Times Watch for August 21, 2003
The Return of George Wallace?
Thursdays front page story by
Southern-based reporter Jeffrey Gettleman is on top Alabama Judge Roy Moore,
whos earned the contempt of the Times for installing a granite monument of the
Ten Commandments in the lobby of the state Supreme Court. As of midnight
Wednesday, Moore is in defiance of an order from a federal judge to remove the
granite block.
Unusually, Gettlemans
story, Alabamas Top Judge Defiant On Commandments Display, is datelined
today (Thursday) rather than Wednesday, so Gettleman can report that Moore is
officially in defiance as of midnight. Even more interesting, the early version
of this story (filed yesterday) makes the cheapest of cheap shots against the
monument, comparing Judge Moore and his supporters to Alabamas segregationist
former governor George Wallace.
Despite threats of having
his state fined $5,000 a day and being held in contempt of court, Justice Moore
vowed to disobey a federal court order that begins at midnight. This afternoon,
the United States Supreme Court refused to block the removal of the Ten
Commandments monument. If they want to get the Commandments, Justice Moore
said in a statement today, they're going to have to get me first. His
obstinacy smacks of segregation-era defiance, of state rights versus the feds,
of George Wallace's notorious-and failed-stand in the school house door. But
many people like that. That attitude probably pleases the Times editorial page,
which made the same comparison August 13. But perhaps its a trifle too obvious
a slam for the news page,
which could explain
why in a later version in Thursdays paper Gettleman quotes someone else
making the same comparison.
In an audacious example of
comparison shopping, Gettleman looks around for someone who agrees with his
George Wallace comparison and quotes him. Gettleman finds Barry Lynn, who has
fought for years to clear the public square of religious references and
even supports removing the phrase Under God from the Pledge of Allegiance.
This time around,
Gettleman uses Lynn to make the Judge Moore-George Wallace comparison:
Detractors say the whole thing smells like Alabama's obstinacy of yesteryear,
of the lost battles for states' rights in the 1960's. He's been even more
flamboyant and stubborn than George Wallace when he made his stand in the
schoolhouse door, said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for
Separation of Church and State.
Lumping the Ten
Commandments protesters (which even Gettleman admits were racially diverse) with
segregationist sympathizers is bad enough. But Gettleman didnt even stand by
it, later finding a sympathetic soul to agree with his formulation and quoting
him instead.
Gettleman's earlier piece
read: "They came streaming in from all directions, wearing their crosses and
Confederate T-shirts, carrying dog-eared bibles and bottles of water and enough
Power Bars to outlast a siege. One man even walked from Texas, 20 miles a day,
in a frock. Their mission: to protect the rock, Roy's rock. Their morale: high
and rising."
As the heir apparent to
the folksy Southern specialist Rick Bragg, Gettleman has some leeway for
colorful description. But that doesnt excuse the deep condescension toward the
Ten Commandment protesters. The Times treated antiwar protesters with far more
respect. On March 21 Kate Zernike and Dean Murphy drily reported far more
repellent antics during a San Francisco protest: Marchers set fire to bales of
hay in the shadow of the Transamerica Building, opened fire hydrants and smashed
police car windows. They vomited on the pavement outside a federal building and
linked themselves with metal chains, forcing firefighters to use circular saws
to separate them.
For Gettlemans early story on the Alabama Ten
Commandments controversy,
click here.
For Gettlemans later version,
click here.
Alabama
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Jeffrey Gettleman
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Barry Lynn
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Judge Roy Moore
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Protesters
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Religion
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Ten Commandments
Italys
Shameless Berlusconi Hampers Press Freedom
The Times odd anti-Berlusconi
crusade continues in Thursdays Arts section. Television reporter Alessandra
Stanley reviews The Prime Minister and the Press, an unsympathetic PBS
documentary of conservative Italian Prime Minister and media mogul Silvio
Berlusconi, reviled by the European left. Stanley likes the documentary,
lamenting only that it doesnt go far enough to expose how Berlusconi gets away
with such outlandish statements and acts.
She also
accuses him of hampering freedom of the press: A glimpse of Mr. Berlusconi's
power and folly can be seen tonight on Wide Angle, a weekly PBS news program
about international affairs. This episode, called The Prime Minister and the
Press, focuses on how Mr. Berlusconi's control of Italian television has
hampered freedom of the press in Italy. His media company, Mediaset, controls
the country's three main private channels, while his government oversees the
three state-controlled channels.
She
recycles old charges against Berlusconi, who stood out among European leaders
for his support of Bush during the Iraq war: He has also been dogged by charges
of corruption for more than a decade and has just won passage of a law in
Parliament that grants him immunity from prosecution while in office, derailing
a trial he was facing in Milan. But that law applies to all government
officials, not just Berlusconi, as even
a recent critical article by reporter Frank Bruni notes: Parliament passed
a law that gave the top Italian government officials, including him, immunity
from criminal prosecution during their time in office.
Stanley goes on to half-lament
whatever measures the documentary took toward objectivity: To their credit, the
producers resist the temptation to paint Mr. Berlusconi as a buffoon or a
Mussolini Mini-Me. Yet that same Anglo-Saxon sense of fairness and restraint is
also a liability. It is a trusting world view that cannot quite capture what is
different about Italian journalism and Italian society and why it is that Mr.
Berlusconi gets away with such outlandish statements and acts.
According
to Stanley, heres whats different about Italy: The Italian press is not built
on the American model. As in many other European countries, only more so,
Italian newspapers and magazines are ideological and opinionated, and facts are
not always ruthlessly checked. With a few exceptions the Italian media are not
fair, balanced or tenacious. They were noisy but pliant under previous
governments, and they are now ill-prepared to fend off the far more shameless
incursions of the current prime minister.
Unfair, unbalanced,
ideological and
factually dubious journalism? Sounds to Times Watch not unlike a certain
Manhattan-based newspaper empirebut never mind.
Stanley
praises Italian journalist Mario Travaglio, prominently featured in the
documentary, as a dogged muckracker. His book The Odor of Money charges that
Mr. Berlusconi's first real estate ventures in the 1970's relied on financing
from associates with mob ties, a rumor that has floated around the billionaire
for years but that has not been upheld in any of his trials on charges of
financial misconduct. The documentary does not point out until much later that
Mr. Travaglio is also a correspondent for L'Unit, which it describes as a
small, leftist paper. L'Unit was once the newspaper of the Communist Party
and the most powerful left-wing news organization in Italy. It is small, and
foundering, but it is still financed by an offshoot of the old Communist Party,
the Democrats of the Left, which is the main opposition party to Mr.
Berlusconi.
One would
think the fact that Travaglio is a partisan journalist for a party-run
anti-Berlusconi newspaper would hurt his credibility. But no: That does not
mean Mr. Travaglio's reports about Mr. Berlusconi's misdeeds are wrong. Instead
it suggests what the documentary leaves out: that investigative reporting in
Italy is so difficult and so unrewarding (Mr. Berlusconi in particular sues
critics with abandon) that only the most passionate and partisan journalists
make the effort.
In
Stanleys jaundiced view, the fact PBS chose to use left-wing journalist
Travaglio for its anti-Berlusconi documentary demonstrates Berlusconis
suppression of Italian journalism. Sorry, but Times Watch doesnt see the
connection.
For the rest of Alessandra
Stanleys review of the Berlusconi documentary,
click here.
Silvio Berlusconi
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Italy
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Media Bias
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PBS
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Alessandra Stanley