By Steve Rhodes

“Journalists have a pleasantly heroic self-image of down-at-heel crusaders dedicated to exposing falsehood, promoting justice and speaking truth to power,” the Economist notes. “But that image is shared by few others: hacks routinely come near the bottom of surveys of public trust, sharing that honor with other perpetual hate-figures such as politicians or estate agents. Nick Davies’s latest book will only stoke such contempt.”
“A long-serving reporter on the Guardian, a British daily, Mr. Davies turns his investigative skills on his own profession. The picture he paints of journalism (almost entirely British despite the ‘global’ in his subtitle) is of a debased trade in which rumor and unchecked speculation often masquerade as fact, where staff cuts mean that vast swaths of national life simply go unreported and where overstressed and underfunded reporters are easy prey for influence-peddlers, liars and con men.

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Posted on February 28, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“Regret the Error is a compendium of published media corrections, many of them hilarious,” Carl Sessions Stepp writes in the American Journalism Review.
“But Craig Silverman, a journalist who founded the website RegretTheError.com, turns what could have been a sudsy little stocking stuffer into a serious study of why journalists fail so often.”
And they do.
“Various studies show that errors occur in up to 61 percent of all stories, far more than the media acknowledge.”
Far more. Let me tell you what I’ve learned from personal experience.

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Posted on February 21, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Mystery Bombing
“Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border,” Seymour Hersh reports in The New Yorker.
“The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war.
“But in the immediate aftermath, nothing was heard from the government of Israel.”
Nor – oddly – very much from Syria.

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Posted on February 13, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A look at the local (and not) book reviews.
Race Wars
“A few years ago, an American lady showed up late at an exclusive Parisian store and was turned away. The outraged shopper was Oprah Winfrey, who charged racial bias; a companion said it was ‘one of the most humiliating moments of her life,'” Orlando Patterson writes in his review of Richard Thompson Ford’s The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse.
“Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite status in our new gilded age – being waited on in luxury stores after hours – but had she been the victim of racism?”

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Posted on February 11, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the local (and not so) book reviews.
Hillary Schmillary
Have any political figures in American history been as thoroughly – and often ridiculously – examined as the Clintons? From Bill’s sex life to Hillary’s laugh, the obsession is beyond absurd.
Now comes Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Wome Writers, which is not a wholly uninteresting premise, but also shows just how far behind we are as a nation compared to the rest of the globe’s matter-of-fact history of women leaders.
Thankfully, the Sun-Times’s Teresa Budasi, as she states in her Sunday column, has read Thirty Ways so we don’t have to. (Wouldn’t 10 or 15 ways have been enough?)

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Posted on February 5, 2008

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.”

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Posted on January 30, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at book reviews local and not.
Sex Machine
“Writer and former stripper Stephen Elliott likes sadomasochistic sex,” Mike Thomas writes in the Sun-Times. “And he doesn’t care who knows it.”
“In fact, he wrote about his kinkiest predilections at length in the sexual memoir My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, and he’s glad they’re no longer secret.
“‘It’s incredibly freeing to write about sex,’ says Elliott, 36. The politically active journalist, author and editor of several books – including the forthcoming collection Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica – Elliott grew up in Chicago, where for a time he did drugs and lived in tough group homes for lost kids.”

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Posted on January 28, 2008

By The Beachwood Barack’s Books Affairs Desk

“The book, a giant best-seller, is called The Audacity of Hope,” Bob Somerby writes at The Daily Howler. “In Obama’s very first chapter (“Republicans and Democrats”), he sketches his feelings about Ronald Reagan – and about Bill Clinton.
“Is something wrong with Obama-on-Reagan? In The Audacity of Hope (chapter 1), the gentleman sketches his thoughts on the subject. Presumably, this work was carefully composed, unlike last week’s offhand comments. For our money, his published account of the 1960s and the 1990s is a bit odd from the Dem perspective; on the other hand, much of what he says about Reagan in this same chapter is not. But if you want to see what Obama said about Reagan – and about Bill Clinton – when he had time to say it carefully, we’ll suggest that you look at his book.”
So that’s just what we’ll do. Here are the relevant excerpts by Obama on Reagan – and Bill Clinton – from The Audacity of Hope.
*
[A]s disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, as unconvinced as I might have been by his John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous assaults on the poor, I understood his appeal.
It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes. It was related to the pleasure I still get from watched a well-played basketball game, or my wife gets from watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.

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Posted on January 23, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

The incredibly shrinking book reviews at our two daily papers have made this feature nearly impossible to continue in its current form because, quite simply, there isn’t much to review. Still, we’ll soldier on with a weekly look at the book reviews laying around Beachwood HQ and continue to point you to the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as trying to expand the outlets under our consideration. This feature is also open to submissions or even someone else willing to take it under their wing. Contact me if you’re interested.
*
Top Gun
“If you read Andrew Morton’s unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise with a fan’s curiosity in one hand and a thinking person’s skepticism in the other you’ll likely end up in the same place you were before you read it: not all that interested,” Teresa Budasi writes in her Sun-Times books column.

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Posted on January 21, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

An (almost) weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Change Bank
* “America wants change,” the Economist says from overseas. “It just can’t work out what sort of change . . . and who can deliver it?”
Which is just about right, but the Economist buys into a bit of clever, disingenuous and divisive Obama spin when it posits that change might not come without a break from “Bush-Clinton partisan politics.”
Since when was the Clinton Administration anything like the Bush Administration? And who were the divisive, partisan forces of the 90s – the accommodationist, centrist president or the right-wing loonies whose wild and lunatic attacks seem to have been internalized by Democrats?

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Posted on January 17, 2008