Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 159

Late Entry (So to Speak) for Correction of the Year

It's a shame Craig Silverman awarded his annual media Corrections of the Year prizes the other day or this one might have earned consideration for one of the also-ran slots.  Al Goldstein, the famed/defaming creator of Screw magazine, has died at the age of 77, long after he lost his empire, defiled women in print and ended up in a homeless shelter.  The NYT has a lengthy obit, which doesn't quite get at the putrid heart of the man, but includes the amazing story of how his son asked him not to attend his graduation at Harvard--so Al posted doctored photos of his son screwing men and his own mother etc.  But topping that is the correction just appended to the obit:

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a movie Mr. Goldstein starred in. It is “Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Are Screwed,” not “Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Get Screwed.”

Inside Look at First Look

The new media company formerly known as NewsCo.   now has a new name, First Look Media,  and more flesh on bones, as sketched out today by funder (at $50 million) Pierre Omidyar and advisor Jay Rosen, both to be found here.   The journalism operation, to answer a key question, will be non-profit while the related tech operation will be for-profit.  Rosen:

Another way to say it is: public service, mission-driven journalism, including investigative work, has always been subsidized by something: advertising, other kinds of news, donors to a non-profit (as with ProPublica) or a related and profitable business like the Bloomberg terminals that subsidize Bloomberg News. First Look Media is adding to the picture another possible source of support: profits from a company specifically focused on technology for producing, distributing and consuming news, views and information.

'Wash Post,' Amazon and the CIA

My new piece at The Nation on protest over Amazon's $600 million CIA deal--in light of Bezos owning Wash Post.

Celebrating Over a Star's Canard

I caught this fella or gal down by the Hudson strutting in celebration as a star of "Duck Dynasty" is suspended for making an anti-gay slur.  A foie-paux?

But Racism Is Over in USA, Right, GOPers?

Pleasantville is a rather nice little town over in Westchester, about half an hour across the bridge from my home.  Among other things, it houses the coolest movie theater/society outside New York, the Jacob Burns Center, where we visit often and where I have even given a talk about Kurosawa.  Anyway, it's not the sort of town where you'd expect a raging racist cop to feel so comfortable about his bias that he would post at Facebook under the name Coon Trapper and called President Obama a "Commie Muslim" and wonder why he's still alive.  "Go die in a shallow grave," he instructed the president.  Now he's been suspended.  But so much for the end-of-racism meme.

Precedent Brown?

Jerry's gotten a lot of kudos in his return as California's ageless gov but running for president in 2016 at the age of 78?  He ain't ruling it out, L.A. Times says today.  Of course, Jerry ran as long ago as 1976 and 1980 and won a few primaries.  BTW,  speaking of governors, I interviewed his Dad twice, once on his role in Upton Sinclair's 1934 race for governor and on his key role in the death penalty debates of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Happy Birthday, Keith

But the wonder is, how did he reached #70?  That's Keith Richards, of course, and how better to pay tribute than with the isolated guitar tracks (can this be my ring tone?) from one of the five greatest rock 'n roll songs ever, "Gimme Shelter." And below that, rare version of song with Keith on lead vocal.

Catching Mitt

Trailer just out for Mitt Romney 2012 doc coming on Netflix.  "This may not end well." "The flipping Mormon."  "A loser for life."  Love that elegiac music! This could be somewhat revealing or laughably bad.

Nagasaki, 'Silent Night'

When SNL opened its show last December at this time with a choir singing "Silent Night," in tribute to the children killed the day before in Newtown, I couldn't help but flash back to an earlier rendition of this song after a much greater (that is, more massive) incident of the slaughter of innocents.  The song was sung at Christmas, 1945,  by parishioners who had gathered at the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, the largest Catholic church in the Far East, which had been mostly destroyed (see above) by the very unnecessary second U.S. atomic bomb on August 9, 1945--which had exploded, a little off-target, right over the large Catholic section of the city.  The vast majority of the 80,000 or more killed that day were children and their mothers and school teachers.

I learned about the "Silent Night" when probing the footage shot in Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the U.S. military--and then suppressed by the U.S. for decades.  This forms the basis of my book Atomic Cover-up .  You can see some of the footage they shot in the brief video that I created but not the "Silent Night" section.  Perhaps I can upload it off VHS some way.  In a moving tracking shot that goes down the center aisle, it shows the congregants--women with heads covered by a white, filmy veil--singing with battered walls behind them (you don't see the absence of a ceiling above).

It's the only part of the tens of thousands of feet of film that includes sound.  Hence we know they are singing "Silent Night."  And many no doubt thinking of their missing children, destroyed one day in a matter of seconds. 

The Error of '60 Minutes'

Yes, the CBS "news" show has picked up another award--this time the not-so-coveted "Error of the Year" prize from famed Regret the Error creator (now at Poynter) Craig Silverman.

Somehow he narrowed down the show's nominees to just one, the Lara Logan "Benghazi" con job.

Runner-up is that New York Post cover story and photo of the Boston Bombing "Bag Men"--seemingly IDing them as chief suspects (wrong).

But don't miss, Craig also names a correction of the year, typo of the year, and apology of the year, plus discusses trends in all those fields!  One correction runner-up from Slate:  "An earlier version of the Carlos Danger Name Generator suggested incorrectly that the Carlos Danger Name for Anthony Weiner is Armando Catastrophe. The Carlos Danger Name for Anthony Weiner is Carlos Danger."

Somehow this one from the NYT did not win:  "The Media Equation column on Monday, about the animated comedy show 'South Park' and its creators, misstated a plot point in the show. While the character Kenny was once killed in every episode, that is no longer the case. The column also misstated the circumstances of his repeated deaths. While Kenny met his fate in a variety of ways over the years, he was not routinely 'ritually sacrificed.'”

And from Metro UK:  "Yesterday’s Lou Reed obituary should have referred to his collaboration with Metallica on the album Lulu, rather than collaborations with Metallica and Lulu."