Journalism in Pensacola

We confess that we have no idea who J. Earle Bowden is targeting in his latest Saturday column. Bowden, of course, is the justly revered editor-emeritus of the Pensacola News Journal whose name is honored among other places by Bowden Way, that stretch of beautiful Gulf-front road between Pensacola Beach and Opal Beach.

His latest column appears in print but not on line as of this writing. Nevertheless, you can get some idea of what's bugging him from this brief excerpt:

Some unnamed Internet bloggers cast me a museum relic, a throwback. Well, maybe. One unnamed blogger said I should be banned by the Geneva Conventions from ever writing another word. ***

Sounds a little like Mark Twain's "Journalism in Tennessee", doesn't it? No "mush-and-milk." A veritable assault on the editor himself:

I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plow through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and marred the symmetry of my ear.

"Ah," said he, "that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano--he was due yesterday." And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired--Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith's aim, who was just taking a second chance and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off.

We hasten to point out that Mr. Bowden can't be thinking of us. We've had nothing but good things to say about him -- his unique syntax, puzzling neologisms, and frequently mixed metaphors notwithstanding.

J. Earle Bowden is a gentle soul and a hugely entertaining raconteur, both in person and in writing. He is justly regarded as a giant in the two worlds of Pensacola history and Florida journalism.

We suspect, though, that he doesn't know a blogger from a troll. On that shoal his latest column seems to have run aground.

Try as we might, neither we nor several Internet-savvy friends we enlisted in the cause can find any "Internet bloggers" who have had a bad word to say about Mr. Bowden. The closest we can come is a now-ancient snark -- a sideswipe, really, criticizing another PNJ columnist -- by Rick Outzen which appeared a few months ago.

Outzen is both a newspaper publisher and a blogger. We blog. None of the other Pensacola area bloggers we read have had much, if anything, to say about Bowden.

So, who got under his skin? Our best guess is that it's some trolls on the Pensacola News Journal's own message boards.

For Mr. Bowden's benefit, the Urban Dictionary helpfully explains that a "troll" is --

one who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or messsage board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument.

By contrast, Mr. Bowden, a "blogger" is authoritatively defined as "a person who keeps and updates a blog" or "web log." (Or, if you prefer Stephen Colbert's outdated but famous definition, "A person with a laptop, an ax to grind, and their virginity.")

With distressingly few exceptions, the PNJ's message boards, which were begun in a pathetically misguided effort to increase readership by inviting instant feedback, seem to be infected by swarms of trolls who add nothing to the body of any article they are reacting to. Far more often than not, they have nothing so valuable to say that it's worth anyone's time to read.

Virginity aside, we merely want Earle Bowden to know that it's not bloggers who are his nemesis. His target should be the trolls his own newspaper invited into the Internet Pipes.

Catchword for Careerists

Hundreds if not thousands of bloggers are meeting in Austin at the annual Netroots Nation convention, including the erstwhile Digby, the casually enigmatic Duncan Black, and the hilariously profane Rude Pundit, among lots and lots of other DFH notables.

What fun we're having comes from staying put and reading their laptop dispatches and occasional pieces in the New York Times' blogs.

Hallabaloo stand-in, dday, on Friday reported on a panel discussion about the media that included Princeton economist/New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Just before dday's laptop battery gave out, he passed along this gem from Prof. Krugman:

"It is better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right." The example is how nobody who was actually right about the war is allowed to comment about it, but that's also true with the housing bubble, etc. "There's something wrong with you if you actually figure this out too early." There's a narrow range of being counter-intuitive. It's acceptable, for example, to say "Bush is actually better on the environment than you think."

Krugman, of course, was one of those DFHs who was right on both issues, early and often. You might not known that because -- wouldn't ya 'know -- he isn't allowed much on TeeVee.

Once upon a time, the advice a certain type would give to someone from the next generation was "plastics." In the America we have now, that same type now can pass along the life maxim to budding journalists: It's better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right."

Have a great career.

Musical Warfare on Pensacola Beach

Island Authority "executive director" (nee general manager) W.A. "Buck" Lee is waging war on criminal "rowdies" who come to Pensacola Beach, the weekly Gulf Breeze News is reporting. And music is his "first weapon" of choice.

Lee has nixed contemporary rock, blues and jazz -- which apparently attract undesirable beach-goers -- and is switching the weekly "bands on the beach" concerts to "oldies, Beatles and country," the newspaper reports.

Country music? Buck's got it all wrong. Just because he's an oldie doesn't mean the rowdies don't share Buck's poor taste in music. In fact, most of the hooligans we've come across on the beach seem to prefer country music -- the fewer the chord changes, the better.

No, if he wants to drive the punks, ruffians, and roughnecks away from Pensacola Beach, what Lee needs to do is roll out the Big Guns --Mozart, Sibelius, Offenbach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms. The composers don't have to be dead to drive villains away from the beach, either.

A fitting place to start might be with contemporary avant garde composer Phillip Glass. A few minutes of his opera "Einstein on the Beach" will send those beach brutes back over the toll bridge, screaming for mercy:

(For modernist comedian Emo Philip's weirdly appropriate dance interpretation of the same music, click here.)

If there's anyone left on the beach after that, Buck could try Glass' "Waiting for the Barbarians." It's a "harrowing" allegorical opera of a --

loyal civil servant who conscientiously runs the affairs of a tiny frontier garrison town, ignoring the threat of impending war with the "barbarians", a neighboring tribe of nomads.

Sounds just like Pensacola Beach to us.

Obama Art Index

Today's Wall Street Journal reports on the brisk market for "Obama related art work." Like the Obama book index which we mentioned over a year and a half ago, political posters, prints, paintings, and billboards -- even ragged, torn-off pieces of billboards -- about Barack Obama look like a better investment these days than the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Tellingly, the WSJ observes, "there appears to be little demand for art promoting Sen. John McCain... ."

According to statistics from eBay, only six McCain-related art items sold on the site in the past 60 days, with an average selling price of $57. That's compared with 889 Obama-related art items that have sold in the past 60 days, with an average selling price of $127.

Indeed, the market for what might be called Obama Poli-art is so brisk there's even a web site devoted exclusively to the study, analysis, pricing, and collection of the stuff.

But is it art? you may ask. Who cares? we reply. If a Campbell's Soup can is considered art, anything can qualify.

Even perhaps, an anti-McCain poster.

Insuring Against a Bank Run

Worried about the potential insolvency of Wachovia, SunTrust, Washington Mutual or some of the smaller Florida banks? Here are the rules about FDIC insurance.

The FDIC web site also has a consumer-friendly "insurance calculator" where you can check whether, and just how completely, your bank accounts are insured by FDIC. The answer you get may surprise you.

Equal Cartoon Time

David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer rescues satire from the death grip of humorless "literalist" liberals:

Obama Channels Jon Stewart

Is Barack Obama channeling Jon Stewart for campaign advice? Could be.

In Los Angeles, the LA Times' "Top-of-the-Ticket" campaign column acidly observed that the Obama campaign 'blundered' last Sunday when it "sent out his communications director, Bill Burton, to denounce" this week's New Yorker cover drawing:

It was a huge PR mistake by a campaign that doesn't make many. *** It turned a mere magazine cover that the Obama campaign would rather no one see into a must-see for millions.

By Tuesday night, however, Obama himself had a better response on the Larry King show. To King's lead-off question, What do you make of it all?, the candidate replied:

"Well, I know it was the New Yorker's attempt at satire. I don't think they were entirely successful with it. But you know what? It's a cartoon, Larry, and that's why we've got the 1st Amendment.

"And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what's happening with the banking system and the housing market, and what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it."

"Smart stuff," Top-of-the-Ticket says. "Too late."

Yes, it was a bit tardy. That's probably because it takes awhile to psychically channel a comedian's mind across four time zones. Here's the excerpt from Stewart's brain waves that Obama borrowed:

Click here to see the entire segment of John Stewart's take on Cartoon-gate.

Sea Turtle Rescue

The sea turtles are back and sometimes need help. Check out Barrier Island Girl's photos of a rescue at Opal Beach.

A Run on the Bank

Harbinger of things to come? One hopes not, but here's today's Los Angeles Times/KTLA-TV news report from outside a southern California branch of the IndyMac bank, now "poised to become the third-largest bank failure in American history."

"Analysts are calm," the south Florida Herald-Tribune tells us. That may be because they have the list of who's next:

Seven Florida banks -- including First Priority Bank and Freedom Bank, both of Bradenton -- received Bauer's rock-bottom rating of "zero" in the firm's first-quarter review.

Florida bank analyst Richard Bove on Monday listed some large banks -- those with at least $5 billion in assets -- that could be considered candidates for the next failure.

Seven banks topped the 5 percent "danger" ratio of non-performing assets to outstanding loans. Among them is BankUnited Financial Corp. of Coral Gables, which has offices in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties.

What to do, what to do? MSNBC and Mother Jones agree: stuff your money in a mattress.

Satire in the Cups

Don't these people get it? Americans do not take satire in their political coffee:

'No Values Voters' Looking To Support Most Evil Candidate

Swift Cover Story

You knew Jon Swift would have a thing or two to say about the satirical New Yorker cover, didn't you? Well, he did and he has:

I must say I also agree with many in the liberal blogosphere who believe that satire and most other kinds of humor should be avoided at all costs. I have long been opposed to satire, which just causes unhealthy confusion and, like fluoridated water, weakens our body politic. How can we fight an enemy that doesn't have any sense of humor at all if our media is distracting us with such esoteric and ill-advised attempts at comedy?
* * *
The next time the New Yorker tries to run a satiric cover, they should include a label that says "Satire" in very big letters just as they label all of their advertisements. Although I am not generally in favor of solving problems with legislation, the time may have come when the government needs to mandate warning labels for satire like they do for cigarettes.

One of Jon Swift's creative readers helpfully adds in the Comments section that the next time the New Yorker dares to publish a satirical cover. the cover should be wired like a musical greeting card, only with a laugh track to make the "intention clearer."

And Swift has more... ha ha ha.

Manatee Matinee

On Sunday, just before Blue Angels 2.0, Barrier Island Girl spied a manatee off the beach. Unusual, though not unprecedented. Check out the photos on her blog.

About that Obama Cover

Blogger Bryan at Why Now? stopped by and was inspired in the Comments section to ask this question. On his own blog, he adds:

When some people are given lemons by life, they make lemonade. When the Obama campaign was given a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild, they turned it into vinegar.

Hey, Bryan! The good news is that if "Panic Bean" is from Northwest Florida, our species may not be quite as extinct as you think!

Bush Disses Dad's Drilling Ban

George W. Bush today lifted the executive order that bans drilling for oil off the Florida coast, near-shore California and the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. It was Bush's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, who imposed the executive moratorium when he was president in 1990.

The bad seed son thus continues his Oedipal assault on his father's record. It's a "token move," as the International Herald Tribune observes.

Still, as of now a congressional ban enacted in 1981 is the only thing standing between Pensacola Beach's unique white sandy beaches and a disastrous oil slick. No thanks to Jeff ("Judas") Miller, (R-Chumuckla), Northwest Florida's lame congressman.

Miller has done his best over the past four years to erase the congressional ban. Fortunately for Florida and its millions of tourists and businesses that depend on tourism, so far the mendacious Miller has been as inept at that as he is at everything else in Washington. It's what comes of being a Bush puppet.

As for whether drilling would have any effect on escalating gas prices, forget it. As Senator Bill Nelson said again today:

"The fact is, the industry should be sinking wells in areas already under lease, before demanding control of millions of new acres or destroying long-protected lands," Nelson said in a statement.

"Clearly, Americans are being gouged. But we cannot allow the administration to take advantage of the situation to give away the store before the president leaves office."

The New Yorker's Obama Cover

One of the greatest dangers facing those who passionately support a presidential candidate is not only that they may lose all sense of humor, but that they also can become blinded to unexpected opportunities that come their way. So it seems, today, with the sudden storm over The New Yorker cover which we reproduced earlier here (and to the left here).

Take Kevin Drum, for instance, Atrios, and whoever is writing today for The Playground. Each of these blogs understands that The New Yorker cover is a satire. They see, too, as Andrew Sullivan and Aziz Poonawalla do, that the joke is on the mass media more than anyone else.

As Laura Flanders told CNN, "This isn't a jab at [the Obamas]... . This is a jab at the media. ... It should be cause for our conversation to focus on the kind of fear mongering that the media and people on the right have engaged in."

Say that again... "the kind of fear mongering that the media and people on the right have engaged in."

The only unfunny thing we see in all of the ab-reactions to the cartoon cover, from the Left as well as the Right, is that for too many of them this is the only time they have so much as mentioned The New Yorker in the past seven years, much less given it air time or ink. Yet, the New Yorker has been peerless in being out in front of nearly every news medium -- print or electronic, and certainly far ahead of the chattering heads on Cable TeeVee -- in exposing with devastating regularity the many criminal and criminally negligent acts of the Bush administration; from Seymour M. Hersh's coverage of the Iraq War and the Bush administration's incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina to the miserable state to which our political culture has sunk over the past decade and James Surowiecki's keen insights into everything from the collapse of Enron to the then-"coming" oil crisis.

How can it be that the self-same chattering TeeVee heads are now cluck-clucking like high priests over a mildly satirical magazine cover that simply holds a mirror up to their very own right-wing fantasies of what constitutes 'news'? Do they not recognize the image of their own journalistic judgments staring back at them?

As Laura Flanders says, that should be the topic of the day -- for Kevin Drum, Atrios, the Obama campaign, and even the MSM. "What has the news media done," they should be asking, "that it can inspire such satire?"

Dept. of Amplification

New Yorker editor David Remick in an interview with the Huffngton Post, explains that normally he wouldn't be explaining a cover of The New Yorker. But today he does:

The fact is, it's not a satire about Obama - it's a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.

As cited in the issue's table of contents, the title of the cover drawing by Barry Blitt is "The Politics of Fear."

Daily Heller puts up some recent New Yorker covers and then asks, "Now, class, What is satire?