Block the Vote!

Now I’ve screwed everything up.

On March 18, through an electronic poll, MiamiHerald.com asked its readers how they, as Floridians, feel about getting the state's Democratic delegates from the state’s Jan. 29 primary counted at the Democratic National Convention.

As you probably know, the Democratic National Committee told Florida Democrats that their votes won’t count because the state scheduled its primary too early.

There was talk of a mail-in do-over primary, although now it looks that won’t happen.

The question remains whether the delegates could be included without a do-over.

MiamiHerald.com posted a Web reader poll on the issue. The only trouble is, the poll allowed readers from outside Florida to vote, raising the question of whether the results reflect the opinions of none but Floridians.

I know of one case in which a wise guy from the Northeast skewed the results by participating in the poll. Even though he is registered to vote in Massachusetts, he participated even though the issue of the delegates affects him less directly than it does Florida residents.

The Herald asked

a) if delegates should represent the state, with or without a do-over. [``Why should the voters be punished?’’] b) if delegates should be excluded. [``The rules were broken and not counting the votes is the consequence,’’] or c) the delegates should count only if the primary were held again.

So what the heck, although I am registered with the newspaper’s Web site as a Massachusetts resident, I voted, and the Web site did not block my vote.

Of the whopping 257 votes that had been cast, I was one of 47 who, in accordance with my newly discovered principals regarding nominations, clicked on ``C.’’ I was in the minority, among 19 percent, which means that maybe I’m not afraid to espouse unpopular positions.

Option A took 58 percent, B, 47 percent.

Not that my participation made much difference. My vote counted for less than four tenths of 1 percent of the total tally. Also, the poll was crap to begin with. Consider the utter dubiousness of the notion that 257 is representative of the population of Florida. No scientific attempt to poll a demographic cross section was made. Instead it is confined to MiamiHerald.com readers who feel like taking the poll.

It also did not ask whether the poll-taker was registered Democratic or Republican. (I am a Democrat.)

Natalia Muñoz and La Prensa

To the links on this page I have added LinksLatinos Blog Zone, by Natalia Muñoz, who I used to work with in the Northampton, Mass. office of the Union-News.
Muñoz is the founder and editor of La Prensa, a newspaper for Latinos in western Massachusetts. The blog is dynamite. Read ``All Talk'' and ``Five Easy Questions for the Green Candidate,'' for starters.

Don't Tell Me What to Read, Buddy...

The Internet has put many thousands of news sources, as they say, ``just a mouse click away’’ (ouch!). Now there is a mammoth pile of punditry and reports about the mind-numblingly myriad (are the alliterations bugging you? They’re killing me) events out there. Readers must choose between what to take in and what to neglect.

Gone are the days when you can read a few newspapers and catch TV news from one of four networks and consider yourself informed about current events.

I sympathize profoundly with Jan Rooth of Hollandale, Fla. In a March 3 letter to The Miami Herald, Rooth argued that the media provided a great deal of space to the flap regarding Louis Farrakahn’s endorsement of Barack Obama, and the Democratic candidate’s renunciation of Farrakhan, but have done little to point out

[T]he cozy relationship between the Republican Party and dangerous radicals like Hagee.

Rooth was referring to the endorsement of John McCain last month by mega-church evangelist Pastor John Hagee. Hagee has been criticized for attacking catholicism and urging military action against Iran to protect Israel.

Hagee has described the Catholic Church as a ``great whore,’’ and ``the anti-Christ,’’ among other things.

Arguably not a man to have in your camp if you’re trying to win votes.

However, The Washington Post and The New York Times covered the Feb. 27 endorsement and the controversy days before Rooth’s letter appeared. But who could blame Rooth for missing those stories? Although the print version of the Times must be available in southern Florida, the story ran on page 8, according to NYT.com.

Is the print edition of the Post available where Rooth lives? I don’t know. I live in western Massachusetts, which is also far from D.C., and I can get only the Sunday edition. I missed the Times and Post stories, too. I didn’t look them up on the Internet until I read Rooth’s letter, which is the first I’d heard of the endorsement.

The first mention of the endorsement on MiamiHerald.com appeared in the bottom of a Feb. 27 article. The paper next referred to it on March 1.

This overwhelmed ``news consumer’’ (ouch!) thanks you, Jan Rooth.

Starbucks, au Courant

Are the times a-changin’ at Starbucks?

For the Hartford Courant, enough time has for customers to wake up and assess whether they get more of rush from patronizing one of the Seattle-based chain’s cafes than they did a week ago.

Starbucks has taken action to avoid sinking like a stone. On Feb. 26, days after it announced the layoff of 600 employees, Starbucks closed 7,100 stores from 3:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. to train more than 135,000 employees in the fine art of brewing espresso.

Just one week later, on March 4, the Courant ran a verdict story.

Was the Starbucks experience conspicuously improved? Or is it all foam?

One reader called the training a corporate stunt.

Another said Starbucks is great and that she doesn’t mind paying the ``extra few cents.'' A writer, boldly self-identified as ``JP,’’ said ``Pretentious BS, like calling the minimum-wage counter drones `Baristas,’ ‘’ should be ignored. JP doesn't mind five bucks a cup for some brews.

``It’s a cup of coffee,’’ another reader noted. Baristas – Starbucks also calls them ``store partners,’’

[C]ould probably care less and are just being exploited for meager wages by pretentious suburbanites who feel an undeserved sense of entitlement.

By pretentious suburbanites, was this commentator was referring to Starbucks corporate execs or customers, or both? Not clear.

Will Starbucks become a more fun place?

Maybe yes.

Maybe no.

Cracking Tough Nuts

The fun, and often the challenge, in reading letters to newspapers in Bloomsburg, Penn., many of them dating to the 18^th century, is that they are written by folks who are convinced that their message is clear when, to a 21^st century reader who has never been to Bloomsburg, they are baffling. The fun part is witnessing writers stumble. I admit that I often laughed at the attempts at communication from people whom I suspect were often lonely or angry and too confused to know how to say what they wanted to say.

Reading ``Letters to the Editor: Two Hundred Years in the Life of an American Town,’’ can also be tough for the same reason – many of the letters are cryptic. Because I obviously don’t know the background story behind the letters, I had to make a great effort to understand that which is far from self explanatory. Just proves the point that people need to make sense of what’s around them, even if they must momentarily suspend their laughter.

Many letters are charming – or troubling– because they often say more about the writer than what the writer considers to be his or her main point. It’s not what they say, but how they say it.

When he wrote to The Bloomsburg Daily in 1899, W.J. Lanyon (page 125) either didn’t know, or was just finding out, that the Philipine Incursion was not going to be much fun. After shipping off,

``bands playing, guns firing, banners flying and the officers making speeches and all of us singing patriotic songs,’’

the disillusionment of war wastes no time setting in:

``A great many of us are getting seasick now.’’

One of the letters from Christian Reice, on page 118, uses a matter-of-fact tone that makes the letter turn eerie when he describes shooting a man.

``[W]e are within six hundred yards of the Insurgents outpost and they keep firing at us all night. I shot one out of a tree a few days ago. … As soon as I saw him I took aim and fired. The shot took effect but some of his comrades came and carried him away.’’

I have no idea how he felt about shooting the insurgent. Reading between the lines, I see this as a story of a young man who doesn’t know what to make of killing. For the time being, his use of the bloodless ``took effect’’ is the best he can do.

There is Dikeman, who on page 42 objects to young men using canes as an accessory. Apparently canes were just coming into fashion then.

``With what admiration, bordering on ecstasy, would persons from the country look at some of the town exquisites promenading the streets of our goodly borough, with that useful, beautiful and important aid to their walking organs…’’

Dikeman probably was painfully aware that he would never be considered an ``exquisite’’ around town.

Chiming in on page 42 is Harriet, who finds Dikeman’s intolerance insufferable. If we follow Dikeman’s example, Harriet fears, the town might end up cursed by

``some contemptible whiffet scribbling against the use of wigs, curls, lacing, and all the paraphernalia of a lady’s toilette.’’

(A whiffet is a little whiff or puff.)

But earlier, Harriet said there’s no reason why using a cane ``should so excite the spleen of the petty scribbler.’’ Look who’s talking about scribblers with excited spleens, Harriet. Of course, a woman has a right to defend her paraphernalia.

And a fellow has a right to eat. ``One of the Gang,’’ on page 58, admits that his gang was noisy the other night, but they didn’t steal a chicken. They ate a chicken, but they didn’t steal it.

``We hope that no act of ours will ever cause a disturbing wave to ruffle the calm peacefulness of our town, and in the future, should our palates tickle for chicken we will – well – we will eat chicken.’’

The Globe Quietly Scoops the Times

The Boston Globe did it right.

The New York Times’ dubious piece that asserted that John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist whose ``clients often had with business before McCain’s Senate committee’’ – and thereby violating egregiously the public trust – was really nothing more than a stale recapitulation of a story of a man who has crusaded for government ethics. And who also has a habit of pushing ethical boundaries.

To keep the story from being nothing but old news, the Times added the hook of the Affair-that-Probably-Wasn’t to make it smell like fresh information.

On March 29, the Globe actually got something, no sex necessary. The paper reported that McCain, co-author of the McCain-Feingold campaign financing bill, is trying to get out of his own, legally binding, commitment to spending limits dictated by a law that dates to the Nixon Administration.

McCain applied for public funding – with a stipulated limit on campaign spending – when his campaign was broke. Now that he is raising tons of cash, he is trying to get out of the arrangement.

The Globe says McCain’s campaign used his eligibility for public funding to get on the ballots in Delaware and Ohio, ``instead of taking the time – and expense – of gathering signatures.’’

If McCain, the apparent Republican nominee, is not allowed to spend more than the law’s $85 million limit, he won’t be able to ``pay for ads, mailings, polls or travel,’’ until September, when the general election season begins.

McCain and Barack Obama had agreed to abide by the law if they face each other in the general election. Now that he is raising his own load of money, Obama is having second thoughts.

Three Pegs, the Same Hole

It’s not a comfortable topic.

A column by humorist and Miami Herald blogger Dave Barry on getting his first colonoscopy -- 10 years later than he should have -- drew two responses, one by an ``expert’’ and another from a person who, although she did not have a title, has been there. Both think the column will be helpful.

The American Cancer Society estimated that 148,810 Americans will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer this year, and 50,000 will die, wrote Phyllis Teitlebaum, the RN coordinator at the Cancer Resource Service, Baptist-South Miami Regional Cancer Program in Miami.

Most important, Barry pointed out that

The fear of having a colonoscopy is far worse than having one,

she said.

Ana Maria Bacallo of Miami described herself as part ``of the over-50 crowd that has had this dreaded test.’’

The bark is worse than the bite,

she said.

Barry got his first colonoscopy at 60, after his brother Sam reported that he had learned, by way of the procedure, that he had cancer. (Sam’s cancer was removed surgically. Barry's results were negative.)

Barry’s describes MoviProp, which they make you drink before the exam to clear out the colon, as ``a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleaner, with a hint of lemon’’

``Have you ever seen a space shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviProp experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt.

Then

``you have to drink another liter of MoviProp, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.’’

Just Don't Ask Me to Define `Insanity'

Feb. 25, 2008

Dear Karin Wahl-Jorgensen:

Last night I finished reading your ``Journalists and the Public’’ for the Feedback Journalism class at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Interesting to read about the criteria that cause editors to eliminate letters from publication. During 11 years, I struggled with attempting objectivity and the pain of feeling the deadline pressure shaping my work into pre-fabrication. However, I had only a vague idea of what an editor’s job is like, and none about a letters editor’s job.

I was most interested to read in chapter six about editors’ ``expression preferences.’’ I was grateful that you pointed out that political movements used to contain a great deal of emotion, if emotions weren’t their only fuel. I suspect that activists who shun emotion in their public communications now have for some reason decided that they must take an objective tone, and their feelings have nothing have to do with objectivity. Why did we become so hung up on trying for objectivity anywhere and everywhere?

``Though the embarrassing, the painful, the wonderful, the funny, and the beautiful textures of our lives may be grounded in experiences of a deeply personal nature, perhaps they are also the only experiences we can truly share with others, and speaking about them the only way to link us together in an emphatic pursuit of the elusive common good.’’

Really nice.

Although the use of objectivity and nothing else cuts out a lot of useful communication, I still want and expect at least an attempt at objectivity in news reports. One way for the public to get around the limitations of newspaper objectivity could be in the use of blogs. That is, blogs that aren’t written by crazy people, but more on that in a minute.

The only trouble with your recommendation that letters editors get more time to find letter writers and spend more time editing shaky letters into readable form, is that it is kind of thin. As Bob Dylan said, I don’t think that’s liable to happen / like the sound of one hand clappin.’ For publishers and owners, time is money and that rule is gonna remain inert short of sea change. Those people just don’t give a damn.

Depressing to read that editors speak an ``idiom of insanity.’’ But it seems all too clear, based on what I read in your book, that a lot of the letter writers are ``insane,’’ or close to it. They produce an avalanche of letters that just don’t qualify. Buried under the avalanche, the editors had the idiom forced on them.

So I walked away from your book wondering how people who don’t employ emotion and their experiences in politics could be persuaded to do so. I also suspect that letters sections won’t get better until we figure out why there are so many ``insane’’ writers out there. A lot of folks aren’t born crazy, they’re driven to insanity. Good news articles could explore why this is, and how to change it.

All That Bad, Bad Stuff

From three whole weeks of reading The Miami Herald, I’ve gained the impression that its readership is passionate. They are split over the plan, passed this week by the city and county governments, to construct a traffic tunnel and a new stadium for the Florida Marlins. The main sticking point is that the plan, slated at nearly $500 million, was never put to referendum.

This has lead many readers to cite this as a symptom of rampant corruption. The old-boy network has taken money from taxpayers and from two redevelopment authorities that were not chartered for large-scale commercial development projects. The old-boy network gave the money to their own – the elites who are going to make big bucks from the development.

And – this is an ugly issue, but it must be mentioned – there is a fair amount of acrimony against the community of Cuban exiles. The Herald, like many, many other media outlets, allows readers to post responses to its stories, blogs, letters to the editor and columnists.

After President Fidel Castro announced his resignation this week, the flood of such remarks for and against were often acrimonious, bitter. Although many were concerned with Castro’s decision to quit, often they spoke either for or against the value of the Cuban community in Miami. I have used the word ugly, and ugly some were.

The instant on-line comments on any Herald item are often odious, Herald ombudsman Edward Shumacher-Matos, said in a column from Dec. 16, 2007. Put another way, the paper has a problem with ``ranters.’’

The problem is so bad, he said, that it begs for some sort of regulation of the Internet.

After the Herald informed its readers of the shooting death of the Washington Redskins’ safety Sean Taylor in November,

``Taylor was called a `thug,’ and an `animal.’ Contributors, with absolutely no evidence, openly speculated under The Miami Herald’s banner whether a drug deal or sexual cheating was involved. In what amounts to a public tarring, some suggested that Taylor’s virtual wife, the mother of his 18-month-old child and long-time partner, did it.’’

The Herald deleted responses that were actually much worse, Shumacher-Matos said. In a column from Dec. 16, 2007, he said the paper uses software that screens out remarks that include offensive words. I’ve seen words using the dollar sign instead of the letter S.

Herald editors don’t take unilateral initiative to delete the offensive material, Shumacher-Matos said. Instead editors ``react to readers who complain by clicking on a box next to each comment’’ before deleting messages.

Part of the answer might lies with requiring readers to register with the paper’s Web site before they submit their comments, Shumacher-Matos said.

``Registration… is a must. On the Taylor story, both ESPN.com and WashingtonPost.com reported far fewer offensive materials than The Miami Herald. One difference is that those sites require registration, including confirmation of the reader’s e-mail address.’’

Regarding registration: Right now the Herald requires on-line readers to register by providing, along with an e-mail address, a user name, password, first and last name, the city or town, state and country where the reader lives, their gender, year of birth, and to indicate whether they subscribe to the Herald’s print edition.

The same information, and nothing more, is asked of those who want to post comments on stories.

By e-mail I asked Shumacher-Matos whether the registration system is the one he had in mind in December, or whether a new one is in the works.

Regarding deletion of offensive messages, I asked Shumacher-Matos if Herald editors will delete a message even if they considered it inoffensive, just because a reader clicks on the ``Report as violation’’ link.

I got an automated reply saying editors and Shumacher-Matos consider ``issues of coverage, readers [sic] questions and significant media topics and writing occasional articles’’ about them.

More on the issue of deletion of offensive messages in the post below this one.

Shumacher-Matos said the Herald must be willing to spend money to hire editors who would review comments before they are posted, as the New York Times has done.

There are people out there who believe that the Internet should not be regulated, and many medium are not ready to challenge that belief, he said.

``Media companies today, with reader and viewership numbers dropping along with their stock prices, are further cowed by the arrogant claims of the ascendant internet culture and its Ayn-Rand like absolutism against any controls.’’

In November 2007, the number of visitors to MiamiHerald.com was up 66 percent from the previous year, Shumacher-Matos said.

``(R)egistration might slow or even temporarily reverse such strong growth. I suspect from their language that the ranters in the site are not the young, upwardly mobile or educated readers that the Miami Herald and its advertisers want.’’

This reminds me of what Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, in ``Journalists and the Public: Newsroom Culture, Letters to the Editor, and the Public,’’ discussed as the ``normative-economic’’ approach that editors use to decide which letters to publish. The idea is that a desirable letter will promote public debate and increase circulation at the same time.

But editors can keep letters with racist, sexist and homophobic, etc., material out of a newspaper.

Not so easy to keep the crap off the on-line instant comment board.

Shumacher-Matos said,

… (I)f news is moving from being a lecture to a conversation with readers, then readers must be transparent and play by the same ethical rules as the media… The law may catch up with the internet anyway, and should.’’

Pedantic Nation, tasteless National Review

I cannot be the only one who has wondered if political candidates gain or lose votes because of endorsements. Perhaps there really are folks who wait for other people to make up their minds for them. They look to their federal or state representative or mayor, or labor union, etc., to dictate their vote.

But I can’t help but think that most people, even before the endorsements roll in, have gone a good distance toward deciding how they are going to vote – if they plan to vote at all.

This would apply even if the endorsement comes from an influential senator – Ted Kennedy, for example. Although the endorsements last month of Senator Barack Obama by Kennedy, his son U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy and niece Caroline Kennedy, as the Democratic presidential nominee, may influence few voters during the primary season, they certainly were taken seriously by at least two political journals – The Nation and The National Review.

The Nation had high praise for Ted Kennedy. No one else in the history of the Senate, the lefty journal intoned, has been ``a more consistent fighter for an enlightened agenda, be it civil rights and liberty, gender equality, labor and immigrant justice, environmental protection, educational opportunity or opposing military measures.’’

Kennedy was ``a rare sane voice among the Democrats in strongly opposing the Iraq war…’’ and he endorsed Obama in part for also opposing the war. ``And let no one deny that truth,’’ The Nation quotes Kennedy as saying.

This is all to dump on Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize the war. The Nation said that Hillary would probably – only probably – be a better candidate than the Republican nominee. The Nation also excoriated her for doing less than John McCain to fight Pentagon waste and minimize the power of lobbyists. The ``war profiteers’’ have given her more money than to McCain. She gets a noticeable amount of cash from ``the bankers, Wall Street traders and other swindlers who produced our economic meltdown…’’

The point of the blog on the conservative Review’s cite is that while Obama may have the Kennedys’ endorsements, he is no Jack Kennedy (the article actually uses the cliché as its title) – at least not yet, because he hasn’t shown that he understands that ``the great question of modern history is whether free governments or coercive governments will prevail,’’ as Kennedy had comprehended.

But the Review can’t resist the temptation of indulging in reminders of Chappaquidick and Bill Clinton’s philandering. It jokes that Kennedy endorsed Obama out of jealousy. ``The Kennedys, after all, didn’t get three full years at the White House. And now Bubba and his consort, hillbillies practically, are trying to add four more years to their eight.’’

Since when did the assassination become the stuff of humor? But seriously, folks, this is a reprehensible statement.

Although The Nation blog is earnest and pedantic, it least it has the guts to lay into a candidate who stands in approximation to its political perspective. In other words, the candidate is a Democrat. The blog is also much more substantive than the Review's posting.

The National Review has bad things to say about almost every Democrat it mentions. I don’t have a problem with that, but I don’t like the way the Review says the bad things.

Maybe the Review blogger, sticking it to the ``hillbillies,’’ had more fun writing his commentary than did the Nation blogger. But – surprise – politics isn’t always about fun. We would hope it would be about substance, and responsibility.