COMM 337: PoMo on Wall Street

If you're taking COMM 386, you ought to read this too. It has a clear exposition of how one of the theories of postmodernism we're studying plays out in the world of finance and government.

An article in The New Yorker explains the Wall Street credit crisis from a standpoint of literary theory. Unexpectedly, it makes sense.

The story is by John Lanchester, who is a novelist, a literary critic and a a member of the editorial board of the London Review of Books.

Lanchester compares the derivatives or

The crisis began with defaulting subprime mortgages, and spread throughout the international financial system. Thanks to the new world of derivatives and credit-default swaps, nobody really knows who is at risk from the wonderfully named “toxic debt” at the heart of the trouble. As a result, banks are reluctant to lend to each other, and, since the entire financial system depends on interbank liquidity, the entire financial system is at risk. It is for this reason that Warren Buffett was doubly right to compare the new financial products to “weapons of mass destruction”—first, because they are lethal, and, second, because no one knows how to track them down.

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an “aporia,” from a Greek term meaning “impasse.” There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. Anyone invited to attend a meeting of the G-8 financial ministers would be well advised not to draw their attention to this.

The result of our era of financial deconstruction has been a decades-long free-for-all of deregulation and (for the most part) bull markets, ending in partial nationalization. It’s like a surreal parody of what happened in the former Soviet Union, with decades of socialism ending in the overnight transition to a full market economy. ...

COMM 386: Two stories on race in International Herald Trib

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/07/america/07race.php "Tolerance over race can spread, studies find"

WASHINGTON: It popped out casually, a throwaway line as Barack Obama talked to reporters about finding the right puppy for his young daughters.

But with just three offhand words in his first news conference as president-elect, Obama reminded everyone how thoroughly different his administration — and inevitably, the United States — will be.

"Mutts like me."

In American English, a mutt is a mixed breed dog.

"Obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me," Obama said with a smile [at the news conference]. "So whether we're going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household."

Benedict Carey
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/07/america/07race.php "Tolerance over race can spread, studies find"

This was supposed to be the election when hidden racism would rear its head. There was much talk of a "Bradley effect," in which white voters would say one thing to pollsters and do another in the privacy of the booth; of a backlash in which the working-class whites whom Senator Barack Obama had labeled "bitter" would take their bitterness out on him.

But lost in all that anguished commentary, experts say, was an important recent finding from the study of prejudice: that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion.

In some new studies, psychologists have been able to establish a close relationship between diverse pairs — black and white, Latino and Asian, black and Latino — in a matter of hours. That relationship immediately reduces conscious and unconscious bias in both people, and also significantly reduces prejudice toward the other group in each individual's close friends.

This extended-contact effect, as it is called, travels like a benign virus through an entire peer group, counteracting subtle or not so subtle mistrust.

Postman

excerpts from the book
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Broadcast_Media/AmusingOurselves_Postman.html

p106The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window to the world, has made Americans exceedingly well informed. Much depends here, of course, on what is meant by being informed. I will pass over the now tiresome polls that tell us that, at any given moment, 70 percent of our citizens do not know who is the Secretary of State or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Let us consider, instead, the case of Iran during the drama that was called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis." I don't suppose there has been a story in years that received more continuous attention from television. We may assume, then, that Americans know most of what there is to know about this unhappy event. And now, I put these questions to you: Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one American in a hundred knows what language the Iranians speak? Or what the word ``Ayatollah" means or implies? Or knows any details of the tenets of Iranian religious beliefs? Or the main outlines of their political history? Or knows who the Shah was, and where he came from?
Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us.

* * *

... I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

COMM 386: Conversation on race?

Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post hardly ever gives his opinion, but today he he gave his opinion that President-elect Barack Obama's victory means race "is no longer an issue" in presidential politics. Kurtz said:

His election does not eliminate racial prejudice in this country with a single stroke. Nor does it instantly improve the lot of many minorities. But it changes the way America views itself, somewhat to our collective surprise, and that is no small accomplishment.

Obama did not run as a racial candidate, in the manner of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, although occasionally he had to address race. A two-year campaign enabled America to get to know him and to judge him, against the competition, on the content of his character. He was right, though it brought accusations from the McCain campaign, that he does not look like the other presidents on dollar bills. But with a financial crisis looming, it's worth remembering that the color of those bills is green.

In the short term, at least, the country is feeling pretty good about itself ...

Kurtz quotes a number of pundits, who were out in full force today, to more or less the same effect.

A few sour notes were sounded (in my opinion), as when writing for New Republic, Alan Wolfe says, "The single most disturbing aspect of last night's election is the transformation of the Republican Party into the party of the Confederacy." Kurtz takes exception to this pronouncement:

This strikes me as unfair. I'm sure there are good old boys in the southern states who would not vote for a black candidate. But maybe millions of southerners decided John McCain was a more experienced nominee who better reflected their views. How can we just write them off as racists?

I'm just Southern enough to agree with Kurtz on this one.

In yesterday's column, sounded the same chords as he surveyed election night reaction.

But by and large, race hasn't been mentioned very much in this year's campaign coverage ... except as the "elephant in the room" that nobody wants to talk about.

One exception to that is Dawn Turner Trice, who began an interactive blog called "Exploring Race" in the spring after controversy over Obama's former pastor raised racial issues in a big way.

Trice, who is black, weighed in with a brief commentary headlined "Was this race a referendum on race?" Her answer: Not as much as she'd feared.

Trice's style on the blog is to raise questions and let the readers answer them. So the result is something like the national conversation about race that she, and others, hoped would occur when the uproar over the pastor was in the headlines. A lot of the time it reads like the discourse in any other electronic forum -- dogmatic, cranky and ill-thought-out -- but what Trice is attempting here is very interesting. Worth looking at.

I'll pose a question: How well do the media handle racial issues? How well does Trice's blog? Does the election analysis comprise a national conversation on race? (The term was President Bill Clinton's. He tried it in 1997 and didn't get very far with it. Can we have such a conversation now? Should we?

COMM 337: Three deadline articles in The Washington Post

Out of the welter of coverage of last night's election, three articles stand out in my mind. They're not the three best. There's a lot of good stuff out there I've barely had time to look at. (Including an editorial in Springfield's State Journal-Register that notes "we’ve had an especially good seat to the making of this piece of history" and adds, "We hope Obama’s conciliatory demeanor can be a balm for a nation that has spent two years arguing itself into red-faced anger.") These three just happen to be articles I read this morning on The Washington Post's website.

The first was a historical analysis by Kevin Merida, staff writer and author of a biography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The headline:

A DAY OF TRANSFORMATION
America's History Gives Way to Its Future

Here's Merida's lede, obviously written on deadline (although I doubt the rest of the story was, and I want us to look at it in class and see where the transition might have come):

After a day of runaway lines that circled blocks, of ladies hobbling on canes and drummers rollicking on street corners, the enormous significance of Barack Obama's election finally began to sink into the landscape. The magnitude of his win suggested that the country itself might be in a gravitational pull toward a rebirth that some were slow to recognize.

Tears flowed, not only for Obama's historic achievement, but because many were happily discovering that perhaps they had underestimated possibility in America.

When the novelist Kim McLarin watched her vote being recorded at her polling station in Milton, Mass., she stood still for a moment with her 8-year-old son, Isaac.

"My heart was full. I could scarcely breathe," she said. "What I've been forced to acknowledge is there has been a shift -- it's not a sea change. But there's been a decided shift in the meaning of race. It's not an ending. It's a beginning."

What kind of beginning it is, Americans were wrestling with late into the night, some popping champagne and others burdened with unease. Would enduring strains of intolerance lose their power or gain rebellious steam? Could new hope be harnessed to create new solutions? Is America ready to pull itself together or resigned to live divided? The campaign that began for Obama 21 months ago had raised in stark terms whether America was ready for a black president. Last night's answer -- a resounding yes -- raises the next question: How much more change will America embrace?

Another story, by metro reporter Bill Turque, details
the celebrations on the streets of Washington as the returns came in.

When history landed, it was with car horns, tears, gunfire and echoes from historic corners of the city.

In a heavy drizzle shortly after midnight, several thousand people filled the barricaded segment of Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets in front of the White House dancing and chanting "O-ba-ma!" and "Whose house? Obama's house!" Some sang "America the Beautiful" and "Star Spangled Banner."

At 14th and U streets NW, hundreds of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters chanted, "Yes, we can!" People danced on bus shelters. Strangers hugged.

And Greg Rhett emerged from the Madison Hotel, pumping his fist as tears welled.
"Now the healing begins," said Rhett, 50, a consultant who lives in Ward 7. Now I can tell my 4-year-old you really can be whatever you want to be," he said. "We're going to get it right this time." Behind him, his wife, Candace, screamed at the top of her lungs:

"President Obama!"

The third story was from Obama's ancestral home of Kenya. Stephanie McCrummen, foreign correspondent, reported:

KOGELO, Kenya, Nov. 5 -- The news arrived in this rural village as the sun rose Wednesday, the voice of CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer drifting across a gathering of several hundred people who'd hoped for months, prayed for hours and finally stayed up all the cool night watching U.S. presidential election returns projected on a big white sheet.

More details followed, including this:

And in this dirt-road village of farmers where Obama's father grew up, the news left people hugging and dancing, hoisting the white plastic chairs they'd sat on all night. They waved palm branches or sang or just stood there as John Odihiambo did, taking it all in, tears in his eyes.

"It's like a miracle," he said, confessing to a cynicism that seemed to vanish with Obama's victory. "There was that doubt that with black-white relations in America, a black man could not be elected. But he was," said Odihiambo, a government worker who drew a parallel that many here did, between overcoming racism in the U.S. and rising above tribalism, the bane of Kenyan society. "If America can elect a black man, then why can't Kenya shun tribalism and elect anyone, regardless of tribe?"

And this at the end, which gives McCrummen kind of a different "kicker" for her story:

"It's wonderful," said [Bonaventure] Mboya, the textbook salesman, who heard the news on BBC and sent his wife a one-line text message that speaks to how personally people here took Obama's campaign: "We have done it," the message read.

"He's suggesting that the world has finally changed," Mboya said.

As Obama began to invoke the signature line of his campaign -- "yes we can" -- one last time before a sea of supporters in Chicago, a Kenyan on the other side of the world finished the speech for him.
"Twa wenza," Mboya said, offering the phrase in Swahili.

COMM 386: President-elect Obama, the Trib and a sense of history

Within an hour of President-elect Barack Obama's victory speech in Grant Park, the Chicago Tribune was up on its website with an editorial on its historical significance. It was, as Obama said, a "defining moment." And editorials like the Trib's help define moments like this.

(How do papers react so quickly to events? Easy. They write the editorials ahead of time. My guess: The Trib would have had another editorial, equally well argued, all written and ready to put up on the website if Republican John McCain had won.)

Anyway, the Trib has been invoking Abraham Lincoln lately. And I've noticed more historical references in the media lately, from a long piece on President Andrew Jackson's legacy means today in Newsweek to the chorus of media commentators tonight talking about how extraordinary Obama's victory is and how it fulfills what historical figures like Dr. Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass fought for. To give credit where it's due, the media have tried hard lately to rise above the cliches about lipstick on pigs and endless "horserace" coverage. They've tried to put things into perspective, often hard to do on daily and weekly deadlines.

At any rate, the Trib mentioned Lincoln again in the Obama editorial. The lede:

On Feb. 12, Americans will celebrate the birthday of their most important and most beloved president. Abraham Lincoln entered the world on that date in 1809 in a cabin near Hodgenville, Ky.

His bicentennial would be an important occasion under any circumstances. But it will carry even greater symbolic significance because of something scheduled to happen three weeks earlier: the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States.

Obama’s victory is one of those events that reveal how far the nation has traveled. ...

Chicago writer Studs Terkel, who died just last week, used to say American has a national case of Altzheimer's disease. But in the last few days, maybe it's been in remission.

Another issue the Trib touched on was civility, and it saw hope in Obama's refusal to get down in the briar patch with his opponents:

There are other reasons to celebrate the election of this citizen of Chicago—the only one ever elevated to the White House. Obama won by appealing to a deep yearning for national reconciliation and unity that spans partisan divides. From the moment he captured national attention with a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to the last day of this campaign, he reminded us that amid our often-contentious diversity, we are one nation joined in a common mission.

Skeptics often questioned his approach, insisting that it made him look weak and was doomed to fail. But even when he was losing primaries to Hillary Clinton, even when Republicans painted him as an anti-American socialist, Obama retained the composure and intelligence that he has always shown under pressure.

While ably defending himself and pointing out his opponents’ shortcomings, he declined to descend into angry invective. By winning, he raises the hope of a more civil polity. His moderate tone may also ease the pain felt by John McCain’s supporters, who will be waiting to see whether his administration is as inclusive as his rhetoric.

McCain deserves credit for this, too. But the Trib's editorial predicted, I think quite correctly, that "America’s political rancor won’t instantly disappear." The Trib said defusing it will be one of Obama's great challenges:

Pollster Peter Hart recently found that one-third of each candidate’s supporters have come to “detest” McCain or Obama so thoroughly that they couldn’t accept him as president. Hart asked a Wall Street Journal reporter, “How do you knit a nation back together with this kind of animosity?”

That remains a challenge. But Obama could not have dared to run for president if he didn’t believe his fellow citizens could overcome the pitfalls of the past and the present to achieve a better future.

MSNBC widget

Linked to a story on "Where to Watch Election Night Online" in The New Observer ... which looks like an interesting publication in its own right.

COMM 386: Civility

In class this afternoon, somebody mentioned an elementary school kid who voted for Barack Obama in a class election but who had nice things to say about John McCain, too.

I was reminded of that kid tonight when I read Peggy Noonan's endorsement of Obama, which was in The Wall Street Journal last week. "Something new is happening in America," she said. "It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life. Life moves." She's been leaning this way for several months.

But of McCain, she told a story. Noonan is at her best when she's telling stories. This one went like this:

... It was a night during the Republican Convention in September, and two former U.S. senators, who had served with Mr. McCain for a combined 16 years, were having drinks in a hotel dining room. I told them I collected stories of senators who’d been cursed out by John McCain, and they laughed and told me of times they’d been the target of his wrath on the Senate floor.

The talk turned to presidents they had known, and why they had wanted the job. This one wanted it as the last item on his résumé, that one wanted it out of an inflated sense of personal destiny. Is that why Mr. McCain wants it? “No”, said one, reflectively. “He wants to help the country.” The other added, with almost an air of wonder, “He wants to make America stronger, he really does.” And then they spoke, these two men who’d been bruised by him, of John McCain’s honest patriotism.

It's called civility or civic virtue. Webster's defines it as "civilized conduct; especially courtesy, politeness." And Wikipedia says it "a foundational principle of society and law." We need more of it, and it may not be too much to hope this year's election restores a measure of it to American political life.

COMM 386: Election? What election? We've got a book (and companion website) to read ... but it'll get back to the election, anyway

The website is put up by the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and its address is: http://www.concernedjournalists.org/ ... kind of a plain vanilla name, if you ask me (and nobody did), but easy to remember. Concerned journalists dot-org. Kind of sticks in your mind, doesn't it? I hope it does, 'cause we'll be visiting it as the semester dwindles down to our last few precious days together. So let's take a break from the Nov. 4 election, which is at risk of settling into a same-ole same-ole pattern, anyway ...

So let's surf the website, and the top story below the nameplate is by Tom Avila, and it's headlined "What the Campaign is Teaching Me: The Opposite of Hate is Journalism." A staffer for the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, Avila is concerned about "the level of anger and, frankly, outright hatred that we’ve seen" toward candidates in both presidential camps. His concern reflects the hostility so often shown to people of his sexual orientation, but he brings the discussion back to journalism as he says, "the role of the journalist is an incredibly crucial one right now. While I have never wished to be wrong more than I do right now, I think that the ugliness we are seeing is a glimmer of what might come to pass come the early hours of Nov. 5."

So it goes. The next most prominent story on the CCJ website is also about the election. It's headed "Conflict and Conflation of Race and Gender," and it's by author and CCJ trainer Tracy Thompson. She wrote it in March, but it's still timely because she goes deeper than the day's headlines as she writes, "We live in fractured times, ... and this conflict mentality long ago stopped being a useful method of understanding the world -- which, after all, is what journalism is supposed to be about." Her view is nuanced and complex, as she explores the tension between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, black and white feminists and journalists who transition from daily deadlines to free-lancing as their are children and they take on caregiving obligations.

Or Jon Margolis, who covered politics for The Chicago Tribune for years, then went to the "toy department" (sports desk) and now free-lances from his home in Vermont. He has a column on "postmodern" election coverage in which he notes "the campaign and its coverage have been about ... the campaign and its coverage." He explains:

Did Barack Obama call Sarah Palin a pig? Did John McCain say you have to earn $5 million a year to be considered rich? Does Obama really want to teach kindergartners about sex? Are McCain’s campaign ads dishonest?

Forget for a minute that the answers to these questions are: No, No, No and (with Karl Rove’s apparent endorsement) Yes. Instead, just think about their connections to the world outside the campaign. Minimal at best. Not only are the candidates and their talking heads squabbling about events almost entirely unrelated to such mundane matters as war, peace, prosperity, schools, health care and such, but they are squabbling over the coverage of these squabbles, with Obama-ites complaining that the press isn’t forthrightly condemning McCain’s ads and the McCainiacs proclaiming they don’t give a hoot what the “elite media” say.

Margolis says both campaign and coverage are "ironic and absurd [and] ... self-referential," just like postmodernism.

Margolis wrote when the financial crisis upended the presidential race. And given his subject matter, I think we have to allow for the possiblity he's being a little ironic, absurd and self-referential here, at least around the edges. But I think he's onto something important here.

(Disclaimer: My ears perk up when I hear the word "postmodern." So should yours, since I've been known to ask about it on final exams.)

Anyway, let's look at Margois' article, headlined "Post-Modern Campaign Needs Reporters Rooted in the Now." Part of it is about ancient history, Nixon and Vietnam and stuff like that, and part of it can be written off to nostalgia on the part of a reporter who covered the '68 election. But, again, Margolis' column is and I think he's onto something.

And, not to be self-referential, it is the kind of thing that's been known to pop up on my final exams.

Studs Terkel, May 16, 1912-Oct. 31, 2008 / COMM 337 ASSIGNMENT

The death of Louis "Studs" Terkel, Chicago radio host and author of at least a half dozen highly regarded oral histories, led the Chicago news websites this weekend. His primary medium was radio, but he was a fixture on the city's literary and music scenes, especially jazz and gospel, and he fought for equal rights. The coverage of his death is worth reading, not only for their insights into how a skilled interviewer and journalist went about his business but also because some of them are unusually well written themselves.

Your assignment: Follow the links below, and read up on Studs Terkel. Look especially for: (1) quotes from Terkel offering insights you can use in your own writing and/or interview techniques; (2) other wisdom of Terkel's you can use in your career; (3) tricks or techniques in the obits you can copy: and (4) anything else that strikes your fancy. Post your reactions to your blog: What did you learn that you can use from reading about him?

Studs Terkel did so many things, and he did so many of them so well, I'd encourage each of you will find a different focus as you read. (Example: I'm especially interested in his friendship with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and other musicians, since Terkel almost single-handedly brought black gospel music as it was performed on the highly segregated South Side of Chicago to white audiences, but that's only a small part of what Terkel did over the years.) With the links below, I've tried to pull out quotes from different writers that try to give a balanced, overall assessment of the guy. As you read the stories I've linked to, I think you'll find a lot more than that. So follow your own interests.

First we'll listen to a little bit of Terkel and -- if the link is still active -- watch a 2:44min. video clip. National Public Radio has a an obit and sound clips including two-minute clips "On Finding Stories And Storytellers" and " On 'Journalism Against the Grain." And The Chicago Tribune has several videos linked to the front page of its website (or did over the weekend -- we'll have to see if they still work by class time Monday). But mostly, we'll read about Terkel.

Terkel's obituary on the Chicago Sun-Times' website Friday, by columnist Neil Steinberg, tries to sum up his career in the lede:

Studs Terkel turned the voice of average Americans into a font of history.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning author, television pioneer, theatrical actor, long-time radio host, unrepentant leftie and friend of the little man, died peacefully at his home on the North Side of Chicago this afternoon.

He was 96.

"He had a very full, eventful and sometimes tempestuous life ," said his son Dan. "It was very satisfactory"

Studs — calling him "Mr. Terkel" always seemed overly formal — was a character. He liked to wear a red-checked shirt, a rumpled suit and had a stogie jammed in the side of his thick-lipped mouth. He enjoyed a martini well into his 90s.

Though his dozen books were national best-sellers — Division Street America, and Working and The Good War — Studs was best known to many Chicagoans as an interviewer who hosted a talk show on radio station WFMT from 1952 to 1997.

Steinberg comes close, but Studs Terkel did so many things, and did them so well, you can't really sum up his career in a few grafs.

At the end of Friday's obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Rick Kogan also comes close:

... he said with zest that when he "checked out"--as a "hotel kid" he rarely used the word "dying," preferring the euphemism "checking out" and its variants--he wanted to be cremated. He wanted his ashes mixed with those of his wife, which sat in an urn in the living room of his house, near the bed in which he slept and dreamed.

"My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat,'." he said.

He then said that he wanted his and Ida's ashes to be scattered in Bughouse Square, that patch of green park that so informed his first years in his adopted city.

"Scatter us there," he said, a gleeful grin on his face. "It's against the law. Let 'em sue us."

Terkel is survived by his son. A memorial service is planned.

An appreciation by Patrick Reardon, senior reporter for the Trib:

It would be wrong to say Terkel was colorblind. He was deeply curious, deeply intrigued, about all the colors of the rainbow, whether in skin tones or political stripes or philosophical shadings. His only bias was on behalf of the powerless, the oppressed and the unheard.

And those on the margins responded in kind.

Also in the Trib, metro lifestyle columnist Mary Schmich notes some irony: "I'm told that Studs' absentee ballot arrived in the mail the same day he died, and he didn't get to vote. But his work, his hope, are among the reasons that 96 years after he was born it's possible that by Wednesday we'll have elected our first black president."

One of the best is in the lede to Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert's reminiscence. He says:

So there wasn't a World Series in Chicago, and Studs missed the 2008 Presidential election. Other than that, Louis (Studs) Terkel did everything possible in 96 years.

Was he the greatest Chicagoan? I cannot think of another. For me, he represented the joyous, scrappy, liberal, generous, wise-cracking heart of this city. If you met him, he was your friend. That happened to the hundreds and hundreds of people he interviewed for his radio show and 20 best-selling books. He wrote down the oral histories of those of his time who did not have a voice. In conversation he could draw up every single one of their names.

Ebert also links to a birthday tribute in May headlined "How Studs helps me lead my life."

By Saturday, editorials were going up on the Web. The Trib's was headlined simply "Studs" ... it ended with something I never would have expected. But maybe it summed him up best of all:

It is inconceivable that such a long and creative life would have passed without someone asking Terkel the signature question of all ages, "What is your work all about?"

That happened a few years ago. Terkel's answer was simple, revealing, profound. All those books, he said, were about redemption.

"Anybody can be redeemed," he said.

"I've seen it."

How Sarah Palin Was Unmasked / CBS News

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/31/business/marketwatch/main4559732.shtml

Three observations:

1. Nathan Thornburgh was "working the edges of the story," as I like to call it. Instead of going to the McCain-Palin rally in Ohio, the center of where the action was, he booked a flight to Anchorage.

2. They're measuring readership by clicks or unique page views instead of circulation -- "For instance, a recent story on Palin ... drew 508,980 page views, according to Time spokesman Daniel Kile." Before the Internet, there was no good way to measure how many people read a given story.

3. His resume sort of works the edges of the profession, to coin a phrase. Instead of majoring in print journalism at something like the Medill School, he taught English, played saxaphone and started writing music reviews in an alternative weekly. My kind of guy? Maybe, for someone who got a Ph.D. in Shakespeare and went next to covering the Anderson County (Tenn.) sheriff's police next.

COMM 337: Assignment for last analytical paper

You have two choices:

• Analyze the story in terms of its structure, as Donald Murray discusses structure in terms of "story line," conflict, tension and surprise ... i.e. an organic structure determined in part by the content of the story.
  
• Analyze it as a piece of creative nonfiction ... according to Wikipedia (at least today), "[f]or a text to be considered creative nonfiction, it must be factually accurate, and written with attention to literary style and technique."

COMM 386: Media bias? Yep. But not what you think it is ...

Howard Kurtz' analysis of media bias in today's "Media Notes" column hits a nail on the head. Rather, one of the stories that Kurtz quotes hits the nail on the head.


It's an article by John Harris and Jim VandeHei of Politico.com, who acknowledge McCain and Palin are "getting hosed i the press, and at Politico":

"Responsible editors would be foolish not to ask themselves the bias question, especially in the closing days of an election. But, having asked it, our sincere answer is that of the factors driving coverage of this election -- and making it less enjoyable for McCain to read his daily clip file than for Obama -- ideological favoritism ranks virtually nil ...

"Reporters obsess about personalities and process, about whose staff are jerks or whether they seem like decent folks, about who has a great stump speech or is funnier in person than they come off in public, about whether Michigan is in play or off the table. This is the flip side of the fact of how much we care about the horse race -- we don't care that much about our own opinions of which candidate would do more for world peace or tax cuts."

Harris' and VandeHei's column is worth reading, too. It's the only time I've seen a lede quoting the journalists' mothers in an article on bias. I'm not sure they pull it off, but the idea of quoting someone who's supposed to be biased in that context is kind of cute.

COMM 337: Surprise!

I've been thinking about Donald Murray, author of the little green book that won't go away, lately. This time it's for a faculty newsletter I edit (don't ask), and I'll probably send out a link when we get some technical difficulties worked out and we get it up on the Internet.

More surprises. I like Murray, and I thought I'd already seen everything written about him. Till I did a Google keyword search, looking for an article I'd used before but misplaced somewhere. Turned out I never found it, but ...

When I searched keywords on "Donald Murray" and "surprise," this quote popped out of the directory. It was in Murray's obituary in The Boston Globe, which noted "with characteristic frankness," he described his childhood as unhappy:

"My parents and teachers got together and decided I was stupid," he wrote last year. "My response was to develop a private mantra: 'I'm stupid but I can come in early and stay late.' Surprise. It worked. Good work habits will beat talent every time."

Words to live by. Surprise the SOBs.

a blog post titled "Donald Murray was / is my hero!" by Deb Renner Smith, a Michigan literacy consultant. She says, "Don Murray is incredible. He says that he wrote, 'I write and I find myself saying what I do not expect, in a way I haven't quite said it before. I am energized by surprise.' Over and over he says that 'surprise' is the key to his writing."

And Smith linked to the text of a Murray's Keynote Address to the National Writers' Workshop in 1995 at Hartford, Conn.

I'd never seen it before.

Some nuggets (I've been thinking about nuggets, too, lately) follow:

If you are confident of your craft and are writing without terror and failure, I hope you will learn how to escape your craft and write so badly you will surprise yourself with what you say and how you are saying it.

* * *After I leave my writing desk, I lead a double life. I am a mole, living an ordinary life of errands, chores, conversations friends, reading, watching TV, eating and - at the same time - I am a spy to my life, maintaining an alertness to the commonplace, the ordinary, the routine where the really important stories appear.

I am never bored. I overhear what is said and not said, delight in irony and contradiction, relish answers without questions and questions without answers, take note of what is and what should be, what was and what may be. I imagine, speculate, make believe, remember, reflect. I am always traitor to the predictable, always welcoming to the unexpected.

This paying attention is not always comfortable. Reporting on the self can bring terror as well as celebration, pain as well as pleasure.

* * *I write easily, and that is no accident. I remind myself that John Jerome said "Perfect is the enemy of good" and follow William Stafford's advice that "one should lower his standards." I write fast to outrace the censor and cause the instructive failures that are essential to effective writing.

I write for surprise. I start a column with a line or an image, an island at the edge of the horizon that has not been mapped. And I do not finish the columns unless I write what I do not expect to write forty to sixty percent of the way through. My drafts tell me what I have to say.
* * *I was stupid stubborn. In one prize fight I was knocked down 13 times and won.

I believed - and still believe - it is my job to educate editors - by example. I propose new ways of writing old stories by showing them a draft or at least a lede. When they didn't listen I wrote it their way - and when possible wrote it my way and submitted it somewhere else.

I was and am, a cross-writer, exploring the possibilities of fiction and poetry, books and articles, columns and textbooks. Each genre illuminates the other.

I realize I had energy - and still do. My energy comes from the writing. I write and I find myself saying what I do not expect, in a way I haven't quite said it before. I am energized by surprise.

Along the way, Murray spoke of grief, of the death of his 20-year-old-daughter and his elderly father (whom he imagined being buried with a telephone in his coffin and later wrote a poem about it), of his days as a cub reporter at The Boston Herald, of aging, of his wife, of combat in World War II, of writing poetry, freelance stories for top commercial markets, scribbled notes on 3-by-5 cards and columns for The Boston Globe.

By now you're probably sick of hearing me go on and on about Don Murray. But if you read his talk to the National Writers' Conference, I think you'll be surprised. Pleasantly surprised.

Murray is also cited regularly by academic writing teachers. In fact, that's where I first came across him, when I was trying to make sense of freshman English composition as a new adjunct instructor at SCI after 15 years of newspapering. Most recently in January, Bruce Ballenger, an English prof at Boise State, wrote "Reconsiderations: Donald Murray and the Pedagogy of Surprise" by in College English (Volume 70, No. 3). Ballinger's abstract says, "Toward the end of his life, Donald Murray felt that his approach to writing instruction was no longer appreciated by journals in his field. Nevertheless, his emphasis on encouraging students to surprise themselves through informal writing still has considerable value." An earlier article in English Journal (the first page of which is avaliable on the JSTOR website) notes that "Murray valued surprise" where traditionalists value form.

http://www.ncte.org/pubs/journals/ce/articles/128778.htm
http://www.jstor.org/pss/822100
Tom Romano "The Living Legacy of Donald Murray." The English Journal, 89.3 (Jan., 2000): 74-79. Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

COMM 337, 386: Satire on a blog (content advisory for those who are burned out on election stories: the satire is political)

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
-- William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (5.1.7-12).

Here, courtesy of the blog Mudflats: Tiptoeing Through the Muck of Alaskan Politics, is a "Palin Talking Point Generator" that gives Gov. Sarah Palin's talking points as a Republican vice presidential candidate the local habitation and name of moose nuggets.

If you're not sure what a moose nugget is, I think you'll figure it out by looking at the picture of the Palin Talking Point Generator. In her discussion of several of Palin's "nuggets," the Mudflats blogger drops metaphors like, uh, tasty little M&Ms.

Irreverence

Jack Shafer is the media critic for Slate.com. Here's what he had to say, in a recent article headlined "Countdown to the Obama Rapture," about some of the recent coverage of the Nov. 4 election:

Reporters do their least self-conscious work when they're startled by a story they hadn't prepared to write. Think of the astonishing coverage of the 9/11 attack, natural disasters, and the 2000 election-that-would-not-end. But giving a reporter (or a pundit) too much time to think about a historic event such as VE Day, the moon landing, the fall of Communism, or the release of Nelson Mandela is like entering him into a grandiosity competition to see who can squeeze the most poetry out of his keyboard. Suddenly, everybody with a notepad and a word processor thinks he's Norman Mailer.

Shafer adds,

Every new president gets a honeymoon, of course, but not like the one we're likely to witness. As the countdown to the Obama rapture accelerates this week, say a prayer for the press corps skeptics, naysayers, cynics, pragmatists, faultfinders, and scoffers who'd rather not dance at Obama's magisterial ball. And if they write something noteworthy, send it my way.

And he provides a link.

Here's what another media critic, Mark Twain, said about newspapers:

Our papers have one peculiarity--it is American--their irreverence . . . They are irreverent toward pretty much everything, but where they laugh one good king to death, they laugh a thousand cruel and infamous shams and superstitions into the grave, and the account is squared. Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. -- Mark Twain's Notebook

COMM 337: Assignment for Wed. Pls post to your blogs

Please post your reaction to this opinion piece in Judith Warner's blog for The New York Times on your own blog. Consider:

· Where, for you, is the 'line' (in Don Murray's sense of the word) in this story?

· What sources of conflict, or tension, do you find in it?

· Any surprises? (In Murray's sense of the word. In yours?) Anything unexpected? Anything that goes against the grain?

· How do Warner's values compare to the values of the 90s? … that she finds on Wall Street? What lesson(s) does she take from the financial meltdown? Is is (are they) what you expected as you started reading the column?

COMM 337: OK, let's forget about the election and the economic crisis for a minute or two and look at a tried-and-true feature story

How can you not like this? A dog rescues a litter of kittens from a fire in Australia, and the news goes 'round the world. I just searched on "dog," "kittens" and "Australia," and I got 270 hits.

I first saw the raw video when I was tracking the latest meltdown in world financial markets on BBC News ... and a fuller report in The Herald Sun, a tabloid newspaper in Melbourne owned by Rupert Murdoch. The story is local, and the Herald Sun milks it for all it's worth. The head:

Lion-hearted Leo has courage licked

We'll look at the Reuters video that's linked to the page, so you can see where the pun comes from.

And the lede, which lays on the 'literation:

A TENACIOUS terrier dubbed Leo the Lion-hearted is being lauded for staying loyally by the side of four helpless kittens trapped in a burning house.

The gutsy bitzer had to be resuscitated by firefighters after refusing to abandon the kittens even as thick smoke and flames filled a Seddon weatherboard home on Saturday night.

Don't know what a bitzer is? Google it -- uh, perform a keyword search in the Google search engine -- and keep trying. Hint: If you don't find it at first, why don't you guess it's Australian slang and add that to your keyword search?

COMM 337, 386: Let's go off on a tangent (but it may not be a tangent when we get there if you like surprises)

While I was looking for stories to discuss for our class in advanced journalistic writing, I came across a piece of political reporting by Judith Warner, a freelancer who lives in Washington, D.C., and writes a blog for The New York Times. Last month, soon after Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, Warner went to GOP rally in suburban Virgina to scope out Palin's appeal to the party faithful. Her report went against the grain, and the people who posted comments didn't know what to make of it. I'd be tempted to say they misunderstood it, if I thought I understood it myself.

For COMM 337, it's worth reading just for Warner's voice. She's reporting, she's doing commentary ... and she's doing it with a voice that isn't quite like anything else I've been reading lately. And she has some insights into class resentments and GOP attacks on the "liberal media" that are worth looking in COMM 386. She also links to a piece by Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, on the politics of class resentment and moral values across cultures.

So let's read it.

COMM 337: Judith Warner, combining the personal and political / READ MONDAY

Since the first generation of women's lib, feminist writers have made a point of combining the personal and the political. It operates on several levels. One has to do with airing women's issues in the political arena. Another is a reaction to the perceived tendency of male writers to dwell on subcommittees, caucuses and public policy issues while women write more easily about people and values. It's a stereotype, but like most stereotypes, it has just enough truth to it to be worth considering.

One writer who combines the personal and the political today is Judith Warner, a freelancer who writes the blog "Domestic Disturbances" for The New York Times along with pieces for other markets on cultural and political issues. It's ostensibly about parenting, but she's been writing lately about subjects ranging from the Nov. 4 election to migranes, R.E.O. Speedwagon and the stock market crash. But with an eye for detail and a sensibility that sets her apart from most financial and political writers. She gets kind of East Coast-y and New York City-ish sometimes, but then she writes for a paper in New York.

Today's column takes off on Sarah Palin, of whom Warner says,

She speaks no better — and no worse — than many of her crowd-pleasing male peers, dropping her g’s, banishing “who” in favor of “that,” issuing verbal blunders that linger just long enough to make their mark in the public mind before they’re winked away in staged apologies.

Music to my ears, because my generation preserves the distinction that you use "who" for people and "that" for inanimate objects, even if I am getting to the point I've heard quite enough about Palin to last me for a while.

Another column, one I think shows Warner at the top of her form, is headlined "Waiting for Schadenfreude" and gives her take on the financial crisis. She begins:

A couple of years ago, at the height of the boom, a friend in New York publishing described to me the indignities of being a five-figure employee commuting daily from suburban New Jersey on trains packed with traders, stock brokers and hedge-fund types.

“These were the guys who, in college, I used to step over on Sunday mornings when they were lying in a pool of their own vomit,” he said. “And now they’re earning millions and millions – in bonuses alone.”

The image, as you might imagine, stuck in my mind. For it summed up so well a certain kind of resentment and sense of injustice that a particular class of non-monied professionals in the New York area came to feel sometime in the late 1990s.

The feeling of injustice wasn’t just about money, though it was partly about being more than solidly middle class and still struggling to pay the bills, as New York writer Vince Passaro captured so well in his “Reflections on the Art of Going Broke” (“Who’ll Stop the Drain?”) in Harper’s in 1998.

It was, rather, about a sense that the wrong people had inherited the earth.

They had taken over everything. Their salaries (and bonuses in particular) had pushed real estate costs and living expenses sky-high. Their values had permeated every aspect of life. And their choices seemed to have become the only acceptable — even viable — ones possible.

I haven't read the article she mentioned, and I don't take a train to work. But I know what it feels like to opt for a low-paying career. Warner continues:

Many of us who’d proudly decided, in our twenties, to pursue edifying or creative, or “helping” professions, woke up to realize, once we had families, that we’d perhaps been irresponsible. We couldn’t save for college. We could barely save for retirement. If we set up a “family-friendly” lifestyle, we threw our financial futures down the drain.

So, like just about everyone, we worked hard and treaded water, but felt we were entitled to do better than that. And if we lived in the New York area, or another similarly wealthy area where the spoils of the new Gilded Age were constantly thrust in our faces, we felt, like my friend on the train, a little something more: we knew that we were losers.

Then, hardly even a month ago, came the crash. Warner said she was surprised she didn't feel vindicated.

... those of us who felt, well, like losers, are feeling like even bigger losers, as we shove our unopened 401K or (if we’re double-loser freelancers) SEP-IRA statements into bottom desk drawers and wait for a cathartic burst of schadenfreude that simply refuses to come.

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats — the ones who bent the rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed regulations on the banking and mortgage industries — are taking us down with them.

In the end, she gets back to her friend who commuted into the city with all the stockbrokers from Jersey:

I called my friend in publishing yesterday to ask him how things were going on the train.

“There’s a lot of rueful chuckling. There’s a lot of talk about riding this out, about maintaining,” is all he had to say.

It was 23 years ago that Tom Wolfe introduced us to the Masters of the Universe. They were curiosities then — remote, very rich, and decidedly not like you and me. But now, the world of Wall Street has become our world; there is no outside to it, there is no other option than to pay and play. Our fortunes rise and fall together to a degree like never before, and our values are enmeshed like never before. The language of Wall Street — of cost-cutting and efficiency, self-interest, using each situation to maximize profit, is the language of everyday life and social interaction.

We’re all losers now. There’s no pleasure to it.

Let's read some more of Warner (click on her standing head "Domestic Disturbances" to get a directory). But when you get to the bottom of "Waiting for Schadenfreude," read some of the comments. They're civil, they're literate. At least one of them (from a blogger in San Francisco) may be kind of self-promotional, but it's civil and literate, too.