Just shut up?

Those of you who follow us on Facebook, know that the traditional first post of the day is "Bob's Morning Edition  pick," which is Bob Leweke's choice as the do-not-miss  feature of the day. Today, Bob's pick was "Shooting Fallout: Political Rhetoric Takes the Heat ."  At npr.org, Corey Dade begins his story begins this way:

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) has raised concerns about the effect of inflammatory language that has become a steady undercurrent in the nation's political culture.

No kidding? You think maybe that might be the case?

Later on in the same article, Corey Dade brings up "The Crosshairs Controversy,"

During the midterm elections, Giffords and other Democratic House candidates were featured on the website of Sarah Palin's political action committee with crosshairs over their districts. Giffords, disturbed at the reference, said at the time, "When people do that, they have got to realize there's consequences to that."

In a Sunday interview with talk radio host Tammy Bruce, Rebecca Mansour, who works for Palin's PAC, said the images of crosshairs weren't intended to evoke violence: "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," she said.

The controversial image (which SarahPac took down over the weekend) is shown above. As someone who occasionally target shoots, it seems to me both disingenuous and unhelpful to claim those circles with crosses in the middle have nothing to do with targets and shootings. Isn't denying the obvious yesterday tantamount to squirting gasoline on today's rhetorical flames? I mean, truth still exists, right? Surely, the meaningful question about the above image is not what is it, but what are its consequences.

There have been many, many calls for moderation in our political language over the last 24-hours. However, Fox News seems to be complaining today that . . .

. . . many on the American Left said the horror could be traced to the malign influence of American conservatives; members of the Tea Party; right-wing pundits Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck; former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin; and Fox News. 

Among the "many" cited by Fox News (4 in all) was Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who wrote yesterday, "We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.  . . . " And Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat and friend of Gabrielle Giffords, who, according to the article, "argued that the 'vitriol' of the country's harshly polarized political climate was partly to blame, arguing that unbalanced individuals are uniquely 'susceptible' to vitriol."


Which, you know, just might be the truth. And what's wrong with speaking that, I'd like to know?

Gabrielle Gifford on the way to intensive care

The New York Times today writes in its lead editorial that

Jared Loughner, the man accused of shooting Ms. Giffords, killing a federal judge and five other people, and wounding 13 others, appears to be mentally ill. His paranoid Internet ravings about government mind control place him well beyond usual ideological categories.

But he is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery. With easy and legal access to semiautomatic weapons like the one used in the parking lot, those already teetering on the edge of sanity can turn a threat into a nightmare.

Okay, okay, enough!

The point I'd like to make is who cares anymore whose fault our poisonous partisan state of affairs is? Hasn't who said what, when, and to whom after yesterday become much less than important. Can't we all just shut up, calm down, and start our political conversation over at a much lower pitch..

And another thing. Jared Lougher seems to have been obviously lurching  toward Sunday's violent murder spree. Why didn't we do something? Were we just too busy talking heated and pointless nonsense to realize that the last thing we needed was to allow Jared Lougher's mental illness to  go untreated, while, at the same time allowing him access to a gun?

Your thoughts?

The Radiohead model of monetizing journalism. . .

In 2007 British alternative rock band Radiohead released their seventh album, In Rainbows, as a digital download, asking listeners to send in what they thought it was worth. I learned about this in 2009, when I ran a Civic Soapbox by JMU student Ted Ghaffarian that mentioned it.

Hmmm, I thought. Very, very interesting.

For the last decade or so, we journalists have been madly assessing the Internet's impact on our profession. Of course, what we're really madly assessing  (once we've touched on such high-minded concerns as the future of well-sourced journalism) is the impact of  the Internet on our paychecks.

Print journalists have been hit the hardest. The newest trend among newspapers appears to be layoffs. If they are to survive at all, print newspapers must figure out how to monetize themselves on the Internet.

Yesterday, I saw on NPR's website that the New York Times is going to start charging for full web access in 2111. Wow, I thought. For everyone in my line of work, this is big news. I, like most people I talk with, am leery of plans that expect people to pay for news coverage they've long enjoyed for free. The prevailing wisdom appears to be that we'll all just go elsewhere for our news coverage.

Then last night there was a fascinating discussion on The PBS News Hour during which two pundits  discussed both the back story and the ramifications of the Times' decision. At some point in this conversation, one pundit mentioned the way The Miami Herald now tags each of its news story with two separate links.

I visited the Herald's site first thing this morning and, indeed, found two links at the end of every article. The first link offered a discount on home delivery of the paper.

And here's the second one.

• Support ongoing
  news coverage
  on MiamiHerald.com
  Click here.

Wow, again!  The Radiohead monetization model applied to commercial print journalism. My initial reaction is (in the Harry Potter sense of the word) brilliant!

The question, of course, is, will people do this? Will readers pay voluntarily to keep reputably-sourced, commercially-modeled journalism in business?

At some point, I'm going to make a few calls and try to find out how the Herald's experiment is working. It might have to be after this weekend, after Carl Kasell has come and gone, but I am going to find out!

Monday morning, coming down. . .

In case you missed Maureen Dowd's latest column in The New York Times, here's a link to it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13dowd.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=dowd&st=Search   

Racism resurgent in America?

Obama as an Other?

I've studied the Tea Party pictures that I've been able to find, and I have yet to see a person of color in them. The rhetoric coming out of these gatherings seems to me to be reactive and fearful. I'm assuming these are good people, confused as I am, by economic forces at play that they don't understand; but that, rather than taking the time to educate themselves and address hard reality, the tea partiers, for the most part, are simply unleashing verbal blasts of discontent. 

So today, I'd like to know what you think: Does the color of our brainy president's skin have anything to do with the level of anger in the protests against health care reform?

What do you think?