Even teenagers are part of the dialogue about officer-involved shooting

Las Vegas police investigate a fatal officer-involved shooting Tuesday. A male juvenile was killed after police found him armed with a knife and struggling with a woman. Photo by Duane Prokop.

Some people can’t handle the news. Don’t confuse them with facts.

Review-Journal reporter Anthony  Planas did a yeoman’s task in covering the shooting by police of a knife-wielding teenager who had his arm wrapped around a woman’s throat.

He talked to police. He talked to witnesses. He talked classmates of the dead teen, including one who was in a play with him.

The story was all the buzz on the morning radio programs where the age-old question about use of force by police was batted about once more. Was there an alternative to deadly force? What might have been consequence?

A 15-year-old was quoted in Tony’s story as saing, “I don’t understand why we’re paying taxpayer money to put them through a police academy so they can learn how to disarm people. Instead, they shoot them on sight.”

This did not sit well with a reader who identified himself as KOM674. At 02:43 a.m. he or she wrote a comment about the story on our Web site.

“I am continually disgusted that the RJ must make up news instead of report the facts,” KOM674 wrote. “To quote a 15 year old’s opinion on police deadly force training; a person who can not vote, drive, serve in the military, smoke, drink or gamble, (and has not even reached the age of consent!) is beyond me and speaks volumes of the writers poor reporting skills. While this situation is tragic, the facts appear to be that this young man put a knife to a woman (possibly his mother) and nearly killed her. No one in this city, the police included, would or should be expected to ‘disarm’ this subject while placing themselves and the woman in an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury. To often the police are expected to instantly restore order to a situation that has taken years to deteriorate, all while using no force. I pray for the officer and his or her speedy return to work. We are glad you’re okay. I pray for the family who has suffered a loss and my condolences go out to you.

“RJ, stick to the facts and leave the opinions for Sundays editorial.”

People, even friends of slain teens, have opinions, and those are part of the news, too. Whether the police could have avoided it or not, whether the boy was a scholar or a doper, he was a person. All of this is a part of the community dialogue. That includes high school students who now must deal with this event and, hopefully, learn the right lesson from it.

Good job, Tony.

Banned in Marquette: No free speech zone for the words of Dave Barry

One Herald Plaza

I worked for three years on the sixth floor of One Herald Plaza and never bumped into the infamous Dave Barry. He never invited me up to the roof to fire potatoes into Biscayne Bay from his gas-powered spud gun. I worked for the afternoon Miami News and he for the morning Miami Herald.

I did sit at home on Sunday mornings and laugh till I cried over his humor column in the Tropic Sunday supplement section of the Miami Herald. I especially enjoyed his surprised discovery of the unique flora and fauna of Dade County when the paper finally insisted he move from Pennsylvania and actually live in the community he was writing for.

He discovered land crabs and palmetto bugs and fire ants. Really funny stuff.

Image my surprise to find the funnyman at the center of a First Amendment firestorm, so to speak.

A student at Marquette University had the audacity to post on his door a quote from that radical political rabble-rouser Barry:

“As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.”

Truth should amount for something, but the university administration called the quotation “patently offensive.” One administrator curiously said that “while I am a strong supporter of academic freedom, I’m afraid that hallways and office doors are not ‘free-speech zones.’”

I did not know free speech was limited to certain zones.

Neither did the folks at Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE for short, who came to the student’s defense. Despite numerous letters from FIRE and from Barry, as well as news stories and angry alumni, Marquette never admitted it did anything wrong.

Now FIRE has named Barry an honorary vice chairman for its 10^th anniversary celebration and released a video of the “patently offensive” insurrectionist talking about free speech.

Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 27

A lesson in history and economics, along with a dim glimpse of the not-too-distant future, are delivered today by The Wall Street Journal.

On it op-ed page, which remains free so the public can be so enlightened while much of the rest of the paper requires an online subscription, is a piece by Peter Kann, the former chairman of Dow Jones & Co, which publishes the paper. He also was a Pulitzer-winning reporter.

Kann explains the rather pragmatic decision by the WSJ to not joint the publishing lemmings who decided the business model of newspapers should free online, supported by advertising.

“At the dawn of the era of online editions this newspaper,” Kann writes, “like all the others, was faced with a free or pay choice. At the time, I was chairman of Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, and virtually alone we chose to charge for our online content. The reasons for this have been the subject of much ensuing speculation.

“Allow me to explain: As a predominantly business newspaper the Journal’s content was distinctive and very largely unduplicated. That content arguably had a much higher degree of essentiality to customers than general news or entertainment. …

“So the decision to charge for an online edition was less courageous than it was consistent.”

As I have addressed here in the past, in case you haven’t noticed, Kann points out the problem for American society as a whole, not just publishers, editors and reporters.

“The real threat is to the future of news—informative, relevant, reliable news of the wider world around us, Kann writes. “And that is disappearing as newspapers, whose reporting staffs still produce most of the news, no longer can afford to do so. As their news budgets and staffs continue to shrink, the key question is what can fill that gap?”

Not television, he says. Not the Internet, he says. The first is devolving into cheap shout-fests and the

Sorry to give away the ending, as you should read his piece in its entirety, but Kann succinctly concludes, “As to all the free online editions of our newspapers, their business model does not begin to cover the cost of significant news reporting. So the online editions with growing audiences—largely cannibalized from print audiences—rely on the poor print editions for almost all the news they give away. Sadly, there is less and less of that, and the ultimate loser, of course, is the public.”

Bailout for newspapers by Congress is a terrible idea

While President Obama has said he would be “happy to look at” any bills coming out of Congress that would try to bailout newspapers, Congress, thankfully, is in no hurry to offer succor to its chief watchdog, according to the Washington Times.

Obama told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently, “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.”

But the appetite for such a bailout for “serious fact checking” was not apparent recently when only three or the 20 House and Senate members of the Joint Economic Committee showed up for a hearing titled “The Future of Newspapers: The Impact on the Economy and Democracy.”

Several people testified that subsidies and bailouts of newspaper would jeopardize their role as independent observers and editorial advocates.

One committee member, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, said, “I want to be very clear: This is not about bailouts. No one’s talking about bailouts. We’re through with bailouts.”

Good. The corollary to the First Amendment prohibition against Congress making laws to abridge free speech and press should be that Congress keep its corrupting hands off.

Because, when they have you by the wallet your hearts and minds will follow. Money comes with strings attached that can choke you.

Here is columnist Michelle Malkin’s take on the idea:

Let’s all celebrate Punctuation Day!

If you’ve read and relished “Eats, Shoot & Leaves,” have more than one copy of  Strunk and White, an old version of Turabian and several dog-eared stylebooks on the shelf, this is your day. It is the official Punctuation Day!

Take a walk around an ellipse … exclaim your love of typography! Address, dear reader, your affection for the lowly dots and tail-wagging dots; as well your appreciation of the combination of the two. Let’s get apoplectic over misplaced apostrophes. Why not?

According to the Chicago Tribune, Jeff Rubin, 59, a former copy editor, successfully bid for Sept. 24 to be listed as a holiday in Chase’s Calendar of Events in 2004. There is even a Punctuation Day Web site and contest.

Here is the joke that gives Lynn Tuss the title for her delightful book on punctuation:

“A panda walks into a restaurant, sits down and orders a sandwich. After he finishes eating the sandwich, the panda pulls out a gun and shoots the waiter, and then stands up to go. ‘Hey!’ shouts the manager. ‘Where are you going? You just shot my waiter and you didn’t pay for your sandwich!’
“The panda yells back at the manager, ‘Hey man, I am a Panda! Look it up!’

“The manager opens his dictionary and sees the following definition for panda: ‘A tree-dwelling marsupial of Asian origin, characterized by distinct black and white coloring. Eats shoots and leaves.’”

By adding a comma a joke is born.

Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 26

According to a survey of newspaper publishers by the American Press Institute, 51 percent now believe readers will pay for online newspaper content, while 49 percent don’t think it will work or are not sure. Ten percent said they are already charging for some content.

While I understand the timidity of those publishers who don’t want to see the value of their Web site advertising decline if readers abandon them for free news content elsewhere, I’m reminded of the conflict in values and availability created by the cheap distribution system that is the Web.

That “information wants to be free” quip has been attributed to a statement by Stewart Brand in 1984 at a hacker’s convention and republished a couple of times since. This is the rest of what he said:

“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”

Now, I might be swayed by the views of a majority of publishers, but I am convinced by the words of one newspaper executive in a recent interview with Steve Forbes, the publisher of Forbes magazine. That executive is Warren Stephens, chairman, president and CEO of Stephens Inc., the parent company for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Stephens said he thinks the newspaper “industry at large has got to move to a pay model for its Web content. And the sooner we all do that, the better off we’re going to be …”

Here is a snippet of the interview, which is available as a transcript and streaming video:

Forbes: One of your investments is in newspapers.

Stephens: Yeah.

Forbes: Tell us the future of newspapers.

Stephens: Oh, lord. I wish I knew what the future –

Forbes: We have an indirect vested interest in this.

Stephens: Yeah, exactly. Well, our newspapers in general are mainly small town newspapers. The biggest one we own is Las Vegas. We own the biggest daily in the Las Vegas area, which is frankly ground zero for the housing meltdown and real estate meltdown. So it’s been hit pretty hard. There are things in our newspaper, there are things in your magazines that you can only get in our newspaper or in that publication. We cover things that other people just simply are never going to cover. And that is going to be of value to advertisers. But I’ve come around to the view that having your website for free, giving away all your copyright, is not a very good model. So I think the industry at large has got to move to a pay model for its Web content. And the sooner we all do that, the better off we’re going to be because then –

Forbes: Any new vision scenarios of how this might come to pass? Not a lot of discussion about it.

Stephens: No. You know, I know the Wall Street Journal’s is a paid model. Actually my local paper in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Democrat Gazette, is a paid model. And it seems to work. And there’s a reluctance to do that for people that have been giving it away for free. But I think it’s got to happen. Otherwise, I don’t, you know, newspapers as we know them will I think cease to exist. They’ll have to go to some sort of just electronic-only publication and the ad revenues will be significantly less. I’m not one of those that thinks newspaper business is over. I think it’s declining, I think it’s for sure on a decline but I also think it’s just been severely impacted by the ad recession that we’ve all experienced.

So there you have it. That debate is over.

Stephens Inc. Chairman, President and CEO Warren Stephens

Forbes Publisher Steve Forbes

Grandfatherly advice can be uplifting

MONTEREY, Calif — The lady sitting in front of us folded up her newspaper and tucked it away in her bag as we chatted about some of the acts we had seen over the past couple of days at the Monterey Jazz Festival — Wynton Marsalis, Regina Carter, Joe Lovano, the Piety Street Band, Esperanza Spalding, Susan Tedeschi and even Pete Seeger. We were looking forward to Dave Brubeck and Chick Corea that night.

Then my wife asked her what she thought of Dee Dee Bridgewater’s performance the previous night. The woman said it made her a little uncomfortable.

Bridgewater, who lives in Las Vegas, had filled the stage with her booming voice and chatty conversation and jokes between numbers. She talked about getting back to her African roots and her visit to Mali and how the set would borrow from the music of Mali and blend it with her traditional jazz.

Her final song of the evening was a rendition of Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” a song that was banned on many radio stations when it first came out in 1966 because of its racial theme that some thought stereotyped black women with lyrics like “My skin is black/ My arms are long/ My hair is wooly/ My back is strong.” It was the sound of an angry black woman. It was a subtle as lash across the back.

The lady in front doubted Bridgewater had experienced the Southern Jim Crowism that Simone had. Then she started talking about the advice her grandfather had given her about property and work and not being anyone’s slave, because your labor is your property. She said nations that do not value property and achievement fare poorly. She said she is worried about the direction in which our country is headed.

I asked her where her grandfather was from.

Sea Island, Ga., she replied.

I remarked that his advice sounded similar to that given to Justice Clarence Thomas by his grandfather in Pinpoint, Ga., just south of Savannah.

In his autobiography Thomas wrote, “Despite the hardships he had faced, there was no bitterness or self-pity in his heart. As for bad luck, he didn’t believe in it. Instead he put his faith in his own unaided effort — the one factor in life that he could control — and he taught Myers and me to do the same. Unable to do anything about the racial bigotry and lack of education that had narrowed his own horizons, he put his hope for the future in ‘my two boys,’ as he always called us. ‘I am going to send you boys to school and teach you how to work so you can have a better chance than I did,’ he said. We were his second change to live, to take part in America’s opportunities, and he was willing to sacrifice his own comfort so that they would be fully open to us.”

I could tell by the typography and the column widths that the lady in front of us had been reading the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. There are angry black women and purposeful black women.

Here is a video of Simone singing “Four Women.”

It helps to read the paper before complaining about what is not in it

The angry calls and e-mails erupted Tuesday.

“Why aren’t you covering the ACORN video story?!! There’s nothing in the paper on it! There’s nothing on your Web site!”

Actually, there were two AP stories in the paper this past week when the strange tale of the guerrilla videographers, posing as a pimp and a prostitute catching ACORN representatives on tape giving advice on how to get a mortgage and dodge taxes for their illicit business venture, first broke. And, yes, those stories were accessible on our Web site, you just had to dig down a bit and search for them. There is a news story and a column in today’s paper.

One “gentleman” was particularly, amusingly huffy when I suggested he I might try subscribing to the paper if he wanted the news. He replied, “Buy the paper? Wow, is this your idea of effective marketing? I don’t spend money on other people’s agendas like those commonly found in the RJ.”

How would he know?

If you wish to complain about what the paper is not doing, it might help to read the paper. It gives you a greater level of credibility.

Video can sure press people’s hot buttons. Here is an example of the work of James O’Keefe, 25, and his sidekick Hannah Giles, 20, but you can see all four (so far) at biggovernment.com:

Another czar has left-wing credentials and strange notions

If you liked Van Jones, you’ll love Mark Lloyd.

Lloyd is one of Obama’s army of czars, appointed in August to the newly appointed post of associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission, whatever that is. (So that’s how the administration created and/or saved all those jobs. There are more than 30 of them by some media estimations, but I’ve yet to find how much they are paid.)

Lloyd is a product of academia. According to the FCC announcement of his appointment:

“Mr. Lloyd was most recently the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights/ Education Fund, where he oversaw media and telecom initiatives. Mr. Lloyd was also an adjunct professor of public policy at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, and from 2002-2004 a visiting scholar at MIT where he conducted research and taught communications policy. Previously Mr. Lloyd has been a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, the General Counsel of the Benton Foundation, and an attorney at Dow, Lohnes & Albertson. Before becoming a communications lawyer, Mr. Lloyd had a distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, including work at NBC and CNN.”

In 2007 he published a book called “Prologue to a Farce: Democracy and Communication in America.” The title is taken from a James Madison quote in an Aug. 4, 1822, letter to William T. Barry.

In that letter Madison espoused the somewhat socialist notion of public education:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. …

“(I)t is better for the poorer classes to have the aid of the richer by a general tax on property, than that every parent should provide at his own expence for the education of his children …”

Lloyd uses the passage to expound on a somewhat socialist view of the news media, especially the electronic media. In his book, Lloyd has one segment titled “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” As if that were not enough, he follows up later with a section called, “Why is There No Socialism in America — Redux.”

In the latter section he bemoans the 2003 FCC decision that “reversed thirty years of communications law and eliminated rules designed to preserve a diversity of local voices.”

He is a big advocate of what is being called “localism,” which is really an end run in an effort to re-establish the Fairness Doctrine and silence conservative talk radio.

Lloyd writes, “The socialists, no matter how successful they were in the so-called Progressive Era, could not in the long run compete effectively against the organized power of the trusts.  Not because their ideas were weak, but because the trusts gained control of the public arean through their control of the mass circulation newspapers and the Associated Press. The socialists were merely, as (Upton) Sinclair puts it, ‘conveying some small portion of the truth to some small portions of the population.’ So at least part of the solution must be to restore some measure of political equality in the place where the public deliberates.”

There you have it. This czar believes the nation’s newspapers and the AP are too conservative.

Like other Obama associates, Lloyd glowingly quotes from radical Chicago socialist community organizer Saul Alinsky.

You don’t even have to get into his admiring remarks about how Hugo Chavez handles the media in Venezuela.

When you are in the middle, both sides perceive you as on the other

There is a difference between a healthy skepticism and an unhealthy skepticism. We may have crossed that threshold.

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is reporting its latest biennial findings on Americans’ views of the news media. It shows a steady decline in people’s perception of news outlets since 1985.

It also shows that much of the perception is fueled by a person’s own politics.

Republicans view Fox News favorably by 29 points over Democrats, while CNN is viewed favorably by Democrats by 31 points over Republicans.

An interesting finding is the public’s view of the watchdog role of journalism. The percent of those who say press criticism does more good than harm varies directly by political party and the party of the person in the White House. Democrats agreed with this more than Republicans when Reagan and Bush Sr. were presidents, Republicans agreed more under Clinton, and Democrats more under W. Bush and Republicans more under Obama.

Is it a matter of the media doing a poorer job or are people looking at the media through their own partisan prisms? There are more outlets for news. More competition. More chances for one outlet to find fault in another.

I know we get calls every day — sometimes back to back — from people who accuse us of being too liberal and too conservative. It is less which way we tilt, than the perspective of the observer. Both sides view the middle of the road as being on the other side.

While the Internet is a growing source for national and international news, it still trails badly in local news behind newspapers and television, though I still suspect people answer television to this question only because it is on and occasionally news happens. Depth is another matter.

It matters less the partisanship of the outlet, but more partisanship of the observer.