Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 174

Stop and Frisk--and Arrest

Most amazing-but-true story comes from the Miami Herald on the stop and frisk--and frequently arrest--actions of local police involving one convenience store.  Where the owner installed 15 video cameras not to film robberies (he's never suffered one) but the cops, who frequently arrest customers, even shop employees, on bogus minor charges, such as trespassing--yes, even workers who obviously are allowed to be there.  See story and videos.

The videos show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of Saleh’s business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests.

“There is just no justifying this kind of behavior,’’ said Chuck Drago, a former police officer and consultant on police policy and the use of force. “Nobody can justify overstepping the constitution to fight crime.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/21...

Phil Ochs and Kennedy

One of old friend Phil's greatest songs, inspired by the JFK assassination, "Crucifixion."  Live.  Phil played the song for Bobby Kennedy in 1967, who reportedly cried when he realized it was partly about his brother.  Phil later told Studs Terkel:  "The Kennedy assassination, in a way, was destroying our best in some kind of ritual. People say they really love the reformer, they love the radical, but they want to see him killed. It's a certain part of the human psyche—the dark side of the human psyche."

Courtney And Leonard

Who'd a thunk Courtney Love would call Leonard Cohen "my god" and that she steals all her lyrics from him? And then, naturally, butchers song.

Olbermann on Arod

His skewering last night.

For Pete's Sake

Somehow had never come across this, so h/t to Amy Ringenbach:   Pete Seeger's re-working of "Ode to Joy."   Of  course, our new film features Billy Bragg's update.

New 'CJR' Editor and Iraq

Unlike a lot of media and political writers I am not one to let bygones be bygones, at least in a very few tragic or high stakes cases.  For example, the media failures in the run-up to the Iraq war, given the consequences.  This explains my reaction to the Columbia Journalism Review today announcing, after a widely-watched search, that it was hiring Liz Spayd of The Washington Post as its new editor.

Now, I suppose I should review her entire career, for context, though others are doing it and you can read about it in plenty of places.  She has been managing editor of the Post for years now and obviously supervised a good deal of important work (and some not so terrific, of course).  But I am moved to recall, and then let go,  one famous 2004 article, by Howard Kurtz, then media writer at the Post, which I covered in my book on those media failures and Iraq, So Wrong for So Long .

In a nutshell:  The NYT, under Bill Keller, had printed as an editors' note  a very brief and very limited semi-apology for its horrific coverage during the run-up to the war.  The Post, almost equally guilty (see headline in photo), didn't even do that, leaving it to one of its reporters, i.e. Kurtz, to report it out.  His piece made the paper look pretty bad, with some embarrassing quotes from editor Len Downie, Bob Woodward and Karen DeYoung, among others.  And there was this passage about Spayd:

Liz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national news, says The Post's overall record was strong.

"I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to question the administration's assertions on all kinds of subjects related to the war. . . . Do I wish we would have had more and pushed harder and deeper into questions of whether they possessed weapons of mass destruction? Absolutely," she said. "Do I feel we owe our readers an apology? I don't think so."

In some ways, the "hero" of the Kurtz piece was Walter Pincus, the longtime national security who had tried to get more skeptical stories on Iraq WMD in the paper (or get them on the front-page).

But while Pincus was ferreting out information "from sources I've used for years," some in the Post newsroom were questioning his work. Editors complained that he was "cryptic," as one put it, and that his hard-to-follow stories had to be heavily rewritten.

Spayd declined to discuss Pincus's writing but said that "stories on intelligence are always difficult to edit and parse and to ensure their accuracy and get into the paper."

Michael Getler later reviewed his years as ombudsman at the Post from 2000 to 2005, and offered a strong critique of the role of the paper's editors in the Iraq WMD disaster. He observed:

I should say at this point the Post is an excellent paper, and it also did some excellent reporting before the war—more than you might think. But I also had a catbird seat watching it stumble and, while my observations are necessarily about the Post, they may be more broadly applicable. From where I sat, there were two newsroom failures, in particular, at the root of what went wrong with pre-war reporting. One was a failure to pay enough attention to events that unfolded in public, rather than just the exclusive stuff that all major newspapers like to develop. The other was a failure of editors and editing up and down the line that resulted in a focus on getting ready for a war that was coming rather than the obligation to put the alternative case in front of readers in a prominent way. This resulted in far too many stories, including some very important ones, being either missed, underplayed, or buried.

Gelter chronicles the many important stories the Post either did not cover or buried deep inside the paper (including reports on large antiwar marches).   Then he adds:

Here’s a brief sampling of additional Post headlines that, rather stunningly, failed to make the front of the newspaper: “Observers: Evidence for War Lacking,” “U.N. Finds No Proof of Nuclear Program,” “Bin Laden-Hussein Link Hazy,” “U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms,” “Legality of War Is a Matter of Debate,” and “Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq.” In short, it wasn’t the case that important, challenging reporting wasn’t done. It just wasn’t highlighted.

Of course, Liz Spayd was just one of a group of editors and hardly deserves full blame for the Post's performance.  But she did defend that record afterward--and said no apology was needed. 

Love This

Frank Bruni, the NYT columnist, has one of the tweets of the day already: "Weird: the iPhone left in my yellow cab last night clearly belongs to @ courtney (Courtney Love). Trying to return. Anyone? Courtney?"   Then he explained how he figured it out:  "My ace researcher @ IsabellaMoschen deduced from texts coming in beneath the locked home screen that it was/is Courtney's."

Has inspired these Twitter comments/jokes already:

"you washed your hands, right?"

"If you're for real right now you've got to check out the photos on there"

From John Cook, editor of Gawker: "We will buy it" (maybe not a joke)

"what is the ring tone?" 

UPDATE:  Frank says Courtney's management has contacted him and arranged for drop off.  Too bad for Gawker. 

Umbrella Man

You may know him as a key mystery figure for JFK assassination buffs.   NYT has re-posted this Errol Morris vid from two years ago.  And he has a new one today.

Classic Coke

Colbert last night on the Rep. Trey Radel cocaine arrest.  "I guess he missed the Tea Party lesson that you dump the cargo over overboard before the cops show up," to paraphrase.

More Cowbell? Me and Dylan, Now and Then

The hoopla over the amazing interactive "Like a Rolling Stone" video released yesterday (I was among the first to cover it here), makes me reflect on my first rock concert, 48 years ago--yes, ouch--this month.

Many other concerts naturally followed, from Blind Faith to U2 and beyond, many while I served as senior editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. But that first concert remains vivid, and historic, as it was one stop on what many consider the most significant (and craziest) tour ever—Bob Dylan’s first full road trip after going electric.

In 1965, still in high school, I was a huge Dylan fan—I can honestly say that it was his “protest” phase that made me turn left. He had only recently picked up the electric guitar at Newport and hit the top with “Like a Rolling Stone.” I took a really bold step: ordering a pair of tickets for a Dylan show at Kleinhan’s Music Hall in Buffalo. Even more amazing: this would be my first rock concert.
That wasn’t anything to be ashamed of back then. Only a few kids I knew had ever been to shows, usually girls who drove up to Toronto for the Beach Boys. Few bands came to Buffalo, only twenty miles away but another world, with a thick knot of highways and byways to navigate and a then-huge downtown.

I didn’t know what to expect from the concert. This was long before the “rock press” appeared, wire service tour reports were virtually unheard of, and the net, of course, did not exist. No sets lists posted online. All I’d heard was that the show opened acoustic and then went electric—and was causing disturbances everywhere. No idea who was in the backing band.

A Buffalo paper (I still have the clipping) ran a three-paragraph story, with the last two amounting to this: “He has performed at the Lincoln Center and Town Hall, and has made a series of personal appearances in England. Dylan’s music has dropped most of its original overtones of the wandering troubadour. His beat is sharper and heavier and the words are more complex.” This was the state of “rock journalism” back then.

Somehow we made it to the hall. Immediately I was thrown into the freakiest crowd I’d ever encountered, although “freaky” was not yet in the lingo. Most seemed to be from the University of Buffalo, at the time one of the most politically active campuses in the East. Numerous kids had long bushy hair, like Dylan, far scruffier and wilder looking than the British invasion band members. Many girls had devilishly long, straight hair. Some wore political buttons. A few antiwar protesters shouted slogans outside. It was exciting and, for me, exotic.

I still have a stub so I know that my girlfriend and I were in row J of the left-center balcony. Dylan came out alone, with just a stool next to him. It held a change of harmonica, a glass of water and, evidently, some pills that he dipped into from time to time. He’d already been associated with “drugs,” whatever that meant, and I wondered if he was popping illegal substances or just fighting a cold.

The first set was all one could have wished, although I can’t say for sure which songs he played, except that it was weighted toward the newer non-electric ones such as “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” I specifically remember that he played “Desolation Row,” which I loved and which went on forever—not a bad thing in this case. Okay, no controversy so far.
After intermission, spent largely staring at the odd menagerie of counterculture precursors, I settled back in my seat, nervous, no doubt, about the coming reaction. And a large part of the crowd, it turned out, had brought their “A” game. A band came out with Bob—actually The Band, as it turned out, although they were then known as The Hawks (that’s Robbie Robertson on the left and Levon on the right in the photo above, and see here for cool photo of Levon with Band members in 1964). They immediately started playing “fucking loud,” as Dylan famously ordered them when heckled in Great Britain on the same tour.

No idea what the first tune was, but I do know what happened between songs: heckling, pointed cries of “We want Dylan” (the folk one, that is) and “Put down the guitar!”—and the ringing of a cow bell somewhere down the balcony!

Dylan plunged ahead, with more noisy protest, and the cowbell, after the song’s final note. And so it went, although I recall that the cowbell slackened after awhile. Beyond “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” I can’t say for certainty what they played. Since I’d never been to a rock show before, I had no idea what other bands sounded like live, if the sound system was always this crappy, if performers rarely or always spoke to the audience, and how much of an encore, if any, could one expect.But I had to start somewhere, and this was it.

A few weeks later, the heckling and cowbells got too much for Levon Helm, and he left the tour—to work on an oil rig. He was absent when the troupe famously went on to England and were heckled there, too.

Several months later, Dylan released Blonde on Blonde and then stopped touring—after his motorcycle accident, which some still suggest was faked to give him an excuse to give up the rigors, and controversy, of the road. Levon returned, took part in a few of the Basement Tapes sessions, then stayed on as The Hawks became (briefly) The Crackers and then The Band. And after they played their Last Waltz about a decade later—see “Don’t Do It” from that gig—Levon kept on drumming, acting (Coal Miner’s Daughter, among others), singing and rambling.

Or, as the highlight of that 1969 concert in Buffalo, captured below a few months later, put it: “Slippin’ and Slidin.”