Culture Vultures: Reeducating Jeff Jacoby

...Not pompous in the way that, say, Senator Byrd of West Virginia is pompous...

...AII of us journalists know those occasions when someone else has said exactly what you'd like to say if only you'd got to it first and you find yourself going to great lengths to steal the thought but change the vocabulary...

...I'm no historian, but by my count the number of Signers tortured to death is zero...

...That's what landed Smith and Barnicle in trouble...

...Next thing you know, Jeff's history...

...Apple argued in defense of his "In the Chamber" reports from his E-Z-Boy recliner that distance lends a certain detached judgment...

...Jacoby's reputation would have been a little diminished, and deservedly so, but the British newspaper business is a business: If Jacoby brings readers to the paper, why offend those readers...

...Landers's column is also about the Signers, the price they paid, etc.: "Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader...

...A couple of years back, you may recall, Patricia Smith, an African-American columnist, wrote a heartwarming vignette of a young girl going to the neighborhood hair-braider to have her hair braided as a traditional African-American rite of passage...

...By comparison, MonlJeal, with a smaller population, has four local dailies--one conservative federalist, one moderately nationalist, one austerely separatist, and one sensationally tabloid--plus one provincial and two national newspapers...

...Two days before, John Cowers, who is also talking to Reno, had led a demonstration in Michigan...

...Well, to be honest, he's the only read on the Globe comment page: Everything else is Ellen Goodman, Thomas Oliphant, William Raspberry...

...He's a young guy with a wife and family to support and he's just been told his income this ?,ear will be reduced by a third...

...the local chapter of the NAACP says it will sue Philadelphia...

...Amen to that, brother...

...No one said, "Hey, we can't run this tomorrow...

...And that would have been that...

...of the aooo presidential campaign...

...Meanwhile the Times was nearing the end of a six-week series called "How Race is Lived in America...

...No one at the Globe thought: "Huh...

...I, for one, would be very interested to learn about their editors' lives: Evidently they're spending too much time down at the homeless shelter to listen to Paul Harvey, read their own paper, or engage in any other way with the passing parade...

...But while we're passing out fourmonth suspensions, let me nominate one of my own...

...Anyway, I've never met Johnny Apple...

...In fact, I'm face down in the beer nuts in a bar in Acapulco haggling over prices with a transsexual hooker, but by the time I spotted the error the column had been running for a couple of months and it was too late to change...

...This kind of Mel Gibsonization of the Revolutionary War reduces it to an idiot cartoon...

...No doubt in the weeks leading up to it the famed Times factThe American Spectator _9 S ep t r m b r r 2 o o o 45 checkers called R. Emmett Tyrrell directly to ascertain whether he was, indeed, an anal orifice, as opposed to a rectal passage or mildly irritating colon...

...The Globe is owned by the New York Times, which employs veteran correspondent R.W...

...We'll have to fish an old Landers column out of the backfile and go with that...

...Why hasn't anyone thought of that before...

...Didn't I just read that on the way in to work this morning...

...It was intended, as one of its editors explained...

...Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, had a similar idea...

...Apple conceded that it had occurred to him that the title might not be the most appropriate, but by that stage the column had been running for a few days and it was "too late to change...

...If Jacoby had taken that line, he'd be in the clear...

...The lawyer could argue his case along the lines Ronald Hampton of the National Black Police Association suggested to Newsweek: "Success is designed in white male terms...

...And, given the doziness of their own editors in the Jacoby/Landers fiasco, no one at the Globe is in a position to lecture anyone about the need to learn something about life...

...For the Fourth of July, Jacoby wrote a piece about the fate of certain Signers of the Declaration of Independence, a timely rumination on an important corner of history...

...Indeed, pace the Globe's ombudsman, Mr...

...for a long time, Fourth of July often finds me over in London, or Toronto, or somewhere else...

...Maybe not with gay teenagers, but certainly with Republican senators...

...Jacoby seems to have agreed with the general tenor of the commentary, but-contrary to his characterization by the Globe ombudsman as a "lazy columnist"-was punctilious enough to do a lot of research and correct all the errors...

...You know how difficult it is to get a columnist to do house calls...

...cities in that its one soporific broadsheet and one mildly more readable tabloid have the town to themselves...

...Michael Kelley of the CommereialAppeaI in Memphis did much the same thing and the result was a column called "Declaration Signers Don't Need Cyber-Hype...

...T hat's how bad things are...

...Brilliant...

...If only they'd been willing to put up with George III a while longer, the American colonies would have remained under the Crown and the U.S...

...Better yet, not only does no one at the Globe listen to Paul Harvey, no one at the Globe reads the Globe...

...It doesn't seem to occur to Thomas that "life" might include more than poor neighborhoods and unwed mothers...

...self-respecting columnist in London or Dublin or Sydney would: Tell the Globe to shove it and take his act to the rival broadsheet across the street...

...He'd never bothered going and checking whether in fact within the Greater Boston area any such ailing infants were to be found...

...Also, if you're going to do this sort of thing you have to be thorough: Retaining the "saw" was a mistake...

...Whoever cooked up the column originally--Paul Harvey in 1956 or Rush Limbaugh, Jr...

...That way, concluded Thomas triumphantly, "he might learn something about life...

...father of the present Rush), who may have beaten him to i t - h a d a neat theme: that the Signers showed great courage and paid a high price...

...If only it were that mild...

...By my rough calculation, for every gay teenager in Boston, there are 14 Globe writers pursuing him in search of a heartwarming vignette...

...I had hoped to do so last year when I was in the Senate gallery covering the impeachment trial, but I looked around and never saw him, even though the Times was running a daily report by him called "In the Chamber...

...What Jacoby needed was to be assigned to the newsroom as a reporter, in which capacity "he could spend time in Boston's poor neighborhoods, write about homeless shelters, interview alcoholics, unwed mothers, gay teenagers...

...The next day the Black Caucus claims an "epidemic" of police violence is sweeping the country...

...Secondly, JeffJacoby...

...maybe a couple of other stations...

...So Ms...

...The only problem is that, when you go down to a homeless shelter or a single mothers' center, you can barely squeeze your way in past all the Globe staffers huddling around the door desperate for a bit oflocaI color...

...The highmindedness was abandoned by ombudsman JackThomas only at the end of his column when, after much huffing about Jacoby's cheerleaders on the "radical right," he opined that the columnist's problem was that he'd never worked on the city desk, learning "the craft of reporting and the culture of newspapering, including fundamental ethics...

...Jacoby's version: "Carter Braxton of Virginia, an aristocratic planter who had invested heavily in shipping, saw most of his vessels captured by the British navy...

...The man on the ground in Philadelphia, a particularly nasty career criminal, was black, but so were some of the cops kicking him...

...The question is: How CO1TIe nobody at the Globe spotted that...

...So these guys Ithe Philadelphia copsl internalize the racist, oppressive culture of the police department in order to succeed...

...For a Boston columnist to fall out with the Globe is about as smart a career move as a Soviet columnist falling out with Pravda...

...Except there isn't one, Boston being all too typical of major U.S...

...Smith was sacked...

...Jacoby's entire column reads like that: Internet version: "Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British navy...

...Alas, in Boston and many other towns, it's even worse: one mot-nosed waiter with no daily special, no beverage options, just the same bland fixed menu day after day after day...

...But William Powers summed it up beautifully in the National Joumah "The journalistic establishment is like one big, pretentious snot-nosed French waiter, and it~ time for America to hurl a glass of ice water in its face and give it the boot...

...Next to be upbraided was Mike Barnicle, who wrote a heartwarming vignette of a young black child and a young white child, both sick with cancer yet lying side by side in the same hospital ward...

...A nother da...

...New Hampshire M ore columnar trouble at the Boston Globe...

...In an e-mail of the column he circulated to a hundred people the day before, he acknowledged its cyber-provenance...

...It's that this country's unreadable press and unwatchable news shows are pompous...

...Go on, try it: "In choosing his father's defense secretary as his running mate, Texas Governor George W. Bush is in danger, some might 44 September 2000 _9 The American Spectator argue, of becoming fire Frank Sinatra, Jr...

...However, third among those who should share the blame, let's not forget those stiffs who edit the Globe...

...The race angle here may seem elusive, but seek and ye shall find...

...Mulling over this latest crisis in American journalism, whom should we blame...

...another incident, this one on a z8-second tape shown over and over on television: Philadelphia cops are kicking and stomping a man as he lies on the ground...

...might today have a lively, competitive, readable, diverse press such as Britain, Canada, Australia, India, and other Commonwealth countries enjoy, instead of the butt-numbing snoozefest that is the Boston Globe...

...Full disclosure: speaking to the London Spectator a few years back, Apple called The American Spectator a bunch of"a--holes...

...Apple, Jr...

...So, according to the Globe, he had to go...

...Okay, you like the line, you want to use it, but you've got to do a little jiggling: "In selecting the defense secretary of his father's administration as his vice-presidential nominee, George W. Bush, the governor of Texas, is arguably placing himself in peril of emerging as the 2ooo presidential campaign's, er, Natalie Cole...

...Suspended by the Globe for four months without pay...

...But those versions and the one on the Internet are full ofguff: "Five Signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died...

...Reeducation camp for conservative columnists...

...4 by John Corry The Sounds of Silence All race, all the time, at the New York Times & Co...

...The Boston Globe is now such a monumental yawneroo that even the people who work there can't read it...

...Unfortunately, the girl, the braider, the braids, none of'era actually existed...

...The Michigan demonstrators, according to the New York Times, shouted "no justice, no profits," and sliced up Lord & Taylor credit cards...

...Later that morning, while the switchboard was fielding calls about ]acoby's column, the Globe staffer responsible for pulling Ann Landers offthe wires and shoving it into the paper shows up to work...

...Though I've had a home in the U.S...

...The Mississippi marchers, the Washington Post reported, chanted "Stop the lynching now...

...Enter Jeff Jacob...

...Instead, in the cloistered precincts of American journalism it became a question of"ethics": the grand panjandrums of the media agonized over the gravity of Jacoby's offense far more than they did over, say, the president's impeachment...

...But, granted all that, the Globe caught Jacoby fair and square...

...Nonetheless in announcing the suit against the city, the president of the NAACP chapter said it would hire "the baddest civil rights lawyer" in the state...

...But Jacoby's crime was that his column bore certain thematic and structural similarities to a favorite Paul Harvey radio commentary on the subject and various versions thereof circulating on the Interact...

...According to the Globe's ombudsman, Jack Thomas, "On July 3, readers began to call early to complain that Jacoby's column had been pirated from an essay by Paul Harvey...

...So Barnicle was sacked...

...Now I'm sure he didn't make this accusation lightly...

...Unlike my conservative chums at National Review and the Weekly Standard, I'm disinclined to make Jeff the li'l Elian of the summer months...

...Anyway, I mention this not out of some sniffy truth-in-advertising fastidiousnessI'm sure that the Times, a world-class windbag on the subject of journalistic ethics, was scrupulous enough to insist that a column called "In the Chamber" written from Mr...

...He has just led a march in Mississippi, and he is meeting with Janet Reno...

...A1 Sharpton makes a speech...

...His estates were largely ruined, and by the end of his life he was a pauper...

...He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags...

...Jesse Jackson is slow to be heard from, although he has an excuse...

...swept from the seas.., died in rags...

...It couldn't be, could it, that despite their much vaunted commitment to diversity the whole joint is so homogeneous that they're strictly an NPR crowd and don't listen to the kinds of radio stations--talk, country, variety, oldies, you name i t - that carry Paul Harvey...

...Apple's home had, at the very least, to be typed up in the toilet-but only to suggest that their venerable correspondent has a reluctance to get out of the house far more pronounced than lacoby's...

...Unfortunately, the black kid, the white kid, none of'era actually existed...

...Or rather exit Jeff Jacoby-the token conservative among the sappy hair-braiders at the Globe...

...Exactly so...

...The Michigan demonstrators were protesting the death of a 32-year-old black 46 September 2000 " The American Spectator...

...What's the real problem here...

...I point the finger all round: First, those Signers...

...But no, apparently the Signers of the Declaration of Independence did really exist-though, to judge from current editorial philosophy, the Globe would rather they hadn't...

...Unfortunately, he didn't do that in the Globe...

...Some months later, Mr...

...If Jacoby's worth reading (as the Globe's curious punishment suggests) in four months' time, then he's worth reading tomorrow, and the Globe has no business (the correct word) depriving its readers of their fix...

...Hair today, gone tomorrow...

...You'll notice this column is place-lined "New Hampshire...

...Instead, the boneheads just ran two columns exactly the same on consecutive days, and weren't even aware of it until readers called on the morning of the Fourth with another set of complaints...

...JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's But there is no silence, and the din grows senior correspondent, more confused...

...to get beyond the silence about race...

...We've already run it today...

...Now I assumed automatically that Jacob), must be guilty of the same offense as Mike and Patricia: All these heroic dead white male "Signers" were fictitious, right...

...The one that would be staring Jack Thomas and the rest of the Times-Globe ethics gang in the face if they ever got past patronizing the homeless shelters and gay teenagers...

...Really...

...Yet I'd say over the years I've heard Paul Harvey's "Rest of the Story" on the Signers at least three times--on WDEV Waterbury, Vermont...

...It's a famous piece and Harvey is one of the most popular broadcasters in America, if not the most popular, with z 3 million listeners...

...He could, of course, do what any MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...The trouble with this approach is that it winds up like a dull version of Chinese whispers: "ships" is better than "vessels," "died" is more powerful than "by the end of his life...

...WNTK Lebanon, New Hampshire...

...By comparison the liberal wussies at the New York Times read like G. Gordon Liddy...

...Personally, I found Jacoby the best read on the Globe comment page...

...In London, Private Eye, the satirical "fortnightly" (as the British say), would have run excerpts of Jacoby and Landers side by side under its "Just Fancy That" column...

...As it transpired, he wasn't "In the Chamber" at all, but back home watching the trial on TV...