Chris Boese's Weblog

R.I.P. Geraldine Ferraro, a feminist pioneer

1984. I was in college. The '70s feminist movement was more than a memory. It was present tense, active, on campus and off.

For a time, I was a president of the Student Feminist Alliance. I was an appointed student representative on the University Commission on the Status of Women.

I attended and shot (as a photojournalist) sporting events that would not have been allowed to exist, would not have been funded, if it weren't for Title IX. (Even so, the women's basketball team wasn't allowed to play in the best fieldhouse on campus, except for big tournament games. Not in the early '80s, yet. By the late '80s, I would find myself shooting NCAA Women's Basketball in the University of Arkansas's primary arena).

We got a woman chancellor hired on campus, the first. We pushed for women to be legitimately considered for every major administrative position national search on campus. We didn't push nominally. Nobody just paid us lip service and hired some crony of a crony instead. Not unless they wanted to feel our wrath.

And somewhere in there, it all got woven in with Geraldine Ferraro. Back then we didn't falter. Didn't accept second-best or also-ran (not the way I see it repeatedly accepted now). Sure, good old boys made harumphing jokes about our lack of humor. How dare we refuse to laugh over being belittled or made the butt of unquestioned jokes?

I really don't think too much of all the compromises and "settling" that happens with the so-called "third wave" feminists. Give me some uppity, strident women any day. We've got NOTHING to apologise for.

And if we had any doubt about that, Geraldine Ferraro's nomination as the first woman as the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate blew that doubt away.

We'll miss her. But then, we have already been missing her and her (our) generation of feminists for a long time.

That said, we might also note that the first woman who was Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is a 71-year-old grandmother, and besides making history as one of the most effective Speakers ever, now as House Minority Leader, she is still taking NO prisoners.

I just wish we could get Hillary to run again. I'm not ready to let that greatest generation (after the Suffragettes, of course) pass into retirement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/politics/27geraldine-ferraro.html

New York Times Obituary:

Geraldine A. Ferraro, First Woman on Major Party Ticket, Dies at 75

Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former Queens congresswoman who strode onto a podium in 1984 to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president and to take her place in American history as the first woman nominated for national office by a major party, died Saturday in Boston.

[...]

“If we can do this, we can do anything,” Ms. Ferraro declared on a July evening to a cheering Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. And for a moment, for the Democratic Party and for an untold number of American women, anything seemed possible: a woman occupying the second-highest office in the land, a derailing of the Republican juggernaut led by President Ronald Reagan, a President Walter F. Mondale.

[...]

But Ms. Ferraro’s supporters proclaimed a victory of sorts nonetheless: 64 years after women won the right to vote, a woman had removed the “men only” sign from the White House door.

It would be another 24 years before another woman from a major party was nominated for vice president — Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican running mate of Senator John McCain, in 2008. And though Hillary Rodham Clinton came close to being nominated that year as the Democratic presidential candidate, a woman has yet to occupy the Oval Office. But Ms. Ferraro’s ascendance gave many women heart.

Ann Richards, who was the Texas state treasurer at the time and went on to become governor, recalled that after the Ferraro nomination, “the first thing I thought of was not winning in the political sense, but of my two daughters.”

“To think,” Ms. Richards added, “of the numbers of young women who can now aspire to anything.”

In a statement, President Obama said Saturday, “Geraldine will forever be remembered as a trailblazer who broke down barriers for women, and Americans of all backgrounds and walks of life.”

[...]

Perhap the most important editorial I've read this year

Op-Ed Columnist - Bob Herbert - Glenn Beck in Washington - NYTimes.com.

Thank you, Bob Herbert!

Also, a belated thank you to Alexander Zaitchik, whose book on Glenn Beck came out this year, Common Nonsense. It's a great read, with terrific research, but I am biased, as I helped him out on one particular chapter. Which is why I know how much time he put into digging up and documenting all kinds of previously unknown things about Beck's life. 

I have my own academic obsession going back to the 1990s. I worked on papers analyzing the polemical rhetoric of the far right, after the American Family Association tried to censor and attack a school where I worked in Arkansas because it was connected to Gov. Bill Clinton. More recently, the peculiar brand of freaky demagoguery espoused by Beck got on my last nerve when he indirectly intersected with my life while I was working at CNN Headline News.

Alex nails it particularly well in his book.

Meanwhile, Bob Herbert is properly scathing here! I'd been having personal iss-ewes all day, wanting to purge the memory of Beck's rally from the psychic space of the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

This evening I am even watching Cabaret on my DVD, waiting for that chilling scene in the beer garden, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me."  It always creeps me out, and something in the stars tonight is stirring my emotions up anyway. Maybe if I let that scene creep me out as it always does, it will purge the creepiness of the image of Beck and his abstract rhetoric-miming goose-steppers on the Lincoln Memorial today. 

Meanwhile, I celebrate the wonderful invective of Bob Herbert. Polemic is just SO righteous sometimes! Some great zingers below, all right on the mark.

America Is Better Than This

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 27, 2010

America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?

Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

[...]

The climax, of course, was Dr. King’s transcendent “I Have a Dream” speech. Jerald Podair, a professor of American studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, has called Aug. 28, 1963, “the most important single day in civil rights history.” This is the historical legacy that Glenn Beck, a small man with a mean message, has chosen to tread upon with his cynical rally on Saturday at that very same Lincoln Memorial.

Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior. He famously described President Obama as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

[...]

Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.”

He makes you want to take a shower.

In Beck’s view, President Obama is driven by a desire to settle “old racial scores” and his ultimate goal is “reparations” for black Americans. Abe Lincoln and Dr. King could only look on aghast at this clown.

Beck has been advertising his rally as nonpolitical, but its main speaker is Sarah Palin. She had her own low moment recently as a racial provocateur, publicly voicing her support for Laura Schlessinger, radio’s “Dr. Laura,” who went out of her way to humiliate a black caller by continuously using the n-word to make a point, even after the caller had made it clear that she was offended.

Palin’s advice to Schlessinger: “Don’t retreat — reload.”

There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.

But I worry about the potential for violence that grows out of unrestrained, hostile bombast. We’ve seen it so often. A little more than two weeks after the 1963 March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan and four young black girls were killed. And three months after the march, Jack Kennedy was assassinated.

[...]

Chuck Roberts leaves CNN's Headline News (or HLN, or CNN2, or whatever you want to call it)

Link: Chuck Roberts Departing HLN - mediabistro.com: TVNewser.

Knew there was a reason I held on to this silly blurry snapshot I grabbed from Election Night, 2004, with the incomparable, witty and razor-sharp Chuck Roberts holding down the anchor chair as the results flew in fast and furious after 7P ET.

More blurry snapshots of a wild night covering the 2004 national election at the CNN Center in Atlanta after the jump.

Washington Post Obituary for Mike Gauldin

It took a while, but the national press (AP and Washington Post, at least) have noted Mike Gauldin's passing. Since the link may go missing some time in the future due to the uncertain nature of newspapers online and off, I want to save the WashPo obituary here:

Link: Doris E. Gola, Michael G. Gauldin, William L. Siskos, Ora Belle Tamm.

    

Michael G. Gauldin,

Clinton Press Secretary

Michael G. Gauldin, 55, a press secretary for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton who came to Washington to work in public affairs after Clinton was inaugurated as president in 1993, died July 22 of brain cancer at his home in Burke.

Mr. Gauldin was the director of public and consumer affairs for the Department of Energy from 1993 to 1995, followed by six years as communications director at the Department of the Interior.

He then joined the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement as the director of public affairs. In 2007, he became a public affairs officer for the U.S. Geological Survey, a position he held until his death.

Michael Glen Gauldin was born in Mena, Ark., and raised in nearby Foreman, Ark. He served in the Army as a public affairs specialist in Colorado and Europe before graduating in 1981 with a degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Before going to work for Clinton in 1987, Mr. Gauldin worked as a journalism instructor and assistant director of information at the University of Arkansas and as a reporter and cartoonist for several Arkansas newspapers. In early 1992, Mr. Gauldin briefly served as press secretary for Clinton's presidential campaign.

Mr. Gauldin was a freelance commercial artist and cartoonist. His clients included newspapers, corporations and the last three secretaries of the Department of Interior. He also made American history action figures, including Native Americans and African American Buffalo Soldiers, and sold them online.

He was separated from his wife, Jane Catherine Harrison Gauldin of Springfield.

Survivors include his companion of 15 years, Jana Prewitt of Burke; four children from his marriage, Amanda Willett of Oak Hill, Va., and Patrick, John and Elizabeth Gauldin of Springfield; his parents, Harold and Fairy Gauldin of Foreman; three brothers; and two grandchildren.

-- Emma Brown

Mike Gauldin, 1954-2010. R.I.P.

A great man passed away last Thursday, taken too young by brain cancer, and I am just so sad. So when you're sad, best watch a funny video of the same talented fellow, doing his most hilarious and locally-famous bits for the Northwest Arkansas Gridion Show, as Brother Billy Bob.

Seldom has a parody been as rich. Keep in mind, this was taped probably in the late 80s, contemporary with scandals with Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Baker.

Sort of overshadows the fact that he also went to Washington, D.C. with that other guy from Arkansas, Governor Bill Clinton, doesn't it? But if you want to know about his distinguished career with that stuff, here's an early obituary.

YouTube - BroBillyBob.

No further comment needed

  

Heartbreaking images by Charlie Riedel for AP. More here and here.

  

Wikileaks Shuttered and on Hiatus

Link: Wikileaks: whistleblowing, investigative journalism isn't cheap | Blog | Econsultancy. [Photo by aturkus via Flickr]

Just another voice in the wind about the very real difficulties facing journalism right now. So many people have talked about a non-profit journalism sector, operating largely along the lines of public radio and public television, with telethon-like beg-fests that apparently turn up a fair amount of cash (much to the annoyance of anyone forced to listen to those interruptions).

So, folks reason, this model could be applied elsewhere. It goes back to the first warbloggers, like Christopher Allbritton, working for donations to get to Iraq and be an independent journalist on the ground in-country. I'm not certain that model even worked that well then.

Other "entrepreneurial journalism" ventures have also attempted to crowd-source editorial assignments, and support for those assignments, like the once-hopeful http://newassignment.net.

The inheritors of this mantle now fall to foundation-supported sites, or sites like Pro Publica (http://www.propublica.org/) or Global Post (http://www.globalpost.com/), sites that seem to want to create a new syndication model for longer form journalists along the lines of what the agencies like Black Star or Magnum did for photojournalists once upon a time, only without the high demand of a glossy magazine industry beast that needed feeding.

Then there's the sponsorship of the Knight Foundation, with the News Challenge for entrepreneurial journalism (http://www.newschallenge.org/).

Jonathan Zittrain warns: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms

Link: Zittrain: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms - GigaOM.

I love it when Jonathan Zittrain weighs in on things. Loved his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and mostly what he says here expands on ideas in there, focused on the platform side of things, and the growing lack of "generativity" and openness in the newer platforms coming out, like the iPhone and Kindle.

So if you haven't read the book, here's some pithy bits as summarized by Liz Gannes:

Imagine, if you will, that you bought a cloud-enabled toaster. And that one day, you got a sudden in-home upgrade to three toast slots from two. Then, just as suddenly, the new feature addition was rolled back. So you were left with two slots and some smushed toast. And then your toaster decided it wanted to start serving orange juice.

You don’t truly own the toaster — rather, according to Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, “You entered into a service relationship with a breakfast-oriented provider.” That’s the tragic and giggle-worthy analogy Zittrain uses to illustrate his worry that the cloud computing model gives too much control to platforms, which must be trusted to do good.

[...]

His audience included co-panelist Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, a company Zittrain pinpointed as being at the center of the problem.

For instance, Zittrain called Amazon’s Kindle a device with “an operating system crying to get out.” To an even greater degree than with Apple’s iPhone, programmers can’t get direct access to develop on the Kindle platform, he noted. And Amazon retreating on the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature and zapping of U.S. customers’ copies of “1984″ — despite a convincing apology by Jeff Bezos — show the company can beam itself down to make the device less useful when it chooses.

[...]

Zittrain also pointed to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where people can be put to near-automated work that makes them effectively zombies for largely non-useful purposes such as giving five-star reviews for devices they’ve never used. In this case he thinks government regulation, like the FTC’s new blogging disclosure policy, could be a good thing — at least in the sense that it pressures Amazon to police tasks on its platform.

[...]

R.I.P., Mark Pittman, Reporter Who Foresaw Subprime Crisis

Link: Mark Pittman, Reporter Who Foresaw Subprime Crisis, Dies at 52 - Bloomberg.com.

[Woody Guthrie]

From the Bloomberg.com Obituary:

[...]

In 2007, he was writing about the securitization of home loans when subprime borrowers, who have bad or limited credit histories, began missing payments on their mortgages at a faster pace.

Pittman’s June 29, 2007, article, headlined “S&P, Moody’s Hide Rising Risk on $200 Billion of Mortgage Bonds,” was excoriated at the time by Portfolio.com for “trying to play ‘gotcha’ with the ratings agencies.”

“And that really isn’t helpful,” said the unsigned posting.

Beating the Pack

Pittman’s story proved prescient. So did his reports on U.S. banks exporting toxic mortgages overseas, on Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson’s role in creating those troubled assets while he was chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and on the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc.

“He’s been on this crisis since before the crisis,” said Gretchen Morgenson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial columnist for the New York Times. “He was the best at burrowing into the most complex securities Wall Street could come up with and explaining the implications of them to readers of all levels of sophistication. His investigative work during the crisis set the standard for other reporters everywhere. He was a giant.”

In the “Faustian Bargain” series, Pittman explained how 5 percent of U.S. mortgage borrowers missing monthly payments could lead to a freeze in lending throughout the world.

‘Fearless, Most Trusted’

“Mark Pittman proved to be the most fearless, most trusted reporter on the most important beat during the 12 years he wrote about credit markets, corporate finance and the Federal Reserve at Bloomberg News,” said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler. “His colleagues will miss his laughter and generous sense of mission. Bloomberg readers were rewarded by his many achievements culminating with a federal court ruling validating his search for records of taxpayer-financed policies withheld from the public and the Gerald Loeb Award.”

[...]

What to think about the CNN.com redesign?

I've been checking out the screenshots and early weekend implementation of the new CNN.com redesign. Several of my journalist and non-journalist friends have been weighing in on links I've posted on Facebook (although my CNN buds have been keeping fairly quiet, as is proper. I did same in public forums when I worked there).

Disclaimer: I was a cyberculture columnist for CNN.com from 2002-2005, where I often had to advocate for certain "bloggish" types of discourse that were not generally permitted on the site because the online common wisdom or ways of knowing (crowd-sourced consensus on cyber-topics, usually) couldn't be traced to some important person quoted as saying "X" (an absolute requirement for CNN.com at the time), or because online "conventional" wisdom didn't necessarily jive with journalistic copyediting standards of "The Row" at that time.

Times have certainly changed, both in the network and with the site's embrace of citizen media (something I was also an early advocate for), and now, in its turn toward the site stylings of online "opinion writing" found at Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, among other blog and news aggregators (more on that below).

For what it's worth, a full archive of my CNN.com columns can be viewed here. I was employed by Turner Broadcasting from 2001 to the end of 2006, when I moved to NYC to take a position at Razorfish, ironically, the company responsible for the CNN.com 2007 redesign (UX and creative). I was not involved in the redesign at either company.

That should cover all necessary disclaimers. All I'm doing here is giving my impressions on the 2009 redesign (largely positive, I'll tell you why), in spite of my friends' initial reactions on Facebook (largely negative, I can speculate why), and what I think may have been lost from what I considered a visually stunning "liquid" (the gray modular look) redesign as proposed by Razorfish and executed by CNN.com in 2007.

What follows is my opinion and my opinion only, and in no way represents the views of any of my employers, past or present.