, can we really quibble about the means?

Is it really that porous of a line? Seems to me that one sound’s real, and the other’s not. Either way, the whole thing is very, very cool technology.

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ABC’s Jake Tapper takes on The Newsroom

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Actually, he took it on over a month ago, but I somehow missed it until just now. In the pages of The New Republic, Tapper took Sorkin to task:

There’s much to criticize in the media—and TV news in particular. But though “The Newsroom” intends to lecture its viewers on the higher virtues of capital-J journalism, Professor Sorkin soon reveals he isn’t much of an expert on the subject.

So far, so good. But what bothers me about Tapper’s critique is that he dislikes The Newsroom for all the wrong reasons. Here’s the crux of the problem with the show for Tapper:

McAvoy sanctimoniously laments the deterioration of public discourse and the news media’s complicity in it. But if that is the problem, his subsequent actions reveal a commitment to a uniformly partisan solution. McAvoy—and, by extension, Sorkin—preach political selflessness, but they practice pure partisanship; they extol the Fourth Estate’s democratic duty, but they believe that responsibility consists mostly of criticizing Republicans.

See, this is the crux of my problem with Tapper. I have a whole laundry list of complaints about The Newsroom — from the excessively preachy tone of all the dialogue to the half-baked and subpar romantic suplots to the improbably lucky connections the newsroom stuff was able to milk for details following the Gulf oil spill, and a million other things besides.

But if there’s one thing Sorkin doesn’t get wrong, it’s also the one thing that rubs Jake Tapper the wrong way. This is unfortunate, because — as someone who, admittedly, is not as familiar with Tapper’s journalism as I should be — I nevertheless have some unexplained fondness for the guy. But it appears something about Sorkin’s critique struck a little too close to home.

But before I get into that, Tapper’s not finished:

And when McAvoy goes after a National Rifle Association campaign to portray Obama as anti-gun, he insists on depicting it as a moral crusade in defense of the public good. But he never feels the need to question whether—in the midst of crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the international economy—it’s really so noble after all to devote one’s limited resources to fact-checking relatively unimportant political attacks. As such, it’s hard not to judge the resulting segment as falling short of McAvoy’s newly idealistic raison d’être—though Sorkin clearly seems to think otherwise.

Tapper goes on to say that McAvoy, much like other cable news stars, is blind to his own ideology. There may be a crumb of truth in that. But aside from the anchor’s comically atrocious disdain for the common people (“we are the media elite,” McAvoy declares on-air, without a smidgen of irony), it seems that the NewsNight anchor’s worst crime in Tapper’s eyes is assigning the truth any relevance at all. There are wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, and an economy in crisis. Why not discuss that?

But to those of us who would like to see something more from the news than a mere dash-to-the-bottom for the juiciest new storyline (another suicide bombing in Baghdad! stocks fall 2% in an afternoon!), it really does matter whether the NRA lied about Obama’s alleged anti-gun record. And it really does matter that Michele Bachmann falsely claimed the Obamas’ trip to India cost American taxpayers $200 million per day. (It would appear that even Tapper would agree with this last assessment: he filed a short report about the White House’s rebuttal of Bachmann’s claims.)

Tapper treats the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as completely separate entities from the “relatively unimportant political attacks” to which Sorkin’s Will McAvoy devotes so much of his time. But the aggregate effect of lie after lie being spouted by many vocal Republicans at the time, without any fear of being held accountable by the media, helped to fuel the popular discontent that has rendered Obama a much less effective president on both domestic and foreign policy issues. Political capital is a very real thing.

But that’s not actually the biggest mistake Tapper makes. Indeed, he believes some stories are irrelevant, and yet he and his organization, ABC News, continue to cover them indiscriminately. But the one thing they’ve forgotten to do right — and practically the only thing Aaron Sorkin actually got right — was to nail the coffin definitively on the constant stream of baseless attacks emanating daily from right-wing circles. (Tapper’s tepid report on the India misinformation story, especially given the update he tacked on at the end, leaves the impression this was just another political squabble between perpetually lying politicians. It wasn’t: one side was lying. The other side wasn’t. This matters.)

This isn’t about being ideological. It’s about doing the very thing Jake Tapper thinks he’s doing by focusing on the “moderates and liberals wielding [power]:” holding our elected officials accountable. This is not to say that liberals or Democrats or Obama himself shouldn’t be held to account either. But to simply assume that pointing out one side’s deliberate falsehoods is somehow partisan — without even bothering to evaluate whether the other side is actually guilty of the same crimes and to the same extent — is actually taking sides. It’s taking the side of those who choose to distort and disguise and deny the truth, at the expense of those whose attachment to facts is at least somewhat stronger. (These are all politicians, so we can safely assume no one’s that sentimental about honesty.)

Jake Tapper may be a good reporter, but his attack on Sorkin’s “moral crusade” smacks of New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane’s prejudicial term “truth vigilante.” Sorkin is a lot of things: preachy is one of them, for instance. But being evenhanded — as in a real balance based on facts, not the faux balance based on the terror of appearing partisan advocated by Tapper — is not something Sorkin got wrong. It’s something Tapper didn’t get right.

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50 Shades of Grey gets the literary treatment

Books, , , , , ,

The New York Observer‘s Velvet Roper blog dishes on an unsurprising critical consensus at a panel event:

Ostensibly the panel had gathered to discuss whether E.L. James’s blockbuster book was a step forward for American sexual culture. “I just want to say right off the bat that we are not going to be discussing the book’s literary merit,” said McNally Jackson’s Amy Lee, the moderator for the event. Yet despite this disclaimer, many of the panelists seemed unable to resist taking a few cheap shots at its notoriously clumsy prose, referring to the book repeatedly as a “piece of shit.”

Ms. Jong seemed especially preoccupied with the book’s literary offenses. “What possessed the publisher to not even edit the book?” she began. “I don’t believe anyone ever said ‘holy cow’ at the moment of her first orgasm,” she said disdainfully, voicing a familiar criticism that she would repeat more than once before the end of the night.

My two cents? Methinks literary greatness isn’t what E.L. James was shooting for. I’m sure she has more than enough cash now to buy herself an editor or 70. But why bother?

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