Category: The Media

In which I finally find a reason to post about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Politics, The Media

One of the most influential legal articles ever written — and an article I keep running into since I’m working on an essay about political scandal — is Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s “The Right of Privacy” (1890). “The Right of Privacy” still surfaces in even non-academic settings, as in this recent New York Times Magazine story on privacy in the Internet age:

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet.

You can make a strong case that the shameless coverage of political weddings — Warren to Mabel Bayard (daughter of Senator Thomas F. Bayard); Grover Cleveland to Frances Folsom (a friend of Mabel’s); and several others within Warren’s family — led to the writing of “The Right of Privacy.” In fact, Amy Gajda makes precisely this case in “What if Samuel D. Warren Hadn’t Married A Senator’s Daughter?” [pdf]. Gajda’s essay makes for a fascinating and accessible read — especially in the context of all this saturation-point publicity surrounding Chelsea’s wedding.

Lebronnukah

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Features, Sports, The Media

[Deadspin]

Over at Deadspin, I’ve got a dispatch-slash-photo gallery from last night’s LeBron James television special, which was staged in Greenwich, CT. The special generated tons of coverage in both the standard and Watching-the-Watchmen traditions, but I tried to focus on how the media manufactured and replicated its stories. You don’t need to blame anyone at this event to admit that the media ecosystem deploys its resources in a mysterious way.

If you like the story, you might also like the first thing I wrote for Deadspin—another investigation of media malpractice, this time about the story of a 9-year-old pitcher banned by his baseball league for being “too good.”

Also, the real winner in all this, to my mind, is Kobe Bryant—he’s no longer the NBA’s Iago.

Cheshire’s Library Controversy

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Books, Features, The Media

[New Haven Advocate]

In this week’s Advocate, I’ve got a story on Brian McDonald’s In the Middle of the Night, a true-crime take on the horrific Cheshire home-invasion case from a few years back. The story ended up focusing on the reaction to McDonald’s book as much as the book itself—especially when local residents started calling for the library to ban the book and launching ugly personal attacks at the head librarian. As I write in the story:

Let’s be clear: The only real villains in this mess are Komisarjevsky and Hayes, and, even three years later, it’s impossible to consider Petit’s tragedy without feeling fear, sympathy, and regret. But this tragedy occurred in and was assimilated by a culture that loves lurid details, easy-bake opinions, and petty personal concerns. And, in the reaction to McDonald’s book, you’ll find this culture’s usual suspects—duplicitous lawyers, lazy journalists, small-town politicos, quickie cash-in publishers, and a whole lot of people who’d rather react than read.

One thing I couldn’t work into the story was more on McDonald’s own career, which is fascinating. He described himself to me as “a reluctant true-crime writer” who took on In the Middle of the Night (and a previous entry in St. Martin’s True Crime Library series) “simply because I needed the work.” But McDonald’s far from a hack. He’s written three other books, including My Father’s Gun, a well-reviewed memoir about his family’s three-generation history with the NYPD. And I’d argue that, other than its poor pacing and organization, In the Middle of the Night also demonstrates his talents—as I say in the story, it’s a solid entry in the true-crime canon.

Of course, the only way you’d know that is if you actually read McDonald’s book.

N.B.

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Features, The Media

[New Haven Advocate]

Good news about the media is rare, and, when it occurs, it’s tempting to just nod and slowly back away. That’s basically what happened when Michael Schroeder rescued several small-town Connecticut newspapers in 2008. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other national organs jumped on his last-second bid. Since then, though, no one’s checked in to see how he’s changed the papers—or if he’s got a realistic chance at turning them around.

My new cover story at the New Haven Advocate tries to remedy that. James Smith, Schroeder’s top editor, gave me free reign in his newsroom at the New Britain Herald (“I like cooperating with the free press,” he said), and I spent a couple of days talking to reporters and readers, in addition to Smith and Schroeder.

In the last few years, Connecticut newspapers have lost local readers at a much faster clip than the rest of the country, so the state of the Herald might offer some clues for other areas. Of course, everything’s shifting quickly—that link, to a Hartford Business Journal story from 2007, names the big papers as hot buys and the small ones as toxic assets. At the very least, though, Schroeder’s Herald offers a chance to study a smaller paper, instead of the NYT– and WSJ-level stuff that dominates so much of the metamedia discourse.

Here’s some context I couldn’t work into the story.

  • As I mention in the story, New Britain newspaper readers split between the Herald and the Hartford Courant. No one’s more excited that 2009 is coming to a close than the Courant. In the last year, America’s oldest continually published newspaper lost its top two editors, its Washington bureau, its top local political reporter, and, in the most public embarrassment, George Gombossy, the consumer columnist who says he lost his job for writing stories critical of Courant advertisers. Not surprisingly, the Courant‘s also lost more than 20,000 subscribers in that same period—including one New Britain man who told me about the time Gombossy helped him get his money back from a local Best Buy.
  • If you’re interested in the sordid history of the Journal-Register Company, which, from 1995 to 2008, owned and tortured the Herald, start with this great American Journalism Review story. This Philadelphia CityPaper story outlines the JRC’s nasty reaction to that story;  this Forbes feature is also worth reading. As I mention in my story, the JRC promised to make only “minimal changes” when they bought the Herald—then laid off a dozen people in their first week.

Gladwell Agonistes

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, The Media

[x-posted at The Rumpus]

I’m not sure why Malcolm Gladwell’s fourth book, What the Dog Saw, which collects 19 of his New Yorker essays, has been the one to incite a riot of review-essays. Were the first three books not successful enough? Was something in Gladwell’s methodology not previously clear? Were his best and worst traits not yet delineated?

Whatever the reason, the last few weeks have seen a lot of meditations on Gladwell. I’d like to draw your attention to two, one admirable (Steven Pinker’s “Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective,” the cover review in this week’s New York Times Book Review), one not (Maureen Tkacik’s “Gladwell for Dummies,” in The Nation).

Tkacik begins with a smart point: “That success is in the eye of the unsuccessful would seem to be the great unspoken dilemma dogging critics asked to consider the work of the rich and famous author and inspirational speaker Malcolm Gladwell.” It all goes downhill from there, as she unloads almost 8,000 words of nastiness—a number generously padded by phrases like “Gladwell began studiously scrubbing his sentences of the mildew of the old, liberating his readers from references to anything that might dirty undiluted all-newness with the dourness of precedent.” Tkacik does a fine job summarizing Gladwell’s critical reception (though I’m not sure we really needed that), but, by the end, she seems to be writing a screed against the people who like Gladwell as much as against Gladwell himself.

Then, 180 degrees away, we have Pinker’s essay. It offers all the payoffs of a good review: engaging summaries, sharp observations (e.g., that Gladwell-the-essayist is much better than Gladwell-the-author), and a great sound bite (“The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures”). When it does come time for a reckoning, Pinker damns Malcolm with his own muffed details; his catch of Gladwell’s “igon values” is enough to make any writer cringe at the thought of reaching for a fact ever again.

Best of all, Pinker does this in only 1,400 words. Together, his and Tkacik’s reviews serve as a nice reminder that two takes on the same thing can reveal not only different conclusions—Tkacik describes Gladwell’s “recurring straw man” as “misguided evangelism . . . [for] fringe causes,” whereas Pinker finds “the Straw We . . . a kind of populism” that unites Gladwell’s work—but also different impetuses.