By Steve Rhodes
A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Franklin Mint
“This year marks two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of The Way To Wealth, among the most famous pieces of American writing ever, and one of the most willfully misunderstood,” The New Yorker reports.
“A lay sermon about how industry begets riches (“No Gains, without Pains”), The Way To Wealth has been taken for Benjamin Franklin’s – and even America’s – creed, and there’s a line or two of truth in that, but not a whole page. The Way To Wealth is also a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham.”
Crow Magnon
“I’m sad that people feel like music should be free, that the work we do is not valued,” Sheryl Crow says in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. “When music comes free by way of friends burning CDs, there’s not the understanding of the work that goes into the making of an album.”
Or maybe there’s not an understanding on your part that your fans can’t afford to prop up your lavish lifestyle. Besides, your albums stink.
From Franklin To Crow
Can the press get anything right?
Last spring, you were held up as a parody of environmental correctness when you proposed restricting the use of toilet paper to one square per bathroom visit. What was that about? I think it’s a fantastic and eye-opening example of how the media is operated by political figures, of how Karl Rove was humiliated in the media and how, within 24 hours, he was able to humiliate me and take any sort of credibility away from me.
What are you saying? You think Karl Rove leaked the toilet-paper story to the press after you and Laurie David sparred with him about global warming at the White House correspondents’ dinner? I cannot tie him directly to that leak, but within 24 hours of our exchange, as we were leaving D.C., it was on the CNN ticker tape: “Sheryl Crow has proposed that we legislate toilet paper to one square.”
<strong It was always a joke. It was part of a shtick. It was part of a comedy routine that Laurie and I were doing on the “Stop Global Warming College Tour.”
Beachwood Is Best
The Beachwood is named three times – I think more than any other site – in Chicago magazine’s February cover story, “171 Best Chicago Web Sites.” I find it hard to believe there are even 71 Chicago websites worth such kudos, let alone 171, but there ya go. Our props:
* Our entry in the News-Opinion/Analysis category calls us “a vibrant and playful e-zine.”
* Political consultant Dave Lundy says he visits the Beachwood for its “withering” media and political criticism. He also likes our sportswriting.
* Rock critic Jim DeRogatis looks to us (as well as Chicagoist and Chitown Daily News) for local music coverage.
Eclipse of Mr. Sunshine
A little more than four years ago, Carol Felsenthal penned a fabulous profile of Gov. Rod Blagojevich for Chicago magazine called “Governor Sunshine.”
This month, Chicago’s David Bernstein revisits the governor in a piece called “Mr. Un-Popularity” (which goes so far as to question the governor’s mental condition).
Combined, Chicago has done a service in offering a striking portrait I haven’t seen matched elsewhere.
International Image
“Most commuters are miserable, but Chicago’s may be the most beleagured,” The Economist wrote earlier this month.
“The city’s average commute is not quite America’s longest (that honor goes to New York), but in one respect Chicago is unrivalled: the bitterness and passion of the argument surrounding its public-transport systems.”
Media Madness
“Bill Adair, Washington bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times and editor of PolitiFact, has covered two presidential campaigns during his approximately 10 years in D.C.,” American Journalism Review notes.
“He says that while in the trail in 2000 and 2004, he would sometimes quote a candidate and find himself thinking, ‘That’s not true.'”
Aaaaargh!
“After the 2006 senatorial and gubernatorial races, Adair says, he realized something had to change; he thought journalists simply weren’t doing enough fact-checking. ‘I felt we needed to not just put [statements] out there, but we needed to tell people if they were true.”
Aaaaargh!
Meet your media. They aren’t very bright, and apparently most of them missed their entire first year of journalism school.
Book Sense
“Though a good paper devotes resources to court reporting, it never attempts to dispense with it because it doesn’t attract advertisers. So it should be with book reviews,” David Cohen of Perth, West Australia writes to the Columbia Journalism Review.</strong
Posted on January 30, 2008