By Steve Rhodes
What Rumsfeld knew about Abu Ghraib. What the Cubs knew about Kerry Wood. And what the media still doesn’t know about how stupid it is. In our weekly roundup of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Your Newspaper Industry: The Daily Dumb Show
The cover story of the June/July issue of American Journalism Review is “What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart.” That’s June/July 2007. One answer not sussed out by AJR is to not be so dumb, slow and clueless. Next issue: “Stephen Colbert: Now We Get It!”accompanied by “New Onion Newspaper Catches On With Kids.”
Bushwhacked
The cover story of the June issue of Harper’s is “Undoing Bush,” a collection of essays about “How to Repair Eight Years of Sabotage, Bungling, and Neglect.” One answer not sussed out by Harper’s is to not be so dumb, slow and clueless. Next issue: “We Give Up! Harper’s Ceases Publication As Own Staff Literally Bore Selves to Death.”
What Rumsfeld Knew
If more reporters (and their news organizations) were devoted to getting to the bottom of things, maybe there’d be some true accountability to this administration’s sabotage, bungling, and neglect. Harper’s can essay themselves to death, but nothing takes the place of reporting.
Case in point: Seymour Hersh’s must-read in this week’s The New Yorker, which gets to the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal and persuasively shows that Donald Rumsfeld lied under oath to Congress, and that George W. Bush either sanctioned the torture that occurred at the prison or willfully turned away from seeking the truth.
Hersh’s article is based largely on interviews with retired Army Gen. Antonio Taguba, who was assigned to investigate Abu Ghraib after the story broke and made the career-klling mistake of telling the truth in his report.
In fact, the abuse there was worse than we have even been told up to now; a cache of photos exists that have never been released to the public because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”
Taguba (and others) tell Hersh that the front-line soldiers vilified and punished in the scandal were far from rogue elements; they were acting on orders from above. “Somebody was giving them guidance,” Taguba says, ” but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”
Bush and Rumsfeld are responsible for Abu Ghraib, and the retribution that Taguba faced for doing his duty with honor once again reveals how many dark corners this administration has driven the country into – with the aid of a clueless press that spent its time meditating on the value of torture instead of digging deeper to report the facts of what had actually occurred.
What The Cubs Knew
Just catching up with the June issue of Play, the New York Times‘s monthly sports magazine. Buzz Bissinger’s profile of Kerry Wood is mostly familiar, but additional details emerge about the possible causes of Wood’s arm injuries, including his own refusal to adjust his pitching style early in his career, and the selfish misjudgements of his managers and team executives.
“What is ‘overuse?’ Dusty Baker says, for example. “There didn’t used to be such a word . . . You got to blame somebody and I got blamed for everything.”
Former Cubs manager Jim Riggleman, though, as he has in the past, admits that he wonders if he abused Wood’s arm down the stretch in 1998, when the Cubs went to the playoffs.
At the same time, the true blame lies with the organization’s executives.
“Though Wood had rocketed through the Cubs’ organization, Riggleman says, he wanted to keep him in Class AAA for more seasoning,” Bissinger reports. “But 1998 was shaping up as a magical year for the downtrodden Cubs . . . Influential Cubs players were clamoring for Wood. So when a spot opened up in the rotation in April because of injury, the Cubs brought him up. Wood believed he was ready to handle the workload, but he now says he was carrying too much weight and had paid too little attention to his mechanics to prevent injury.”
He was also 20 years old. Management should have known better.
“Riggleman also notes that the Cubs’ medical reports showed that Wood’s ligament was thin to begin with, making it likely to blow at some point anyway, “Bissinger reports.
And yet . . .
“Baker says that when he came to the Cubs in 2003, he saw photographs of Wood’s mechanics and expressed concern about further injury to members of the organization. But nothing happened, he says.”
So Baker abused Wood too.
“You got to overextend if you’re going to try to win it,” Baker told Bissinger.
Bissinger also writes: “Baker’s bullpen was not very good, so he kept Wood in the game no matter what the pitch count.”
As usual, Steve Stone had it right.
“Stone says he had a private conversation with team president Andy MacPhail in 2000 in which he predicted the following: ‘He’s going to have at least one or possibly two more surgeries. They will be in the shoulder. The elbow will probably hold up. He’s going to break your heart on almost a yearly basis. He will never win as many games as you think eh should, and he will consistently break down to the point where you will give him an extraordinary amount of money for very few active days.”
Posted on June 22, 2007