Remember Pearl Harbor--Dan Rather Looks Back

During my time at CBS News Radio, I had the privilege to write commentaries for Dan Rather for his "Dan Rather Reporting" segment on the network. Commentary by anchors and pundits used to be a staple on thousands of radio stations that picked up network feeds. They're all but gone now, a casualty of shifting formats, changing demographics and hyper-partisan politics. 

Below is one I wrote for Dan that aired December 7, 2001, when the 9/11 attacks were still fresh. I was proud he chose to use it on such a momentous day, and as proud when it won an award from the Writers Guild of America. That it's been 20 years is proof that the days go by slowly, but the years go by fast.

Remember Pearl Harbor.

That was the battle cry a staggered nation rallied to after experiencing its first day of infamy 60 years ago.

Images of the USS Arizona collapsing into the water as it was consumed by a torrent of fire were as prevalent then as photos of the mangled wreckage as the World Trade Center are today. It was our original Ground Zero.

Remember Pearl Harbor

It's left to the dwindling ranks whose lives were forever altered that Sunday to recount and reinforce the horror of that moment. The notion of the U.S. under attack was in danger of becoming an historical curiosity in this new millennium. September 11th changed that, of course. But it took such a tragedy to fully allow younger generations to understand and appreciate such a moment.

Remember Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese do. Tens of thousands visit there every year. What a difference 60 years makes. They are told how a wave of their country's planes pierced the early-morning sky over Oahu. One of them dropped from on high a 1,760-pound bomb on the Arizona.

One sailor recalled the battleship literally jumped out of the water, with its millions of pounds of gunpowder exploding soon after. It took just nine minutes for its shattered hulk to succumb to the deep. More than 1,100 crewmen died. Some 900 are entombed in the harbor now and forever.

It is said that bubbles from the oil that leaks from the Arizona to this day are the tears of dead sailors. Many of us who lived through that day will undoubtedly shed a few of our own.

Remember Pearl Harbor.

Dan Rather reporting, CBS News.

 

 

NY Times Takes a Long and Winding Road to Set the Record Straight

 No Joke: Jackie Mason Gets an Error-Filled Farewell

Perusing The New York Times print edition this morning (yes, it's still a thing) and was startled to find a sizable chunk of page A-16 was devoted to corrections of stories that appeared in recent days.

That's hardly notable, in and of itself. The Times routinely owns up to errors, unlike many other papers. But what was striking was how many of them were in this roundup.

Some are copy editing hiccups--filed under the category of stuff happens, like being off a year on someone's age or a careless misspelling. But several came from one article--the obit of comedian Jackie Mason, which had some eagle-eyed readers kvetching.

An obituary on Sunday and in some copies on Monday about the comedian Jackie Mason contained a number of errors. It referred incorrectly to the circumstances in which he was reported to have used a Yiddish word, considered to be a racial slur, in talking about David N. Dinkins, at the time a Black candidate for mayor of New York City. The comment came in 1989 during a luncheon with Newsweek reporters, not during a banquet at the Plaza hotel in Manhattan. The obituary misstated where Mr. Mason pursued rabbinical studies; he did so at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem of America, a yeshiva in Manhattan, not Yeshiva University, also in Manhattan. It overstated the number of times that Mr. Mason had appeared on the “The Ed Sullivan Show” before his contract with it was canceled after Mr. Mason made what Mr. Sullivan regarded as an obscene gesture onstage; he had appeared on the show about 20 times before then, not “dozens of times.” The obituary omitted two of Mr. Mason’s survivors: a sister, Gail Schulman, and a brother, Rabbi Gabriel Maza. And it was not the case that Mr. Mason’s two younger sisters had married rabbis.

Oy vez is mir. That's a lot to get wrong. And it's especially surprising, given the heft of the Times obit desk and its ample resources to fact check. Given the putative author, William Grimes, has long been gone from the paper, it's likely this one has been gathering digital moss for a while and the haste to crank it out allowed for these oopsies.

At least the Times set the record straight, given that Mr. Mason was unable to do so.

Brian Schatz's Office Can't Even Be Bothered to Send a Real Form Letter

 The Things You Find When You Clean Out Your Gmail Promotions Folder

Poking around in the recesses of my Gmail Promotions folder--where would-be spam and solicitations forever rest in digital purgatory--I came across a shortie from the office of Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii. This was no mere happenstance. Back in March, I happened to email him (or the intern who monitors the inbox) at the end of March for the start of Passover (like me, Schatz is an M.O.T.).

I didn't pick Schatz randomly to make this request. Having made numerous visits to the Aloha State, I have a strong affinity for the islands and their people. I know that making a go of it is tough when you live there. Almost everything's expensive and wages often don't match up. And an article in the Star-Advertiser brought that home on March 26, reporting that nearly half of all kids in the state are food insecure and that 15 percent simply don't have enough to eat. Half!

Given that one of the traditions of Passover is inviting strangers to join in the Seder--the holiday meal-I gently suggested to Team Schatz that, in the spirit of Passover, he perhaps could wield the visibility of his formidable social media platforms to highlight the problem of food insecurity and how people could come to the aid of his fellow Hawaiians.

Or not. Despite emailing him about a problem specific to his state and wishing him a Chag Pesach (Happy Passover), this is all I got back.

Thank you for contacting me. For more information regarding communicating with a U.S. Senator from your state, please visit: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

Sincerely,

Brian Schatz

U.S. Senator

Huh? I know how to send emails to Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, thank you very much. So, living nearly 5,000 miles from Hawaii apparently deems me incapable of making observations about a dire problem in the state or caring about the people Schatz represents?

Look, I get it. Senators get jillions of emails, letters and other brickbats thrown at them every day. Was I expecting Schatz to get anywhere near my email? No, brah. Would I have expected someone to have the foresight to forward this to his social media guru. Yeah. Maybe. Would it have been too much to ask for someone to have actually read what I sent? Definitely not.

And if you agree that hunger in Hawaii is a problem that needs to be dealt with--by Schatz or anyone--do what I do and give to organizations helping, like the Maui Food Bank and the Maui Farm. 

And I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from Brian Schatz too.

N.Y, Post Reporter Falls on Her Sword; Many Not Impressed

Laura Italiano Wrote Fabricated Kamala Book Tale; Trolls Are Out in Full Force. But Are They Wrong?

Here's a story you won't read in the New York Post, about how veteran scribe Laura Italiano was "ordered" to write a whopper of a tall tale about how taxpayers funded gave undocumented children copies of Kamala Harris's book and that Italiano resigned in protest after the fact.

The Kamala Harris story -- an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against -- was my breaking point.

— Laura Italiano (@Italiano_Laura) April 27, 2021

Actually, you can read about it in the Post, though the Washington Post, where the story by Paul Farhi was at the top of the charts this morning. 

Unsurprisingly, the Twitter trolls had little sympathy for Italiano. The few "thank you for your integrity tweets were outflanked by missives like this:

You wrote the incorrect story, and then resigned??? That says a lot about your moral character.... or LACK there of.

— kennygallegos (@slvnative) April 28, 2021

 If the story was incorrect and you knowingly went ahead helping create it - and took a paycheck for doing so - the word you’re looking for is “complicit”.

— Safe Spaces | Commentary+ (@real_safespaces) April 28, 2021

Italiano is no journalistic fawn who got caught in a no-win situation. She's been at the Post since the 1990s, knew who she was looking for and how it operates. Inevitably, no matter how dedicated or skilled a journalist, she knows that the hard-right agenda fomented by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch inevitably colors the news report a dark red.

Given that, if quitting was in Italiano's mind, the end result, wouldn't it have been better to outright refuse to write the story, take her chances with disciplinary proceedings and possibly benefit from all the publicity? As she tweeted, she failed to "push back hard enough." Meaning, if you take that to its literal conclusion, she knew the story she was writing was verifiably false. Yet, she wrote it anyway, even though the debunkers came at it fast and furious.

The N.Y. Post belatedly took down the story after sheepishly admitting in an editor's note at the bottom of a story that its report that thousands of kids had been given Harris's book was wrong.

The original version of this article said migrant kids were getting Harris’ book in a welcome kit, but has been updated to note that only one known copy of the book was given to a child.

But that mea culpa is at the very bottom of a rewrite of  an April 23 Italiano story now re-headlined: Kamal isn't at the southern border -- but at least one migrant kid got Veep's book

So, sorry, not sorry.

And, as Farhi points out, it's not even clear any child actually got that copy. It was contained in a toy and clothing drive sponsored by the city of Long Beach, Calif. 

In the end, I'm sorry Italiano was put in this position. But she's had a birds-eye view of the underbelly of New York City politics, courts and cop shops long enough to know when a story stinks to high heaven. She spent her professional life writing nonfiction. That she chose otherwise with the Harris book nothingburger and quit in disgust after she had reached a "breaking point," then good for her. But it's not really good enough.

Meanwhile, the Kamala beat marches on at the Post. The vice president has been mentioned prominently in articles on nypost.com no less than seven times in the last three days alone. Doubtful Mike Pence ever got that much attention. But when his boss gleefully sucked up all the right-wing media oxygen, it's easy to understand why. And no newspaper made more sure of that than the New York Post.

Standards and Practices at NBC Needs Some Practice

 There Goes the Myth About all the Jewish Writers

So, Michael Che is taking his time apologizing--assuming he ever does--for his anti-Semitic trope on Weekend Update on last week's Saturday Night Live. It went something like this:

"Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population, and I'm going to guess it's the Jewish half."

Now, I don't know if Che wrote the joke, although he's one of four putative head writers on the show. Weekend Update itself actually has a staff of five writers, though it's safe to guess if Che didn't like the joke he wouldn't read it. He apparently liked the joke.

What's baffling--beyond why he'd find it funny (spoiler alert: it wasn't) --is that scripts are ostensibly still vetted by Standards and Practices before they hit the air. And they'd have not one, but two opportunities to knock it off, in dress rehearsal and before the live show. But it appears nobody got their girdles in a knot over this crack.

Which then begs the question of "why not?" And why has NBC and SNL gone quiet about this for four days, despite wide condemnation. Even the ADL hasn't been able to get a response out of Lorne Michaels. 

One more time: why not?

In other NBC anti-Semitic news, the network today did pull the finale from its streaming platforms of "Nurses," a series it imported from Canada, which stereotyped its way into ignominy. In it, a Hasidic man refuses a bone graft because it would come from a "goyim leg."

Oy vey iz mir.

Among those who went on the attack was the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which knows a thing or two about anti-Semitism. 

"Overreaction? Orthodox Jews are targeted for violent hate crimes -- in the city of New York, Jews are [the] number one target of hate crimes ... this is no slip of the tongue. It was a vile, cheap attack masquerading as TV drama."

As Deadline reported, an NBC source said the network was contacted by several Jewish groups about "Nurses" and was "keen to have conversations with them about the topic."

That's all well and good, but also disingenuous. NBC doesn't own "Nurses." It's a Canadian import that was used to plug a hole in its schedule caused by Covid. There are no plans to repeat the episode or bring "Nurses" back for another season. On the other hand, "SNL" is an NBC property. And on Che they remain silent.

They should know better. In broadcasting, nobody likes dead air.