The mail
SEEKING ‘SAVIORS’ FOR NEWSPAPERS
KrestiaDeGeorge’s
“Remaking Media: the D&C’s Hazy Future” (October
4) contains a lazy, unsupported, and inaccurate statement: “Recently a slew of
articles in outlets that cover media, including a cover story in the Columbia
Journalism Review, have advocated private, local ownership as the savior of the
embattled metro daily.”
No. No one thinks private owners are the savior. Some people
think they might be a way out of the trap of public ownership, but that is a
long, long way from advocating it as a solution or declaring “you’re our
savior.”
Here are some quotes from the CJR story on private
ownership, January-February 2006:
“To be clear, private equity investors are not Santa Claus.
They can be every bit as rapacious as the most aggressive fund manager.”
Sound like a savior?
“There are plenty of examples of private equity firms
resorting to a ‘pump it and dump it’ strategy, making steep cuts to goose
earnings and prettify the balance sheet before flipping the company to another
buyer.”
Savior?
That article has the same attitude one of your sources has:
“It’s hard to know what’s better.” You mischaracterized it. CJR is too
squeamish to come out and say what’s better. That’s why the title of the
article is “A Way Out?” with a question mark, not “The way out!”
Jay Rosen,
pressthink@journalism.nyu.edu, is associate professor and former chairman of
the Department of Journalism at New YorkUniversity. He also runs the media criticism blogPressThink.
KrestiaDeGeorge’s
response: Rosen is right: words like “advocated” and “savior” were too
strong for me to have used in summarizing the CJR article. I’d argue, however,
that the article was less neutral on the ownership question than my source’s “It’s
hard to know what’s better” comment. Consider the following paragraph, which
concludes the CJR article:
“Compared with the lineup of bloodless managers and
mandarins currently squeezing the life out of journalism, Charles Foster Kane
looks pretty damn good. So while there is no guarantee that the private
ownership of today would recognize the value of journalism, it has already been
established that Wall Street does not. Maybe it’s time we took our chances.”
Advocacy? No. But strong enough
that I’d be uncomfortable labeling it “squeamish.”
MEN, BASHED
There is never a wrong time to visit the issue of misandry — the hatred and abuse of men, especially as it
occurs in today’s society. Radical feminists will groan their displeasure, even
though their own outcries about the treatment of women go on endlessly.
As a clever person once noted, “Satan’s best trick is to
make us think he doesn’t exist,” so is the case of abuses against males. From
the popular “Boys Are Dumb” merchandise marketed to young girls (and later
pulled from many stores because of outraged protests) to the negative portrayal
of men in popular entertainment (observe those horrible TV movies and dramas
where men are constantly portrayed as murderers, molesters, rapists, adulterers
while the women are brave, courageous, and noble), the image of the male is
stereotyped, then ridiculed and debased to the point of something like
blasphemy. The satanic trick lies in its seeming unassailability. Similar
treatment of women would not be tolerated. Bash men? Go right ahead. It’s the
norm.
But it is not just a stupid pop-culture thing. Men get the
shaft in real life, too. They routinely lose in child-custody battles, even
when many of them are proven to be loving fathers. (At least one feminist has
stated that fathers are totally unnecessary to a child’s healthy development.)
Men have been victims of false abuse charges, false rape
charges, paternal fraud plots, parental alienation conspiracies, and all other
manner of character assassinations. In another area, despite the fact that more
men than women die from virtually every one of the major diseases, research
funds for women’s health issues and allied funds for public awareness outnumber
funds for men’s concerns by millions of dollars.
I can only scratch the surface here. There are whole books
written on the topic of offenses against males. These offenses constitute not
only an unspeakable insult to good men everywhere but they branch more
seriously into the dirty waters of outright discrimination.
Be angry.
Harold Jewell, Rochester
HUSH MONEY
Congressman Tom Reynolds must donate the money he received
from Mark Foley to a charity. It’s obviously hush money, and it makes Reynolds
an accomplice if he keeps it. Greed should not prevail. This is bad enough
already.
John Urich, Rochester
WRITING TO CITY
We welcome and encourage readers’ letters for publication.
Send them to: themail@rochester-citynews.com or The Mail, City Newspaper, 250
North Goodman Street, Rochester14607.
Our guidelines: We don’t publish anonymous letters — and
we ask that you include your street name and city/town/village. We don’t
publish letters that have been sent to other media — and we don’t publish form letters generated by activist groups. While
we don’t restrict length, letters of under 350 words
have a greater chance of being published. We do edit letters for clarity and
brevity. And in general we don’t publish letters (or longer “op-ed” pieces)
from the same writer more often than about once every two months.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2006.
