media – RI Future

May 21, 2015May 22, 2015

ProJo passes tipping point

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The editorial staff of the Providence Journal claim to be “sympathetic” to the struggles of tipped employees and their families, yet they offer no solution for this subordinated “server” class of Rhode Island workers. They also fail to quote or offer any opinion from an actual waitress or waiter. The May 17 article pretends to speak for the actual staff of restaurants in Rhode Island (whose minimum wage is $6.11 less then every other legal citizen of our state) by printing a quote from Dale Venturini, “president and CEO of the businessfunded Rhode Island Hospitality Association”.

This is typical of what has been the public discourse on this subject. We have heard over and over again from people like Bob Bacon, major owner of the Gregg’s Restaurant chain, and Josh Miller, who is not only the owner of such local institutions as Trinity Brewhouse and Hot Club but is also a State Senator. These people always claim to have heard from many servers (in their employ) on the subject.

Having worked as a server in Providence for eight years leading up to the closure of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, I can say that nothing from the May 17 editorial rings true to my experience working in the service industry. Nor does it corelate to the overwhelming majority of the personal stories that I heard while campaigning for this law around Rhode Island this year. I have met no one who has ever recieved compensation from an employer to make up the difference between the $2.89 subminimum and the $9 minimum wage. I have, however, personally spoken with hundreds of servers who have worked whole shifts and even weeks without earning minimum wage.

The article claims that the proposed bill would cause these workers to be “without jobs”, because “Many restaurants operate on very thin margins, and many go out of business.” But to back up this frightening claim, the article’s author offers no statistics. According to the Restaurant Opportunity Center, a tiny national and local lobbying group operating on a shoestring budget with an office right on Broadway in Providence, all of the states that have eliminated the subminimum wage for their workers have seen an increase in business for their local restaurant industries.

The Providence Journal trots out the same tired argument that in order to create jobs, the jobs themselves must suffer. But what good does creating a job do when working that job full time is not enough to support yourself and your family? Rhode Island taxpayers will have to continue to foot the bill of over $600,000 in food stamps that servers require every month. Working without a living wage makes everyone but the job “creator” suffer. Had the editorial staff of the Providence Journal looked at this important economic issue from the point of the servers, they may have realized how neccessary this bill is for not only the actual servers and their families, but for everyone in this state. The most successful owners in Rhode Island’s heralded restaurant industry claim that they won’t be able to stay in business if they have to pay their workers fairly. I have been inside the industry long enough to know better.

March 29, 2015March 30, 2015

Philip Terzian is still tweeting on Phoenix’s grave

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Philip Terzian has been a Pulitzer Prize juror, a speechwriter for a former U.S. Secretary of State, and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, and the American Spectator. According to his bio, he has “reported from a dozen foreign countries,” written a book called Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century, and held positions at a number of news organizations, including Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, and the Providence Journal, where he served as editorial pages editor.

It’s this sparkling resume that makes it so striking that Terzian would relish the closing of a community newspaper. He wasn’t just some anonymous Twitter troll chirping about how “amusing” and “deeply satistyfing” he found news of the Providence Phoenix‘s farewell, back in October. He’s the literary editor of the Weekly Standard.

Not just amusing, but deeply satisfying as well | #ProvidencePhoenix to publish last issue next week http://t.co/55PKUNxb96 via @wpri12

— Philip Terzian (@PhilipTerzian) October 9, 2014

Five months later, he’s apparently still giddy about Rhode Island losing its second most widely-circulated newspaper. This past Thursday, he tweeted:

Steady, comforting sound of crickets @provphoenix!

— PhilipTerzian (@PhilipTerzian) March 26, 2015

Now, longtime readers of the Phoenix‘s Philippe and Jorge will remember that Terzian occasionally appeared in the column. In an item titled “Faux Phil’s Glass House” from 2002, for example, P&J wrote:

Your superior correspondents got a big kick out of perpetually arrogant “Faux Phil” Terzian’s regular editorial column of Wednesday, December 11. He excoriates the New York Times and executive editor Howell Raines, in particular, for the recent and (we agree) unseemly spiking of a couple of (subsequently published) sports page commentary columns about the exclusion of women members from the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.

Phil blows hard about the “wall of separation” between the editorial and news divisions of newspapers. His charge that Raines seemed to be breaching that wall of separation by exercising far too much influence in the editorial department (that he ran until last year) certainly has merit. But Phil’s condemnation of theTimes and its “act of stunning, self-defeating arrogance” loses a bit of its bite considering how the Urinal indulges in the same sort of behavior when supposedly independent writers at the O.P. stray from the views of the Big Boys upstairs.

Does Terzian’s #Twittersadism stem from a long-simmering grudge over one of these jabs? We can only speculate.

Back in October, I asked Terzian, via Twitter, why he was celebrating the fact that 14 people – including me, the Phoenix‘s final news editor – had just lost their job. He never responded, and blocked me from following him.

When I saw his most recent tweet, I tried to send him an email via his website, but I received an error message.

So, if anyone knows Mr. Terzian (who doesn’t seem to have a publicly available email address), please pass along the following note. I remain eager to hear his response.

Hi Philip,

I didn’t understand why you tweeted about how “amusing” and “deeply satisfying” you found the closing of the Providence Phoenix, back in October. And I don’t understand why you would still be publicly giddy about the paper’s death, with a tweet from earlier this week that reads, “Steady, comforting sound of crickets @provphoenix!”

Would you care to offer an explanation for either tweet, for a blog post I’m writing about them? To ask the question another way: why do you – a former Pulitzer juror, published author, and experienced journalist and editor – publicly celebrate the demise of a newspaper?

To be clear, I’m asking these questions with utter sincerity, and I’m happy to include any response you have in my post about your strange and upsetting tweets.

-Phil

Freelance Writer, Editor, and Teacher

Former News Editor, Providence Phoenix

https://www.facebook.com/phileilwriter

By the way, Terzian still contributes to the Providence Journal. As recently as December, the paper ran this op-ed about journalistic ethics.

October 12, 2014October 14, 2014

What does GoLocal’s purported Con-Con poll really show?

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GoLocal ran a story claiming that a Center for Freedom and Prosperity poll indicates that Rhode Islander’s strongly favor holding a Constitutional Convention. But the poll, as released, doesn’t show that at all. What the poll demonstrates is that 70% of likely Rhode Island voters think “things” are on the “wrong track” in the state, that 59% think the economy is the most important problem we are facing, that 77% believe that our political leadership deals with problems inadequately, and 79% believe that state government is more geared to “special interest groups.”

How is this news?

These results are hardly surprising given the state of the economy and government. Based on these poll results, Center CEO Mike Stenhouse urges voters to approve a Con-Con to address these issues, but the poll does not demonstrate that voters favor a con-con as a remedy. In fact, it seems that the results of the poll that might deal with a con-con, Q.8-Q.18, have been withheld from the public. You can view the poll here, and see plainly that the questions jump from Q.7 to Q.19.

In other words, the information released is only what the Center wants you to see, not a real picture of likely voter attitudes.

Some results from Q.16 were released by the Center. These are statements from participants on why they favor holding a Con-Con, but question 15, which perhaps asks participants if they favor a Con-Con, is not included. There are 96 statements in support of a Con-Con listed, out of 516 participants interviewed and weighted for this poll. If this is everyone in favor of a Con-Con, that’s less than 20% support. Even if this is only half of the support the poll found, we’re still left with less than 40% favoring a Con-Con.

Had the poll indicated a majority of likely Rhode Island voters were in favor of a Con-Con, the Center would certainly have included this in the poll results they released. In the absence of the full poll results, we can only assume that the Center did not get the results they were looking for, and that GoLocal made a huge mistake in mischaracterizing the results.

Based on the information released by the Center so far, it’s obvious that Rhode Island voters see the Con-Con for what it is, a chance for special interests like the Center for Freedom and Prosperity to alter the Rhode Island State Constitution in favor of the corporate interests they front for.

October 10, 2014

Ashes at the Phoenix

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My first paying job as a journalist was at the Providence Phoenix. It was the NewPaper at the time, and I happened to walk into their offices a few days after they’d been bought out by the Boston Phoenix. My first newspaper lesson: timing is crucial.

I’d been living in Providence for about a year and one of my first big assignments was to cover the 1990 governor’s race. Was I qualified, knowledgeable in the history and back rooms of Rhode Island’s politics? Nope. But I did the work, went to the press conferences, interviewed folks, and wrote my story. Then, Sunday morning, Charlie Bakst came out with the exact same story in the Providence Journal. Not word for word, of course, but the essential conclusions were the same. I spent the next 24 hours rewriting my story so that it said something completely different. Lesson 2: Journalism can dance very close to fiction; you pick your topic and your goal and write your story.

My favorite gig at the NewPaper was writing the “Urban Eye” column. Every week I wandered Rhode Island, looked for quirky things and wrote about them. I talked with Chris Morris at Antonelli’s Poultry, and Brandt Heckert at Pastiche. I talked with Bill Scambato about Yacht Club Soda, whose water comes from a mineral spring. Their factory store is conveniently located on Mineral Spring Ave. I met one of my best friends, Nora Forbes, who was the first person in Rhode Island to serve a frittata panini.

Decades later, I was walking around WaterPlace Park, when the woman I was seeing told me that she’d loved my stories, that she remembered them, and she’d been a big fan. I married her.

When The Phoenix first bought the NewPaper, they promised that they’d turn it into a paid publication, but they never did. Free is difficult to change. After a few years, I asked for a pay bump. Instead, my columns got cut. I left the NewPaper, and began writing fiction for real.

Lesson 3: Don’t ask for more money unless you’ve got leverage.

For a long number of years The Providence Phoenix offered an “alternative” view, but it had grown long in the tooth. Decades later, many of the writers were the same. Hardly cutting edge and alternative. There were long articles that questioned the establishment, but you still had to grab them at the liquor store or coffee shop. And then… The InterWeb. You know the rest of the story.

With the loss of The Providence Phoenix, and the dwindling of The Providence Journal, Rhode Island is being rapidly stripped of its public faces.

Yes, journalism exists online. There’s awesome writing here on RI Future. But nobody knows you’re reading it. Conversations about digital news aren’t invisible, but they’re often siloed until they break out into the physical world.

With a Luciferian ex-mayor in danger of victory, with a state government led by a “representative” who was never elected by the general population, Rhode Island needs public tangible voices that will break through the walls of lies and deception and misinformation.

The Providence Phoenix was a voice that worked to expose injustice. It showcased local and national music and theater and film. It will be missed.

June 3, 2014September 21, 2014

Chafee on Ed Achorn: ‘virulent,’ ‘unethical’ and purposefully misleading

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In a follow up interview about why he chose to release his full op/ed after a watered down version appeared in today’s Providence Journal, Governor Chafee called ProJo op/ed page editor Ed Achorn “virulent” and said the relatively new leader of the paper of record’s opinion page is “frankly unethical himself in his portrayal of different initiatives I’ve had here.”

Chafee agreed with me when I said he paper’s editorials can seem “purposefully incorrect” at times.

“Purposefully incorrect, I would agree with that,” he said.

Chafee said he complained to the publisher about the way he is portrayed in paper’s opinion page in 2011. “This irrational negatively is hurting Rhode Island,” he said he told the publisher a the time.

Chafee said his critique was not meant for news reporters. But he did say “there’s a reflection down. I think the reporters pick up on a theme that comes from the upper floors.”

I also asked Chafee if RI Future was equally guilty of such yellow journalism (my word, not his)

You can listen to our full conversation here:

May 29, 2014May 29, 2014

‘History of Hate’: New video shows DePetro’s worst transgressions

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In case you are fortunate enough to not be familiar with John DePetro, the For Our Daughters campaign produced a video of the WPRO shock jocks most famous indiscretions. They range from rigging Arbitron ratings, to calling teachers whores, to threatening to kill his lover’s husband to being sued by a co-worker for sexual harassment.

“It is incomprehensible to us that he has yet to be fired, and WPRO management should be ashamed that they employ such a person,” said Maureen Martin, chairwoman of For Our Daughters, the group leading the campaign against DePetro.

Martin and other activists organized the For Our Daughters group specifically to target DePetro. By highlighting his often obnoxious and insulting behavior, the group hopes WPRO will take him off the air.

According to a For Our Daughters press release: “The coalition will be distributing the video to WPRO management, Cumulus management, WPRO’s current and potential advertisers, and other state, elected, and business leaders. They also plan to widely distribute the video over YouTube and social media.”

The entire congressional delegation, nearly every statewide politician (with the very notable exception of Attorney General Peter Kilmartin) and more than 70 state legislators have refused to appear on his radio show. You can see the full list here. “We are very proud of the elected officials and candidates who are participating,” Martin said, “and this video will reassure them that they are doing the right thing by taking a strong stance against his vile brand of hatred.”

The boycott has noticeably crippled his show. (Last week he rebroadcast most of RI Future’s entire 25-minute with gubernatorial candidate Clay Pell, presumably because he is unable to book news makers himself. His addition to the interview was teasing the candidate for his effeminate voice and calling him “Clayboy” Pell.)

To date, WPRO has stood by DePetro. The new video, released yesterday, indicates that the For Our Daughters group is not going away for campaign season, a critical time for WPRO to book guests and advertisers.

“The boycotts will continue until John Depetro is off the air,” Martin said. “For anyone who thinks we are going away, we are not.”

May 13, 2014May 13, 2014

John DePetro’s tacit antisemitism

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“The people have won. The atheists have lost! The people have won. The atheists have lost,” crowed John DePetro as he began broadcasting last Tuesday, May 6th, about the Supreme Court decision Greece v. Galloway that ruled that the “practice of beginning legislative sessions with prayers does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”

Was DePetro’s contention that the Supreme Court decision was a victory of “people” over atheists (not “people”) a fair or complete assessment? Given DePetro’s penchant for playing rather loosely with reality, you probably know the answer. But there was an odious undercurrent to DePetro’s celebratory monologuing that morning, a strain of something far darker and more historically dangerous. As DePetro celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision as a victory for Christianity over atheism, he was also celebrating a victory of Christianity over Judaism.

Susan Galloway, who is named in the case, is Jewish, not an atheist. Linda Stephens, her co-plaintiff, is an atheist. The pair were represented not by the ACLU, but by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. The American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, among other Jewish organizations, filed amicus briefs. If the decision can be celebrated as a victory of “the people” over atheists, it can equally be celebrated as a victory of “the people” over Jews. Moreover, the Supreme Court split along religious lines, as all “five justices in the majority were Catholics, and three out of the four dissenters were Jewish.”

Imagine if DePetro had declared this ruling as a victory of Catholics over Jews. We would have immediately recognized such speech as hateful bigotry. Why is it different when he goes after atheists?

Cranston City Councillor Michael Farina spoke* to Gene Valicenti that morning, and DePetro used the clip endlessly on his show. Farina said, “We don’t typically try to push religion on anybody in the city. That doesn’t mean we can’t. This ruling, I think, will give us the ability, if we wanted to say a brief prayer, we could.”

Which prompted DePetro to say, “You would think that this idiot in Cranston would implement [prayer] right away, instead of cowering like the cowards they are, to the ACLU and the atheists” and “Cranston is the worst. First they fold to the ACLU and the atheists with the banner, and now they’re ‘Oh, we’re not pushing religion.’ No one is pushing religion.”

Try this experiment. Replace the word ‘atheists’ with ‘Jews.’ After all, a Jewish woman was at least 50% responsible for bringing this case, and many Jewish groups were involved.

“Cranston is the worst. First they fold to the ACLU and the Jews with the banner, and now they’re ‘Oh, we’re not pushing religion.’ No one is pushing religion.”

“You would think that this idiot in Cranston would implement it right away, instead of cowering like the cowards they are, to the ACLU and the Jews.”

Using the Greece v. Galloway decision as an opportunity to attack atheists reveals Depetro’s ugly bigotry. By neglecting the facts of the case, and pretending the case was brought entirely by atheists, DePetro omitted the fact that many religious minorities and including Jewish Americans, are equally marginalized by such prayers.

Ignoring the opinions and even the very existence of Jewish Americans involved in this court decision is tacit, if not overt antisemitism. I would be interested in hearing DePetro explain exactly how atheists are “mean spirited individuals” for bringing this lawsuit but Jews are not. I’d be interested in hearing John DePetro explain the opening words of his broadcast, “The people have won. The atheists have lost! The people have won. The atheists have lost!” in such a way as to dismiss the humanity of the atheist woman who brought the suit but not the humanity of the Jewish woman involved.

Atheists according to DePetro, are not people. Following DePetro’s logic, neither are Jews, or any other religious minority, for that matter. After a while, one wonders if there is any group, aside from rich, white, non-union Catholic males, that DePetro considers worthy of consideration and humanity.

John DePetro is contemptible.

You can listen to the entirety of his comments on Greece v. Galloway below.

*When will people learn that there is no difference between going on WPRO News and WPRO Talk? Did Cranston City Councillor Michael Farina know that his soundbite for the Gene Valicenti newscast was going to be played relentlessly by DePetro, or that DePetro would spend a half hour of showtime calling him an idiot? How often do I have to point this out?

April 24, 2014

What does gender bias in the media look like?

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Rhode Island NOW is proud to be a sponsor of the She Said He Said campaign along with Women’s Fund of Rhode Island to start and continue the conversation on gender bias in the media. During the campaign kickoff event, Celinda Lake, President of Lake Research Partners, presented research on the damaging effects of media sexism and the impact it has on female candidates and their vote count.

Here are what we see as critical takeaways from her research:

Initially, after given a neutral profile of both a female candidate and male candidate, voters were more likely to say they would vote for the woman.
Even mild sexist language has an impact on voters’ likelihood to vote for a female candidate and on how favorably they feel toward the woman seeking office.
Neutral, positive, and negative descriptions of the female candidate’s appearance all had detrimental impacts on her candidacy.
The impact of sexism can be diminished by a strong, immediate response from a female candidate or third party validator.

We can help combat the harmful effects of media sexism by speaking up and speaking out. Who’s we? All of us, voters, advocates, and the candidates themselves—we must speak up when we see sexism and redirect the conversation back to the issues.

What is sexist media? Here are a few examples from She Should Run:

Jean Stothert, Mayor of Omaha

As the only woman in the race, Stothert experienced severe sexism, most notably from a fellow City Council member. The Councilman was photographed wearing a shirt that featured an illustration of Stothert in a bikini, on a stripper pole, with the words “Jean, quit stripping…off our tax dollars” and “sponsored by: suck my private sector.” Classy. She fought back, stating, “It’s not only demeaning to me, it’s demeaning to women.” She is now the first woman Mayor of Omaha and proof that addressing sexism head-on can turn out positive results.

Jenifer Rajkumar, 2013 Candidate for New York City Council

In an article critiquing Rajkumar’s nonprofit experience, the New York Post ran the headline, “This over-achieving beauty is running for City Council as head of non-profit that’s only skin deep.” This subtle form of sexism focuses on her appearance, specifically her “beauty,” which diminishes her credibility as a candidate by evoking unfavorable gender stereotypes instead of focusing on substantive issues. Even subtle forms of sexism must be addressed.

Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts

Since February 2012, Warren has been battling sexist coverage by the Boston Herald. Name It. Change It. declared, “No other mainstream media outlet has shown Warren such disrespect as a woman running for office. Whether the editorial page of this paper is mocking her age by calling her “granny” or belittling her by calling her Liz or Lizzie, it has become clear that The Boston Herald cannot stray from utilizing sexist vocabulary when writing about Elizabeth Warren even after being called out for it.”

For more examples of sexist media coverage check out NameItChangeIt.org, a nonpartisan joint project of the Women’s Media Center and She Should Run.

Looking Ahead

“One has to consider whether sexist media coverage contributes to the low participation of women in Rhode Island politics,” stated GoLocalProv reporter Kate Nagle at a recent forum on sexism and the media.

Women still only make up make 27 percent of the General Assembly, and few women have run and achieved statewide office. But the picture is not completely bleak. We are making strides. Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed broke the glass ceiling in 2008 when she became the first female Senate President in Rhode Island history. Several women have already thrown their hats into the ring for statewide office; Gina Raimondo is hoping to become Rhode Island’s first female Governor and Nellie Gorbea is seeking the office of Secretary of State.

There are also many women who will be seeking election and reelection in city council and school board races across the state as well as the General Assembly. Several female General Assembly members already know they will be facing challengers to win back their seats. Whether you’re undecided, opposed or supportive of these candidates it is on all of us to defend these women should issues of sexism arise. If they are brave enough to seek elected office, then we should be brave enough to speak up when they are unjustly attacked based on gender.

As the 2014 election cycle heats up in Rhode Island, it is important to remember that the media is a reflection of society. Collectively—with force—we can influence the conversation. Celinda’s research found that even mild forms of sexism can hurt female candidates. She also found that sexism hurts all candidates, not just the women they may be targeting. So it is on all of us, men and women, to be third party validators against sexism in the media and return the conversation to the issues. After all, isn’t our economic future and education system too important to be derailed by sexist bylines?

I hope you will join Women’s Fund of Rhode Island and the members of Rhode Island NOW in becoming third party validators, because the cost of being a bystander is just too high. Be sure to join the conversation on Twitter, check out @WomensFundRI @RhodeIsland_NOW #shesaidhesaidri. We look forward to engaging with you!

Amanda Clarke, the author of this post, is Chair of Education and Outreach for the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women.

December 13, 2013December 13, 2013

Yes, politicians can boycott a radio station

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The Rhode Island right is angry that Democratic politicians are joining the boycott of radio station WPRO until host John DePetro is gone from the station. DePetro is using the “free speech” argument which, of course, is bull. Free speech means you can call protestors at a Gina Raimondo fundraiser “whores.” It doesn’t absolve you from the consequences of your speech. I have the right to call anyone I see an “asshole.” I don’t have the right to not be kicked out of places and yelled at for doing so.

Justin Katz (in the first link above) uses the economic argument, that this is government intervening in the economy for personal reasons. He also sets up the idea that politicians (specifically Chafee in this instance) aren’t allowing their constituents to hear them.

Katz’s argument doesn’t hold up. Businesses can get hammered for the things they say or the things they support. If WPRO had a white supremacist or a communist host or someone who said things more repulsive than DePetro’s pronouncements, I doubt that Katz would be rushing to defend WPRO maintaining their business relationship with such a person. Even if they were a ratings bonanza. But because Katz’s views and DePetro’s are largely in line with one another, we’re being “pushe[d]… one step farther into the realm of Banana Republics and Lord of the Flies“.

Meanwhile, Marc Comtois posits on Twitter whether it’s more effective for politicians to boycott going on-air on WPRO or to go on and express their distaste and then sit through the interview.

Comtois has a way more interesting point. First, let’s talk about the politics of this. WPRO and its hosts tilt conservative. The constituencies that elect Democratic politicians tilt liberal. Therefore, there is very little for a Democratic politician to lose (politically) by refusing to going on-air on WPRO over misogynist comments made by WPRO’s most conservative host. Case in point, Gina Raimondo, whose fundraiser was the reason for the protest which led to DePetro making this remark, was one of the first politicians to join the boycott. Raimondo is one of DePetro’s favorite politicians (I suspect largely because DePetro hates unions, many unions dislike Raimondo, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend). Raimondo doesn’t appear see any problem with calling for the removal of possibly her biggest supporter in Rhode Island’s media landscape.

Notice I used the phrase “media landscape” there. That’s because WPRO is not the only radio station in town, much less the only media outlet in Rhode Island. If Rhode Islanders need to be informed as to what their politicians are doing, they can pick up a paper, turn on the T.V., check the Internet or turn the dial on their radio. It’s possible to cover virtually all of Rhode Island while missing one outlet (as disrespectful a practice as that might be).

The politicians may also have a bit of room here when dealing with WPRO. They’re not going on-air, but it’s unclear whether WPRO’s reporters will be able to get quotes. I’d bet they will. And they’ll still be able to attend news conferences and the like. But just because you have a media organization doesn’t mean you’re entitled to interviews from politicians (RI Future can attest to that).

The politicians also have a bit of leverage. It’s not as though WPRO is going to blackout coverage of the boycotting pols. After all, what Gina Raimondo and Angel Taveras and Lincoln Chafee are doing is news that gets ratings. And for any blackout to be effective, it’d have to include other media organizations. Which means getting all those other news sources above to take a stand, and tacitly support the right to say misogynist things on air without consequence; while also losing the ability to gets views for their coverage of important political figures. Somehow, I don’t see this happening.

But finally, while denying WPRO’s talk-show hosts access to their lovely personalities is one thing, actually joining the boycott of the businesses that advertise on DePetro’s show is another. And it’s unlikely to me that we’ll see politicians doing that. There’s far more to lose by doing so.

UPDATE: While this post was was waiting for approval, Alan Fung announced he’s following suit. And so did the RI Republican Party. Oh and so is Ken Block.

December 4, 2013December 5, 2013

How to buy the Providence Journal, and why

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With the news that The Providence Journal is up for sale, there’s a lot of people trying to suss out who will be the new owner, with famous rich people being thrown out as names.

One name I suggested was the people of Rhode Island. Maybe a “Make The Journal Your Own” campaign or something. The problem is, of course, that you still need some rich civic-minded millionaires. If the sticker price for The Journal is say, $30 million, then you need 30,000 people to average a payment of $1000. It’s not impossible, but it’s not likely.

This type of arrangement, where a group of people get together and buy a corporation is more typical of sports. In America, the most prominent example is the Green Bay Packers, who have been a nonprofit corporation since 1922 and have 5,014545 shares of stock owned by 364,114 stockholders, according to the team’s website. Their history of being owned by their supporters is a bit different, it took benevolent local businessmen to ensure that that would happen.

I certainly feel like news media is a more important investment than a football team, especially in Rhode Island. The value would be that the entirety of The Journal would be beholden to Rhode Islanders; instead of to some single entity, whether a faraway private corporation or an extremely rich owner and their family. They’d have a board of directors picked by the shareholders, and the corporation could even have a rule that no single person could own a controlling majority of the stocks.

Could you make money? That’s ultimately the question, and the argument might be that the concern for these new citizen-owners wouldn’t necessarily be a return on investment in financial terms, but rather in news terms. There’s no mistaking that The Journal has been gutted over the years; the physical paper’s shrunk as fewer and fewer journalists are working for it.

This isn’t a solution for news media though. One of the more interesting things said by the authors of Dollarocracy at a talk I attended earlier this year was that for too long we’ve thought of news media as a business because advertising has been investing in it. But as they went on to say, this wasn’t because advertising loves news, it’s because the eyeballs were there. In the modern era, where you can go to Google or Facebook and purchase a demographic (16- to 32-year-olds who love skateboarding-dogs), why bother making your demographic New York Times readers or Providence Journal readers?

The authors had an idea for a citizen voucher to fund news, based off of an idea that came out of the Center for Economic and Policy Work for a “Artistic Freedom Voucher” which was aimed at working around America’s restrictive copyright laws. This puts news outside of the profit-making scheme and into the publicly-financed realm. That might be an interesting policy decision for Rhode Island, but in the here and now, I don’t think it’s likely.

If The Journal was also printing money along with newspapers, I don’t think A. H. Belo would be selling it right now.

August 10, 2013

Television, internet, radio up as main news sources

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The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released the chart at right detailing the main sources people get their news from, as part of a larger overview of American attitudes towards news and journalism. As you can see, though both T.V. and newspapers are down from 2001, television has started to swing back up, while newspapers continue to crater. Both the Internet and radio are above where they were in 2001.

In response to the popularity of televisions and the Internet, Ted Nesi, of WPRI, posed this idea on Twitter: “TV and Internet arguably have more in common as media (info via screens!) than papers & Internet.”

It caused me to pause and reflect about the barrier to use for each of these four sources of news. I think the commonality all three of the rising news sources (television, the Internet, radio) is that you can get them regardless of whether you want to get them for news, and it never has to be a conscious decision.

Virtually every audio system you can buy comes with a radio, they appear in your car, and prior to the rise of MP3 players, radios were installed on every portable audio device. You can listen to music on a radio or fill your ears with news.

Television isn’t as readily available as the other two, but it’s still virtually everywhere, from bars and restaurants to your home. And it’s easy to switch from reality television, to (more) scripted entertainment, to music, to news. Even within a single channel there can be a diverse range of programming.

The Internet is sort of like television and radio in that it tends to have specialized sources for specific genres, but those genres include everything you could ever want. You want to see a dog riding a skateboard? Check. Read up on what that guy you met in college like one time is doing in Malaysia now? Check. No other medium comes close to the diversity and range of the Internet, your all-in-one stop for everything there is under the sun (and everything that avoids direct sunlight as well). Furthermore, the Internet is now virtually everywhere, thanks to smartphones and wi-fi.

And now this brings us to the poor plight of the newspaper. Here’s the thing, newspapers have to be a major network, and in print, and at least a day behind everything else. Furthermore, unlike television, radio, and the Internet where you can just stumble across news, newspapers don’t have that advantage. Few people just “stumble” across a newspaper (well, maybe the Phoenix). You tend to have to make a conscious decision to go get a newspaper, whether its from your front step or the box. And though they often contain sections related to entertainment, culture, lifestyle, etc.; their name says it all. They’re a “newspaper” and its primary purpose is to deliver news to you.

The point here is not to disparage newspapers. It’s to point out that by their very design, newspapers are disadvantaged in simply getting to their consumer in a way other mediums aren’t. Until the Internet became widely available and used, newspapers were doing just fine. Now, their place in the media landscape is shifting so rapidly that their very future no longer seems assured. That said, despite these disadvantages, they have managed to continue beating radio, which of all media has the lowest cost barrier for consumers.

June 17, 2013

Arlene Violet misses the issue on teacher evaluations

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No one connotes Rhode Island quite like Arlene Violet. She’s got the full package: the accent, the politics and the resume. She’s been a nun, a lawyer, a politician and, as a result, now she’s a political pundit. Violet is so Rhode Island she even wrote a musical about the mob.

And here’s another thing that makes Arlene Violet pretty typical of the Ocean State: she doesn’t seem to have a strong understanding about the underlying issues causing the political problems in public education.

Here’s what she wrote about Deborah Gist in last week’s Valley Breeze: “Disingenuous arguments about how she ‘disses’ educators and only has a one trick pony for evaluation of students’ achievements and teacher competencies failed to derail her.”

On Newsmakers she followed this up by adding:

“It’s just a systemic resistance, for example for teacher evaluations. After I wrote a column in supporting of your reappointment I got my usual feedback when I support you, and they talked about the Rhode Island model teacher evaluation and support system addition 2 is 100 pages written by someone who has never spent a day in the classroom…”

However, there are actual issues with the new evaluation system that incentivize, rather than discourages, the dreaded status quo (that Violet herself rails against). Specifically, that the system being used to evaluate teachers inspires mediocrity. Here’s how an actual educator at the now-famous teacher rally in Cranston very succinctly summed up the real problem with the new teacher evaluation system:

“Less rigor of task or target set to low teacher becomes highly effective; rigorous task and target and the teacher is scored effective and developing. The rating has little to do with the quality of the teaching and everything to do with the subjective development and rating of the task.”

This is why holding someone accountable is only as good as the metric being used. But this didn’t stop Arlene from pretty much ignoring any criticism at all and skipping right over to educators being lazy. “First of all I’d like you to respond to that criticism, but putting that aside,” she asked Gist, “do you feel that anyone will ever accept teacher evaluations or is this just ‘don’t bother me?'”

She may as well have asked if teachers beat their spouses (the most famous example of a hard-to-answer leading question in journalism)! WPRI had no counterbalance to Violet’s support for Gist; the panel consisted of two impartial reporters and Violet, who says on the show that she often supports Gist.

But Gist, to her credit, didn’t take the bait: “They [teachers] want to make sure the process is fair, that the process is high quality and they want to be held accountable in a way that is appropriate and fair, not that they don’t want it to happen at all, that they want to make sure the process is done well.”

May 15, 2013

Bill sponsor Malik more unbiased than WPRO news

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Here’s an interesting instance of media bias: a WPRO preview story on a proposal to eliminate the state sales tax was less balanced than an op/ed in the Fall River Herald News written by the bill’s sponsor, Jan Malik.

The WPRO report uses an interview between conservative talk show host Matt Allen, a supporter of the proposal, and Mike Stenhouse, the leader of the corporate-backed think tank that initially suggested the idea to explain the legislation. There was no counter perspective in the WPRO, even though no economists support the idea.

Malik’s op/ed, on the other hand, did contained balance:

The Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity has backed the bill, while URI economist Dr. Leonard Lardaro and URI business administration professor Ed Mazze found fault with the idea.

For a little perspective on these three sources of information: Mazze and Lardaro are economists and URI business professors. The Center for Freedom and Prosperity is a corporate-funded political group that gets paid to claim that anything that shrinks government is good for the economy.

So while Malik’s op/ed doesn’t offer a lot of balance, it’s worth noting that it offers more than the local talk radio outlet that bills itself as “the Station of Record.”

February 25, 2013February 26, 2013

Conservative Hate Radio Falls Out Of Fashion

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Will Rhode Island soon hear a kinder, gentler WPRO?

Probably not, but Lew Dickey, CEO of WPRO’s Atlanta-based parent company Cumulus, is hinting that we might start hearing less about Republican politics and more about the Red Sox baseball.

“We’re seeing a shift in spoken word radio from political-based talk over to sports,” Dickey told Bloomberg News recently. “The ratings are slightly down on talk and moving up on sports. Advertisers follow audiences and that is what we are seeing.”

You can watch him here. Dickey seems excited about the potential for country music as well as sports radio to keep making money for Cumulus. But he doesn’t seem too excited about the bombastic variety of conservative hate radio to which WPRO devotes most of its resources.

“I think people might be tired of all the partisan bickering,” Dickey told Bloomberg.

There is evidence that WHJJ sees this writing on the wall. This week the mild-mannered Andrew Gobeil is filling in for the always angry Helen Glover.

Not so much, though, at WPRO, where station manager Barbara Haynes seems to be bucking the trend and getting rid of the least conservative personalities, rather than the most: I was the first to be let go, then Andrew Gobeil then Ron St. Pierre. If this trend holds true, John DePetro might be the last employee at the Salty Shack!!

The American Prospect has a great piece on the rise and fall of conservative talk radio in America as seen through the experiences of Rush Limbaugh.

Since Limbaugh’s program began airing nationally 24 years ago, the goal of every episode has been to create an environment in which liberalism can’t but die. The show and its host came along at a time when the Willie Horton-ized politics favored bomb-throwing. The medium of political talk radio was just beginning its ascendance from regional media backwater to primary driver of national Republican politics.

But here we are today, newly embarked upon the second half of the Obama epoch. The conservative movement is fissured, and Barack Obama’s re-election brought a round of recriminations against the conservative media for poisoning Republican politics. For all of 2012, right-wing media gave its audience Obama-bashing and unfounded assurances of a Romney victory. As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf argued, this ended up putting conservatives at a disadvantage. “On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while The New York Times got it right.”

Limbaugh is doing what he’s always done, because it’s worked for him in the past. But there’s a question now as to whether this model, an artifact from the Reagan years, can plausibly lead the broader conservative movement forward. It’s not 1988 anymore, and Republicans and conservatives still smarting from 2012 have to be wondering about the future of the party of Limbaugh.

January 10, 2013January 10, 2013

RIPR Should Hire Andrew Gobeil To Do Talk Radio

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Rhode Island Public Radio should hire Andrew Gobeil to host a moderate and fair call-in talk radio show. The Ocean State could really use this. I haven’t spoken to either party about about this idea, but it sure seems to be a no-brainer to me. RIPR is a great young radio station in need of a personality to engage its listeners and Gobeil is a talented talker and a proven journalist who was fired by WPRO last week.

I know RIPR has long-sought to create something like a local On Point – a topical, call-in show with guests that enlightens listeners through engaging conversation. The still-young start up radio station would be wise to do so. There are so many of us media consumers out here working away on laptops and in offices or who would tune in daily. And if you also made it a podcast, you would get that many more listeners. Think in terms of the “virtuous circle” that WPRI is investing in.

I’m pretty certain Gobeil is the perfect fit. He’s great at live radio, he’s a proven reporter, he’s well-known, he’s well-respected and he’s all over the local social networks.

If station manager Joe O’Connor and news director Catherine Welch want to check out what Gobeil is capable of on air, they should listen to last Wednesday’s John DePetro Show. After being on live from 5 to 9 a.m., Gobeil was asked to fill in for DePetro who didn’t show up for work. Not only did he put in three additional hours on the spot with no prep time, he nailed it. I even tweeted as much at the time – twice! Here and here.

It was nuanced and fair and intelligent talk radio. Not to put too fine a point on it, but such content simply isn’t what WPRO is interested in producing. And, quite frankly, management there might indeed be right that the market won’t support it. This economic reality is both why Gobeil was fired and why public radio exists.

January 9, 2013January 9, 2013

GoLocal Hires Paul J. Spetrini from Standard Times

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RI Future would like to extend a big giant progressive welcome to Paul J. Spetrini, the new news editor at GoLocalProv.

The Providence native who grew up on Atwells Avenue, comes to the Capital City journalism scene after serving as the editor of the Standard Times, the North Kingstown weekly paper owned by Southern Rhode Island Newspapers.

“I’m really excited about it,” he told me. “I’ve never done the daily grind before. I think it’s going to be a challenge but it’s going to be a fun challenge.”

Spetrini replaces the well-respected Dan McGowan, who is off to become the second digital reporter at WPRI. McGowan launched his journalism career as a blogger for RI Future.

Spetrini was the editor of the Standard Times for two years. Prior to that, he covered sports for Southern Rhode Island newspapers for four years. He went to college at RIC, where he majored in criminal justice and says he stumbled into journalism by accident.

“I went to the wrong meeting,” he said. “I thought I was going to the RIC TV meeting.”

Instead, he was at the school newspaper meeting. So he started covering sports for The Anchor.

Spetrini started for GoLocal on Monday, he said. He is on Twitter at: @PaulSpetrini

December 17, 2012December 17, 2012

Web Editor Dee DeQuattro Is Leaving WPRO for ABC6

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WPRO digital reporter Dee DeQuattro is leaving the station she is suing for a new job on December 21. On January 2, she starts as the assignment editor for ABC 6 and ABC6.com. She’ll also do a morning TV spot and keep her own political blog in her new position.

“I’m excited to pursue a new endeavor and transition to tv after working in radio for the past five years,” DeQuattro told me this morning.

She would not comment on her lawsuit alleging that DePetro sexually harassed her. When I asked if she was sad to be leaving WPRO, she said:

“Not sad. I’m excited and enthusiastic to move on in my career and I expect to maintain professional relationships and personal friendships with some of the people I met working here.”

She confirmed that she is leaving the Salty Shack after I got an email forwarded written by station manager Craig Schwalb to WPRO employees wishing her good luck in her next opportunity.

The email from Schwalb, according to the employee who shared it with me, said, “Want to say thanks and good luck to WPRO-AMs web producer/reporter Dee DeQuattro who will be moving to ABC 6 for a new job there. We wish her nothing but the best in her new role and thank her very much for helping make 630wpro.com what it is today.

“We will be working with Dee next week to transition into our interim plan until a replacement can be named in the coming weeks.”

Full disclosure: I was DeQuattro’s manager at WPRO and am referenced in her lawsuit for statements DePetro made to me about DeQuattro and her allegations after they became public.

December 6, 2012December 6, 2012

Is Ted Nesi Biased on Pension Reform?

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Ted Nesi is easily the most knowledgeable and well-respected local reporter on the pension beat. As such, it’s not easy to call him out for what I think is some bias in his pension reporting as of late.

Today on Twitter I asked him why he didn’t include either Angel Taveras or Ernie Almonte’s perspective when he reported that Gina Raimondo, Gordon Fox and EngageRI all disagree with the governor’s tack.

Yes, Raimondo, Fox and EngageRI are important players in this debate. But so are Almonte and Taveras, both of who had publicly weighed in defending Chafee by the time Nesi posted on the issue. WPRO had Almonte on Wednesday morning and RI Public Radio had a post on Monday saying Taveras thought, “the state should seek a settlement to a challenge by a series of unions to last year’s pension overhaul,” wrote Ian Donnis for RIPR.

Here’s the exchange we had on Twitter:

July 10, 2012

The Media-Audience Feedback Loop

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A couple weeks ago, I said that the media rewards personal attacks with coverage. Ted Nesi, of WPRI fame, responded with a quick tweet that there’s an audience that rewards personal attacks. Essentially, the media picks up personal political attacks because it knows that those attacks bring in eyeballs, which means ad revenue. This is actually one of my favorite sort of chicken-or-the-egg conundrums; who’s more responsible for where the media goes? The producer of media, or the consumer of media?

I’m going to shift away from politics to explain this, and that’s where this gets not safe for work. Because I’m going to talk about porn. So if you don’t like veiled references to pornography and pornographic acts, I suggest you don’t read this.

Also, a second disclaimer, I’m a feminist, so that’s how I approach this. I’m a male feminist, so I’m complicated, but at the end of the day, I believe men and women should be equal, and that makes me a feminist.

Alright, so, porn. Porn is a smorgasbord of depravity. In fact, statistically, a whopping proportion of people reading this blog probably know what porn’s like. Two out of every five Internet users in the United States; 125 million people, . A third of those people are women. And yet, porn is overwhelmingly misogynist. Why? Well, that’s up for debate.

See, the reason that porn producers use to justify why they shoot rough scenes is that that’s what people buy. But the consumer retaliation is that the producers are the ones making this stuff to the exclusion of other products. I’d argue that added to all this is the versatility of the American consumer to self-date with the aid of a wide variety of what’s available. But that versatility doesn’t aid one side or the other in their arguments.

So what are we to assume? That the vast majority of American males who consume porn are into some depraved stuff (in which case, congratulations ladies); or that there is a highly profitable industry that isn’t exactly meeting the wants of its consumers (though it should be noted those profits are shrinking)?

What I believe we have is what I like to call a media-audience feedback loop. Essentially, at some point, the ball got rolling, and now the audience and the media point their fingers at one another trying to decide who’s responsible for this state of affairs. It effects every aspect of media; from the focus on negative, fear-based news to the “reality” shows in prime time.

That said, I’m going to lay the blame for not getting out of the loop on media’s doorstep. It’s a lot harder for consumers to stop consuming than it is for producers to stop producing. People consume media like addicts. Looking at this through that paradigm, you read RI Future because we give you a different high than, say, the Providence Journal. But before RI Future came along, you lived and got by, getting your fix somewhere else. Before Twitter existed, people read like, a thousand, five thousand, maybe even a hundred thousand character-long posts or articles. We did alright.

We’d be just as well off if media shifted its focus off horse race journalism (which shifted from taking up 45% of news coverage to taking up over 80% of news coverage in 30 years). When we’re focused on policy and leadership, we’re less focused on the “well, how is candidate A going to clobber candidate B?” question. It also means that when we talk about political campaigns being a debate, they’ll actually be debates when media covers them as such. Should we ultimately care how much Congressman David Cicilline has compared to Brendan Doherty? Not particularly, because unless I’m working for them, the hundreds of thousands of dollars they’ve raised won’t make much impact on my day.

What will affect us, as Rhode Islanders, is their policies and their leadership. If you’re a progressive, Mr. Cicilline without a doubt aligns more on your values than Mr. Doherty. In the Democratic primary, you know that Mr. Cicilline has a better style of leadership than Anthony Gemma. Mr. Gemma has been ungracious when taking defeats like that he suffered at the Democratic State Convention.

The same applies elsewhere. Think Senator Sheldon Whitehouse vs. Barry Hinckley or the CD-2 race. They haven’t gotten much play because media isn’t evaluating the candidates based on their policies. The horse race factor says that Mr. Whitehouse and Jim Langevin are shoe-ins. You might argue that media has dismissed the non-incumbents as having poor leadership and unpopular policies. But I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any media coverage that’s really focused squarely on their policies alone. This being my first election cycle as a commentator, maybe the policy stuff happens around the debates and I’m just whining about the early coverage.

Anyhow, yes, there is a media-audience feedback loop. And both consumers and producers are responsible for it. But producers are responsible for letting us get off.

July 3, 2012July 3, 2012

Projo Misses News at Doherty, Brown Event

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Doherty-Brown — Photo courtesy of Pat Crowley. @PatCrowleyNEARI

So, if you still have doubts that the ProJo editorial board is the tail wagging the newsroom’s dog; those fears should be laid to rest after the ~~Newspaper~~ Spin Cycle of record’s coverage of the Brendan Doherty event at Metacomet Country Club in East Providence.

Journal scribe Phil Marcelo, covered all the political details about how Sen. Scott Brown made the trip down from Massachusetts, gave a closed-door speech to the big donors and then left quickly. He also covered the fact of the approximate amount of money the event raised and even mentioned how both men met as youngsters at a basketball camp. Marcelo also goes on to note how Doherty was impressed with Brown’s call for bipartisanship.

Now here’s where I take exception to the ProJo’s coverage. When a story mentions bipartisanship, shouldn’t it at least include some of what the other side might have to offer, or object to? Maybe an example of Sen. Brown working in a cooperative manner?

Not only was there no mention of the other side’s views in this story, there wasn’t even any mention of the protesters outside the entrance to the country club. Members of Planned Parenthood and several labor groups were outside the event to make attendees and passers-by aware of extreme right-wing positions Mr. Doherty has staked out for his campaign. My question is: How is this not news?

Maybe if the ProJo goes back to fairly and accurately reporting the news and keeping its opinions on the editorial page, the paper can gain back some of its credibility. If not, I fear for my former co-workers on Fountain Street, as readership declines and the state will lose a once Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, to be replaced by a print version of Fox News.

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