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August 31, 2005
Hurricane
I grew up on Florida’s Gulf Coast where hurricanes were a regular threat. When I was a teenager, my friends and I loved to hear that a tropical storm was headed up the gulf. Unlike the oceans, the gulf is calm and peaceful. The approach of a hurricane meant a great opportunity for body-surfing.
Later, when I was a journalist in Florida, I took a more responsible view of hurricane threats. When one was headed our way, we invariably quoted Dr. Neil Frank, director of the National Hurricane Center. He was a doomsayer, always predicting the worst. Only rarely did the damage match his warnings.
Last year, with four major hurricanes hitting Florida, something had obviously changed. This week’s horror on the Gulf Coast – cinderblock buildings simply disappearing in Gulfport and Biloxi, New Orleans inundated – was exactly what Frank worried about all those years.
My friend Jim Amoss is editor of the Times-Picayune, the New Orleans newspaper. Through heroic efforts, the paper is being published online. The staff evacuated the newspaper building yesterday. If they had a way to print a newspaper, there would be no way to deliver it and few people to whom to deliver it.
The online edition includes sections where local readers can share information. Two are titled “Missing persons” and “What’s happened to my neighborhood?” Today’s lead headline tells the magnitude of the tragedy:
UNDER WATER
LEVEE BREACH SWAMPS CITY FROM LAKE TO RIVER
Population urged to leave; years of cleanup ahead
Gwen Filosa, a former Monitor staffer, works at the Times-Picayune. She is one of many staffers there who lost their homes and possessions. She wrote an e-mail a couple of hours ago to inform us at the Monitor of her situation. It reads:
“We evacuated the paper, 20 at a time, in the backs of delivery trucks, and made an 8-hour trek to land in Baton Rouge (usually a 1½-hour trip). We’re in Baton Rouge, taking over LSU’s journalism dept. Just wanted to say hello and let you all in New Hampshire know I’m okay. We’re all working, for now. I’m still a renter, and pretty much lost everything I owned, but as soon as we waded out of New Orleans, where lawlessness is reportedly hitting all-time lows, I was relieved. I feared people, 7,000 inmates next door to our paper, more than the water.”
(We’re running a longer account from Gwen in tomorrow’s Monitor.)
What an enormous tragedy Katrina has wrought. We can only hope that it is an anomaly, a storm of the century like the Galveston hurricane of 1900. Unfortunately, the evidence points another way.
Posted by Mike Pride at 06:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 29, 2005
Left out
I hope you read Annmarie Timmins's excellent Sunday Monitor story about the visiting room at the state prison for men in Concord. When the late Ray Barham wrote a column for the paper, I often visited him there. He’d tell me about the prisoners at the other tables, especially those who had committed grisly crimes. The rules forbade me to speak with other prisoners, but I was curious about them and their visitors. Annmarie’s story satisfied this curiosity.
At least one prisoner who might have been in the story was omitted, and thereby hangs a tale.
To report the story, Timmins went to the visiting room with Jeff Lyons, spokesperson for the Department of Corrections. She approached prisoners and their visitors and asked if they were willing to be interviewed. If the answer was yes, Lyons came to the table with a consent form that said the department would share information about the prisoner with the Monitor.
While Timmins was writing the story, a family that had signed the form objected to her intention to include the prisoner’s crime in the story. He was a sex offender, and his family said publishing the information might endanger him in prison. But prisoners’ offenses are a matter of public record, and we knew readers would want to know the crime committed by each prisoner in the story.
Timmins and her editors discussed the family’s concerns. We checked with people in the know about whether inmates generally know each other’s crimes and whether sex offenders are mistreated. The answers conflicted.
My view was that we should go with the information. The family had signed a form and spoken with Timmins. The crime and sentence were public information. Case closed.
But when the issue is ethical rather than legal, an editor is often an adviser, not a decision-maker. The decision is the reporter’s – especially when the reporter is a veteran like Timmins.
She decided the family had a point. The consent form they had signed said nothing about our including the crime. And if they felt publication might hurt the inmate, who were we to disregard that fear? Besides, in every other case, Timmins had discussed the crimes with her subjects during the interviews. In this one instance, it was only during a follow-up call to the family that she had raised the issue.
So she dropped the inmate from the story.
Reporters make decisions daily about what to put in their stories and what to leave out. This one provides a window into how complex such decisions can be.
Posted by Mike Pride at 04:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 26, 2005
Casualties of war
In summertime I commute an hour to and from work each day, and many evenings I listen to Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Last night, Gross interviewed Kayla Williams, who served five years in the Army as an Arabic linguist, including a tour of Iraq. She’s written a book about her experience as a soldier called Love Me, Love My Rifle.
Toward the end of the interview, Williams told Gross about her marriage to a soldier she had met while stationed in Iraq. He still has shrapnel in his brain from a wound he suffered there. Williams described the initial care he received as excellent but added that the military seemed unprepared for the large number of traumatic wounds American soldiers are incurring in Iraq.
Kevlar vests and helmets have saved the lives of many men and women in Iraq who would have died in previous wars. The downside is that their wounds tend to be more severe than wounds in some earlier wars – amputations, head injuries, disfigurement, burns.
Williams’s discussion of these issues (click here to hear the interview) got me thinking about numbers. I’ve heard many commentators during the war in Iraq use the terms "deaths" and "casualties" interchangeably. “We’ve suffered more than 1,800 casualties,” they say, when in fact they are referring only to deaths.
That number grossly undercounts the American lives that have been lost or damaged by the invasion of Iraq. As of today, the official U.S. military death count is 1,874, but 13,877 have been wounded. The casualty count is thus 15,751.
And as we have seen in recent days from the duel between the antiwar parents called to action by Cindy Sheehan and the counter-forces mustered to cheer on President Bush, a casualty affects far more people than the soldier killed or wounded.
From the beginning, citizens have wanted to believe – and have been encouraged to believe – that the Iraq war’s human costs to American families were minimal. Iraq is no Vietnam and no World War II in this regard, but the casualties are mounting. The death count you hear every day doesn’t tell the whole story.
Posted by Mike Pride at 03:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 24, 2005
We've got game
In my mail today was a copy of a personal letter to the Monitor’s sports editor, Sandy Smith. I won’t disclose the writers' names, but I will quote briefly from the letter. The writers are an athlete’s parents who have seen Smith working the local sports beat for three years.
“(We) watched the incredible dedication and enthusiasm that you bring to your profession,” they wrote. “. . . How many sports editors attend games an hour away on their day off? How many writers know the players by name and are known by name to these athletes?”
Even outside of Concord, the writers said, the Monitor’s coverage of sporting events and athletes is known to be “THE BEST.”
It makes me blush to pass on such high praise, but I agree with the writers about Sandy and her department.
The kind words come at an opportune time: The sports staff is gearing up for another year of high school coverage. Maybe you read Tim O’Sullivan’s column in today’s paper on three football teams – John Stark, Newfound and Gilford – that are about to enter their second season. Tim also previewed Class L girls’ soccer. More previews lie directly ahead.
Our sports staff – Sandy, Tim, Jeff Novotny, Ray Duckler, Dave D’Onofrio and Donovan Burba – will soon be in the thick of it. We cover 22 high schools, and there are nine fall sports. On a typical weeknight, we’ll write up 40 games.
The sports staff has two kinds of help in meeting this challenge. We have long relied on local coaches to call us on deadline with scores and details. And we typically have a crew of part-timers – “monkeys,” we affectionately call them – who take calls and write game accounts. Some of the “monkeys” are high school students. I have a soft spot for them because this was my own first job in journalism back in the dark ages of hot metal and letterpress printing.
The demands on our sports department have grown immensely in recent years. New Hampshire International Speedway, the Quarry Dogs, the Fisher Cats, the Monarchs, the success of the Boston pro teams, interest in UNH hockey and football – these are only a few of our burgeoning coverage challenges.
High school sports have been the biggest growth area of all, and they remain the heart of our sports mission.
Let the games begin!
Posted by Mike Pride at 02:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 22, 2005
Tongue-twister
In the Aug. 22 New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg takes a rip at President Bush's statement that intelligent design should be taught in public schools. I’m a member of the choir Hertzberg is preaching to, but I doubt his Menckenesque scorn will persuade anyone who isn’t.
What intrigued me was his decision to quote Bush word-for-word on the subject. On Aug. 1, the president had a roundtable with Texas reporters in which he was asked whether both evolution and intelligent design should be taught in public schools:
Bush: “I think – as I said, harking back to my days as my governor – both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made by local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.”
Reporter: “Both sides should be properly taught?”
Bush: “Yes, people – so people can understand what the debate is about.”
Reporter: “So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?”
Bush: “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I’m not suggesting – you’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”
Of course, the president is quoted all the time. But the tendency in journalism is to use bits and pieces of speech, helping any speaker say what he means without sounding as fumbling as most of us do from time to time.
The Associated Press story on this exchange quoted Bush this way: “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”
In the actual exchange, the president first misspeaks, saying, “harking back to my days as my governor.” In the final answer, he seems to realize mid-sentence that he wants to evade the actual question – are intelligent design and evolution both valid scientific theories? – yet give a definitive response. The result is a convoluted statement.
So was Hertzberg being unfair in quoting Bush verbatim?
I don’t think so. He’s writing an opinion piece, not a news story. And how Bush said what he said is important here. This is a politician groping to please a particular constituency, not a man giving an honest, thoughtful answer.
Posted by Mike Pride at 05:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 19, 2005
On Teen Life
One of my favorite features in the Monitor is Teen Life. It is immediate, surprising and human. The immediacy comes from our photojournalists allowing the subjects to tell their own stories in their own words. The surprise and humanity spring from the variety and unpredictability of what people choose to do with their lives.
Among other subjects in this photo column, we have profiled a camp counselor, a volunteer who works with refugees, a smoker trying to quit, a boy having his Bar Mitzvah, a rock band, an inmate at the women’s prison, male cheerleaders, a carnie, a blogger, a bride, a ballerina, a soldier and a lifeguard. Monday’s subjects are young people helping out the firefighters in Hopkinton.
This week’s column, headlined “You can find all different types at the mall,” wasn’t the first in the series to draw a reaction from readers. Letter writers wagged their fingers at the subjects, two girls who spend a lot of time patrolling the mall, and criticized the Monitor for giving them the ink.
I’m fine with the criticism, of course. It goes with the territory.
But I liked Elyse Butler’s photograph, and I appreciated how forthright the subjects were. The column was longer than most in the series, but I found myself reading it to the last word. Like most parents, I rolled my eyes at what matters to these two girls and how they spend their time, but in many ways, I realized, their values reflect the culture in which they live. I suspect a lot more young people out there identify with these values than most adults would like to acknowledge.
Our mission as a newspaper is to show people as they are. Teen Life is one place where we accomplish this mission nearly every week. The feature on the girls at the mall was no exception. If it provoked discussion of the girls’ behavior (or the Monitor’s), all’s the better.
Posted by Mike Pride at 02:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 18, 2005
Words that still ring
James F. Lowe, a reporter at the Argus- Champion, wrote a fine front-page obituary of Ed DeCourcy, publisher and editor of the Argus from 1961 to 1982. DeCourcy died last week at 93. As Lowe described him, DeCourcy was an editor who thought globally and acted locally.
My favorite part of the obituary was DeCourcy’s signature moment. It occurred during the Republican congressional primary of 1962. The candidates included James C. Cleveland, who won the seat that year and went on to hold it for nine terms, and Bert Teague, later a Concord legislator.
Teague was a native of Goshen and a popular local figure in Newport, where the Argus was then published. DeCourcy considered Cleveland the best candidate in the field and decided the Argus should support him. In response, several advertisers threatened to boycott the Argus. DeCourcy held his ground. He made his case in words that still ring today – words sure to stir the heart of anyone who cherishes the First Amendment. Here they are:
“A publication that would surrender to any financial pressure, however great or small, to espouse a cause in which it did not believe, to remain silent on an issue about which it had convictions, to withhold legitimate news, or to publish material that had no news value, is not a newspaper. It is a prostitute.”
Posted by Mike Pride at 02:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 17, 2005
Sing-along
Will Brown’s obituaries will be filled with well-deserved tributes to his work as a conservationist, a Democratic political activist and a Dunbarton town official. He was a public servant in the best sense of the word, firm in belief, gracious in behavior.
For all that, my best memory of Will has nothing to do with politics or conservation. Nor does it pertain to his many quiet, well-reasoned letters to the editor, which he always carried in by hand. Rather I remember the time I saw Will leading a group of developmentally disabled citizens in a sing-along at the Concord Community Music School. This was four or five years ago, so Will was in his mid-80s.
Peggy Senter, the school’s founder, was leading three of us from the Monitor on a tour. She showed us the new rooms where instructors taught prodigies and thumpers alike how to improve their playing. We stood in the wings of the former church sanctuary while chamber musicians practiced.
Then Peggy led us into a large room where a cacophony of voices was singing “Row Row Row Your Boat.” There at the front of the room was Will Brown, mouthing the words loudly and making rowing motions with his arms. It was a late autumn day, and Will wore his trademark flannel shirt, buttoned to the top, and red suspenders. Madonna-like, he had a microphone clasped to his head.
Some of the people in the room sang lustily, in tune and out. Some leaned and lurched and tried to figure out how to follow Will’s lead. And some sat silent, lost in their own worlds.
The song changed to “Old McDonald.” With great animation, Will flapped his hands beside his head like donkey ears or mooed like a cow. He had a deep, hoarse voice, and he seemed not to have a self-conscious bone in his body. His whole purpose was to cajole his audience to sing along.
I took this lesson from Will’s performance that day: One secret to a long life is to stay active even as your physical abilities decline, to set aside the inhibitions that grow like barnacles with age and to seek out good works that need doing.
It’s hard for a community to lose a Will Brown, but if others follow his lead, he stays with us.
Posted by Mike Pride at 01:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 15, 2005
Swimming with loons
In the mid-afternoon heat on Saturday, my wife and I took a long swim. To avoid swimming directly into the sun, we followed a triangular route – east across the pond, south along the far side and northwest back to our camp.
On the final leg – the hypotenuse – two common loons appeared directly in front of us perhaps 75 yards away. We are blessed with loons on our pond almost every day, although they do not nest there. Their calls are magic, day or night. They sometimes fish within 10 feet of our shore. They have become so accustomed to sharing the pond with people that they do not necessarily flee when they happen to rise from a fishing dive and surface within a few feet of the bow of a canoe.
As we swam toward home on Saturday, we stopped talking and tried our best to breathe through our noses and not to splash with our strokes. We hoped to get as close to the loons as we could. They were not fishing. Instead, they were riding high in the water, their heads held erect. We could see their checkerboard backs and white breasts in the slanting rays of the August sun.
The loons did not seem to notice us until we were about 20 feet from them. Even when they saw us, they did not bolt. Their distress seemed only slight as they watched us and prepared to give us wide berth. We did the same, swimming around to their right as they swam to ours.
Then they began to call, first one, then the other. The call was not a wail. It was a soft, repeated, two-note song. We saw the caller’s beak, then saw the other loon’s beak scissor as it replied in kind.
We swam on, and the loons swam on, their calls becoming softer as the distance grew between us and them.
I remember many years ago going to the Connecticut Lakes in far northern New Hampshire and seeing loons for the first time. I stalked the shore trying to follow them, but they seemed wary of humans. With good reason, I am sure.
Loons are more common in our state now, but to me they still have a strong and mysterious attraction. Their size, their appearance, their behavior, their calls – we are lucky to share our waters with them.
Posted by Mike Pride at 06:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 12, 2005
Ouch
My gas tank holds between 15 and 16 gallons. I filled up this morning on the way to work, and the price at the pump came to $38.27. On my car radio I heard a story about the runaway U.S. trade deficit. It said gas prices were a factor but not the only factor in another big leap. The per-barrel price of oil hit a record $67.
Who’s to blame?
That’s the question everyone is asking. The usual culprits are the oil companies, the sheiks and, if you’re a Blue American, the oilman in the White House.
I have no insight into the actual answer. Knowledgeable people say that the emergence of China as an economic power and other effects of the global economy are driving up demand for crude oil beyond what the earth can produce. If they’re right, the price is only going to keep rising.
A more optimistic view is that the market will correct itself. Demand will fall as people forgo travel and otherwise economize. People will turn to alternative fuels, buy smaller cars, weatherproof their houses.
Although gas-price crises have come and gone since the 1970s, I’m in the pessimists’ camp on this one. The effects of high oil prices always ripple through the economy, and I don’t see how we’re going to escape the inflationary effects of gasoline at $2.49 a gallon.
There seems to be little political will to encourage conservation or alternative energy. Maybe the new energy bill will make a difference, but as far as I can tell, it asks little of the public. There is no election this year, so there is no pressure on politicians. At least an election would be a forum for public debate about causes and potential solutions.
We in New England are in for a long winter. Fuel-oil prices last year were off the charts, and this year’s will probably be worse. For low-income people, especially older people who resist asking for help, this could mean a real crisis.
$38.27 for a tank of gas. Wasn't I paying just over half that a year ago? Something tells me, though, that I’ll be happy if $38.27 is all I have to pay for my next tank.
Posted by Mike Pride at 06:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
August 10, 2005
A new beat
We’re trying something new this summer. With the Legislature out of session and no state election campaign this fall, we’ve detached one of our two State House reporters, Meg Heckman, to spend a few months developing a beat on the issues of aging. Maybe you’ve seen some of her stories already, including today’s on the difficulty many older people are having in understanding changes in Medicare benefits.
Even though this is a temporary assignment for Meg, we’re excited about it. When we embarked a couple of years ago on a content-driven redesign of the Monitor, we identified several subjects we hoped to cover better. Aging was one of them (we’ll be introducing others soon). The age range we’re covering in the beat begins with people preparing to retire and runs to the end of life.
Speaking of this new beat, the Sunday Viewpoints page will feature a first-person commentary by a Texas doctor dealing with his father’s long, slow, difficult decline. It is truly an eye-opening account – one that I’m sure will raise familiar issues with many readers. Familiar but frightening, I should add. The issues of old age – or old old age, as this physician calls it – comprise a national problem that will only grow more immense in coming years.
Posted by Mike Pride at 04:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 09, 2005
The professional
As editor of the Concord Monitor, I run into many of the heavyweights of the news business. Except in a few cases, I can’t say I know them or they know me, but our paths cross. Some of them seem to me to be gracious people, some self-absorbed boors – just like the populace at large.
When I heard about Peter Jennings’s death, I immediately recalled my one encounter with him. It happened during the winter of 1991. The first gulf war was several months old, and ABC News decided to check into three or four communities across the country to see how it was playing. Concord was one of them.
ABC brought a crew into the Monitor newsroom and interviewed me at length.
We had reported and published many stories taking the community’s pulse about the war. We had run accounts of local military people in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq and covered the ways their loved ones on the home front were coping. My job as an interview subject was to be a mirror of community opinion. How were the letters to the editor running? Were there peace demonstrators in town? How much traction were they getting? To what extent was the Vietnam War, then still a dark shadow over American military policy, a factor in local people’s thinking?
I enjoyed the interview and, for better or worse, looked forward to seeing myself on television.
The day the segment was supposed to run, Iraq accepted a ceasefire. The war was over. ABC scrapped its local-reaction story. So much for my 37 seconds of fame.
The next morning, Peter Jennings called. He apologized for putting me through the hassle of the interview for a story that never ran. I told him I was in the news business, so I understood. He thanked me and said that when ABC did stories like this one, he was always impressed with how well communities across the country were being served by their local newspapers. He said that if I was ever in New York, I should phone ahead and stop by for a cup coffee.
Of course, I never did, tempted though I was.
I never had more than that first impression of Peter Jennings, but he treated me with the same grace and professionalism that marked his delivery of the news to America’s living rooms.
Posted by Mike Pride at 06:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack