The Periodical Table

A weekly review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.

Deja Vanity
The October issue of Vanity Fair feels Green - completely recycled. An airbrushed Nicole Kidman on the cover? Is she still around? The stupidity of George W. Bush? What is this, the 2000 campaign? How the media screwed Al Gore? What is this, the 2000 campaign? Snoopy? Rachael Ray? Sarah Silverman? Hello, she's been done. Way. Meet the real Stephen Colbert? We met him a long time ago. Cooked intelligence and another botched war? Really? The End of News? Gee, haven't heard about that. George W. Bush's disconnect? Really?

C'mon, Vanity Fair. Put all those perfume ads to good use and come up with something new.

Gored
"Going After Gore" is only an important article to those who haven't been paying attention. Unfortunately, that's a lot of people - including many in the media to whom this is really directed. For example, Eric Zorn wrote last spring that "no one seems to know is that Gore never said he invented the Internet."

Hello? Where the hell have you been? The media's handling of the Gore campaign in 2000 has been topped only by its abhorrent coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War as Exhibit A for the last eight years of the media's collective sheer malpractice-by-narrative.

It's a bit late to catch on; no wonder we have so many "journalists" - including Zorn - pounding such ridiculous themes (woven for them by campaign strategists) as Barack Obama As JFK, Abraham Lincoln and RFK.

I was always astounded when I worked in newspapers (and magazines) how little my colleagues seemed to know about their own business - both in terms of the economic structure and the baloney they believed from their corporate paymasters and the methods and ethical parameters of the journalism itself (should we be surprised that Zorn, among others, defended Amy Jacobson?) Hell, I mentioned Romenesko - the world's premier media site - to Phil Ponce once a couple years ago and he had never heard of it. Wha?

This is why I believe so strongly in undergraduate journalism degrees. That's where you learn the history, law, ethics, economics, conventions and criticism of the field. It's essential as much as English degrees are to those teaching literature or medical degrees are to those practicing medicine.

What Evgenia Peretz documents in Vanity Fair, then, is maddeningly true but maddeningly way, way, way too late. She borrows heavily from the work of Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler, but the same criticism has been lodged in other quarters far and wide - far and wide enough for anyone really paying attention to be aware of.

In short, Al Gore never said he invented the Internet, he never said he discovered Love Canal, he was never advised by Naomi Wolf to dress in Earth tones . . . and on and on. The evidence is here and incontrovertible.

Similarly, John Kerry was Swift-boated while the media stood by like potted plants just like they stood by when George Bush ran a presidential campaign in 1988 based on Michael Dukakis's alleged lack of patriotism.

People who wonder why I write what I do about Obama and Hillary Clinton should start here. Much of what the press wrote about Hillary and Bill Clinton - whom I never voted for - was of the same bullshit. As documented by Gene Lyons and others, Whitewater and the "Clinton Scandals" were all about . . . nothing. It is now also well-documented that there was a right-wing effort, funded mainly by Richard Mellon Scaife, to disseminate all manner of anti-Clinton propaganda. (One of those in his charge, David Brock, has switched sides and now runs Media Matters.)

And so it is really the false narratives I am attacking - not Hillary Clinton opponents or Barack Obama supporters - when I write about campaign coverage. As I've written many times now, I'm not voting for Hillary Clinton - her war vote is just one of many reasons why. But that doesn't mean she doesn't get a raw deal from a thickheaded press.Because we still get things like John Kass writing about "Filegate," which he was forced to retract (last item) and did so with a joke about Hillary's cattle futures. Guess what? That was bullshit too.

This isn't ideological, by the way. I am not a Democrat. And as I've written before as well, Dan Quayle got a raw deal with the potato spelling and George H. W. Bush with the supermarket scanner. It's just the way the media works, and it incenses me.

Much of what the Obama camp pushes, meanwhile, is baloney. They're making up a narrative about their candidate just as much as narratives were sewn about Hillary and Gore. It's up to reporters to see through the bullshit, not deliver it to the citizenry. And that is why I write what I do about Obama - and by default, Hillary Clinton.

COMMENT FROM SO-CALLED AUSTIN MAYOR:
I think there is a substantial and significant difference between attacking a politician for something he didn't say (Gore/internet) and the use of analogy/metaphor to talk about a candidate (Obama/JFK/Lincoln/Jesus).

One is a matter of fact. The other is a matter of opinion.

It is wrong to dismiss hard facts as if they were something over which one can disagree. Similarly, we should not treat those with opinions with which we disagree as though they were being factually dishonest.

RESPONSE:
True enough. This item wasn't written with as much clarity and nuance as I wished. I do think, however, there is a line to be drawn between the two categories SCAM identifies, and that is the use of constructed narrative as a substitute for independent and critical analysis. But yes, I wish I would've written this item a bit more clearly to articulate my points. Thanks, SCAM.

Money Pit
"Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency - much of it belonging to the Iraqi people - was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority," Vanity Fair reports in its one vital piece this issue. "Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed."

Nine. Billion. Dollars.

Billion.

Dollars.

Nine.

"That transfer of cash to Iraq was the largest one-day shipment of currency in the history of the New York Fed. It was not, however, the first such shipment of cash to Iraq. Beginning soon after the invasion and continuing for more than a year, $12 billion in U.S. currency was airlifted to Baghdad, ostensibly as a stopgap measure to help run the Iraqi government and pay for basic services until a new currency could be put in people's hands. In effect, the entire nation of Iraq needed walking-around money, and Washington mobilized to provide it."

Sick to your stomach yet?

"Of the $12 billion in U.S. banknotes delivered to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for."

The story is reported by Donald Barlett and James Steele, two former newspapermen unceremoniously sent packing to magazineland because the newspaper industry couldn't cope with their (relatively modest) salaries and time-intensive investigative expertise. They have long been among my journalism heroes.

Campaign of the Century
"The year is 1800. Americans go to the polls to elect a President. Which Founder do you favor?" asks Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. The Federalist incumbent, sixty-four-year-old John Adams, or the Republican challenger, fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who, awkwardly enough, is currently serving as Adams's Vice President?

"Consider your vote carefully. This is the most important election in American history. What Jefferson dubbed "the revolution of 1800" marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. (Before that, whoever placed second became the Vice-President, which is what happened to Jefferson in 1796.) It might have - and should have - spelled the end of the Electoral College. At the time, many people, not all of them members of the Adams family, thought that it might spell the end of the American experiment."

Our sytem is not set in stone; democracy comes in many forms and structures and requires constant reform and progression.

After 2000, for example, the Electoral College should have been done away with. Look what it has wrought. Just another case where Democrats didn't have the balls and Republicans didn't have the statesmanship to do the right thing by America.

Credit Check
You know how you have to wait for your credit card to be validated after you swipe it and hand it to a cashier? The validation is done via The Luhn Algorithm, invented by IBM researcher Hans Luhn. It's simple. First, your credit card number is reversed. Then every second number is doubled. Then the numbers are added up. If the result is divisible by 10, you're valid.

"Consumers and companies increasingly depend on a hidden mathematical world," reports The Economist.

Hail algorithms! In the commercial world, they enable logistics, optimization, efficiency and security.

"Algorithms are a way to cope," the magazine says. They are, one expert says, "bound to take over the world."

Secret Government
"In the wake of heightened government secrecy in the post-9/11 era, one media outlet has responded by making freedom of information news coverage a full-time job," Quill reports.

"The government secrecy beat at Cox News Service's Washington bureau was the brainchild of bureau chief Andy Alexander, who dreamed up the position in response to heightened levels of secrecy - not just in the Bush Administration but at state and local levels."

Remember that election of 1800? We still don't have it right, do we.