Restaurant Critic Getting Schooled

Last night, at the Blogger Gathering, I met Owen Morris, who writes for the Pitch's Fat City food blog.

Naturally enough, the topic focused on food for a while before veering off into the legitimacy of being apolitical, and Owen impressed me with his knowledge and passion for food. When I checked out Fat City last night, I saw that he is actually taking advanced culinary classes at Johnson County Community College, and he's going to do a weekly diary about his experiences.

I'm looking forward to going through culinary classes vicariously.

The Star's Sloppy Endorsements

I was early to make my endorsements during this cycle because. as I wrote then, "I'd hate for anyone to think that the Star's analysis influences me . . ." At the time I wrote that, though, I had no idea how sloppy the Star would be.

I'm not complaining about endorsing candidates other than the ones I support. I'm complaining of my disappointment with their ability to get facts straight and arguments lined up correctly. This season, the Star has erased its own credibility.

In the Sheriff's race, the Star had nice things to say about my favorite candidate, John Bullard, but wound up endorsing Mike Sharp. That's fine with me - reasonable minds can differ as to who is the superior candidate. But what made their endorsement laughable was their mistaken reasoning - the headline of their endorsement noted "Sheriff jobs require experience, solid administrative skills" and the text of their endorsement claimed "Mike Sharp has impressive credentials for the sheriff’s job, given his combination of service with the Kansas City Police Department and years of experience as a businessman". That all sounds pretty reasonable, but Mike Sharp has hardly any relevant experience! What happened was that the Star took at face value Sharp's claim that he has twenty something years of experience as a reserve officer, but, in fact, that's apples compared to oranges. That's like claiming that a kid who received a pair of pilot's wings on his or her first plane trip a dozen years ago has 12 years of experience as a pilot. It's absolutely fine to endorse Mike Sharp if you like him personally, or you think he will bring fresh perspective, or whatever, but it's just plain sloppy and embarrassing to endorse him because he has experience. He doesn't, and the Star should have realized that.

As sloppy as that endorsement was, though, they really shocked me with their endorsement of Jeff Harris - even when we agree that Jeff Harris is the best candidate! Clearly they reached the right result, but they gave him an edge "based on his leadership role [in the General Assembly] and prosecutorial experience". There are two things wrong with that statement - in an Attorney General race, prosecutorial experience is only important for those who do not know what the AG's office really does, and, second, Jeff Harris doesn't really have much irrelevant prosecutorial experience. Instead, Jeff Harris has experience as a division leader in the Attorney General's office itself - much better, and much more relevant!

Over the past several years, political insiders have been chattering about how fewer and fewer people pay attention to the Star's endorsements. Is it because of the rise of blogs, is it because of declining circulation, or some other reason?

I suspect the reason fewer people are paying attention to the Star's endorsements is because the Star is not paying attention when they are making them.

Midwest Voices

A while back, someone brought Midwest Voices to my attention, and I've been meaning to link to them ever since. It defines itself as follows:

Welcome to the Midwest Voices blog, a community forum created to foster discussion on issues that matter to our region, nation and the world. We hope it will become a gathering place of thoughtful debate, a spot to share ideas and push projects. The blogosphere is full of opinion options, but we hope to fill a niche by offering conversation among neighbors in this region who like to debate the issues of the day.

In short, it's a good collection of the editorial columnists of the Star mixed in with some amateur content of varying quality. Definitely worth visiting - and I'll add it to the blogroll the next time I tinker with the template.

By the way, who do you think I should add to the blogroll on the left?

They Pay For this Kind of "Analysis"?

Steve Kraske and Dave Helling needed to team up to produce the ludicrous "analysis" that the Kansas City Star recently published, posted and presumably paid for. In it, they claim that the "hard part" for the Democrats may be piecing the party back together after the primary season.

I wish I had been there to see the article get written. Was it written over the course of a tequila shot drinking contest, with the winner getting to eat the worm and the loser being made to list his name first? That would be kind of funny to watch.

Or did they write it while grilling wieners in an enclosed space, not realizing that the carbon monoxide was slowing their brain activity to a snail's pace? I would have rescued them.

Regardless of the circumstances, it takes a special kind of opacity to worry about the Democrats on the day that Obama clinched the nomination. After a primary season that saw record numbers of democrats, including millions of new voters, come to the polls to vote for their favored brand of CHANGE, the Democratic party has never been stronger.

From the beginning, the overwhelming majority of democrats have voiced the opinion that either Obama or Clinton would be great, regardless of which one they were supporting. While an occasional few have fallen to the intoxication of partisanship, they are not representative of a trend, or even of their more sober sides. Give them a week or two to calm down, and they will be fine. (Mr. Martin, were you really fearing a heart attack while watching a rules committee? That's not normal, and a specialist of some sort should be consulted.)

Because expressions of anger between the Clinton and Obama sides were apparently so hard to find, these two journalists were forced to resort to quotations of anger toward - journalists! They quote Mike Sanders:

“I firmly believe that Hillary Clinton was held (by the media) to a different standard than every other presidential candidate who ran in this cycle,” said Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders. “Not just Barack Obama, not just John McCain, but every other candidate.”

Helling and Kraske are weakly attempting to portray Sanders' dissatisfaction with how badly journalists did their job as some kind of dissatisfaction with his fellow Democrats. I suggest that they ask Mr. Sanders if he will be voting for Senator Obama in a match against McCain, and I promise that the answer will be a strong "yes".

The fact of the matter is that the dissension among the Democrats is nothing compared to that among the Republicans. Of course, in the heat of the moment, a few petulant Clinton supporters are going to overstate their disappointment in seeing their candidate fall short, but nobody who supports Hillary's progressive agenda and Democratic values is going to fail to see those same qualities in Barack Obama.

Within a couple weeks, Obama will be riding high atop a surge of enthusiastic Democrats eager to bring change to our country. I hope Kraske and Helling invite me to observe whatever collaboration they dream up then. It appears they may need adult supervision.

(I enjoy making fun of Kraske and Helling, because I'm frankly jealous they get paid decent money to produce such mediocre foolish verbiage a couple times a week, while I produce high-quality foolish verbiage almost every day, for free. I know, deep in my heart, that the only thing separating me from the professional pundits is a j-school degree and a willingness to really dive down deep into the murky depths of obtuseness and emerge with pearls like the article discussed here.)

Kansas City Star ROBBED by Pulitzer Committee!!

Incredibly, the Pulitzer Committee somehow overlooked the 120-article series on "hot fuel" penned by the obsessive Steve Everly. How could they fail to recognize the constant, tedious reportage plumbing the shocking, shocking fact that liquids tend to expand when they are warmed?

They must not have an award for pointless, breathless exposes . . .

Even so, they should have given an award for the weekend teaser they used back in October - "The hot fuel debate rages on nationwide . . .". Pulitzer for comedy writing?

Is David Martin a Fair Journalist? Guess Again . . .

A few months ago, David Martin of the Pitch got scooped by the Wall Street Journal. In his embarrassment at having an out-of-town paper get a story he had missed, he decided that the story wasn't true, and wrote an article attacking the credibility of a City Councilwoman, based entirely on his unproven guesswork.

Once again, we are getting a dose of Martin's guesswork when he fails to get to the bottom of a story. According to Martin, the City Planning and Development Department allowed bidders to look at each other's qualifications before they came in for interviews on a feasibility study regarding improving the bridges over the southern edge of the downtown loop. This is apparently unusual, though, frankly, it sounds like a good idea to me. Who's going to do a better job of reference checking than a competitor? And shouldn't the submitted qualifications of someone seeking a million tax dollars be a public record?

Brushing aside most journalists' preference for openness in government transactions, though, Martin sets out to avenge this breach of back-room secrecy and find out who dared to seek this information.

But he failed. He couldn't get anyone to tell him who did it - at least not on the record.

So he accuses HNTB without proof.

Again with the guesswork instead of journalism? Martin tells us twice that it was HNTB who requested the review, but nowhere does Martin explain what leads to that conclusion. Everyone who knows anything refuses comment.

Since speculation is part of the game in Martin's version of journalism (Martinism might be a better word, since it's not really a version of what I consider journalism), I'm guessing that someone told Martin off the record that it was HNTB. I'm guessing he failed to get anyone to go on record with it. I'm guessing he dislikes someone at HNTB for God-knows what reason.

I'm guessing that David Martin was frustrated because he couldn't prove that HNTB had done anything wrong. I'm guessing he was angry enough that he wrote a story calling the company names, but utterly failing to introduce proof.

I'm guessing other journalists would have stayed on the story and uncovered proof, or simply not written it up.

Unlike Martin, though, I'm not going to present my guesswork as fact. Unlike Martin, I won't put my credibility on the line by writing something like "Well, I can tell you it was HNTB." Because, unless he or she has the proof, a journalist really shouldn't tell you anything. I'm just a blogger, but even I know "that's just weak."

Kraske - Hacktastic again

Steve Kraske, the Star's political news columnist, offers up this gem in today's paper:

It’s official: Mayor Mark Funkhouser admits he, too, has heard the talk of a mayoral recall stemming from the Frances Semler appointment.

No leader of such an effort is emerging, but reporters are on watch.

I swear that's the entire segment. Go ahead, follow the link and see if he explains why the fact that Funkhouser has heard of something that has been discussed in political circles, on blogs, and even in Kraske's freaking paper is news. (He doesn't.) Go ahead, follow the link and see if he explains why he's devoting space to a recall drive that he acknowledges doesn't even exist outside the imagination of a few crackpots, blowhards and joke bloggers. (He doesn't.)

I have a scoop for Kraske. Political observers are talking about how worthless his column is, and wondering whether the Star ought to just get rid of it. Someone, someday, might circulate a petition asking that they ditch it. Nobody's actually doing it, but now that he's heard about it, it's worth putting in his column, isn't it?

Journalism, Blogging, and David Martin in the Middle

I am frequently amused by bloggers who get full of themselves and start to think of themselves as journalists. (I won't link to any examples - my most frequent critic [the one I live with] says I've been too mean lately.) Simply stated, journalism is similar to much of blogging in that it normally consists of timely writing on current events. But journalism has the added burden of carefully checking facts and getting reliable and verifiable sources, whereas bloggers can, and do, let a story fly based on an email or a suspicion. It's a huge difference, and an important one - I wrote about it here when Dan Margolies of the Star called me to try to find sources on a (true) story I had published based upon an email and a suspicion. We both wound up writing about the same thing, but I did it as a blogger and he did it as a journalist (only after he had confirmation of the facts). Journalists don't publish stories based on rumors and conjecture.

That is, unless you are David Martin of the Pitch. You see, David seems a little worked up that the Wall Street Journal (a source of real journalism, at least until Murdoch gains control) wrote about a small demonstration of Minutemen outside Beth Gottstein's place. David missed the story when it happened (even though he claims he's been "reading about" the Minutemen since someone else at the Pitch wrote about them), and now, egg all over his face, he wants to get to the bottom of this tiny facet of the whole Semler story.

Humorously, he seems surprised that Beth didn't want to talk to him when he shows up, flash photographer in tow, and insists on grilling Gottstein about the demonstration outside a meeting. Ambush journalism has its place, but not when the topic is a 5 week old demonstration consisting of a few Minutemen waving signs outside a plaza condo. In that context, it's just another form of harassment, and Beth treated the jerk like a jerk. Good job, Beth. Too bad you didn't have some mace for him.

Gottstein showed a lot more class than she needed to, and called him up to give him the interview he wanted. In it, he accuses her of making up the demonstration, and demands to know where the Wall Street Journal got its story. Beth, having moved past this 5 week old story, refuses to play his game, and rebuffs his attempts to stir up another fight between herself and the Minutemen crazies. She, like everyone else, knows that if she gives him a quote about the demonstration, he'll use it to provoke another one, and nobody except a failing "journalist" would benefit from that.

In other words, David Martin just got outscooped by the Wall Street Journal and outsmarted by Beth Gottstein. It's been a bad week, and he's feeling fussy about it. He's forced a photographer to invest time in this fool's errand, and he has no story. People must be kind of chuckling at him around the office.

Instead of being a journalist and sticking to the verified facts, David Martin attacks. He actually publishes an article based on his unverified suspicion that the demonstration didn't happen. Angry that real journalists found a facet of the story that he had totally missed, he assumes it must be false, because he would have known about it if it had happened.

What's his best piece of evidence? That someone with the Minutemen denies that he knew about it. Note - nothing in Martin's article says the Minutemen denied it happened, but a person who was not tied to the demonstration denies that his nutcase organization harassed a city councilperson. There's a shocker! That's enough to run the presses for David Martin, though.

Oh, there's one more bit of evidence, but it contradicts Martin's position. The Minutemen were gathering for a protest in Topeka later that day, so the thought that they decided to raise two kinds of hell on their trip, when they already had their signs painted, makes a fair amount of sense.

Laughably, Martin ends his article with an accusation that Gottstein is not telling the truth, and that she is stirring things up by embellishing the truth to make herself a victim.

David Martin, you have no facts. All you have is a suspicion, and a large dose of frustration. A blogger might run with that, but a journalist most definitely would not. Talk to some of the journalists in your office, and maybe they'll take the time to explain the difference. They pay attention to the difference, and publish their non-journalism on their blog, where it belongs, instead of in print. On the other hand, they might refuse to talk to you, just like Beth Gottstein did, because you cannot be trusted to act like a journalist.

The Sell-Out of the Washington Post

It's nice to think back to a day when an independent press doggedly sought to publish the truth and expose the corruption of our nation's capitol - but it's mostly an illusion. "Insider" press corps members have always shielded the American public from knowledge they didn't think we could digest properly, and shielded government officials from scrutiny of matters they didn't think were the proper concern of the public. Examples include the health issues and philandering of certain presidents. Who knows what other revelations have remained hidden in the buddy-buddy world of Washington?

It's also nice to think that things are improving, and that our press corps has develped a more complete sense of duty since Watergate. Alas, that is also a fanciful illusion.

Take a moment and read this paragraph by the Washington Post's "liberal" Richard Cohen:

With the sentencing of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald has apparently finished his work, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, to make a mountain out of a molehill. At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak and wound up prosecuting not the leaker -- Richard Armitage of the State Department -- but Libby, convicted in the end of lying. This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.

If you're not dismayed and disgusted by the prospect of a so-called journalist arguing that the prosecution of Scooter Libby (begun by a criminal complaint filed by the CIA, not the NYT) represent an unwarranted shining of light onto the "dark art of politics", then go here and read Glenn Greenwald's explanation of why you should be.