Don’t Quote Me

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Anyone who has ever been interviewed for a news story has experienced that "Oh God I hope I don't sound like and idiot" feeling and the related "I hope they don't use what I say out of context to make me look like an idiot" feeling. It's terrifying and a primary reason that there's an industry built ar0und media training.

Related to the fear of being misquoted is the desire to control the story and as a result there's a growing trend for people to demand quote approval as a condition for being interviewed. Some traditional news people argue that it's bad for the news reporting business, but Dilbert creator Scott Adams thinks it might actually be a good thing:

I've been interviewed several hundred times in my career. When I see my quotes taken out of context it is often horrifying. Your jaw would drop if you saw how often quotes are literally manufactured by writers to make a point. Some of it is accidental because reporters try to listen and take notes at the same time. But much of it is obviously intentional. So much so that when I see quotes in any news report I discount them entirely. In the best case, quotes are out of context. In the worst case, the quotes are totally manufactured.

I've also been in a number of interviews in which the writer tried to force a quote to fit a narrative that's already been formed. The way that looks is that the writer asks the same question in ten different ways, each time trying to lead the witness to a damning or controversial quote. It's a dangerous situation because humans are wired to want to please, and once you pick up on what a writer wants you to say, it's hard to resist delivering it…

Quote approval is certainly bad for the news industry because it reduces the opportunities for manufacturing news and artificial controversies. But on balance, I'd say quote approval adds more to truth than it subtracts.

Over the past few years I've been interviewed a few times for news stories related to my job, but they were mostly "friendly" stories that didn't carry any "gotcha" risks. Then a few weeks ago I was interviewed for a story and it was apparent throughout the interview that the reporter had a pre-conceived narrative and she was trying mightily to get me to give up a juicy quote to support that narrative. I spent the better part of 20 minutes trying to not give her that quote and then spent eight agonizing hours until the story was aired to see how anything I might have said would be used. I've never been happier to end up edited ott of a story in my life.

Lonely Highways

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My commute from home in Lewisville to work in Greensboro is spent primarily on I-40 and almost every day I pass the spot where a decomposed body was found today. As a pretty avid fan of mysteries (I grew up reading the Hardy Boys, became a fan of the Spenser novels in college, and have long been a devotee of Ross Thomas, Gregory McDonald, Elmore Leonard, etc.) it has occurred to me as I drive the highway that although thousands of people pass by every day, it's rare that anyone walks those grounds and thus the wooded areas between the exits would make a pretty good place to hide a body or many other kinds of wrongdoing. 

Along the same route there are also dozens of bridges and multiple creeks, and in at least a couple of spots it's pretty easy to imagine how someone could run off the road in the middle of the night and, if no one else is in sight when it happens, not be discovered for a very long time. We tend to think of those kinds of stories as happening in the Everglades or in rural, mountainous areas, but the nature of our interstates being what they are it can easily happen just about anywhere.

Food for thought during the drive home, eh?

Remember the Carolina Cougars?

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Folks of a certain age from around these parts (Piedmont Triad of North Carolina) might remember the Carolina Cougars of the old American Basketball Association. The Cougars were based in Greensboro until 1974 when they were purchased by Ozzie and Daniel Silna, moved to St. Louis and renamed the Spirit. That's when this story starts to get really interesting:

Four of the A.B.A.’s seven teams merged with the N.B.A. in 1976, but the Virginia Squires were a financial wreck and the Kentucky Colonels were placated with a $3.3 million payment. But if the Spirits couldn’t join the N.B.A., the Silna brothers wanted to share in what the A.B.A. didn’t have: national TV revenue. They settled with one-seventh of the television money generated annually by each of the four surviving A.B.A. teams — the Nets, the San Antonio Spurs, the Indiana Pacers and the Denver Nuggets…

In 1980-81, the first year the Silnas were eligible to get their share of TV money, they received $521,749, according to court documents filed by the N.B.A. For the 2010-11 season, they received $17,450,000. The N.B.A.’s latest TV deal, with ESPN and TNT, is worth $7.4 billion over eight years. Soon, the Silnas’ total take will hit $300 million.

That's what you might call a heckuva deal, but the brothers are looking to maximize it:

In Manhattan federal court on Thursday, lawyers for the Silna brothers and the league argued over whether the men are owed money beyond what they get from the N.B.A.’s national broadcast and cable television contracts. They want to tap into the money the league gets from international broadcasts, NBA TV, the league’s cable network, and other lucrative deals that could not have been imagined in the three network television universe of 1976.

If Federal District Judge Loretta A. Preska agrees, the Silna brothers — Ozzie, 79, and living in Malibu, Calif., and Daniel, 68, and living in Saddle River, N.J. — stand to receive millions more, all without having assembled a team or used an arena for more than three decades.

As the article pointed out the brothers' original investment in a struggling team in a struggling league was quite risky, but it's hard to imagine that they imagined it would pay off to this extent.

The Battle for the Southern, White, Evangelical, Working Class Vote

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Reuters has an interesting article about the challenges Romney and Obama face with lower income whites in the south. Let's just say that being rich and Mormon complicates things for Romney:

Reuters/Ipsos polling data compiled over the past several months shows that, across the Bible Belt, 38 percent of these voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is "very wealthy" than one who isn't. This is well above the 20 percent who said they would be less likely to vote for an African-American…

According to Reuters/Ipsos polling data, however, 35 percent of voters overall, and the same proportion of lower- and middle-income white Bible Belt voters, say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is Mormon.

Even the fact that a (rather shocking) number of Republicans believe President Obama to be a Muslim (the horrors!) is somewhat offset by Romney being a Mormon:

In a survey conducted this summer by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life, almost a third of Republicans said they believe Obama is Muslim, compared with 16 percent of independents and 8 percent of Democrats. The falsehood is a frequent theme of conservative talk radio.

Still, the challenge for the GOP is to ensure that white evangelicals, most of whom voted for other candidates in the primary, are sufficiently enthusiastic about Romney to make it to the polls…

In 2008, Parrish was a fan of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who was defeated in the GOP primary. She counts him as a Facebook friend. She has yet to "friend" Romney, although she plans to vote for him.

"I'm not extremely excited," she confessed. "I'd prefer not to have a Mormon."

Nonetheless, she added, "Romney seems to align himself with conservative values."

Long story short, what would normally have been a slam dunk demographic for a Republican in 2012 ain't necessarily so. The Republicans certainly did themselves no favor by nominating a rich Mormon with the charisma of stale Wonder Bread. 

myWinston-Salem.com

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The folks behind Winston-Salem-based Contract Web Development just announced the launch of  Cover Story Media, an online publishing company "that focuses on original content founded in reader engagement." One of their products is mywinston-salem.com and after taking a quick trip around the site I'd say it looks like a good new player in the local online content game.

Congrats to tennis buddy Alex Schenker and his team on their new venture. Here's a video they created for the launch.

Pooplant

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So what could sound worse than a fecal transplant? A DIY fecal transplant at home:

Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. [He] mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon.

The transplant was a success — the patient’s diarrhea cleared up within a day and did not return… Khortus was able to demonstrate that we can move colonies of microorganisms from one person to another.

With an estimated 10,000 different species of bacteria living in our bodies, and with bacteria outnumbering cells ten to one, this discovery may have implications for health care more generally. And if the fecal transplant treatment is any indicator, it could lead to fewer doctors’ visits, too. Why is that? Because as this scientific study notes, bacteriotherapy for CDI can be done at home.

 

Collapse of the Authority-Media Complex

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Eric Garland has written a thought-provoking piece about why the celebrity "big-thinkers" are starting to be called on the carpet:

It would be positively idiotic to somehow blame Messieurs Lehrer, Gladwell, Zakaria, Ferguson and others like them for the hot mess of American leadership over the last couple decades. However, their brand of “thought leadership,” it must be said, did wonderfully in a world of authority for its own sake. People still needed to feel as if they were talking to somebody who knew what was going on, lest they sink into a horrific depression realizing that nearly all sectors of American leadership failed catastrophically all at once. Media properties were looking for towering figures who could stand up across a wide variety of platforms, as billions of dollars of content sales were now concentrated into the hands of a few companies: Disney, Time Warner, News Corp, CBS, and others who owned publishers, TV, radio and more. Speaking agencies had to fill keynote spots for the billions of dollars of conferences held every year, and having superstars is a way easier sale than actually finding the right speaker for each occasion. (You want to talk international security? Great, here’s Thomas Friedman. You want to talk international business competition? Great, here’s Thomas Friedman. You want to talk about renewing American potential? Have you heard of Thomas Friedman? He’s very influential, you know. Only $50,000, too.)

If you notice the career arcs of those who attained success against the teeth-gritting backdrop of constant leadership failures, you’ll notice that none of these high-minded intellectuals tend to rock the boat too much. Gladwell, for example, has been pre-eminent in the world of publishing for more than a decade, a period of time covering all of the collapse of character and values I have described above. Can you name a single controversial opinion the man has taken? Has he ever gotten up in the grill of anyone who might hesitate before shelling out his $75,000 speaking fee? I actually think Gladwell is a good writer, but as far as the paragon of intellectual virtue in the Western world for the last decade, shouldn’t some part of the last decade’s clusterfuck have struck him as worthy of spending a little built-up credibility and inspired him to call some people out on the carpet? I don’t mean a Network/Howard Beale cri-de-coeur, I mean maybe some minor article recognizing the dramatic drop in results from our leadership, something in tune with the times. Lord knows he could have always regained some ground with a nice book on how people get successful. Fear of starvation was not holding him back.

The piece is pretty extensive and Garland does a great job of looking back at the last 30-ish years to explain how we came to this point in our culture where we are being led by folks who really don't know what they're talking about, much less what they're doing.

The Incredible Shrinking Middle

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One of the underexplored aspects of the current unemployment situation in North Carolina is the movement of people from adequate paying jobs to under paying jobs. A study by the NC Justice Center makes it vividly clear:

The nonprofit group determined there were 356,000 more working-age adults employed in the state in 2001 than in 2010, with manufacturing taking the brunt of the job decline.

The state lost 380,000 jobs in that period, with about 75 percent concentrated in industries with average hourly wages that enabled individuals and families to stay above the living income standard. A family of four needed to earn at least $23.47 an hour in 2010 to have enough money to meet basic expenses, according to N.C. state government standards.

The state's manufacturing workforce, which paid an average of $25.30 an hour, fell by 38 percent during the 10-year period. Manufacturing accounted for 72 percent of the state's job losses…

Where North Carolina did have job growth, it mostly came in low-wage industry sectors, the group said. About 83 percent of the job growth came with average wages of less than the $23.47-an-hour living income standard for a family of four.

For example, 15 percent of the state's job growth from 2001 to 2010 came in the food-services and accommodation sectors, which paid $7.15 an hour.

The state's median household income dropped 9.4 percent during the decade, or from $47,823 in 2001 to $43,326 in 2010.

The center found the number of North Carolinians living in poverty – $22,314 annual income for a family of four – rose by 24.1 percent during the decade.

In a nutshell the middle class is shrinking, and not from upward mobility. You would think that would lead to an outcry against the "corporate class," but outside of a little wrist-slapping at the height of the economic meltdown it just hasn't happened. That's what makes this interview of Mike Lofgren by Bill Moyers so easy to believe (h/t Fec for the link). For those of you expecting an anti-Republican screed you'll be disappointed – he basically argues that both parties have been captured by the corporate class. Enjoy: