Edwards catch-up

By Jennifer J. Foster

A lot has happened over the past few days in the John Edwards story-that’s-not-a-story.

First, the National Enquirer announced that two of its reporters had filed a criminal complaint against the hotel guards who spirited Edwards away from Enquiring minds at the Beverly Hilton last week. In the complaint, the reporters allege that the guards “acted unlawfully while the reporters were trying to question the former senator.”

Never mind that the questioning was being done in the bathroom. In the basement.

Enquirer reporters got all their ducks in a row for the stakeout. They made sure they registered as hotel guests to ensure that they had proper right to be on hotel property. They held off on confronting Edwards until he was leaving the hotel – enabling them to document the time he was there and the movements he made throughout the hotel while he was there.

Only then did they pounce.

The Enquirer’s initial story about the encounter said that the guards intervened after Edwards took refuge from reporters in a men’s room:

Edwards … ran into a nearby restroom. He stayed inside for about 15 minutes, refusing to answer questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER about what he was doing in the hotel. A group of hotel security men eventually escorted him from the men’s room, while preventing the NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporters from following him out of the hotel.

Of course, Edwards has denied all this. But the Enquirer isn’t easily denied.

Enter the criminal complaint, which Enquirer lawyers made possible through their knowledge of (and familiarity with?) an otherwise obscure section of California law:

The reporters charge that not only did one security guard threaten to break their camera but that security also violated several statutes of the California Penal Code, including false imprisonment and preventing a guest from entering land.

The ENQUIRER reporters were registered guests at the hotel, while Edwards was not.

Now, how many cameras do you think the photographers for the National Enquirer have had broken in their time? How many times do you think they and the reporters have been removed, even forcefully removed, from locations where their presence – ahem – isn’t desired?

Hostility is nothing new to National Enquirer staffers. So the criminal complaint, of course, is nothing more than a roundabout way of eliciting comment from Edwards: “Edwards now could be contacted by police to give an eyewitness account of what occurred,” the story says.

Presumably under penalty of perjury.

Wow.

There’s a certain beauty to a “get” that provides an avenue to a second “get.”

So the mainstream media began to take notice of the story, but in two entirely different ways.

Fox News was first, posting the Edwards-was-caught-at-the-Hilton story on Friday. But – tricky, tricky – it used confirmation of the event by one of the security guards involved in the skirmish as the news peg. That way, FNC was able to mention all the controversial (salacious?) stuff, but attribute it all to the Enquirer.

Meanwhile, Slate’s Mickey Kaus notes that the Los Angeles Times gagged its bloggers on the issue, forbidding them from mentioning it at all. “That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal,” he wrote.

Now, that’s good sarcasm.

Kaus went on to wonder whether the Times’ gag order was “part of a double-standard that favors Democrats (and disfavors Republicans like Rep. Vito Fossella and John McCain)“ or if it simply reflects “an outmoded Gatekeeper Model of journalism in which not informing readers of certain sensitive allegations is as important as informing them—as if readers are too simple-minded to weigh charges that are not proven, as if they aren’t going to find out about such controversies anyway?”

Kaus also mentions the speculation on BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine’s blog that it may be the attorney generalship, not the vice presidency, that’s at stake in this scandal.

More on what the Edwards story means for journalism in a bit.

Despicable

By Jennifer J. Foster

Before we go any further, I want to add my voice to the chorus of those expressing outrage over an Israeli newspaper’s decision to publish the contents of the note Barack Obama left in the Western Wall during his visit there Thursday.

The rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinovitz, said publishing the note intruded in Obama’s relationship with God.

“The notes placed between the stones of the Western Wall are between a person and his maker. It is forbidden to read them or make any use of them,” he told Army Radio. The publication “damages the Western Wall and damages the personal, deep part of every one of us that we keep to ourselves,” he said.

Is nothing sacred anymore?

The newspaper, the Maariv, reportedly got the note from—get this—a Jewish seminary student who had removed it from the wall “immediately after Obama left,“ according to the Associated Press.

Seminary student? Can you say EXPULSION?

Once in possession of the note, newspaper staffers morphed into CSI-type investigators: They undertook a handwriting analysis, ultimately concluding that the writing on the note “appeared to match” the note Obama wrote Wednesday in a guest book at Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, and concluded that it HAD to be Obama’s prayer, especially since it was “written on stationery from the King David Hotel, where Obama stayed while in Israel.“

This is the most despicable, inexcusable invasion of privacy that I can remember in politics.

And that’s saying something.

Sometimes, as that seminary student so aptly demonstrated, people do stupid things. They have no boundaries or respect for other people’s human dignity (think paparazzi). In those cases, it’s up to the media to enforce its own ethical boundaries—something that was completely lost on the editors of the Maariv.

By publishing Obama’s prayer, the Maariv failed Barack Obama, the Jewish community and the institution of journalism.

It is despicable.

Nasty editorial

By Jennifer J. Foster

One of John McCain’s stops that was lost in all the hype about Barack Obama’s tour of Europe and the Middle East this week was a campaign event he held in New Hampshire.

McCain, long a favorite of New Hampshire voters, arrived in Manchester Monday night to a crowd of exactly two journalists—one reporter, one photographer.

He held a town hall meeting Tuesday at the Rochester Opera House. The event was open to the public, no tickets were required and, as is his custom, McCain took questions from the audience.

But while the national media might have ignored McCain’s New Hampshire appearance, it wasn’t lost on the editorial board of the New Hampshire Union-Leader. In its editorial Tuesday, the UL called out Obama not only for his highly anticipated, highly publicized trip abroad, but also for skipping a series of town hall meetings with McCain:

But while McCain is answering voters’ questions, Sen. Barack Obama will be somewhere on the other side of the world, playing to his real constituency—those sophisticated non-Americans who speak multiple languages and eat organic arugula.

McCain has invited Obama to join him in a series of town hall meetings. Obama has chosen to skip them. Some bitter, gun-owning, religious American might be waiting with an embarrassing question.

Yee-OUCH!

New Hampshire is expected to be a swing state this fall. Sure, it’s only four electoral votes, but ... it is four electoral votes!

This kind of coverage must be what the Los Angeles Times’ James Rainey meant when he said, “Don’t assume that more coverage is always good coverage.“

RIP, Randy Pausch

By Jennifer J. Foster

Randy Pausch, who transformed himself from a computer scientist into an inspiring lifecoach after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, died early this morning.

Pausch developed his talk, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,“ after he was told he had terminal cancer. The “last lecture,“ as it came to be known, was delivered on Sept. 18, a year after his diagnosis, before a packed crowd at Carnegie Mellon University, where Pausch was a professor. His funny, engaging and poignant advice to students about living life to the fullest (“You have to decide whether you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore”) actually wasn’t for the students at all: his voice cracked, ever so slightly, as he revealed at the end of the lecture that he had put those thoughts together for his three children, all of whom are younger than 6 years old.

Someone videotaped the lecture and posted it on YouTube ... and the rest, as they say, is history. The talk was viewed by millions and converted into a book, which topped bestseller lists after it was released in April.

Click here to see the lecture on YouTube, here for the book listing on Amazon (best $13.17 you’ll spend), here for Carnegie Mellon’s In Memoriam page in Pausch’s honor, here for his Wikipedia entry and here for his CMU home page (it’s down right now, presumably as it is rewritten to reflect his passing).

Randy Pausch was 47 years old. He is survived by his wife, Jai, two sons, Logan and Dylan; and a daughter, Chloe.

Barack’s bad move

By Jennifer J. Foster

... or non-move. According to the Associated Press:

Sen. Barack Obama scrapped plans to visit wounded members of the armed forces in Germany as part of his overseas trip, a decision his spokesman said was made because the Democratic presidential candidate thought it would be inappropriate on a campaign-funded journey.

The spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said Thursday that Obama made his decision out of respect for the servicemen and women ...

Bad decision.

I’m confused. Obama says he was making the Middle East leg of the trip as part of a congressional delegation, and he spoke to citizens of Berlin today as “a citizen of the world.“ But now he’s saying that since he’s there as a candidate, he can’t visit the troops who will be voting for president later this year?

First of all, if Obama thought it would be “inappropriate” to visit the troops on a campaign-funded journey, then why did he have his campaign set it up? Could it be that he never really intended to make the stop?

And even if he did intend to make the stop, do you think wounded servicemen and women care whether his trip is funded by the government or his campaign? This guy wants to be their commander-in-chief. I’m pretty sure they’ve earned their spot on his itinerary, no matter who’s funding the trip.

Not visiting wounded troops. Bad move, Barack.

As for the speech itself, some media outlets pegged the crowd there to hear it at 200,000. I watched the whole thing; I wouldn’t put it up there with his greatest efforts. It was a nice speech, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t hold a candle to his tour de force on race relations. Today he seemed like he was being careful—almost too careful. Whether he wanted to or felt like he had to, he shortened his pauses and barreled into the next phrase whenever the crowd began chanting his name, or “Yes we can.“ And the change of pace was obvious. There were a couple of times when he misspoke. All in all, the delivery was average; it was what we usually see from most politicians. But an average oratatorical performance by Barack Obama is below average for him.

Regarding the content of the speech (transcript here), I liked the parallels Obama drew between the Berlin Wall and the virtual walls of race, religion and economics that separate people around the world. The substance of the speech was solid. The one thing that seemed lacking—and to me, glaringly so—was the huge opportunity Obama missed to identify America before Europeans as the greatest country in the world. He set it up perfectly:

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

But instead, he said:

But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived, at great cost and great sacrifice, to form a more perfect union, to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world.

Doesn’t he still believe that America is still the greatest country in the world? Surely he does; he’s said so in previous domestic speeches.

Sure, some might say that such ethnocentrism is out of place on foreign soil and that it would fly in the face of the one-world message Obama was delivering. And those things are likely true. But in the end, isn’t it the opinions of Americans that should matter most to their president?

That first paragraph should have been followed with, “But America is still the greatest country in the world. She has done more for freedom and liberty than any other in the history of the world. Her people have fought against injustice, both within her borders and without. And she is still that shining city on a hill, the hope of humanity and the beacon of freedom that she has been ever since she was birthed as an idea in the minds of patriots who yearned to breathe free.“

And then he could have come back to the one-world thing by saying something like, “America is ready to lead again.“

Something like that!

Overall, I’d give Obama’s speech today a B- ... but, of course, we’re grading on the Obama curve.