Owlspotting

Another “fine” moment in journalism took place Sunday.

On NBC’s Meet the Press Tim Russert pretended to be unaware of a new talk show strategist James Carville was going to do on XM Satellite radio. He even tried to “scoop” other media by getting Carville to give some details of the show and maybe it’s co-host, who Mr. Russert pretended not to know. Just read the exchange (at the bottom of the page) — it will almost get you excited.

Well, today it was revealed that Carville’s co-host will be none other that Russert’s son. And we had to go through that disgusting show on national TV to find out. That’s where our journalism is today and, following up on yesterday’s post, the political right is far from being the only problem.

I got pissed (again) so I did what I always do when I get pissed: I wrote an e-mail to Meet the Press. Here’s what I said:

“As a journalist, I’m disappointed Mr. Russert engaged in fake discussions about Mr. Carville’s future as a sport-show host. Those precious moments in a supposedly serious national talk show were used for giggles among friends. Not to mention the false interest Mr. Russert displayed when asking who will co-host the show, when he knew damn well it would be his own son.

If promoting a show Mr. Carville and Mr. Russert’s son will host is what passes for televised democratic discourse in this country, I’m afraid journalists will lose more and more relevance. Thank you Mr. Russert for showing viewers how hypocritical our kind can be. “

The journalism world has been wrestling its future for a while. The future is looking strong so far, having slammed traditional journalism through a proverbial table a great many times. This future goes by many names: “citizen journalism,” “we media,” “participatory journalism” etc. It is embodied by technology more than method and its franchises are blogs, wikis or podcasts.

The world is obsessed with technology, and when it comes to “mainstream journalism,” this obsessions has turned to reverence at best, and fear at worst. It’s not hard to get this feeling of impending doom if you are a print or broadcast journalist spending a few hours in the Internet jungle. Futurists predict the decline of traditional journalism, news aggregators like Google News use algorithms not people to compile news, and bloggers strike from every angle.

And that’s probably an understatement. I have bought into the future myself — I even penned (well, typed is more accurate) an essay titled “The Internet, the ripper of the traditional press” (RO) for a Romanian weekly. It surprised me to see the piece picked up by Romanian bloggers (RO) who complimented me on my vision for the future — one in which journalism will mostly be produced online.

What I wasn’t saying is that blogs will produce the journalism of the future.

I’m not going to spend too much time on this issue. There are wiser men than me looking at the impact of technology on the future of the media as we know it (check Mark Glaser‘s MediaShift).

What I will say is along the lines of an e-mail I sent Elle today about a post on Talking Points Memo, a successful blog that stands above the crowd because of its occasional original reporting (TPM is not the only blog to do original work).

The post was arguing for a need to have outlets such as blogs perform a check on the mainstream press — even if this check turns into full-blown attacks, which sometimes can go overboard. Why? Because the media is too quick to construct a false balance in the news for fear of upsetting the American political right.

Here’s what Joshua Marshal had to say: “Indeed, when you actually watch — from the inside — how mainstream newsrooms work, it is really not too much to say that they operate on two guiding principles: reporting the facts and avoiding impressions of ‘liberal bias’. “

I don’t believe this to be true, and here are a few reasons why:

1. I agree with Marshall that keeping an eye on the press is good (and boy are there eyes on the press). But we need to remember that those people in the newsrooms work hard to get that information people in cyber space bitch about. There are thousands of newsrooms in the United States and I’ve seen plenty recently to argue that journalists believe in their mission and really try to do the best they can every day.

People should be aware of the fact that information is not always readily available and although there are plenty of slip-ups and mistakes, the majority of the information out there comes from these imperfect creatures staffing “mainstream media.” These people REPORT — some do it better, some do it worse. But they are the ones who put up the most bricks in creating the picture of the world.

2. I have seen enough reporters at work to say I don’t believe the shallowness comes from a fear of the political right. There are plenty of other reasons — the social disconnect, the “just j-school” or “only ivy-league” hiring mentality, the lack of expertise and so on (I’ve had my moments of depression, too). Saying it’s the fear of the right that makes journalism bad is overlooking the problems that plague the craft from the inside.

3. Yes, there is fake balance created at times and it’s unfortunate. But again, I would argue that comes from more from a failure of living up to journalistic standards than fear of political retribution. Every blogger should spend a day in the newsroom answering calls from readers. They will learn first-hand what it’s like to be accused of bias — gender, political, racial, take your pick. It’s not easy trying to work through bias; and if you are to have a press that fosters democratic dialogue, carrying the flag of one ideology over another won’t help.

I suspect that the majority of newsrooms in this country have a majority of staff with liberal-leanings. And no, that doesn’t mean that fake balance for fear of being labeled as liberal is the answer. Neither is championing the overwhelming ideology in the newsrooms. I believe we need media who can make sense of the noise, which the future is largely responsible for creating (that’s a fact, not necessarily a wrong or a right).

And despite its flaws, that sense-maker could be the traditional media (I hope it will — it still tells great stories). That doesn’t mean it has to do it off-line though. The future needs to be embraced, all while keeping the principles of the craft alive: truth, verification, independence.

Oh wait, that was, like, a whole bunch of times.

My brother and I can start so many stories that way.

Did you notice gas prices bump up a bit last weekend? Yeah, that was me. My bad.

My 17-year-old brother navigated as I drove a bigass rental truck 1,000 miles to Washington, DC. last weekend. We waved bye to mom in Missouri at 7 a.m. armed with snacks and an AM/FM radio. The plan was to drive straight to our nation’s capital, unload it and park it, um, somewhere.

I thought I was renting a truck that was ten feet from nose to tip, an SUV on steroids or something. I mean, in the picture online it was only about an inch long. But no, it was ten feet tall. In other words, it was really fucking big — as in, the interior was about the size of my apartment, as in, after loading everything we could sort of tell how the furniture would look together, as in, “Wow, there’s plenty of room for some illegals in here.” As my brother put it, the truck’s suspension was “designed to carry a shit-ton of shit,” and we were nowhere near that, maybe 1/23 of a shit-ton or so, and the ride was rather bouncy. It was kind of like a 20-hour deep-tissue massage.

20 hours? But Mapquest says the trip is only about 15 hours. True, but despite the truck’s aforementioned capacity to carry a shit-ton of shit, and despite the fact that loaded it was spacious enough to unfold the sofa-bed and still sit at the table, my right foot had to work very hard to keep that sucker going over 40 m.p.h. over the mountains of West Virginia, where we almost died.

Ah, the near-death experience. What road trip is complete without it? We had been gaining altitude for about an hour when it started snowing around 10:30 p.m. A pretty little dusting, the kind when the snowflakes dance just above the asphalt and you know it’s going to stick. But then it started snowing a little harder. And a little harder. Harder, harder, harder. Everyone loves snowglobes. But nobody wants to live in one. I think the last thing I could see that was more than 8 feet in front of me was a yellow sign advertising a 6% grade over the next 5 miles. So pretty soon we were going through this white mass really fucking fast.

Our terror accelerated faster than the truck. Some monster on wheels blared its brights in my sideview mirror and then disappeared. And it kept getting… whiter. I felt like I was going to leap out of my own skin. “Shit, Hunter, what do I do??!!” “I don’t know!!!” and then “Be cool…be cool… be cool…” My chin was on the steering wheel, my foot was vibrating as it hovered over the brakes. There were bridges and railings and turns, and then all of a sudden it cleared up a little, and we pulled on to the first exit, Bruceton Mills, WV.

I think we scared the locals at the hotel since we were still high on adrenaline. It was a little hard to think, and it took us a while to find a place to park until we figured out that anywhere would be somewhat inappropriate. Then we passed out. In the morning we ate biscuits & gravy with the locals and walked two blocks and saw cows. Then we drove to DC.

I found my apartment, but I couldn’t find the mysterious alley that supposedly led to the loading zone and service elevator. So I double parked and ran inside to ask the door person. When I got back about 2 minutes and 30 seconds later, Hunter had already talked us our of a ticket.

The alley was tiny and winding and full of 90-degree turns and poles and Lexus SUVs. Hunter had to get out and do the whole “Cut right, back up and cut a hard left, now ease it straight…” etc. thing. When we finally got back there at about 3:30 p.m., some wimpy city dudes were unloading drywall. “We’ll only be about 10 minutes.” So we waited. After 25 minutes, I looked at the rental agreement. The return site closed at 5, not 6 like I thought. It was Friday. Panic set in. [Something that had been eating away at me the entire trip was, Where the hell could we park a truck in DC?]So as those little city biceps struggled with another sheet of drywall, Hunter helped me squeeze between a giant dumpster and a sedan, and we started filling the space by the elevator with stuff. The dudes left about 10 minutes later, and we unloaded that badboy, literally sprinting between elevator and door, my brother running down the hall carrying the coffee table, in 45 minutes.

We drove through rush hour traffic in Dupont Circle a second time and got the truck in just after 5. The guys there took pity on us. As we were checking out, I asked where the nearest Metro stop was, and said I thought we could maybe walk home. The boss goes, “No no no!! You’re not wearing a jacket! We’ll drive you home.” So we were dropped off in front of my apartment building in an Escalade.

It was a beautiful ending, really.

I just returned from a 10-day trip to my home country of Romania. Although most of the time I spent in the motherland was devoted to family and friends, I did find a few hours to write an op-ed about my home country. The piece ran today in the Christian Science Monitor.

It was originally published with a mispelled headline: “Romania needs to kicks its habits. It has since been corrected online. You’ll find the article here.

You might have heard of the whole Wikipedia/Seigenthaler controversy — a famous retired journalist smeared in a fake bio by an anonymous dude who later claimed that it was a prank.

Well, today (around 1:30 PM) I noticed that a Wikipedian is trying to do something to the sexual reputation of Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, whose bio on the encyclopedia I stumbled upon while reading about Columbia University.

The last line: “His penis is also incredibly tiny” was added Tuesday night at 22:42 by someone whose IP tracks back to Johnson County Kansas according to the WhoIS database.

I’m curious how long this will stay up until someone corrects it. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: The entry was corrected at 9 PM, Wednesday, Dec. 21. So, in the Wikipedia world, Kurtz had a tiny penis for almost 24 hours. That’s long enough if you ask me. The IP of the person who corrected the error traced back to Harvard — yes, the university. It appears this was their first edit to the encyclopedia. I wonder if this person was in the network of people who I’ve told about this.

National Christmas Tree, originally uploaded by owlspotting.

This is not a tree. It’s a lot of other things, but it’s not a tree — certainly not a Christmas tree.

It’s a ghost who dressed as a bulb factory for Halloween. Or an LED condom. Or a hunk of elephant poop hosting the Lightning Bug National Convention.

Here are the Boston squirrels: Patty O’Shea, John “One Punch” Miller and “Running Nose” Andrew. They are known as “Tourist squirrels” for the ease they show around curious people chasing them with cameras.

More pictures of Boston, here.

Here’s more action from Boston. In the shot below tourists rub John Harvard’s toes in a desperate attemp to resurect them. This is what many experts over the years have called “The Harvard Rub,” or trying to wake up a snow-covered toe (aka foot finger).

See more shots of Boston and Cambridge, here.

I finally made it to Boston. I’ve been wanting to see this city for years. It’s beautiful enough to make me upload hots just 12 hours after getting to town. For more shots of the city, go here.

Thom Fitzgerald visited Romania. Bless his heart and the money he spent to boost my country’s doomed economy in the dark ages of 2002 — a time before iPods (when Discmans ruled); a time of few malls; a time when stray dogs, stray cripples, stray whores and stray Canadian diplomats lived in a loving putrid harmony.

Thom Fitzgerald would be a mediocre film maker even if he were the only film maker alive today. His movie about Romanian misery and the great Western minds that decode it, “The Wild Dogs” (2002), is a piece of shit.

But let’s take it one step at a time. Here’s what this movie says — or fails to say.

A fat Canadian pornographer by the name of Geordie (a role which Fitzgerald finds himself suitable enough to play) is sent on a quest for “teen pussy” to the dark and gloomy land of Romania. On the plane he meets a guy whose testicular cancer almost kills him during the flight. Don’t ask me for medical specifics — balls have a mind of their own. This guy is a Canadian diplomat who sticks his finger inside Romanian women and later stirs his whisky with said finger. Pretty standard stuff.

In other story lines — so well developed I wish I could contribute money to send Mr. Fitzgerald back to film school — a dog catcher starts collecting stray dogs in a deserted building, and a bunch of crippled homeless children parade about the screen in an pathetic effort to jerk tears from sensitive liberal Westerners.

Here are some choice scenes aside from “finger inside random woman” that speak to the subtlety of the movie:
— Canadian pornographer has sex with diplomat’s daughter and blackmails diplomat with the footage. As a favor he asks for a passport and a visa for a disabled, homeless child.
— Canadian mother and daughter visit orphanage to play with the abandoned children.
— Canadian daughter of diplomat explains to Canadian photographer why there are so many stray dogs — Ceausescu and his grandeur, much canine sex. She also calls current Romanian president Traian Basescu an “idiot” for wanting to neuter or euthanize the gangs of dogs (that project was in full swing in 2002 when the movie was filmed; Basescu was mayor at the time)
— Canadian pornographer takes pictures of naked Romanian girl who spreads her legs while talking about the greatness that was communism.
— Canadian pornographer decides not to photograph naked 12-year-old girls. He draws this conclusion after crying in the shower — also known as the “oh my God, I need to help these bastards” moment. After such a suculent moment, he decides to focus on the misery and dirt of the Romanian street, bringing it into his Hilton hotel .
— Canadian pornographer (he steals the spotlight, doesn’t he?) gives passport with Canadian visa and scores of dollars to disabled beggar. That is known in the language of film as the “fuck capitalism” moment.

There is some sort of message “The Wild Dogs” is trying to send — so let me attempt to decode its intellectual intricacies:
— there are many disabled crippled children in Romanian who will do anything for money. This must be true as the kids in the movie were recruited from the street and paid for Fitzgerald act of self-congratulatory movie making.
— there are also many dogs and Romanian treat this dogs with the same contempt and hated they treat their children.
— Romanians are so savage and impotent when it comes to changing the status quo, that even a Canadian pornographer can become a humanitarian God.
— Bucharest is as dangerous as a capital city should be. You can have random sex with freaks, midgets and the woman with the foot-long mustache.
— Canadians are so awesome and their hearts so large that it’s no wonder Romanian bum rush its borders.

All said, this movie is exploitative — of the children it portrays, of the myth of a savage post-communist Romania and ultimately of its audience. What angered me even more than the movie itself were the stories and comments written about it — mostly in Canadian newspapers — but not only:

* Perhaps the greatest revelation of the film is the treatment of gypsies. In one scene Geordie is told he can’t bring a gypsy into the Hilton hotel. That would definitely happen in many hotels, bars and restaurants, reports Fitzgerald. “And not just the gypsies, even the short people. The Hilton put security on them because they were so short.” (Toronto Star)

* Our heroic pornographer finds himself compelled to help the crippled and the abandoned he sees within Bucharest. The ambassador’s wife also helps people; the most powerful sequence in The Wild Dogs is a bit in which Watson goes about her day, shopping and dining out, and all the while being followed by a crippled boy to whom she has shown kindness. It is surreal. (Ottawa Sun)

* The Wild Dogs is arresting storytelling, but gloomy as hell, and hell it is. Warning: an ordinarily melancholic viewer may be pushed into a suicidal funk; only the beautiful setting (decaying, of course) offers respite from the bleakness. (Calgary Herald)

* [Fitzgerald] wrote The Wild Dogs, partly to expiate his own guilt, mainly to capture the crazy soul of one of Europe’s most brutalized and defiant peoples. Fitzgerald plays Canadian film director Geordie, who is sent to Bucharest to herd porn starlets and finds exploitation, cynicism and survival in a Romania left stripped and perverted after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. […] We have two very telling quotations for context. Geordie’s producer back in Canada has sent him to Romania “because those girls will stick a bratwurst up their ass for a nickel.” Life is cheap and desperate. Bogdan doesn’t get paid because “Sunday is payday, and nobody works on Sunday.” Life is a paradox. And all around Geordie, life is a carnival of ordinary horrors. (Montreal Gazette)

* There’s a lot to be said against Thom Fitzgerald’s The Wild Dogs, a film which, when faced with abject poverty and suffering, doesn’t really know how to resolve its feelings and resorts to bad doom-laden metaphors in order to compensate. But as it flails wildly in the hopes of hitting a target, there’s no denying that it occasionally does, and that when it does it often scores a direct hit. Even if Fitzgerald can’t solve the problems of a crumbling Bucharest, he evokes the state of wanting to extremely well, thus saving his film from the sanctimony that another director might have brought to the subject. (on some Web site)

* Fitzgerald has been surprised by some of the response to The Wild Dogs, in particular the charge that the film misrepresents Romania itself. “I was making a film about street people, I was not trying to capture an entire culture. People often think in a nationalist scope much of the time. I don’t think this film captures all of the good things about Romania. But that’s not my job. That’s why they have tourism videos.” (Montreal Mirror)

Not much left for me to say. I am so grateful for this truck-load of sympathy delivered by a sensitive writer/director/actor like Thom Fitzgerald. WOOF!