Year 2010

Invasion of the body scanners

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

I like to think I don’t take a back seat to anyone when it comes to defense of civil liberties—I was against the Big Brother-y Patriot Act before it was cool—but I don’t get all the fuss about body scanners in airports.

I’ve been able to mostly ignore the uproar about the Transportation Security Administration’s airport security measures because, well, I’m pretty good at ignore.  But I couldn’t look away from a series of posts by Padre Steve, a guy I find to be a pretty entertaining read, on the existential threat to liberty from our surrendering freedoms in the name of security.  Admittedly, I was hooked by his extended reference to an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to illustrate the problem.

With respect to Padre Steve and the others who have suffered indignities at the hands of an idiotic TSA employee, I’m not convinced.  It seems likely to me that when one man pithily proclaimed “don’t touch my junk,” that was all that was necessary for the news media—the people with too little judgment and too much space to fill—to rev up the hysteria generator; Howard Kurtz does a good job surveying the landscape of the freak-out over pat-downs.

I’ll posit that we all agree that commercial air travel is not a right but a public accommodation justifiably subject to regulation in the interests of safety—would you get on a plane today if there was no screening of passengers or baggage?  We can debate the appropriateness of the screening measures that are being used, but that’s just details.  And in the meantime, there’s always the train or the bus.

Most experts believe the full-body scanners do not pose a serious health risk for the vast majority of travelers.  As to the complaint that they’re too invasive, because someone will see a black-and-white x-ray depiction of your naked body—

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Oh, yeah…verrry sexy.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask for the sake of better collective security, and certainly not when considered against the alternative of an all-over hands-on greeting from the TSA.  All in all, the scan seems a reasonable security tactic in a world where religious fanatics convince poor lemmings to stuff their shoes and underwear with explosives to strike a blow against people they don’t know who’ve never harmed them.

But in the spirit of the holiday, I will say I am thankful for the comedy (click the pic):

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Texas jury pounds The Hammer

Pat Ryan 2 Comments

Must pass along the good news: my former representative in Congress, Tom DeLay, has been convicted of money laundering and faces a possible sentence of life in prison–the American jury system triumphs, even over the powerful and well-coifed!  More later…

Easily, the best news of the day

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(…even though the day is very young.)  The owner of the Houston Astros is getting seriouser about selling the team!  I can imagine no more encouraging news, or anything more likely to improve the team on the field, than for Drayton McLane, Jr. to get the hell out of the way, not even the blockbuster news of the trade for a 31-year-old .254-hitting shortstop (for reals).

UPDATE 9:30 am→

Thanks to Astros County for pointing out that Mark Berman at Fox 26 broke this story last night.

UPDATE 5:00 pm→

The Old Grocer confirms, the team is for sale…now if he can just find somebody to pay his criminally inflated asking price, we’re in business.  Oh, frabjous rapture!

Judging news judgment

Pat Ryan 4 Comments

I boarded this train of thought reading  Ted Koppel’s op/ed piece in Sunday’s Washington Post in which he eloquently denounces the cable networks’ proliferation of opinion-as-news programming.  I mostly agree with his complaint that Fox News and MSNBC have given up any pretense of being objective in favor of creating an “idealized reality.”

They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

In this essay Koppel seems to put a lot of the blame on the desire to turn a profit; I find that disturbing.  No one in this argument should be against the idea of the Koppel_11_25companies turning a profit, and Koppel himself has proudly noted in the past that Nightline made a pile of money for ABC, although he says they did so with high standards.  I see that Koppel, in the end, is lamenting the death of any effort at real reporting, the loss of any non-partisan effort to uncover facts that can illuminate the truth.

So last night on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann did what he does: protest perhaps a bit too much about being the subject of criticism and spend a lot of valuable minutes proving points that were never called into question.  Mostly though, he gratuitously blasted Koppel for not having done on “Nightline” what Olbermann believes he does on his program—seek for truth, particularly about the war in Iraq.  (Click on the picture to see the whole commentary; runs something over 12:00.)

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Credit where I think credit is due: Olbermann did his damnedest to get America to see the ugly truth about the Bush Administration and the Iraq war, in the spirit of Murrow’s takedown of Joseph McCarthy.  But as he himself has admitted, in a previous incarnation Olbermann squandered an inordinate amount of precious airtime on the Monica Lewinsky “story.”  Nobody’s perfect.

The important issue here is news judgment.  In Olbermann’s examples of Murrow’s reports from London, and when Cronkite made clear the fiasco of Vietnam and the importance of Watergate, their reports were  the result of a collective decision within their organization about what was news: what was important, what had lasting value, what did the audience need to know about.  In Koppel’s examples of the shouting heads on today’s cable network programs, the reports are the result of a collective decision within those organizations about what will grab attention: what is current, what has flash, what does the audience want to hear.

Koppel’s complaints focus on cable programs, not the broadcast networks and their news programs.  I don’t think those guys have any room to crow when it comes to news judgment when you consider their response to news from London of a wedding within the royal family: leading with the story as “breaking news,” dispatching armies of troops immediately to London, and planning major special reports.

Really?  Is there really anything more pointless, or with less real substance or import to our future, than the wedding of British royalty?  What does it say about our news media when we see them drool on themselves at this news?  Personally, I laughed at the headline Unemployed English girl to wed solider from welfare family, but that’s just me.

I’m not completely pessimistic about the future of journalism; I believe there will always be some place to get an honest recitation of what’s gone on, along with some perspective to help me make sense of my world.  But I know that it will not be from the Tribune Company’s TV station here in Houston.

KIAH-TV is moving ahead with a plan developed by the ousted corporate boss Lee Abrams to do away with traditional newscasts altogether.  They need “preditors” to run this new paradigm, and there’s no pretense: the ad says clearly that they aren’t interested in experience or credentials, they value the ability to make noise and grab attention; heat, not light…flash, not value.

And that’s fine, too—it’s their station and they can put whatever they want on their air.  But when it’s about news judgment, we all need to think about who we want to trust.

(Note: the spell-check dictionary didn’t like the word “Olbermann’s”; it recommended “Doberman’s”…I’m just saying.)

(Would you look at that: a post with Prince William, royal wedding, and Monica Lewinsky tags…I should be ashamed.)

This medicine will not taste like candy

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The elections are over; now comes our chance to see if the big talkers can walk the walk when it comes to putting the national budget on a sustainable path for the future.  The bipartisan commission on deficit reduction is due with its recommendations by the first of the month, and the crackling of the first embers of what should be a firestorm of debate are already being heard.

Good, because a real debate is what we need; not a standoff in which the major parties hurt lethal talking points at each other, but a real adult conversation about what our options are and which road we’d rather go down.  This plan will serve as a starting point for that discussion and some painful decisions…not surprisingly, many of the people who just won the responsibility to make these decisions are already crawfishing back from the brink.

Raise the age to get Social Security?  Trim benefits?  Cut the home mortgage interest deduction for income taxes?   Pentagon cutbacks?   Higher gasoline taxes?  Everything has to be on the table or we get nowhere; if this was easy, it would have already been done.

Our friends in Great Britain have the same problem, and the new government has come up with plan to reduce their deficit.  This should provide a vivid lesson for U.S. lawmakers in how to implement a drastic but absolutely necessary program.  I fear, however, we’re much more likely to see this:

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