Blithe Spirit, the Blog

Picking up on Chi Trib’s story of Working for Less in Decatur, it should be noted that Illinois taxes have a role to play in Illinois’ job picture.  If Decatur is doing badly compared to 10 years ago, can that have something to do with high taxes in Illinois vs. in, say, Tennessee or Florida.  Or any other state that is not doing as badly.  This is presuming that jobs have left Illinois not only for China but also for Tennessee and Florida.  I ask this not knowing the answer but wanting to know it and finding nothing to help me in the story at hand.

Another point has to do with what Nicholas Lemann is trying to do at Columbia Journalism, as explained by Hugh Hewitt in Weekly Standard, namely teach

a capacity to discover and analyze data.  . . . more sophisticated research and analytical skills than most journalists bring to the table. 

“‘Regression analysis is the best example,’ [Lemann] tells me [Hewitt]. ‘Every social science study in the United States depends upon regression analysis, but almost no reporters understand it. You can’t read and understand these studies if you don’t know how regression analysis works. I taught myself how to do it, and we are going to teach the M.A. students, equipping them to go beyond their ordinary reliance on dueling experts interpreting studies.’”

Mark Tapscott, who is quoting the Hewitt article, says he’s been trying to do just that at the Heritage Foundation, where he went in 1999 from his daily-paper job.  It’s Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR).  He runs one– and two-day CARR “boot camps” at the foundation.  Nine are scheduled for 2006.  It’s the 7th year for the camps, which have graduated 200–plus newsies.  This year they are partnering with the Media Bloggers Association for a two-day camp in Nashville as part of the association’s annual meeting.  This is more than checking and verifying, copy-desk style.  They work on “computer modelling.”  One of their models is the

U.S. economic model described by The New York Times as among “the most frequently used” in Washington. Investor’s Business Daily used [Heritage’s] U.S. economic model to compare the 2000 presidential candidates tax proposals. Other available models include the Heritage World Trade Model that measures things like the economic impacts of changing trade trends and tariffs and the Social Security Rate of Return Model, the first to project returns by ethnicity and geography.

There’s more, more, more in all this, and it takes us far beyond the tried and still true checking it out when your mother says she loves you, of City News lore.

Chi Trib’s page one-er is not the ultimate weeper, but it’s competitive.  The story “Will Work for Less” — that’s the head, in inch-high type, with its Buddy-can-you-spare–a overtones — is all about a guy in Decatur who is making less than half the $27/hour he made six years ago.  The pic (of the guy) is an art shot, 6×9 with forehead cropped, chin in hand, looking dramatic.  It can fit on his mantel, if he still has a mantel.  We learn in the second ‘graph that he can barely afford a $3 slice of pizza.

That is, the story seems all about him.  But by the 6th ‘graph, it enters discussion of the “underworld . . . now the reality. . . for thousands of workers as the industrial Midwest undergoes the most wrenching economic transformation since the bad old Rust Belt days of the 1970s.”  That’s how you write such a story.  You start with the emotional grabber, you see, carry it a few paragraphs, then smack-dab your topic lead with as much drama as you can muster.  It’s classic newspaper journalism, done perfectly by Stephen Franklin, with maybe some help from his desk and copy editors, though at the Trib it seems sometimes that those guys and gals just stand around and watch.

The story continues: “ . . . forces of globalization . . . slash costs . . . move out or go under . . . [no] competitive advantage . . . pay cut.”  It moves to the man’s employer filing for bankruptcy, and then to “any number of industries where American factory hands are competing against the Chinese or the Cambodians . . . and the fallout is the same: The standard of living for the Americans slips.”  Then one expert, an economist:  “For the United States, it’s the end of labor as we once knew it.” 

And then Decatur and the human-interest side of it, including one man’s complaint about ”corporations” and how they “want the American worker [collectively considered] to tread water or sink so other workers around the world can catch up with us.”  Now we are at the down and dirty, hearing the man on the street — actually on his 10 acres with a 13–foot pond — talking like we talk, you know. 

Again, perfect performance in accepted daily-paper style.  Art department supplies graphs, charts, and boxed, oversize figures that cite government bureaus.  It’s all there.  We read of the union’s losing battle.  And cases.  The man with two kids in college and one headed for college makes do with an old car and buys day-old bread.  Bang, bang, bang.  We get it.  His college-educated young bosses make him feel like “a second-class citizen.”  Ouch.  That phrase still around? 

But Herrnstein and Murray said this 12 years ago in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.  A “cognitive elite” is emerging.  There’s “cognitive partitioning by occupation” and “economic pressure to partition” and “steeper ladders, narrower gates” for employees.  Is it therefore news that in Decatur people used to get along on “two strong arms and a willingness to put in a hard day” but can’t do that now?  If so, to whom? 

The story’s last eight inches are pure human interest, hard luck reiterated in Saul Alinsky rub-raw-sores-of-discontent manner without a hard edge, but rather the obligatory aura of disinterest.  The writer has to be cool about it.  People don’t like rant.  But ah, the closer, in a quote from the last-described sufferer, gives us true-blue classism:

 ”We’re in a cycle right now where corporations have the advantage, and unions don’t,” he said. “But soon the cycle will change.”

This is Franklin’s last word on the subject, for now.  This is designated a “Tribune special report,” which means, as reporters used to type at the bottom of their hard-copy, there must be more more more to come.

Meanwhile, at Columbia School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann is “trying to teach a new generation of journalists what he calls ‘power skills.’ By this he means the capacity to discover and analyze data through sophisticated research and analytical skills,” reports Paul Mirengoff at Power Line: Too little, too late?, citing Hugh Hewitt in Weekly Standard. 

But there’s the old-dog, new-tricks problem.  The piece by Franklin, done just right by conventional standards, is this morning’s best shot from the major, major media outlet Chi Trib.  But it’s at best a preliminary snippet toward understanding what’s going on, devoid of context except what’s supplied by various OK words, some them tired and abused.

Chi Trib’s page one-er is not the ultimate weeper, but it’s competitive.  The story “Will Work for Less” — that’s the head, in inch-high type, with its Buddy-can-you-spare–a overtones — is all about a guy in Decatur who is making less than half the $27/hour he made six years ago.  The pic (of the guy) is an art shot, 6×9 with forehead cropped, chin in hand, looking dramatic.  It can fit on his mantel, if he still has a mantel.  We learn in the second ‘graph that he can barely afford a $3 slice of pizza.

That is, the story seems all about him.  But by the 6th ‘graph, it enters discussion of the “underworld . . . now the reality. . . for thousands of workers as the industrial Midwest undergoes the most wrenching economic transformation since the bad old Rust Belt days of the 1970s.”  That’s how you write such a story.  You start with the emotional grabber, you see, carry it a few paragraphs, then smack-dab your topic lead with as much drama as you can muster.  It’s classic newspaper journalism, done perfectly by Stephen Franklin, with maybe some help from his desk and copy editors, though at the Trib it seems sometimes that those guys and gals just stand around and watch.

The story continues: “ . . . forces of globalization . . . slash costs . . . move out or go under . . . [no] competitive advantage . . . pay cut.”  It moves to the man’s employer filing for bankruptcy, and then to “any number of industries where American factory hands are competing against the Chinese or the Cambodians . . . and the fallout is the same: The standard of living for the Americans slips.”  Then one expert, an economist:  “For the United States, it’s the end of labor as we once knew it.” 

And then Decatur and the human-interest side of it, including one man’s complaint about ”corporations” and how they “want the American worker [collectively considered] to tread water or sink so other workers around the world can catch up with us.”  Now we are at the down and dirty, hearing the man on the street — actually on his 10 acres with a 13–foot pond — talking like we talk, you know. 

Again, perfect performance in accepted daily-paper style.  Art department supplies graphs, charts, and boxed, oversize figures that cite government bureaus.  It’s all there.  We read of the union’s losing battle.  And cases.  The man with two kids in college and one headed for college makes do with an old car and buys day-old bread.  Bang, bang, bang.  We get it.  His college-educated young bosses make him feel like “a second-class citizen.”  Ouch.  That phrase still around? 

But Herrnstein and Murray said this 12 years ago in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.  A “cognitive elite” is emerging.  There’s “cognitive partitioning by occupation” and “economic pressure to partition” and “steeper ladders, narrower gates” for employees.  Is it therefore news that in Decatur people used to get along on “two strong arms and a willingness to put in a hard day” but can’t do that now?  If so, to whom? 

The story’s last eight inches are pure human interest, hard luck reiterated in Saul Alinsky rub-raw-sores-of-discontent manner without a hard edge, but rather the obligatory aura of disinterest.  The writer has to be cool about it.  People don’t like rant.  But ah, the closer, in a quote from the last-described sufferer, gives us true-blue classism:

 ”We’re in a cycle right now where corporations have the advantage, and unions don’t,” he said. “But soon the cycle will change.”

This is Franklin’s last word on the subject, for now.  This is designated a “Tribune special report,” which means, as reporters used to type at the bottom of their hard-copy, there must be more more more to come.

Meanwhile, at Columbia School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann is “trying to teach a new generation of journalists what he calls ‘power skills.’ By this he means the capacity to discover and analyze data through sophisticated research and analytical skills,” reports Paul Mirengoff at Power Line: Too little, too late?, citing Hugh Hewitt in Weekly Standard. 

But there’s the old-dog, new-tricks problem.  The piece by Franklin, done just right by conventional standards, is this morning’s best shot from the major, major media outlet Chi Trib.  But it’s at best a preliminary snippet toward understanding what’s going on, devoid of context except what’s supplied by various OK words, some them tired and abused.

If Kendra Davis has it right about the United Center confrontation between her and Michael Axelrod, and cursing and name-calling (of her husband Antonio) was going on all night until she finally got up to do something about it, what were the security guards doing all that time?  On the other hand, if the security guards saw nothing amiss and didn’t come over until Axelrod motioned them when she got in his face, were things as bad as she says they were?

If Kendra Davis has it right about the United Center confrontation between her and Michael Axelrod, and cursing and name-calling (of her husband Antonio) was going on all night until she finally got up to do something about it, what were the security guards doing all that time?  On the other hand, if the security guards saw nothing amiss and didn’t come over until Axelrod motioned them when she got in his face, were things as bad as she says they were?

Chi Trib began its lead editorial 1/21 cleverly: “Osama bin Laden, like Mick Jagger, cannot relinquish the microphone.”  But the funniest thing happened.  One elderly reader, picking up on the simple “Osama’s unease” headline, read “Obama” and found the lead wonderfully appropriate, thinking momentarily of the junior senator from our state who gets more ink, pix, and air time than any other junior senator in our memory.

Chi Trib began its lead editorial 1/21 cleverly: “Osama bin Laden, like Mick Jagger, cannot relinquish the microphone.”  But the funniest thing happened.  One elderly reader, picking up on the simple “Osama’s unease” headline, read “Obama” and found the lead wonderfully appropriate, thinking momentarily of the junior senator from our state who gets more ink, pix, and air time than any other junior senator in our memory.

If it’s Monday, it’s Dennis Byrne and Charles Krauthammer day on Chi Trib op-ed page. Yesterday, that is. In “Not another Chavez chump: Venezuela’s president didn’t count on Chicago being Chicago,” longtime (going back to Chi Daily News glory days) Chicago reporter, writer, and columnist Byrne notes that Chicago (Transit Authority) refused $15 million in free gasoline from U.S.-basher, dissent-crusher, Venezuela-poverty-ignorer Hugo Chavez. It’s not our kind of gas, CTA said. Trade it for your kind, complained Cong. Luis Gutierrez, apparently having no problem with U.S. bashing, dissent crushing, and poverty-at-home ignoring.

The $15 mill would have barely shown up on the CTA billion-dollar budget. One gulp, and there would go Venezuelan oil but not propaganda for S. America’s dictator with the mostest (money). He, that is the country he runs, owns Citgo, which offers no bargains in heavily Spanish-speaking Pilsen, Byrne discovered, and is actually (gulp) an arm of “Big Oil,” which Congr. G. and lib-dem friends usually condemn. Read all about it here or in yesterday’s paper if you haven’t pitched it yet.

Meanwhile, C. Krauthammer exposes Spielberg’s “Munich” as 99% anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian propaganda.

If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction “Munich” and root it in a real historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Once you’ve done that–evoked the actual killing of innocents who, but for Palestinian murderers, would not be much older than Spielberg himself today–you have an obligation to get the story right.

K. seems to have it right. S-berg and his writer Tony Kushner have skillfully evoked the Palestinian side of things, for example humanizing the Munich murderers but presenting Israeli pursuers in the worst possible light.

Roger Ebert, however, gave it four stars, calling it “an act of courage and conscience,” in that S-berg had one of his characters say at movie’s end, “There is no peace at the end of this.” (Gimme a P, gimme an A, gimme a PAC, on to I-F-I-C-I-S-M.) Called “an attack on the Palestinians,” the movie is no such thing, says Compleat Leftist (apologies to Isaak Walton) Ebert. “By not taking sides, [Spielberg] has taken both sides.” Ebert essentially writes an apologia for Spielberg, whom he seems dying to defend. Or did he and Krauthammer see different movies?

If it’s Monday, it’s Dennis Byrne and Charles Krauthammer day on Chi Trib op-ed page. Yesterday, that is. In “Not another Chavez chump: Venezuela’s president didn’t count on Chicago being Chicago,” longtime (going back to Chi Daily News glory days) Chicago reporter, writer, and columnist Byrne notes that Chicago (Transit Authority) refused $15 million in free gasoline from U.S.-basher, dissent-crusher, Venezuela-poverty-ignorer Hugo Chavez. It’s not our kind of gas, CTA said. Trade it for your kind, complained Cong. Luis Gutierrez, apparently having no problem with U.S. bashing, dissent crushing, and poverty-at-home ignoring.

The $15 mill would have barely shown up on the CTA billion-dollar budget. One gulp, and there would go Venezuelan oil but not propaganda for S. America’s dictator with the mostest (money). He, that is the country he runs, owns Citgo, which offers no bargains in heavily Spanish-speaking Pilsen, Byrne discovered, and is actually (gulp) an arm of “Big Oil,” which Congr. G. and lib-dem friends usually condemn. Read all about it here or in yesterday’s paper if you haven’t pitched it yet.

Meanwhile, C. Krauthammer exposes Spielberg’s “Munich” as 99% anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian propaganda.

If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction “Munich” and root it in a real historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Once you’ve done that–evoked the actual killing of innocents who, but for Palestinian murderers, would not be much older than Spielberg himself today–you have an obligation to get the story right.

K. seems to have it right. S-berg and his writer Tony Kushner have skillfully evoked the Palestinian side of things, for example humanizing the Munich murderers but presenting Israeli pursuers in the worst possible light.

Roger Ebert, however, gave it four stars, calling it “an act of courage and conscience,” in that S-berg had one of his characters say at movie’s end, “There is no peace at the end of this.” (Gimme a P, gimme an A, gimme a PAC, on to I-F-I-C-I-S-M.) Called “an attack on the Palestinians,” the movie is no such thing, says Compleat Leftist (apologies to Isaak Walton) Ebert. “By not taking sides, [Spielberg] has taken both sides.” Ebert essentially writes an apologia for Spielberg, whom he seems dying to defend. Or did he and Krauthammer see different movies?

Joey the Clown Lombardo “was arrested while sitting in the front passenger seat of a 1994 silver Lincoln parked in an alley outside a home in the 2300 block of North 74th Street,” reports Chi Trib’s Brendan McCarthy, supplying good detail.  But it’s 74th Avenue, as are all north-south numbered streets in west suburbia.  Where was the copy desk? 

“One World, Many Stories” is Trib’s Perspective section page one head.  Subhead says Trib is “one of a handful of American newspapers that field their own foreign correspondents,” etc., which smacks of a promotion, does it not?  First up is Hugh Dellios on “how Mexicans’ need for jobs and [villainous?] America’s drug habits collide at the U.S.-Mexico border.”  Ten other correspondents have stories, each probably respectable.  But the promo feel persists.

Trib’s Kathy Bergen has a page one Business section piece on Berghoff Restaurant closing, “Life’s `perfect’ plate being cleared away: . . .  many longtime workers will lose good-paying unionized jobs with full benefits, increasingly rare for Chicago food-service employees,” which cites high cost of unionization as maybe, in part why it’s closing.  It’s a fair speculation.