By Steve Rhodes

A weekly roundup of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Still Depressed
With the incredibly sad demise of Punk Planet, the arrival of the new No Depression came at just the right time. At least there’s still one good music magazine going. (And at least we have the work of Don Jacobson here at the Beachwood to enjoy; if only we could clone him about a dozen times . . . ) While No Depression’s constant self-examination of what it is and who it covers gets tiresome, Peter Blackstock gets it right in his “Hello Stranger” column this issue when he writes “The difference between ND and most mainstream music publications is, of course, that while we both might cover the Shins or Miranda Lambert or Mandy Moore, the mass-media magazines are unlikely to give significant space to, say, a sideman such as Fast Kaplin (p.8), or a roots-music event such as Merlefest (p. 16), or a family bluegrass act such as Cherryholmes (p. 42). And they darned sure aren’t gonna put a 79-year-old performer of traditional country music on their cover.”

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Posted on June 29, 2007

By The Beachwood Press Failure Affairs Desk

Today we conclude our three-part excerpt from the opening chapter of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, graciously provided to us by the University of Chicago Press and also available in one fell swoop on their website. Catch up here with Parts 1 and 2.
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WMDs and the al-Qaeda Connection
Perhaps the central example that illustrates the press’s having limited capacity to challenge potentially questionable, but dominant, official accounts involves the allegation of links between the international terrorist organization al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and between Saddam and 9/11. Those claims, like the charges that Saddam possessed WMDs, were asserted repeatedly by high administration officials including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, but little solid evidence was ever presented. To the contrary, there was ample evidence that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had condemned Saddam’s government as a secular threat to Islamic fundamentalism, and that Saddam feared an Islamic threat to his rule. Indeed, after Saddam’s capture, documents were found in his possession ordering Iraqi resistance fighters to refuse to cooperate with any Islamic fundamentalists who entered Iraq, suggesting that al-Qaeda, while sharing an antagonism toward the United States, was also seen as a threat to stir Islamic revolution in Iraq.
Despite the available challenges to this core rationale for the war promoted by the Bush administration, the durability of the Saddam-al-Qaeda connection in public opinion polls continued years into the conflict. Just the right dose of reinforcements from high administration sources continued to receive publicity from news organizations that were curiously ill equipped to balance the spurious claims. Indeed, the underlying ethos of “we report (what officials say), you decide (if it is true)” results in the odd problem of balancing erroneous claims. It might make sense to worry more about whether such claims should be reported so decorously at all. In any event, a poll conducted in July 2006, more than three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, found that 64% of Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein’s regime had strong ties with al-Qaeda – even though volumes of contrary information circulated just beyond, and sometimes even found its way into, the mainstream press.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: “Poll: More Than 4 in 10 Americans Still Believe Saddam Involved with 9/11,” June 25.]

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Posted on June 28, 2007

By The Beachwood Press Failure Affairs Desk

This week we are providing a three-part excerpt from the opening chapter of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, graciously provided to us by the University of Chicago Press and also available in full on their website. Part 1 of our series is here. Part 2 follows.
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Mission Accomplished
Consider for a moment that day in May of 2003, when President Bush, wearing a Top Gun flight suit, gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech on an aircraft carrier staged as a big-screen movie set. Nearly every major U. S. news organization reported the story just as it had been scripted. The result was the sort of public relations coup that occurs only when the news can be managed on such a scale. (We believe that the idea originated with a public relations consultant, and was then staged with the considerable resources of the White House communication office and the U.S. military.)
Beyond the irony of a president with a dubious military service record playing Top Gun, the message channeled through the news turned out to be disastrously wrong. But such details were no match for the Hollywood moments that the administration regularly rolled out with the help of Hollywood set directors and Washington PR firms. The news had become something of a reality TV program, replete with dramatic stories from top organizations such as the Washington Post, which published the following:

When the Viking carrying Bush made its tailhook landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off California yesterday, the scene brought presidential imagery to a whole new level. Bush emerged from the cockpit in a full olive flight suit and combat boots, his helmet tucked jauntily under his left arm. As he exchanged salutes with the sailors, his ejection harness, hugging him tightly between the legs, gave him the bowlegged swagger of a top gun.

The fact that all of this was known to have been staged just for this effect did not detract from the amount and prominence of news coverage the media lavished on the event. To the contrary, the orchestration of the event fit perfectly with the unwritten rules of mainstream journalism in the United States, and thus helped make the coverage what it was: dramatic, unchallenged, triumphant, and resonant throughout the media. Beyond this staging, the implicit journalistic preoccupation with political power in Washington shaped the plotline of Mr. Bush’s Top Gun episode. As a result, most of the coverage of the “mission accomplished” moment was not about whether the war was really over (it wasn’t), or even if there was reason to think that things in Iraq were going particularly well (they weren’t). The story was about power in Washington, and in particular, Mr. Bush’s mastery of the imagery of success – which, at that moment, seemed to make him the odds-on favorite in the 2004 election.

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Posted on June 27, 2007

By The Beachwood Press Failure Affairs Desk

Today we begin a three-part excerpt from the opening chapter of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, graciously provided to us by the University of Chicago Press and also available in full on their website.
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PRESS POLITICS IN AMERICA
The Case of the Iraq War
We now know that officials in the Bush administration built a case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq that was open to serious challenge. We also know that evidence disputing ongoing official claims about the war was often available to the mainstream press in a timely fashion. Yet the recurrent pattern, even years into the conflict, was for the official government line to trump evidence to the contrary in the news produced by mainstream news outlets reaching the preponderance of the people. Several years into the conflict, public opinion finally began to reflect the reality of a disintegrating Iraq heading toward civil war, with American troops caught in the middle. But that reckoning came several years too late to head off a disaster that historians may well deem far worse than Vietnam.
There is little doubt that reporting which challenges the public pronouncements of those in power is difficult when anything deviating from authorized versions of reality is met with intimidating charges of bias. Out of fairness, the press generally reports those charges, which in turn reverberate through the echo chambers of talk radio and pundit TV, with the ironic result that the media contribute to their own credibility problem. Yet it is precisely the lack of clear standards of press accountability (particularly guidelines for holding officials accountable) that opens the mainstream news to charges of bias from all sides. In short, the absence of much agreement on what the press should be doing makes it all the more difficult for news organizations to navigate an independent course through pressurized political situations.

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Posted on June 26, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

June 23-24.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Artwork depicting a businessman tearing open his white shirt and tie to reveal the $ on his chest. Text: “Economic Superheroes: A look at the free marketers from the University of Chicago.”
For a Kim Phillips-Fein review of The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business, by Johan Van Overtveldt.
Phillips-Fein’s effort starts out weakly, stating, for example, that the Chicago School of economic thinking dismissed arguments in favor of the minimum wage and against school vouchers – hardly the success stories they are purported to be. Phillips-Fein also notes, in trying to further illustrate the achievements of the Chicago School, that “by 1982, the nation had elected a president who believed that cutting tax rates and shrinking the government were the keys to economic growth,” though it’s not clear at all that anything but displeasure with Jimmy Carter won Ronald Reagan the presidency in 1980, before anyone had conceived of the “Morning in America” marketing conceit – not to mention Reagan’s huge expansion of government spending creating record deficits.

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Posted on June 25, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

What Rumsfeld knew about Abu Ghraib. What the Cubs knew about Kerry Wood. And what the media still doesn’t know about how stupid it is. In our weekly roundup of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Your Newspaper Industry: The Daily Dumb Show
The cover story of the June/July issue of American Journalism Review is “What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart.” That’s June/July 2007. One answer not sussed out by AJR is to not be so dumb, slow and clueless. Next issue: “Stephen Colbert: Now We Get It!”accompanied by “New Onion Newspaper Catches On With Kids.”
Bushwhacked
The cover story of the June issue of Harper’s is “Undoing Bush,” a collection of essays about “How to Repair Eight Years of Sabotage, Bungling, and Neglect.” One answer not sussed out by Harper’s is to not be so dumb, slow and clueless. Next issue: “We Give Up! Harper’s Ceases Publication As Own Staff Literally Bore Selves to Death.”
What Rumsfeld Knew
If more reporters (and their news organizations) were devoted to getting to the bottom of things, maybe there’d be some true accountability to this administration’s sabotage, bungling, and neglect. Harper’s can essay themselves to death, but nothing takes the place of reporting.
Case in point: Seymour Hersh’s must-read in this week’s The New Yorker, which gets to the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal and persuasively shows that Donald Rumsfeld lied under oath to Congress, and that George W. Bush either sanctioned the torture that occurred at the prison or willfully turned away from seeking the truth.

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Posted on June 22, 2007

By The Beachwood Punk Planet Affairs Desk

Bad news from Punk Planet:
Dear Friends,
As much as it breaks our hearts to write these words, the final issue of Punk Planet is in the post, possibly heading toward you right now. Over the last 80 issues and 13 years, we’ve covered every aspect of the financially independent, emotionally autonomous, free culture we refer to as “the underground.” In that time we’ve sounded many alarms: about threats of co-optation, big-media emulation, and unseen corporate sponsorship. We’ve also done everything in our power to create a support network for independent media, experiment with revenue streams, and correct the distribution issues that have increasingly plagued independent magazines. But now, finally, we’ve come to the impossible decision to stop printing, having sounded all the alarms and reenvisioned all the systems we can. Benefit shows are no longer enough to make up for bad distribution deals, disappearing advertisers, and a decreasing audience of subscribers.

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Posted on June 19, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

June 16-17.
Publication: New York Times
Cover: The eyes of Clarence Thomas through his glasses, with the rest of his head and face wiped away, represented only by the white newsprint surrounding it. Accompanying “Thomas Agonistes,” Orlando Patterson’s review of a new Thomas biography that seems to nail down the humiliations and psychological framework of the man’s upbringing while coming up short on new details of the present-day justice.
For example, Patterson describes what I think is new ground on Thomas’ relationship with women. “There is now little doubt that he lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings – not only about his pornophilia and bawdy humor but, more important, about his legal views and familiarity with cases like Roe v. Wade.”
At least according to Patterson’s review, authors Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher fail to plumb this rich vein further, connecting his views – and the forces that shaped them – to his legal theories and positions.

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Posted on June 18, 2007

By The Beachwood Outfit Affairs Desk

Nicely timed to the approaching Family Secrets trial, former Tony Spilotro associate Frank Cullotta has spilled his story to Las Vegas author Dennis N. Griffin in a new memoir, Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness.
The book is a raw retelling of Cullotta’s life of crime that takes us inside Tony Spilotro’s Hole in the Wall Gang and another view of many of the events memorialized in Casino, in which Cullotta was renamed Frankie Marino, played by Frank Vincent.
Cullotta, who spoke to author Nicholas Pileggi for the Casino book that preceded the movie, was a technical adviser on the film and re-created on celluloid the bumbling murder of Jerry Lisner, who simply refused to die no matter how many bullets Cullotta put in his head, and instead had to be chased through his Las Vegas home, endure an attempted strangling, and eventually thrown into a swimming pool where he sank to the bottom.
Pileggi writes the forward for Cullotta, opening with the sentence: “Frank Cullotta is the real thing.”

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Posted on June 15, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Meet Mrs. R. Kelly
R. Kelly’s estranged wife Andrea speaks to Chicago’s very own Natalie Moore in the June issue of Essence. Andrea pretty much skirts around the central issue – her husband’s alleged underage philandering – as she stays loyal to the man she is divorcing and exhibits no sympathy to the alleged victims or their families. The key passage is this one:
“When asked, ‘Do you believe the allegations about your husband?’ she responds without hesitation that she absolutely does not, suggesting it’s all a lie and that her husband is not the man on the tape. ‘C’mon. Who would believe all that? That’s why they call them allegations,’ she says.
“But did she see the tape?

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Posted on June 12, 2007