The Arizona Republic's weird "autism is cured" story
Big splashy story on the front page of the Valley & State section the other day.
Autism therapy group says it cured 6 kids
Results from a Phoenix study of a behavior therapy designed to cure autism give hope to thousands of Arizona families and could revamp special education in the state’s public schools.
But the costly price tag could keep the treatment out of reach for many families. And the state’s budget crisis could mean implementation is years away at the school level.
The Center for Autism and Related Disorders says it has cured six of 14 autistic children who participated in a $5.4 million, state-funded study in the Phoenix area.
Emphasis added. We know nothing about autism, but this story doesn’t have anything close to the amount of information in it to allow someone to figure out what’s going on.
The story says that the treatment included “intensive behavior therapy” but never explains what that is. A few graphs later it’s defined again—as “a type of therapy called applied behavior analysis, known as ABA”—but it’s never explained what that entails, either.
Even further on we hear it can be “web-based.” Then we hear again that it’s “highly intense”—and can cost $200,000.
There’s very little in the story that would help a disinterested reader figure out the value of this program.
There’s mention of one child who was helped by the program, but the reporter didn’t talk to the girl involved. Instead, her parents merely say that she’s “recovered.”
The story also doesn’t explain CARD’s position in the sometimes contentious world of autism treatment, and doesn’t put this program into the context of other CARD programs or the spectrum of autism treatment generally.
And finally, the story ends on an amazing note. First, a director of the center gets to make an unchallenged paean to, unsurprisingly, the center’s work…:
Daniel Openden, the center’s vice president and clinical services director, said the CARD results are the latest to prove ABA-based therapy is the gold standard for autism treatment.
… and then, in the last lines of the story, undercuts the story’s entire premise and headline:
He sees autistic children make amazing progress, but he doesn’t say they are cured or recovered.
“Recovery can mean different things to different people, so the key is to understand how recovery is defined,” he said. “We see a range of outcomes in response to effective treatment, up to and including children who appear indistinguishable from their peers. But we’re not comfortable saying that these children no longer have autism.”
6:11 AM
The Great Fountain Hills Garbage Crisis of 2010
The Republic has a big story this a.m. about how Tea Party folks, feeling their oats, are all upset about changes in the way garbage is collected in Fountain Hills.
The city is going with only one trash hauler for the town, and requiring residents to recycle.
The story goes on and on, letting the Tea Party folks have their say, but never details what the basis for the city action was.
I mean, I assume that Fountain Hills isn’t the first city to deal with this issue? What are the pros and cons of the debate?
Seems to me that one trash hauler rather than the current five would save the city money and might reduce the number of noisy trucks in a neighborhood by 80 percent, among other things.
And it would be nice to know if there were any federal or state requirements for cities in terms of recycling or if there were economic benefits to the city with it. (For example, by reducing the material in its landfill.)
The story tells us none of this.
The one thing we do know is that, with the Tea Party people involved, the debate got pretty dumb pretty quick.
Said one council person:
“"When ideology prevents rational discussion of a really pretty mundane topic, trash, there is no perspective Everything is suspect, which paralyzes us.”
What’s the Republic’s excuse?
5:54 AM
Young Martin Cizmar™ notices us!
PHXated has another life as a writer on various pop-culture issues.
Last Friday, I published a review of the new autobiography of Rolling Stone Keith Richards in the online magazine Slate.
I was grateful it got a little attention.
But readers here know can imagine there’s nothing better than catching the eye of New Times' Young Martin Cizmar™—and this we succeeded in doing the other day.
Indeed, Young Martin displayed a puckishness that we, frankly, didn’t think he had in him:
Our own Mr. Wyman […] recently wrote a book review for Slate, a well-respected online publication. In what can only be described as a brilliant bit of subversive humor, he wrote the piece in the voice of Mick Jagger, the band’s well-known singer. The man who is possibly Phoenix’s most cherished and respected blogger wrote an editor’s note at the top of the piece saying that the piece was pulled from a note delivered to him as a “UPS package containing a typed manuscript.”
Martin, displaying reporting chops he doesn’t always use, also digs up one of the few commenters in the world who didn’t like it!:
“I won’t quote the rest of the article, nor will I post a link to it, because it’s silly nonsense that reeks of a juvenile prank.
7:25 AM
The case against Ben Quayle
1. He’s unqualified. He doesn’t have a profession. He’s trained as a lawyer, recently started an “investment firm.” He hasn’t held a job in his life for more than a year or two.
2. When the nation, two years ago, was facing challenges on several fronts—mismanaged wars, soaring deficits, an economy falling down a sinkhole, Quayle was nowhere to be seen.
3. Did he offer his opinions or advice? Take a public stand? Maybe even point out that, as a Republican, he was troubled by the holy mess his party had gotten the country in?
4. No. Instead, he was helping a friend get a porny web site off the ground. It was called Dirty Scottsdale, with a plan for establishing itself as Skank Central for the sleazy nightlife crowd.
5. When the economy was collapsing, Ben was writing for the site under the name Brock Landers, and went on a search for “Scottsdale’s foxiest first lady!”
6. Ben moved to the district recently and got a congressional campaign going. His main funding source: Friends of his daddy’s! Former president Bush held a fundraiser for him in Texas! In Texas—for a guy from Phoenix who’s done nothing his entire life.
7. Then it came out that Ben had a skanky past. When questioned… he denied it. Then changed his story. Then said “My response has been consistent.”
8. The Arizona Republic, which used to be owned by his family, helped him out by carefully not going into any detail about his involvement with the porny web site during the Republican primary.
9. In that primary he got about 22 percent of the vote. It was a crowded field; that was enough to win. Even Republicans don’t like him.
10. To get attention, Little Benny ran a commercial saying “Barack Obama is the worst president in history.” Sane people know that Barack Obama isn’t even the worst president of the 21st century.
11. He dodged debates with his opponent, Jon Hulburd, finally agreeing to one half-hour session.
12. His public events have been nil. PHXated’s repeatedly asked his campaign for a single time he’s made a scheduled public appearance. There hasn’t been one we know of.
13. His campaign has also refused to answer basic questions about his positions. There are candidates running for ASU class president who have more substantive issue pages. Does he think woman should be jailed for having an abortion? Should gays be allowed openly to serve in the military? To our knowledge, Quayle has never answered these questions.
8:47 AM
Arizona Republic: No news here! Please move along
As PHXated has mentioned before, the Arizona Republic has a curious approach to news.
If you have a wet-behind-the-ears would-be representative with a famous name who worked for a porny web site, or a governor who goes into the Twilight Zone for ten seconds during a debate, for heaven’s sake don’t treat it as big news or cover it as an ongoing story.
It just gets folks riled up.
Newspapers for decades survived on not riling folks up. (They might cancel their subscription!)
The world’s changed, today, but newspapers haven’t.
The latest: The paper heard, recently, that Gov. Brewer had been in a car crash in 1988 during which, it certainly seems, she’d been driving drunk.
The paper had a scoop!
Stop the presses?
Nope.
Instead, the paper buried it in a fact-checking column in section two. And made the story a he-said she-said sort of thing.
… When in fact the officers at the scene said she’d been drunk, and Brewer failed four sobriety tests! (The comical details are here.
The original Republic article apparently had an interview with Brewer, but didn’t ask her the obvious questions:
How do you explain the failed drunk tests? Should she have been arrested? Would failing four sobriety tests in typical stops lead to drivers being arrested—and shouldn’t they be?
Anyway, since then, Brewer has been trying to do damage control.
Here’s Brewer on CNN, for example:
As PHXated has mentioned before, the Arizona Republic has a curious approach to news.
If you have a wet-behind-the-ears would-be representative with a famous name who worked for a porny web site, or a governor who goes into the Twilight Zone for ten seconds during a debate, for heaven’s sake don’t treat it as big news or cover it as an ongoing story.
It just gets folks riled up.
Newspapers for decades survived on not riling folks up. (They might cancel their subscription!)
The world’s changed, today, but newspapers haven’t.
The latest: The paper heard, recently, that Gov. Brewer had been in a car crash in 1988 during which, it certainly seems, she’d been driving drunk.
The paper had a scoop!
Stop the presses?
Nope.
Instead, the paper buried it in a fact-checking column in section two. And made the story a he-said she-said sort of thing.
… When in fact the officers at the scene said she’d been drunk, and Brewer failed four sobriety tests! (The comical details are here.
The original Republic article apparently had an interview with Brewer, but didn’t ask her the obvious questions:
How do you explain the failed drunk tests? Should she have been arrested? Would failing four sobriety tests in typical stops lead to drivers being arrested—and shouldn’t they be?
Anyway, since then, Brewer has been trying to do damage control.
Here’s Brewer on CNN, for example:
Note that CNN, a national organization, is following up on the story.
Here again, the Arizona Republic had another story of national interest to run with, and it both a) mishandles it at the beginning and b) doesn’t follow up on it.
8:08 AM
More dog news from the Arizona Republic!
The paper’s editorial Moriarity, Scruffy McPoochie, continues to wield awesome power from his perch in the paper’s Living section.
Lesser editors vie for his favors by running as many dog stories as they can.
Today, in the Valley & State section, there’s a story about a crazy dog who was running around and attacking people and then threatened a cop, who shot the thing.
That’s a pretty simple story, but the Republic, splaying it all over the front page of the local news section, plays it thusly:
Gilbert police officer’s killing of dog divides neighborhood
It’s a gunshot that has divided a Gilbert neighborhood.
On one side, a family is mourning the loss of its 2-year-old “goofy” bloodhound and is angry that a Gilbert police officer would fire a handgun near their house in the 500 block of West Laredo Avenue.
On the other side are two women who claim they were attacked by a confused, aggressive dog roaming the street. At least one, Janet McLellan, says the officer’s use of deadly force was appropriate.
The neighborhood isn’t “divided.” There aren’t neighbors running around who are “pro-rabid dogs.”
The owners, who had a violent dog on the loose, are mad because their dog got killed.
The hed should have been “Reckless dog owners mad their rabid dog got shot.”
And the bloodhound wasn’t “goofy.” It was running around attacking people.
But it’s clear at the Republic that no one wants to offend the canine-centric sensibility of Scruffy McPoochie!
The Arizona Republic runs more dogs news than Dog Fancy. Our complete archive of the momentous rise of Scruffy McPoochie is here.
7:47 AM
To New Times' James King, Ben Quayle is a hunk-a hunk-a burnin' GOP love!
We here at PHXated celebrate polymorphous perversity as much as the next guy or gal, but we don’t see the sexual attraction of Ben Quayle.
He has his dad’s deer-in-the-headlights look. He’s spindly and nervous and dumb as a box of rocks.
And the single notable achievement in his life is writing for a porny web site.
We like our candidates to be up on the issues. We get turned on by the policy wonks.
A few years back, when the country was facing two mismanaged wars, trillions in debt, and a financial meltdown that threatened our way of life, Ben Quayle didn’t lend his voice to the debate.
Instead, he was on the hunt for foxy chicks for Dirty Scottsdale.
But for James King, one of the contributors to New Times' Valley Fever blog, Quayle is the boy-man of his dreams.
Here he is harping on Quayle’s opponent, Jon Hulburd, again for the crime of doing what any other candidate would do. i.e., pour some money in at the end of what’s turned out to be an unexpectedly close race.
Up to now, King’s been writing long posts trying to explain away Quayle’s lies about having worked for Dirty Scottsdale.
As we’ve said before, King’s a serious journalist and New Times is a serious place, but we think King’s being unacceptably partisan on this issue.
PHXated can see that Quayle is a dink and something of a creep, and finds his opponent, Jon Hulburd, to be a guy who’s very smart, up on the issues, and almost compulsively forthright. (He’s basing that contention on one interview and watching, over the weekend, Hulburd in action at a house party meet-and-greet.)
At the same time, we’ve attacked Hulburd’s crazy support for a continuation of the Bush tax cuts, among other things.
And I don’t want to get into the particulars, but we’ve also done something that had one of Hulburd’s top campaign people calling and screaming at us for days.
In other words, PHXated isn’t spinning for Hulburd.
King is definitely spinning for Quayle.
While getting granular in trying to defend Quayle’s handing of his Dirty Scottsdale scandal, King’s basically trying to make the point that Quayle successfully lied to reporters when they asked about his involvement, so it’s not fair either to a) attack him for the involvement or b) accuse him of lying.
That’s strikes us as a bit … extrajournalistic.
And it evades the point that Quayle was running around chasing chicas in Scottsdale when he could have been doing something a little more … public policy oriented.
And now King’s hammering on some lawsuits that were brought against Hulburd ten years ago. He published his first post on these mid-afternoon on Wednesday, Oct. 13… fortuitously timed for Ben Quayle to bring them up in a debate that started less than an hour later.
Another example: in writing about a recent Public Policy Polling poll of the district, King went out of his way to disparage PPP as a liberal outfit.
But in FiveThirtyEight.com’s rating of pollsters, Nate Silver puts PPP in the middle; in fact, the company gets much better scores than a lot of reputable outfits like CNN/Opinion Research, the LA Times/Bloomberg, and Gallup.
(The closeness of the Hulburd/Quayle race was a surprise, and it’s fair to question the findings in that one poll, as King also does; I’m just pointing out another instance where spin seems to be seeping in to King’s analysis as well. PHXated, by the by, went out of its way to note Silver’s skepticism of that particular poll.)
You can read all of PHXated’s Ben Quayle coverage here.
10:00 AM
Stephen Lemons publishes "The Brady List"
New Times' Feathered Bastard has been on hiatus as he worked on some unspecified long-term project.
But he still managed to conjure up this:
The list is named for the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case Brady vs. Maryland, which found that a defendant’s right to due process is violated if a prosecutor withholds certain exculpatory evidence from the accused’s lawyer.
Supposedly, “Brady cops” have been caught doing something that calls into question their honesty.
[…]
“It can include lying or incomplete reports or being caught in something else that would reflect on their integrity,” explained county attorney spokesman Bill Fitzgerald. “It’s an integrity issue.”
He continues:
There are a total of 482 names on the list, including one from the FBI, and one from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
From the Phoenix Police Department, there are 254 officers listed. But that’s a little misleading as 95 — or more than a third of the cops on the list — are no longer with the PPD, having resigned, retired, or been terminated from their positions.
8:41 AM
The EVT's story about a two-week-old poll
Weird story at the top of the EVT site today:
Goddard catching up with Brewer in final weeks of governor race
Gov. Jan Brewer’s large lead over Democrat Terry Goddard is eroding in the final weeks of a campaign that once looked like a runaway victory for the Republican incumbent.
The only problem: The only poll the story cites came out almost two weeks ago.
The story cites no other data.
8:29 AM
Jon Hulburd's new ad: "Ben Quayle has no business running for Congress"
The ad nicely captures Quayle’s frat-boy sensibility. One assumes the Hulburd campaign is buoyed by a new poll that sees him leading Quayle 46 to 44.
More interestingly, it put Quayle’s negatives at 52 percent, pretty high in a right-wing district.
The leading Congressional analysts aren’t buying it, but it seems smart to hammer on Quayle’s negatives, if that’s where the advantage lies.
3:03 PM
Scruffy McPoochie is back!
After several weeks during which the all-powerful Arizona Republic living section editor has been quiet, presumably nibbling on kibbles in his North Korean-like redoubt at Second and Van Buren and plotting his next incursion, he reasserts himself today.
Readers know what McPoochie is interested in all things canine-related, and publishes stories about dogs compulsively; his extraordinary rise to power in that dark edifice—and the slightly unhinged lengths to which he will go to put dog news into the paper—has been charted by PHXated here and here.
Today, as I said, he’s back, continuing to help make the Arizona Republic the Nation’s Leading Purveyor of Dog Journalism.
We relate this, however, with a somewhat with heavy heart. The Republic’s Richard Ruelas is one of our favorite writers, one of the few national-class talents the paper has.
We think he might have crossed McPoochie, and been put on the dog beat as punishment.
This particular story isn’t about dogs on Twitter or dogs on Facebook, or dogs who go to church, or dog insurance, or swanky dog kennels, to name just a few of McPoochie’s recent triumphs.
The story today is about a “four-legged hero” who happened to bark at a guy in Afghanistan who happened to be a suicide bomber. The dog lives in Arizona and is being honored at some event.
This is what the paper publishes while it doesn’t publish actual news.
The complete Scruffy McPoochie archive is here.
2:13 PM
Laurie Roberts: The Arizona Republic's "go-to newsgal"
Yesterday PHXated noted that the Arizona Republic, in keeping with its feeling that its terrestrial readers don’t want to be bothered with uncomfortable news about Little Benny Quayle, did not include, in its printed edition, a report of a fairly notable poll on the Quayle-Hulburd race.
It said that Quayle was actually trailing Hulburd, 46 to 44, and that his unfavorables were at 52 percent.
While it’s possible the poll was what the big-time analysts call an “outlier,” some of its other findings—support for John McCain and such—were in keeping with the distric’s conservative makeup.
Anyway, the Republic was in a quandary: Having played down as much as possible the previous bad news for Quayle—mostly stemming from his unsavory association with a skanky web site when he could have, you know, been involved in any sort of public service that might make him qualified to go to Congress—it was even more difficult for the paper to write about a poll that showed a big chunk of the electorate was turning up it nose at the candidate, plainly based on the information the paper hadn’t wanted to get out.
Fortunately, Laurie Roberts, a columnist in the local news section, comes through again. It was she who, after the Republican primary was over, told people about Quayle and DirtyScottsdale.com.
Now she’s again columnizing about news that the paper itself has never vouchsafed to readers:
The poll, by Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling, surveyed 655 likely voters and had a margin of error of 3.8 percent. It showed Hulburd and Quayle in a dead heat with 10 percent undecided.
While both men were viewed favorably by a third of those polled, Quayle was disliked by 52 percent, including half of the independents surveyed. Hulburd, meanwhile, was disliked by 20 percent all voters surveyed, with 47 percent unsure what to think.
Interestingly, Roberts cites some evidence of a contention by New Times' James King … basically, not only that Quayle never lied about his involvement in Dirty Scottsdale, but that Politico, the online political magazine, is backing away from its initial contention that he did:
In a recent profile, Politico wrote that Quayle “has always admitted to writing some posts under a pseudonym”. That’s a far cry from its August story, headlined “Ben Quayle changes story about Dirty Scottsdale website”.
[Quayle campaign manager] Heiler says Quayle was responding to questions about whether he was involved in founding the website. The reporter, he said, never directly asked whether he had written for the site.
PHXated’s not buying it, for reasons delineated in the James King post but will look into the question of whether Politico itself is now downplaying what it once trumpeted.
7:46 AM
The Arizona Republic takes a pass on Ben Quayle's disastrous poll numbers
We’ve noticed before how the Arizona Republic didn’t take much interest in Little Benny Quayle’s involvement with a porny web site, Dirty Scottsdale.
Skanky sex, a famous political name…those aren’t the sorts of things the media should be interested in.
Now we can see the paper’s not interested in any bad news about Quayle.
Yesterday, a reputable polling company released numbers on the District 3 race. (The company is Public Policy Polling.)
It said Quayle was trailing opponent Jon Hulburd, 46 to 44.
Worse, it gave Quayle a 52 percent unfavorable rating.
Is this news?
Politico this a.m. has a lede story booming “99 Dem House Seats in Danger—that is to say, it’s not a good time to be a Democrat running for Congress.
District 3 went for McCain by a 57 to 42 margin—that is to say, it’s a solidly GOP district.
But nothing about it in the Republic this a.m. Columnist Laurie Roberts, however, did do a blog post:
The poll of 655 likely voters included more Republicans than Democrats and respondents favored Sen. John McCain by a wide margin over Rodney Glassman. Those aspects would seem in line with the district’s partisan makeup and its presumed political loyalties in another race.
But home readers of the paper—the ones who are clustered in the upscale developments in northeast Phoenix, where this battle is being fought—aren’t let in on the news.
7:45 AM
More on Young Martin Cizmar™'s anti-intern screed!
You’ll recall that New Times' music editor, Martin Cizmar, wrote an intemperate screed about his former intern, Sarah Ventre, on the Up on the Sun blog the other day.
So intemperate was it that the screed was taken down after what PHXated hears was a minor uproar inside New Times HQ … leaving no sign that it ever had existed.
But PHXated, for whom all things Cizmarian are not just catnip, but catnip with chocolate frosting and gossamer dust on top, found it and posted it on Thursday.
The upshot of the post was that Martin was ashamed of Ventre.
She’d written a piece for the NPR web site, where she’s now an intern in D.C., in which she describes sitting down and listening to Pet Sounds for the first time.
Yeah, we know—what a stupid thing for Martin to be upset about, right?
It wasn’t like Ventre had been passing herself off as a Beach Boys expert—or that Young Martin had unearthed the glaring lack of exposure through detective work.
Martin lacks many things; perspective is one of them.
If Ventre was, I don’t know, covering the state capitol for New Times and wrote that’d she’d never visited the building, and had never talked to a state legislator—that you could get mad about.
That’s a comprehensive failure.
But there are somewhere between hundred and a thousand what you’d call essential rock albums any critic should listen to—and that’s just the basics. By definition some of these will be heard later than the others.
Anyway, we were perusing Jay Bennett’s “Nothing Not New” on Up on the Sun when something struck us.
It’s a review of the new Belle & Sebastian album. It was posted last Tuesday.
Here’s how it began:
Sometimes, after a hard day spent arguing with co-workers about which records people who write about music should be exposed to, you just want something breezy, something feel-good. Enter the new record by longtime indie darlings Belle and Sebastian.
We think he’s talking about Young Martin!
Given that Young Martin’s jeremiad was taken down without explanation, this is the first indication we’ve had from inside New Times that the post did cause some heated discussions.
Bennet concludes his piece:
Belle and Sebastian are one of those bands I’d heard a lot about but never listened to. You know what else I’ve never listened to? OK Computer by Radiohead. Or damn near 70 percent of Pitchfork’s top 10 records of the 2000s. Does that make me unqualified to write about music? Perhaps it does. One of my co-workers thinks you need to be well versed in “the canon,” a not-quite-clearly defined list of records (culled from the big four of rock writing: Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, New Music Express) that every rock writer need listen to in order to know what the hell they’re writing about. You know, records like Sgt. Pepper, Exile on Main Street, Nevermind, Pet Sounds, Never Mind the Bollocks, etc. In other words, are you qualified to write about pop music if you’ve never listened to Pet Sounds?
Great question!
PHXated’s opinion, if anyone cares, is that a writer should have something interesting to say and the chops to say it with.
It’s a sliding scale. The trouble with the writing of people who write about music without having heard “the canon”—and the same goes for criticism generally—is that it tends to be trite and solipsistic.
It’s more about the writer than the music. On the other hand, a good writer who is interesting in and of him- or herself can do it.
Now, Young Martin, for example, has listened to Pet Sounds.
But you’ll recall PHXated recently ridiculed a piece he’d written saying that 1994 was the best year ever for pop music.
It was pretty easy to demonstrate fairly conclusively that 1994 wasn’t even the best year for pop music of the early 1990s.
In that case, Young Martin was publicly exhibiting such solipsism. Of course he’s entitled to his opinion; but it was pretty clear from the piece that he was unaware (or hadn’t processed) a lot of the other aesthetic movements of the time. You couldn’t take the piece seriously, in other words, on its own terms.
There was something missing from his piece, and it wasn’t a familiarity with Pet Sounds.
It was thinking.
That’s the answer to Bennett’s question.
10:42 AM
No, seriously, James King DOES seem to heart Ben Quayle
As PHXated noted earlier today, New Times is an amazing paper with a lot of amazing reporters.
(Readers should know that PHXated worked for New Times in San Francisco way back when and counts the owners and editors among his friends.)
But James King, one of the paper’s frequent political reporters and bloggers, really seems to have a big ol' crush on Ben Quayle.
I’ve noted this a couple of times already, but am just now going back to read everything King’s written about Young Ben.
For starters, PHXated’s written about this already here and here.
Here’s another example.
The other day King trumpeted that Politico had “backed off” its story about Quayle and Dirty Scottsdale:
Here’s what apparently went down: the Politico reporter called Quayle at his house around 6 a.m. It’s an unlisted number but because Quayle’s wife’s father was in the hospital that morning, Quayle answered the phone.
The reporter asked Quayle if he was involved with founding The Dirty. He said no. The followup question asked if he was involved at all. Still thinking the reporter was referring to the founding of the Web site, Quayle answered no again. At no point did the reporter ask the candidate if he had written for the Web site.
Now, again, I respect King, and one shouldn’t be glib about the work of a serious reporter. But this is bullshit.
Again, here’s the original Politico passage:
“I did not have a role in founding that site,” Quayle, a lawyer who runs a small Scottsdale investment firm, told POLITICO in an interview Tuesday morning when asked whether he was one of the original contributors to the sex-themed site.
“I was not involved in the site,” he said when pressed about whether he had any role.
You know what happened; the reporter sensed that Quayle was choosing his words carefully. She said, “Did you have any role?” He replied, “I was not involved with the site” — which was, plainly, a lie.
What part of “did you have any role” does King not understand?
The reason I think King is carrying Quayle’s water is that he, like the Quayle campaign, is trying to split hairs on an ancillary issue.
The point is that Quayle was running around with folks putting up an ultraskanky web site. Now he’s a family-values Republican. The main issue is hypocrisy. This wasn’t ten or fifteen years ago. It was three years ago.
Then when questioned about it he lied. That’s another thing that Republicans are supposed to be all so moral about.
Then Quayle (and King) play the sympathy card, that Quayle was worried about his father-in-law and groggily picked up the phone at 6 a.m.
But he obviously had the presence of mind to try to finesse the issue in Clintonian fashion instead of just answering the question truthfully.
He could have said, “Oh, yeah, I used to know Nik Ritchie. I wrote some things for his web site but that’s it.”
A reporter who wasn’t spinning things Quayle’s way would a) bring up the hypocrisy; b) note that at the very least Quayle was being a weasel, at the worst lying, and c) note, as PHXated has consistently, that Quayle has been lying again when he says his story has been consistent.
… not to mention the fact that Quayle’s probably still lying when he says he wasn’t Brock Landers (why would Nik Ritchie make that up?), and that he was lying some more when he said he just posted “comments” on the site, and that he was lying some more when he told Politico that he hadn’t introduced the Dirty Scottsdale guy to some lawyers … and evaded the question when reporters asked him specifics about what he did do for the site:
“What kind of comments?” the reporter asked.
“This is four years ago,” Quayle replied. “This is hilarious this is being brought up. … This is a smear. This is a smear on me from a smear website being pushed by a smear campaign.”
3:40 PM
New Times on Ben Quayle: Does James King heart Ben Quayle a little too much?
The paper’s James King profiles the candidate at length. There’s a very funny graphic, by Jamie Peachey, that portrays Quayle as the 40-year-old virgin:
The story, while not a puff piece, lets Quayle off the hook on a couple of issues, notably the Dirty Scottsdale tale.
Besides being a hypocrite by being a family-values Republican with a history of working for a skanky, woman-hating web site, Quayle lied about it when he was first asked.
New Times is a good paper and King is one of its typically strong reporters.
But this doesn’t wash:
[I]t turns out that Quayle didn’t lie — he just didn’t volunteer information about his association with Dirty Scottsdale.
The Politico reporter who first called Quayle didn’t ask him whether he had written for the Web site. She asked if he was involved in the founding of The Dirty, to which Quayle answered no.
The reporter’s next question was, “You had nothing to do with it?” Quayle contends he thought the reporter still was referring to the establishment of The Dirty and answered no again.
[…]
But the damage was done. The claim that he initially lied about his involvement made the front page of the New York Times.
That’s plainly total bullshit.
Here’s the original Politico passage:
“I did not have a role in founding that site,” Quayle, a lawyer who runs a small Scottsdale investment firm, told POLITICO in an interview Tuesday morning when asked whether he was one of the original contributors to the sex-themed site.
“I was not involved in the site,” he said when pressed about whether he had any role.
In other words, Quayle tried to weasel around the question by framing his first answer carefully. (Note how the reporter includes her original question.)
But then, of course, she pressed him, and he specifically said he wasn’t involved in the site, when asked if he had any role.
It’s one thing to try to lie when asked a question like that, and it’s another level of deceit to try to pretend that your lie had been successful when it plainly hadn’t. That’s what Quayle’s been doing since.
King has it entirely wrong and should correct the story. Quayle plainly lied.
I think it’s fair to beat up on King about this because he’s given Quayle a pass as well on his cheesy little family mailer in which he posed with two little girls, even though he doesn’t have kids.
And finally, Quayle is never asked about his right-wing views.
Among other things, King could have asked him about his position on abortion, and specifically to what extent he would criminalize it if he had the chance.
He could also have asked him about the astate’s medical marijuana initiative—and whether he’d ever tried it himself.
11:47 AM
1Live-blogging the Ben Quayle/Jon Hulburd debate
It’s over.
Simons says the tape will be up on the KAET web site, but it’s not there yet.
I assume it will be on this page.
PHXated will post when it becomes available.
Incredibly, it’s almost over. Closing statements. Schoen goes on some more about manufacturing jobs.
Quayle says he wants to “bend the cost care curve down” in health care. Yeah, that’s always been a big GOP priority. He says he’ll work to repeal the health care bill.
Hulburd says repealing health care is a fairy tale. He says he’s going to go back and act like legislators.
Will Quayle kick the new kids on the health care rolls off? Hulburd says he likes part of the bill, not other parts.
Elect someone who will deal with this as an adult, he says. Hard to argue with that.
Simons asks about immigration reform. A bad question: “Is it needed, how do you do it?”
Quayle wants “a barrier from the Pacific to the Gulf.” He natters on about drug cartels. He wont' talk about reform until “we secure the border.”
Hulburd tries to attack Quayle from the right on this, saying that Quayle has been arguing for a guest worker program. Quayle says only after the border is secured.
Hulburd hits Quayle hard; he notes Quayle’s getting a lot of his money from Cerebrus capital.
Quayle says Hulburd’s getting money from a union. Hulburd says he’ll give back his $10K in union contributions if Quayle gives back the $80K he got from Cerebrus.
Tarp was not the way to go, Quayle says. He says the banks were that much in trouble.
Jesus these guys are bush league. Tarp was a Bush initiative supported by both parties and economists on both sides.
Hulburd says Tarp was a terrible idea, a disaster. Simons says, so should we have let the fire burn itself out? He says yes, the rich people got bailed out by the Titanic. He’s wrong.
Schoen notes than Greenspan has said you can’t cut taxes with borrowed money. He says the tax cuts are jsut going to blow out the deficit. He should be asking both Quayle and Hulburd to address that issue.
Tom Schoen
Simons asks a hard question of Quayle: Business, he notes, aren’t putting their money to work; they husbanding it, buying back shares and the like.
He babbles in response, not answering the question. None of it makes sense.
Simon turns to Schoen, who says he was once sued for defamation, too. I don’t think he needed to volunteer that. But he seems not to be an idiot on the economy.
Hulburd sounds good on the economy too. Even under Simons questioning he sticks to his support for extending the Bush tax cuts.
Quayle keep[s nattering on about “uncertainty.”
(This is a bullshit Republican talking point. Rich people had certainty. They knew their tax cuts were going to end this year; the only uncertainty was whether they could con Congress isn’t extending them.)
Quayle says Hulburd was using blatant lies in ads. When asked, Quayle says it was a lie that he’d pretended to have kids in a mailer. (Which he did.) Hulburd notes that it wasn’t a lie.
The moderator keeps hitting Hulburd, not Quayle. “He says he’s regrets the association,” he says to Hulburd. “Why isn’t that good enough?”
Jesus.
Quayle says he’s been tested in the primary. He says he’s been candid the whole time. (He hasn’t.) He has a deer in the headlights look.
He attacks Hulburd for having been sued for defamation and fraud. Hulburd says the suits were nuisance suits and dismissed with prejudice.
Quayle says something stupid, too: “It didn’t go through the proper trial.” He tries to make it sound suspicious. Well, if they were dismissed, they wouldn’t have “gone through the proper trial” … because they were dismissed.
The moderator asks a dumb question of Hulburd: Why harp on Quayle and Dirty Scottsdale? Hulburd says because character matters.
To that question, Quayle says it’s because he’s going to go to D.C. and fight for the people. Jesus. He says watching actions in D.C. the last year and a half is the best experience anyone could have.
Moderator Simons asked Hulburd why he’s qualified. Hulburd says it’s a fair question, and notes his social, business and personal experience. He stresses he work as a lawyer and family man and volunteer work for Children’s Hospital.
Schoen, the libertarian, shows a chart, demonstrating the decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs.
Hulburd begins, and goes on the attack. He ridicules Qualye for an ad with a wildly inaccurate ad about the federal deficit and goes after him for his involvement in Dirty Scottsdale.
Quayle says it’s “one of the most important elections in the country’s history.”
Quayle tries to attack Obama and the health care initiative.
It’s starting. An “open exchange of ideas,” moderator Ted Simons says. Interruptions are allowed. there’s a libertarian there, too, Michael Schoen, a former prosecutor.
The Ben Quayle-Jon Hulburd debate is scheduled to last for an absurd 30 minutes.
It will be broadcast on Phoenix’s public TV station, channel 8, KAET.
Stay tunes for live-blogging when it begins at 7 p.m. PDT.
(Out-of-state readers please note Arizona doesn’t recognize daylight savings time, it being a comminist plot of some sort, and is a consequence operating currently in the Pacific time zone.)
PHXated’s complete coverage of the life and times of Little Benny Quayle is here.
The complete Brock Landers story is here.
PHXated’s interview with Jon Hulburd is here.
The weird little story about whatever it is that Ben Quayle’s wife does is here.
Braham Resnik to Ben Quayle: “What have you ever done to ‘knock the hell’ out of anything?”.
6:49 PM
The Hulburd-Quayle debate is tonight
It will air at 7 on channel 8.
Incredibly, the Quayle campaign agreed only to a 30-minute session.
The Hulburd campaign says Quayle turned down an offer for a prime-time debate from channel 12, the NBC affiliate.
The Arizona Republic, either through complete incompetence or as part of a campaign to help Ben Quayle ascend to office with as little public examination as possible, has no mention of it that I can find on its web site.
The session is being taped at 4 this afternoon. Hulburd’s campaign manager, Ruben Alonzo, will be tweeting from the session, which is closed to the public. His handle is @ralonzo.
3:15 PM
We unearth the suppressed Young Martin Cizmar™ attack on his former intern!
In the case of relating the sordid tale of Young Martin Cizmar™ and the Mysteriously Disappearing Blog Post Intemperately Attacking His Former Intern, we noted that the deleted post wasn’t even coming up on the Google cache.
After some furious programming/hacking/maneuvering and then a sheer accident, we found it.
It comes exactly as billed, complete with utter humorlessness and Jayson Blair reference.
Note that Ventre is all of 24, and that she wrote the piece saying she hadn’t yet given Pet Sounds the attention it deserved, and was thereupon listening to it.
She hadn’t pretended to have heard it, and she wasn’t caught out, so to speak, by Cizmar. She’s written the article, in public, about it.
Rebuttal
Former New Times Music Intern Cops to Never Having Heard Pet Sounds on NPR Blog
By Martin Cizmar
Tue., Oct. 12 2010 @ 12:44PM
?Sarah Ventre seemed like a great intern.
She was hard-working, talented and friendly. Many of us at Phoenix New Times were quite fond of her. The team of bloggers that brings you Up On The Sun was all incredibly happy for Sarah when she was offered a coveted internship at NPR’s All Songs Considered. We were proud, even.
We were fooled.
Today, Sarah penned a blog post for NPR admitting that until very recently she’d never listened to The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds all the way through. That’s right, during the entire time she worked (note the past tense) at Phoenix New Times writing about music she’d never bothered to listen to the greatest album of all time. I am personally ashamed and would like to take this opportunity to publicly rebuke Sarah and distance myself and this blog from Sarah’s work.
As music editor, I must now apologize for having provided Sarah with this forum. She betrayed our trust and made fools of us all. That’s not an excuse, only a pathetic attempt at an apology.
I’m so sorry, readers.
I know you expect better from us and you’ll get it in the future. Up On The Sun’s staff realizes the importance and spectacularity (existent adjectives fail me) of Pet Sounds and I will personally see to it that everyone who writes for this blog in the future listens to it at least once, in my office while I witness it if need be. Know that I am myself a dedicated Beach Boys fan who has interviewed both Brian Wilson and Al Jardine within the last six months and recently used Pet Sounds in an only half-joking argument for Brian Wilson’s sainthood. I have the album cover hanging on the wall of my office. Sarah sat facing it many times; I can only imagine what was going through her head as she gazed at it blankly.
Please, readers, do not let Sarah’s shameful admission tar us all. To fans of Xtra Ticket, the Grateful Dead cover band Sarah famously lambasted, I offer a special apology. We’ll send out this semester’s intern, Lenni Rosenblum, who, incidentally, loves jam bands, to give the guys another listen.
Seriously, everyone, I’m ashamed and filled with sorrow.
I imagine I feel somewhat like Jayson Blair’s editor must have felt.
Except Jayson Blair had probably listened to Pet Sounds all the way through at least once.
All of PHXated’s writings on Young Martin Cizmar are here.
10:38 AM
Did Young Martin Cizmar, Intrepid Journalist™, go too far?
PHXated World HQ is buzzing with reports about strange doings on New Times' Up on the Sun blog, which covers music and is the dubious domain of Young Martin Cizmar, the Boy Who Always Takes Things Too Far™.
Readers of the blog will remember Sarah Ventre, who contributed regularly in addition to doing hardship duty behind the scenes as Young Martin’s intern.
PHXated has met Ventre and found her, aside from some lingering indications of Stockholm Syndrome, relatively unscathed by the experience.
Anyway, Ventre is now in D.C., interning for NPR. She recently wrote something for the organization’s web site, part of a series of interns writing on music. Ventre wrote about how she wasn’t familiar with the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, but on listening to it found it to be …
… quite good:
The more I listened, the more I realized that the album has virtually no moments of silence in it. Each song is filled with stacked sounds that provide a fluid backdrop to the guitars and vocals that The Beach Boys are so well-known for. There is a constant, subtle motion that carries the music, and it’s easy to see why people get so swept in.
Now, as PHXated hears the story, Young Martin read Ventre’s piece and let loose a screed of invective on the Up on the Sun blog.
His issue, apparently, wasn’t her thoughts on the album.
It was that Ventre had been writing professionally about music for some time, and that this was outrageous considering she’d never listened to Pet Sounds.
Cizmar compared her in some way to Jayson Blair, the NYT’s plagiarist and fabricator, along the way and said he was sorry he’d ever employed her. The posting was serious, not jovial.
He underlined the point by posting the item on his Facebook page, tagging Ventre so her friends would see the attack as well.
Well, you might think; let’s see this post!
That’s the strange twist to the story. The blog post is no longer up on the NT site.
If you Google “Cizmar Ventre Jayson Blair”, you get this:
But the link—to a story apparently entitled “Former New Times Music Intern Cops to Never Having Heard Pet Sounds"—is dead.
… and, mysteriously, there’s no Google cache of it!
As readers might know, it’s a little odd, on the internet, to try to remove published material without alerting readers to the fact and offering an explanation why.
PHXated hears that the post stirred no little controversy inside New Times, and that the post was removed by higher-ups at the paper.
More details as we get them!
All of PHXated’s writings on Young Martin Cizmar are here.
9:53 AM
ABC 15's Steve Irwin: There were rumors about Brewer's health "for weeks"
The ABC 15 reporter blasts John Dougherty, the New Times reporter turned Senate candidate, for posting unsubstantiated rumors about Jan Brewer’s health.
That’s fair comment; but I was struck by this remark, emphasis added:
For weeks now, we’ve been hearing Gov. Jan Brewer was suffering from some unnamed health problem that was limiting her schedule. The rumor was circulating among numerous reporters to be sure, but none would go with the story without something to substantiate it. That’s called responsible reporting, especially knowing the tendency of campaigns to float hearsay in order to derail their opponents.
What I don’t understand about the Phoenix reporter corps is why, hearing the rumors, someone just didn’t make a formal query to Jan Brewer’s staff.
Reporters don’t have to say why they are asking anything. They can just call the office up, and ask, “How is the governor’s health? Does she get regular physicals? Does she have any medical condition that voters should know about?”
If, as you’d expect, the office said the governor was fine, the reporter could conclude there was nothing to the story, absent any hard evidence to the contrary. At the same time, the reporter had the governor’s office on the record on the matter should anything contrary come out in the future.
And right now, someone like Irwin could be saying that ABC news had looked into the rumor and had concluded there was nothing to it, rather than just attacking Dougherty.
No one deserves to be harried by false rumors, of course, but chatter during a political campaign is there for a reason.
Brewer is trying to get elected to office by keeping her profile as low as possible, agreeing to just one debate, barely making herself available to reporters and refusing to answer questions when she’s caught in public. The local media should be fighting back against these tactics.
8:10 AM
Brewer's office: Health concerns "bogus"
The Phoenix Business Journal quotes a Jan Brewer aide saying there’s no truth rumors that the governor has health problems..
The idea was started by John Dougherty on his Twitter and Facebook pages… and promulgated by PHXated. Dougherty is the former New Times investigative reporter who ran for the Democratic senate nomination this summer.
The PBJ:
Brewer communications director Paul Senseman said Monday there is nothing to the Dougherty claims.
“Those comments are completely bogus and started from Mr. Dougherty, who has exactly zero credibility,” Senseman said.
7:11 AM
Is Jan Brewer ill?
The Twitter account of John Dougherty, the former New Times reporter who ran in the Democratic Senate primary, said this last night:
There are persistent reports from reliable sources that Gov. Jan Brewer is seriously ill and may not be capable of…
The tweet linked to this Facebook statement:
John Dougherty for U.S. Senate There are persistent reports from reliable sources that Gov. Jan Brewer is seriously ill and may not be capable of finishing a four-year term. The public has a right to know about her physical fitness now, not after Nov. 2.
A number of people have commented and asked for more detail, but Dougherty responded only this:
This kind of thing is why it can be a mistake to vote your early ballots right away. Wait until the last week, see what surfaces, then make more informed decisions.
PHXated talked to Dougherty, who is a serious person and has a long history as an investigative reporter. He confirmed that he’d posted the tweet and said he based it on “reports from multiple people.”
7:51 AM
The Espresso Pundit nails the Republic again
Local right-wing pol Greg Patterson, who blogs under the name Espresso Pundit, is a nut on several levels, but he reads the Republic closely and occasionally catches it out.
Today he notes that the paper, in its endorsement of Felicia Rotellini for AG, praises her temperament.
This point Patterson ridicules (“My puppy has a nice temperament”) unfairly and dumbly.
(For one, a better temperament is something many Arizona politicians need. Two, it’s not clear he understands what the word means. I don’t think his puppy does have a “nice” temperament for example. I’d bet that, like most puppies, it has an overexcitable, easily distractible, immature one. And finally, in any case the paper didn’t say Rotellini had a nice temperament; in this context it was obviously talking about probity and fairness and the like.)
Anyway, he goes on to note that a few months ago the paper went out to praise Rotellini’s “significant” courtroom experience.
It’s since come out she doesn’t have much of that: Patterson quotes a more recent Republic story that says Rotellini’s never tried a criminal case.
Says Patterson:
Neither the Republic nor Rotellini ever bothered to tell voters that the Republic’s Primary endorsement was based on an incorrect statement. It’s obvious why Rotellini didn’t go back to the Republic editorial board and set the record straight. She would have had to concede that she had exaggerated her record so much that she caused the Republic to get it wrong. Then the public would know that while she was touting her record as a “career” prosecutor, she had actually never tried a criminal case.
Full post here.
8:44 AM
Jon Hulburd's first TV commercial
Hulburd is the conservative Democrat running for the 3rd district Congressional seat being vacated by John Shadegg.
His first TV commercial continues to hammer on Dan Quayle for everything you’d expect.
2:53 PM
For Young Martin Cizmar™ fans only! You might want to sit down ...
Our Martin wrote a record review this a.m. It’s on an album called Bomb, by a singer-songwriter named Jeff Arundel.
It’s .. kinda good.
No, really.
Martin begins with a thesis statement—he tells us that Arudel had been through some painful times since his past album, and that this all informed the new one.
He follows up that cogent encapsulation with … six paragraphs of explication, noting and explaining the album’s main songs, often juggling citations from both the lyrics and the music to make his point.
And then the review ..
… ends with an equally cogent closing paragraph, which not only reiterates his opening rhetorical gambit but even, in a nice little touch, adds a zinger on the same thing at the end.
We almost want to quote that graf, but the whole thing isn’t long, and it’s worth reading even if you’re not a music fan.
Everything about Young Martin Cizmar™ is here.
8:14 AM
New Times smacks Jon Hulburd
One of the weekly’s main political writers, John James King*, goes after Hulburd for a new ad that smacks his opponent, Little Benny Quayle, for “lying” about having kids in a campaign ad.
The Quayle campaign ad story is interesting. (It’s chronicled by PHXated here.)
His campaign sent out a mailing with a shot of Quayle cuddling two cute little girls; the legend said “A NEW GENERATION.”
In the copy below, we read: “Tiffany [his wife] and I live in this district and are going to raise our family here.”
Now, King’s not the only smart person I know who thinks Quayle is being unfairly hit on this issue.
But I don’t.
The intent of the mailer is plain. Two little girls … “raise our family.” Of course that’s the message the mailer was trying to get across.
And there are other slightly skeevy things the Quayle campaign does to protect his flank on this issue.
One of his other TV ads had Quayle saying, “I love Arizona. I was raised right”—a not-so-subtle attempt to get the idea across that he was “raised” in “Arizona,” when he wasn’t.
This is slightly tangential, but that line I kept reading about Quayle’s wife “managing a Fortune 500 company”—that was skeevy too.
And we never hear what Quayle does, because it’s true—he has had four or five different jobs in his undistinguished career, and that’s not counting his time writing for a porny web site, which he did lie about.
King’s right that Hulburd does take a lot of Republican positions, but this a benightedly dumb district—which sent Shadegg to Congress for years, and might do the same for the unqualified Quayle.
And as PHXated noted before, Hulburd is a smart guy with a solid background on most of the issues. How can you begrudge a guy for not embarking on a suicide mission?
Previously in PHXated:
The complete Dirty Scottsdale tale.
So … what exactly does Ben Quayle’s wife do?.
How the Arizona Republic took a dive on the tawdry Ben Quayle/Dirty Scottsdale story.
- PHXated misspelled King’s name originally. Apologies.
8:02 AM
Now on Twitter: "Faux Mike Lacey"!
Lacey, top editor of New Times, investigative reporter extraordinaire and motherfucker about town (as the mug shot above attests), has an alter-ego on Twitter who attempts, with intermittent sucess, to capture his outsize personal in 140-character bursts.
Here are a few:
FauxMikeLacey: WHEN I SEE A BULLET WOUND I THINK PAY RAISE THAT’S HOW IT WORKS IN THIS COMPANY
FauxMikeLacey: GONNA TELL MY REPORTERS TO STOP DICKING AROUND WITH THE TWITTER IF NOBODY WILL ARREST THEM FOR IT THEN IT’S NOT JOURNALISM
FauxMikeLacey: HEY DOLL IS THAT A CACTUS BETWEEN MY THIGHS OR AM I JUST REAL HAPPY TO SEE YOU?
FauxMikeLacey: TWO MORE SHOTS THEN I’M GONNA RIP OFF @BOSSY_BRUGMANN’S DICK AND SERVE IT TO HIM ON A DUTCH CRUNCH ROLL
The first three are fairly self-explanatory; the last one is a reference to Bruce Brugmann, the owner of the Bay Guardian, a weekly that New Times' SF Weekly has been engaged in a death match with for some 15 years.
“Bossy_Brugmann” is a fake Twitter account that spoofs Brugmann similarly.
FauxMikeLacey can be read here.
(N.B.: PHXated worked for New Times in SF, many years ago.)
4:54 PM
Gangplank continues to hate-blog, er, politely ask Martin Cizmar what in the heck he was talking about
More plaintive questions from a Gangplank member, after Young Martin Cizmar™ tweeted yesterday that the place was full of “hate bloggers"—and later expanded on the contention by explaining he was talking about people in "leadership positions.”
As PHXated explained at the time, we’ve had some passing experience with the group, a digital business incubator based in downtown Chandler, and have generally found the place to be a bit wholesome—anything but a nest of haters.
Various Gangplank members pressed Young Martin for details yesterday.
Below is an interesting exchange from last night.
For those not familiar with the arcana of Twitter nomenclature and orthography, the “@” name in bold is the person making the tweet; the “@” name that comes up in the tweet proper is a reference to other tweeters. When it’s at the beginning of the tweet, it generally means that the tweet is directed at that person.
For connoisseurs of Young Martin’s rhetorical dog-fighting, the following is pure catnip:
@willbradley @phxmusicdotcom I dont think you realize how many awesome people are “at” Gangplank and subsequently offended by your original tweet…
@PHXmusicdotcom @willbradley I would assume their first thought would be ‘well, he’s not talking about me, I’m an awesome person…’
@willbradley @PHXmusicdotcom really? Not “who is this guy and why is he talking smack about some of the coolest friends I know?”
@PHXmusicdotcom @willbradley I think the people I was talking about didn’t wonder too much about who I meant… I also don’t think you think I meant you.
@PHXmusicdotcom @PHXmusicdotcom I think you meant “everyone affiliated with @gangplank” when you said it. Either that, or: http://is.gd/fyTH
@willbradley @PHXmusicdotcom then you clarified that you meant leaders, which narrows it down to ~4 and is still vague and insulting to 100s of ppl.
@PHXmusicdotcom @willbradley Dude, I said “or is that just an image some members are cultivating?” in the first tweet.
@PHXmusicdotcom @willbradley I was hoping someone would tell me “no, what those people are up to is not what we’re about!” or maybe “Hellz yeah we are!”
@willbradley @PHXmusicdotcom dude if you hate @tdhurst just say so, no need to be all vague about it.
PHXated thinks that Bradley here has put his finger on something. Tyler Hurst, who tweets under the name tdhurst, is a frequent target of Cizmarian invective.
PHXated’s hunch is that Young Martin thinks Hurst has something to do with Gangplank, which he doesn’t.
@willbradley @PHXmusicdotcom I’m telling you now, I still have no idea which one of my friends (or me) you’re hating on, and I take offense.
@PHXmusicdotcom @willbradley If I wanted to say that I would have said that. I didn’t bc that’s not my point.
Here, however, Martin seems to be dismissing the Hurst theory, albeit in unconvincing fashion.
@PHXmusicdotcom @willbradley My question is whether people like that who are repping the group hardcore and inviting people to speak, are what it’s about?
Another interesting Cizmaranian undertone. PHXated, another perennial nettle in Young Martin’s journalistic sock, was recently “invited to speak” at Gangplank. Could it be that Martin, bedeviled by Hurst and PHXated, is conflating them, wholly unfairly, with Gangplank, and taking it out on the wholesome Chandlerites?
@willbradley @PHXmusicdotcom @gangplank is people going to a place and working on things together. That’s pretty much it. No hateblog required.
@PHXmusicdotcom @willbradley Well then that’s great. I’ve had some bad experiences with affiliates but keep hearing this positive stuff. So I wondered aloud
@willbradley @PHXmusicdotcom way to wonder aloud. Try hanging out at GP before you trash us. Or, after you trash us. Door’s always open.
7:24 AM
UPDATED: Did the Gin Blossoms really sell 30 million records?
From Fox 10:
It’s been nearly 20 years since the Gin Blossoms burst onto the local music scene in Tempe. With hits like Hey Jealously[sic], Found Out About You, and Till I Hear It From You, the Blossoms have sold 30 million records worldwide.
Off the top of my head I say pish posh.
The band went multi-platinum in the early 1990s, and I was a fan even before they were big.
But 30 million? I could be wrong; will research the issue and report back.
FIRST UPDATE:
Two commenters more or less agree with me:
Mark:
I was thinking the same thing recently. Especially since a few years back NME was at about 4 million, and I think CIS was getting on to 1 million. Even if those figures are US only (not sure, but don’t think so) 30 million seems way over inflated.
Thanks for researching, I’d be interested to see how much weight is really behind this number, or if the marketing team just thought it sounded like an impressive number – which to me seems more feasible.
We were happy to see one of Martin Cizmar’s most ardent defenders get in on the discussion as well:
Dan Gibson:
A crazy idea, I realize, but why not check the information BEFORE posting about it? It only took me two minutes to use the search on the RIAA’s site, after all.
Anyhow, it’s not (likely) true. The RIAA has certified “New Miserable Experience” four times platinum and “Congratulations, I’m Sorry” one time platinum. Unless they’re killing it overseas sales-wise, FOX 10 might want to dial down the hyperbole.
Dear Dan: You understand, don’t you, that I did say in the piece they had gone multiplatinum, right?
That information was provided for you!
RIAA information is iffy—quadruple platinum might mean only 3,500,000 sold.
And in any case, we’re talking about worldwide record sales, which are calculated nowhere reliably.
PHXated, fortunately, has a crack team of researchers working on this issue, even as we speak.
We will report back soonest!
12:18 PM
Young Martin Cizmar™ slurs Gangplank, gets nose burned
The tweet this a.m. came out of nowhere:
@PHXMusicdotcom Is everyone affiliated with @gangplank a creepy hateblogger or is that just an image some members are cultivating?
@PHXMusicdotcom is the nom de tweet of PHXated covergirl Young Martin Cizmar™, whose every deed we find interesting.
Gangplank is an digital business incubator. It’s based in downtown Chandler.
To say that the people who work there or who are putting together business startups at the space are “creepy hatebloggers is … odd.
PHXated has been down there two or three times and found everyone casually supportive and upbeat. (PHXated was even invited to speak recently, and had a great and interactive time discussing the growing influence of Scruffy McPoochie at the Arizona Republic and the future of online journalism, among other things.)
Anyway, it’s kind of—what’s the word—oh yeah, insane to use a phrase like “creepy hatebloggers” in association with this unfailingly positive and wholesome outfit.
As might be expected, Gangplank members responded with… well, restraint:
@hepnova: @PHXmusicdotcom : I think I speak for the majority of @Gangplank associates when I say that hate blogging has zero to do with the GP ethos.
@BrandonFranklin @PHXmusicdotcom I don’t know why you’d even think that. @dneighbors is far from a “hate blogger”, as am I.
@BrandonFraklin @PHXmusicdotcom and neither is @GRTaylor2 , nor a large slew of other @Gangplank -affiliated folks.
@Conrey @PHXmusicdotcom human nature to guess the ideals of a large community based off of one or two people? Also who hateblogs from GP?
@Conrey followed up this display of hate-blogging with the following intemperate tweet to Cizmar:
@PHXmusicdotcom also if you’d rather discuss not in public – feel free to email me directly
… and pressed the point home with this jeremiad:
@Conrey @PHXmusicdotcom I haven’t seen where you share your experiences is the thing. As someone passionate about GP-I’d like to effort to resolve
Of course, to silence those questioners, all Martin had to do was cite just one or two instances of Gangplank-affiliated “hate-blogging.”
This he did not do. Instead, incredibly, he pressed his point:
@PHXmusicdotcom Well @GRTaylor2 is certainly a good guy… Maybe you, @BrandonFranklin, and @dneighbors are too. Hate to judge based on a few folks, but…
And then followed that up with:
@PHXmusicdotcom @BrandonFranklin also let me say I am talking about people with leadership positions, not just randoms
Notice that Our Martin has as yet not substantiated his claim of “hate bloggers” bivouacked at Gangplank, but has widened his initial claim to include people in “leadership positions.”
What we like about Martin are these qualities: He’s got thin skin and a glass jaw, and he keeps coming back for more.
We nodded in familiarity at Martin’s next tweet:
@PHXmusicdotcom @conrey I’m done discussing.
It is a sentiment he has expressed to use at PHXated as well, and has always been, as here, merely a preamble to more discussing:
@PHXmusicdotcom @conrey I shared my experience. I’m content to believe it’s just a few bad apples and try to reserve judgement. Hope others do as well.
(Note he has still not revealed who the “bad apples” are.)
A few minutes later, he begins to beat a retreat:
@PHXmusicdotcom @jamesarcher I asked a question – a loaded one, but a question – I got an answer & will refrain from judging the org based on my experience
(You’ll remember Martin’s original question wasn’t so much loaded as rhetorical: “Is everyone affiliated with @gangplank a creepy hateblogger or is that just an image some members are cultivating?”)
By mid-afternoon his tweets tapered off, after claiming he’d sent explanatory emails to the parties involved. PHXated will share his explanation if he gets one.
4:51 PM
1We Read Young Martin Cizmar™ So You Don't Have To: Surfer Blood
Young Martin Cizmar™ reviews Surfer Blood at the Clubhouse on the New Times site.
Our friend Tuscon Toby encapsulates it for us:
Surfer Blood at Clubhouse Music Venue Last Night
For the first six graphs of a 14-graph review, I’ll write about a phenomenon I call “bi-coastal indie band naming conventions.” This band’s name has a variation of “surf” in it; others use words like “beach.”
I find that interesting and confusing.
Surfer Blood reminds me of Weezer. I just saw Weezer in concert and wrote a review. I wasn’t clear whether I liked Weezer but this band reminds me of Weezer.
There were two songs in particular that I remember. One song was the band’s biggest single and the crowd seemed to really enjoy it. The other song I remember was in the encore and I was standing by a man who enjoyed it a lot.
Previously, in “We Read Martin Cizmar So You Don’t Have To”:
Green Day at Cricket Pavillion.
Everything about Young Martin Cizmar™ is here.
9:57 AM
The Republic blasts the county probate court
Laurie Roberts' long-running jihad against the court gets vindicated today with a front-page investigation by Robert Anglen and Pat Kossan.
In a series of columns Roberts has contended that the court essentially colludes with private law firms assigned to oversee assets, and allows the firms to drain the funds with excessive legal fees.
She’s been doing individual cases. The report today is a massive overview, and worth reading.
Here’s the beginning of the main story](http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/09/24/20100924maricopa-county-probate-court-main-0926.html):
Outside of being imprisoned, no action in the American justice system deprives a person of so many rights as being declared incapacitated in Probate Court.
First, a judge rules that you can’t care for yourself. Then strangers can be given control of every aspect of your life. All that you’ve worked for and love – your savings, property, even your ability to contact your family – can be taken away and given to professionals to manage, at enormous expense to you.
Wills, trusts and powers of attorney may not matter.
Probate Court is meant to be a safe harbor for people in crisis because of advanced age or illness, a place where a judge helps protect their assets and well-being.
But an Arizona Republic investigation has found that Maricopa County Probate Court allows the assets of some vulnerable adults to become a cash machine for attorneys and for fiduciary companies, which manage their affairs.
The fees charged can drain the savings of even wealthy individuals in less than a year.
Full report here.
More about Laurie Roberts, on whom PHXated has a big ol' journalistic crush, here and here.
Of course, this being the Republic, the presentation online is seriously flawed. The layout in the paper makes visual and narrative sense; online, it simply lists a bunch of stories. When you get the the end of one, there’s no indication there’s another to be read in the series.
Sigh.
8:31 AM
1We Read Martin Cizmar So You Don't Have To: Weezer
Young Martin Cizmar™ reviews Weezer at the Fall Frenzy on the New Times site.
Our friend Tuscon Toby encapsulates it for us:
Weezer at Fall Frenzy Last Night
Sometimes I read New York magazine (not the actual magazine though). One important fact about all bands is the year I first saw them perform. Weezer is no different. I saw them in 2002. Here’s the thing: I’m now going to natter on about an older album of theirs I like, which will render my assessment of the rest of the show unintelligible. Some people like to say “here’s the thing” right before they say something important. I like to use “here’s the thing” right before I say something incoherent. I tried to write down all the songs so I could show you a set list, but I couldn’t keep track of them. Then I realized there’s a website that does that. Here’s the link. Here’s the thing — I sort of like Weezer now even though I don’t like them very much.
Previously, in “We Read Martin Cizmar So You Don’t Have To”:
Green Day at Cricket Pavillion.
Everything about Young Martin Cizmar™ is here.
10:29 AM
Q.: Can AZCentral.com get any more irritating? A.: Yes!
The site has suddenly increased its use of fake links… words that are underlined as if they are links to other stories or web pages but actually just generate pop-up ads, like the one you can see above.
There, the word “packages”—in a story about suspicious packages, no less—gets a post office ad.
7:31 AM
Jan Brewer, her criminally insane son, the Arizona Republic, and prior restraint
The lede story in the Republic today is a look at how Jan Brewer’s approach to mental health funding has been shaped by her son, who is in a state hospital after being charged with sexual assault and kidnapping.
He was found not guilty by reason on insanity and has apparently been in the hospital for most of that time, though the paper is vague on this point. (Earlier, it said that the son had attended Brewer’s inauguration.)
Nowhere in either of the two stories about the case does it say what it was her son actually did.
New Times reported this a few weeks ago:
According to a Phoenix Police Department report dated July 29, 1989, Brewer, then an unemployed 25-year-old, forced his way into a woman’s apartment on West Indian School Road and threatened to hurt her “real bad” if she didn’t engage in sexual acts, including performing fellatio.
The Republic story says Brewer lost her other son three years ago:
Other personal family tragedies, such as the death of son John Brewer in January 2007 from cancer and AIDS are spoken of [by Brewer] only briefly.
A related story in the paper today is about a backstage battle to keep Brewer’s son’s criminal record out of the public eye. A judge yesterday stated the obvious, that the matter was part of the public record.
New Times broke the story a few weeks back; the Republic, in keeping with its idiosyncratic approach to journalistic niceties, kept the issue under wraps:
“I believe The Republic has been sensitive to the issues involved in this case and responsible in its reporting while, at the same time, working diligently to protect the public’s essential access to criminal-case files,” said Randy Lovely, Republic editor and vice president for news. “Obviously, we’re appreciative of the court’s ruling.”
The Republic decided not to publicize the story until the ruling was finalized on Monday.
Emphasis added. The story is confusing. Apparently, the son, who is apparently sane enough to worry about his mother’s political career, requested and got his files sealed.
The Republic got a copy of them this year, apparently through a mistake in the clerk’s office. Then the governor learned, in an interview with a republic reporter, than the file was open.
Then things get opaque:
… [Brewer’s] son’s attorney, Reginald Cooke, asked a judge to force Phoenix Newspapers, the newspaper’s parent company, to return the case file and prevent the paper from printing anything contained in it. PNI asked the judge to unseal the file.
On one level, this doesn’t make any sense, because this would seem to be a case of prior restraint. A judge can’t stop a paper from printing something in the public record.
It’s possible that the the paper’s lawyer’s decided that the matter turned on a slightly different issue; that since, whether rightly or not, the case was sealed, the paper could have been liable for publishing it, and that the smarter tack was to just make the case that the file was wrongly suppressed.
That’s a defensible argument, I suppose.
Suppressing the story about the actual battle while it was going on, during an election campaign?
That’s not defensible at all.
7:54 AM
The Republic follows up on its searing story on unprosecuted rapes on Indian reservations
Dennis Wagner’s story today details the bureaucratic confusion and lack of federal oversight that allows so many crimes, rape prominent among them, to go without punishment.
Ronet Bachman, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware who analyzed Indian rape data for the DOJ two years ago, said confusion and enforcement shortcomings allow repeat offenders.
Asked if the failure is due to poor training, jurisdictional issues, a lack of resources, mismanagement, complacency or incompetence, Bachman said, “It is botched because of all those things.”
Yesterday it was a case study—done after two years of legal wrangling to get access to police files—argued with some evidence that a man who assaulted more than a dozen White Mountain Apache women was never caught.
The story today has one weird note:
Native American women suffer from violent crime at a rate 2 ½ times the national average. More than one-third are raped during their lifetimes, according to the Department of Justice, compared with a national figure of one in five.
Emphasis added. That seems an extreme statistic.
A cursory check of such numbers on the internet seems to indicate that the story is conflating sexual assaults in toto with rape specifically.
On the other hand, most rape cases go unreported, and it could be that Wagner is actually using valid justice department figures. But the numbers are so high they deserves to have been explained better.
7:21 AM
The Sunday Republic steps up
As we’ve noted before, the Arizona Republic doesn’t always suck.
Today, it’s a good Sunday paper:
- There’s a major investigative piece that shows with some conclusiveness that a rapist who preyed on young White Mountain Apache women near Whiteriver, west of Phoenix, was never caught.
The story paints a grim picture of wholesale police incompetence on the reservation.
The Republic waged a two-year legal battle to get the records of the investigations, which of course should have been public from the beginning.
And there’s also reams of copy about the “birthright citizenship” debate, with a pair of stories by Alia Beard Rau and Dan Nowicki.
(As usual, AZCentral doesn’t make it easy on readers. Nowicki’s piece is not linked to from Rau’s article … and doesn’t come up when you search for “Nowicki”!)
4:11 PM
Martin, short: We Read Martin Cizmar So You Don't Have To
From PHXated correspondent Tucson Toby, one of Young Martin Cizmar™’s biggest fans:
Green Day at Cricket Wireless Pavillion Last Night
I saw Green Day last night. I saw them first when I was very young and liked them a lot. I still like them though they have changed. (Inappropriate literary reference). They played this song and this song and this song. This song is from this album. I would have liked it if they played this song and this song.
#
9:19 AM
Why did the Republic fire one of its bloggers ... and scrub his work from its website without notice?
Nick Martin, at Heat City, says that Bill Richardson, an ex-cop who blogged for the Republic on police matters, has been dropped by the Republic …and had his entire body of work expunged from the paper’s site, with no notice.
Any paper can publish whom it wants, of course. But with the Republic, there’s always something weird going on:
Richardson said one of the paper’s opinion editors, Joanna Allhands, called him Monday to tell him the blog was being yanked because of recent posts he had written about the Tempe Police Department.
[…]
But reached by phone late Tuesday, Allhands flatly denied the move was made because of Richardson’s criticism of Tempe.
“No, that’s not correct,” she said when asked about the allegation. Still, she refused to explain why Richardson’s blog was closed or why his entire archive was deleted from the website.
Seems like either Richardson or Allhands is lying!
And in any case, scrubbing the archive with no notice or explanation is a no-no.
7:06 AM
The NYT on New Times
David Carr, the New York Times' media columnist, takes a look at the debilitating war in San Francisco, between New Times' SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian, pegged mostly to a visit in SF with the latter’s founder, Bruce Brugmann:
Once New Times arrived, a ferocious newspaper war ensued, with charges and countercharges. SF Weekly produced deeply reported articles with no particular political point of view, while The Bay Guardian stuck to its progressive knitting, hacking at the power companies and the daily newspapers.
“They came riding into town out of Tombstone,” Mr. Brugmann said, alluding to the fact that the chain is headquartered in Arizona, “and they started shooting up the place, and now they are going to have to pay the consequences.”
The column offers nothing new on the long legal battle that ensued, but it links to a well-reported take on the fight, from the Seattle Stranger.
New Times, now thirteen papers strong, stretching across the country, and renamed as Village Voice Media, wound up with a $15 million judgment grown to $22 million as appeals go on. (New Times has been losing them consistently.)
6:54 AM
Joe Watson, New Times writer cum "Salon Bandit," get twelve years
It’s a sad story—a by-all-accounts good and agressive writer brought down by a gambling addiction that turned him into a guy who cornered solitary women in stores and robbed them.
Watson, who was a New Times staff writer, was given twelve years for nine armed robberies and one attempted armed robbery.
[Watson] was arrested at the gaming tables after his fiancee recognized him in surveillance video played on television news and called police.
On Friday, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge sentenced Watson to 12 years in prison. He had already pleaded guilty to nine armed robberies and one attempted armed robbery.
“I know what I did was stupid and selfish and just so I could go back to the casino,” he told Judge John Hannah. Though his fiancee left him, Watson thanked her for saving his life by turning him in.
The story doesn’t mention the other odd media angle: The fiancee was Phoenix magazine editor Ashlea Deahl.
A New Times story with a lot of background on Watson is here.
The extensive comments, particularly, provide a comprehensive, if fractured, portrait of Watson.
12:43 PM
Laurie Roberts lays out the Ben Quayle/Brock Landers story in all its porny glory
Yesterday, the Arizona Republic finally vouchsafed to its print clientele an overview of Ben Quayle’s sordid past associations with the ultraskanky web site Dirty Scottsdale.
This came after the election he was running in, but whatever.
Today Laurie Roberts, on whom we have a journalistic crush, finally limns the story the way the paper should have from the start:
So, to recap:.
He denied writing for the website, then he admitted writing for the website, saying he posted a handful of “fictional satirical comments.”
He denied that he is Brock Landers but he hasn’t denied writing under the name Brock Landers.
And he couldn’t recall whether he introduced Karamian to a lawyer for purposes of incorporating the website, but then later admitted that he hooked them up.
Now he says he’s “been consistent from the very beginning on this issue.”
7:47 AM
UPDATE: TheDirty.com libel suit
The AP reported yesterday that a Cinncinnati cheerleader had won a default libel suit against the proprietor of a site called “the Dirt.com.”
The Arizona Republic reported that as a judgment against the site we all know as TheDirty.com, the place where Young Benny Quayle undertook some of his early nightlife epistolary efforts.
PHXated repeated the news (see orignal post below), even correcting the AP’s error.
Turns out the story was half right in about three different ways.
TheDirty is the site that said the cheerleader had VD. But the suit was filed against a different site, TheDirt.com, which ignored it and got a default judgment of $11 million against it. Hilarity has presumably ensued.
Politico has the story here.
It contains these entertaining passages from Eric Deters, the plaintiff’s attorney, about TheDirty.com founder and Quayle literary amanuensis Nik Richie:
“We’re still going to serve that S.O.B. personally,” Deters said of Richie. “I’m going to make that dirty, rotten, mean, vermin bastard pay. He’s a piece of dirt.”
When asked what he thought about Quayle blogging for Dirty Scottsdale, Deters – who has been following national media coverage of the political novice – called it “absolutely disgraceful.”
“He ought to be ashamed of himself,” Deters said “He’s another lying little weasel politician. That’s not slander; that is my opinion.”
Updates as they happen.
The original post:
One of the grimier things about TheDirty.com, the web site Ben Quayle wrote for and helped found, is now hateful many of its postings are.
As we’ve mentioned before, they basically come down to “she has VD.”
The practice seems to have cost the site and its founder, Hooman Karamian, who goes by the name Nik Ritchie, $11 million.
From the AP:
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A gossip website has been hit with an $11 million judgment for libel and slander after posting false accusations about a Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader.
The judgment against Dirty World Entertainment Recordings, which runs the site Thedirt.com [sic], came Thursday after the site did not respond to a lawsuit brought by Sarah Jones. The high school teacher’s picture was posted on the site along with an accusation she had been exposed to two venereal diseases.
Richie is the guy who told Politico that Quayle had helped him get the site going and had written for it under the name Brock Landers.
10:40 AM
Newsflash: Arizona Republic readers learn about Ben Quayle's porny alter ego
In its campaign wrap-up story today, the Arizona Republic tells its readers that Ben Quayle might not be the ideal GOP candidate to replace John Shadegg.
Why?
Well, turns out the sanctimonious family-values candidate used to write for, and palled around with the founder of, a sleazy web site in Scottsdale.
His nom de skank was Brock Landers, the name of a porn actor in Boogie Nights.
As PHXated has noted here and here, while the story has been a national news staple for the past two week, the Arizona Republic has apparently never mentioned it in its news pages.
(We have yet to find an actual printed story in which this was mentioned; the paper has run a couple of wire stories on the web site. It certainly has not done what you’d expect, which is routinely make reference to an ongoing scandal in a major local political campaign.)
Until today, that is… two days after the election he was running in.
11:14 PM
Scruffy McPoochie, rampant
Scruffy McPoochie, the editor of the Arizona Republic’s daily Living section, ignores the criticism that the paper’s feature section should include stories about people.
Dogs are ‘living’ too, McPoochie growls, and resumes pawing through wire stories, searching out the best dog news from across the nation.
Today’s entry is about dog cancer.
It continues to add to the paper’s luster as the Nation’s Leading Purveyor of Dog Journalism™.
The lede is about a dog who lost its leg to cancer.
This poignant anecdote is made all the more affecting when we learn that the dog in question was a greyhound, which are “bred for the racetrack.”
It’s hard to run with only three legs. That’s the poignant part.
You’re not going to believe this. The owner of the greyhound, Tex, who lost his leg?
[Lisa Stone], the founder of a Scottsdale law firm treats Tex and her two Ridgebacks, Layla and Larry, like her children.
“I’m the crazy dog parent,” she said, offering proof: When Tex was in the hospital after his amputation, she stayed at his bedside for eight to nine hours a day.
And when her first greyhound had his hindquarters amputated due to osteosarcoma, she slept on the living-room floor with him for more than a year because he couldn’t climb the stairs to her bedroom.
In other words, she’s had two greyhounds who’ve had their legs amputated.
What are the odds?
The story also contains this paragraph:
“To collect the DNA, we just need a little slobber, and trust me, with my Labrador, you can get plenty of it,” Trent said.
The dog cancer story joins McPoochie’s other dog journalism triumphs.
Another (!) story about a swanky kennel for dogs.
It’s hard to believe the Republic’s circulation is dropping ten percent a year.
10:59 PM
Ben Quayle cancelled his own victory party
From Politico:
After a cascade of accusations and ever-shifting denials that he wrote for a raunchy website under the name of a fictional porn star, it seemed even Ben Quayle thought he was going to lose a 10-way Republican primary in Arizona.
Quayle, the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, went so far as to cancel a victory party he had planned to hold Tuesday night to watch the returns in the race for the GOP nod to replace retiring Rep. John Shadegg in the 3rd District.
6:34 AM
The curious incident of the Quayle that didn't, uh, chirp in the Arizona Republic
It was one of the more noted political antics of this last primary cycle:
Ben Quayle, the son of a notorious former vice president and now a family values Congressional candidate, was a few years ago a writer for an ultra-skanky nightlife web site, then called DirtyScottsdale and now called TheDirty.com.
As an indication of the national interest in the story, Politico followed it intensely.
… and treated the incident prominently in its wrap-up today as well.
The revelation was compounded by the callow Quayle’s handling of it.
He lied at first, denying any involvement.
Then he reversed himself, admitting he had written for the site, and to this day has kept the story alive by not coming clean entirely, as the latest Politico story makes clear:
At first, Quayle denied ever writing for the site, telling POLITICO “I was not involved in the site.” Then he backtracked and admitted to writing under a pseudonym, though he denies Richie’s accusation that he wrote as Brock Landers, a reference to a fictional porn star in the 1990s film “Boogie Nights.”
(It makes no sense for him to admit to writing for the site but not under the pseudonym.)
Here’s my question:
Did the Arizona Republic ever mention the scandal in the paper?
Online, the paper reprinted the first two Politico stories.
But I never saw, and can’t find online, an actual Republic story that detailed the incident for readers.
Am I wrong?
If I did in fact miss one mention of it in print, it still begs the question of why it wasn’t in every story the paper ran that mentioned Quayle.
With the Republic, you never know.
It could have been a decree from on high.
Or it could just be incompetence.
6:36 PM
The Arizona Republic is looking for young entrepreneurs
The paper’s preparing its annual “"35 Entrepreneurs 35 and Under” feature, to be published in October.
There’s a nomination form here
The applicant must have been born after Oct. 1, 1975 to be eligible. The entrepreneur has to have been involved in starting and running and Arizona-based business that already is showing revenue growth and potential.
Applications must be submitted by Aug. 31.
4:35 PM
"Sunday Square Off," with Donna Gratehouse and Greg Patterson
Brahm Resnik’s Sunday Square Off this morning featured our own Donna Gratehouse, the Democratic Diva, along with intermittently nutty right-winger Greg Patterson, who blogs under the name Espresso Pundit; and political consultant Stan Barnes, looking at Tuesday’s state primary.
7:34 AM
What AZCentral is good at
… putting a walking talking annoyance trying to sell us Hondas in the face of anyone who visits their web site:
Getting the search engine to work so one can find a piece of 12 News video?
Not so much.
Note how AZCentral even allows the crappy company it’s using for the animated ads to advertise itself, complete with trademark symbol.
It’s an ad on an ad!
Of course the site needs to sell ads; no one thinks journalism should be free.
But AZCentral.com is a site that’s user-unfriendly even by the clotted standards of most daily newspapers.
I was looking for video from today’s 12 News' Sunday Square Off; two or three passes and it wasn’t coming up.
Here’s what you get the first time using Google News:
7:21 AM
The Arizona Republic: The Nation's Leading Purveyor of Dog Journalism™
The Arizona Republic, which writes about local dogs more than humans, has a story today about a dog who died in the heat.
We’re sorry about the dog, but we already knew that it was hot out.
The story was in our zoned section, but we’re betting Scruffy McPoochie, the paper’s canny, canine Living section editor, will grab the thing and reuse it in his section sometime next week.
McPoochie, pictured above, is just one of the folks from whatever species who’ve help make the Arizona Republic the nation’s leading purveyor of dog journalism.
Just a couple of weeks ago, McPoochie ran a story about dog insurance.
It was a wire story, and mostly about people in Chicago, but McPoochie knew that dog journalism isn’t about states. It’s a state of mind.
It was such a great subject that a jealous business-section editor, in an act of journalistic oneupdogship, reassigned it to a Republic staffer, and the paper ran another story on the same lame subject.
The result, as we saw, wasn’t as good as the Chicago one, but whatever.
The paper doesn’t mind doubling down on dog journalism.
McPoochie ran a story about swanky dog hotels a while back …
… and a few weeks later, ran another story about the same damn thing.
Then there was the story about dogs on Twitter.
Which was almost as interesting as the story about dogs on Facebook.
And this is in addition to the paper’s day-to-day coverage of the beat: The church that allows dogs … another story about a dog who died … earthshaking changes at a dog park ….
Sure the paper’s circulation is declining ten percent or more a year.
That’s just among humans.
The local dog population may yet turn out to give the paper a whole new …
… leash on life!
8:08 PM
Jon Talton: How did they screw up our economy?
The former Republic columnist, now a Seattle-based author, continues his must-read meditations on the Valley and its discontents, “Phoenix 101.”
In his most recent post, he describes the diverse economy the area once had, ranging from vast swaths of agriculture to tech firms:
[B]y the late 1940s, Phoenix’s leaders knew the city must attract new industries or it couldn’t sustain its growing population. Stewards such as Frank Snell made aggressive efforts to attract “clear industry.” It paid off with AiResearch, Hughes Aircraft, Sperry Rand, General Electric and especially Motorola. Makers of automobiles and tractors were lured to establish proving grounds to test under desert conditions. (Between the mines, railroads and construction, membership was very high statewide in trade unions).
In other words, as Phoenix emerged as a populous city in the 1960s, it had an strikingly dynamic and diverse economy, with well-paying jobs — especially for a place so isolated and relatively new. Of course real estate and construction were big (along with tourism). Maryvale and Sun City were new. The groves of Arcadia were being turned into subdivisions. Land fraud was rampant — I remember vividly one man who defrauded my grandmother, a real estate agent, being sent to prison; the Arizona Republic’s martyred reporter Don Bolles earned his chops on exposing such schemes. But real estate was a consequence of the real economy. Real estate wasn’t the economy.
You know what’s coming:
Much changed from when I left in 1978 and returned in 2000. By that point, the Phoenix economy, while still containing the remnants of the old chip makers plus Intel, had degenerated into a massive real-estate Ponzi scheme plus some call centers. Everything depended on adding 100,000 more people a year. Aside from this, the metro economy couldn’t match up to the diversity, quality, dynamism or incomes of its peers. Arizona, after tracking the national average in per-capita income as late as the 1980s, consistently lost ground, a trend that continued during the 2000s “boom.”
The balance of his very long and persuasive post details meticulously how that change happened.
You can read it here.
The complete Phoenix 101 archive is here.
8:25 AM
Confidential to Ben Quayle: On Wednesday, give us a call!
Your big primary is Tuesday. You might be the GOP nominee in the race to replace John Shadegg in Arizona’s 3rd congressional district.
We have to be honest. We hope you win.
The primary, that is.
Last week it was revealed you used to hell around Scottsdale with the guy who founded Dirty Scottsdale.com, a skanky nightlife web site now morphed into The Dirty.com.
You used to write for the site under the name Brock Landers, a man embarked on an epic quest for Scottsdale’s hottest foxiest chick or somesuch, while all around you the site posted porny photos of club denizens with a lot of speculation about venereal diseases.
A classy operation!
This was two or three years ago.
Now all of a sudden you’re a family values Republican who borrows other peoples' kids so you look like a family man.
Anyway, like we said we hope you win, because you’d be vulnerable in the general.
But, here’s the deal.
The Dirty.com has really taken off. You seem to be a web guy with a magic touch.
And be honest: Is the search for Scottsdale’s hottest chick really over?
We think you’re the guy who can help find her—and help PHXated find its groove.
So, like we said, we hope you win on Tuesday.
But if not .. on Wednesday, drop us a line!
The complete Ben Quayle story is here.
5:01 PM
PHXations—Friday, August 20, 2010
The Hoover Dam bypass is almost done. The most noted part of the new route, which means that the trip from Phoenix to Las Vegas will not include the crawl over the two-lane Hoover Dam, is a gynormous, 900-foot-high bridge.
Reports the Republic:
The Federal Highway Administration has not picked an exact opening date for the $114 million span, officially named the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. At a sneak preview Thursday to showcase the completion of the bridge deck, officials announced an opening gala on Oct. 16. A federal spokeswoman said the bridge will open in early November.
Workers are finishing the last details on the bridge as well as the highway connections and access paths for walkers, gawkers and bicyclists. The work includes installing a pedestrian railing, building a parking lot for visitors, and adding lighting, striping and crash barriers to the approach roads.
The story says that the Arizona approach to Hoover Dam will be closed, so you’ll have to get to Nevada if you want to see the dam proper.
The dam’s official name is the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.
Tillman, of course, is the Arizona football star was was killed in friendly fire in Afghanistan. O'Callaghan is a former governor of Nevada.
Nick Martin is the Valley’s best blogger, Phoenix magazine says.
The mag’s Best of the Valley issue salutes Martin’s blog, Heat City, calling it “a true marvel of D-I-Y journalism”:
Competing against entire newsrooms at The Arizona Republic and other newspapers, Martin took first place in breaking news at the most recent Arizona Press Club Awards for getting the scoop on a series of arrests related to the 2004 bombing of the Scottsdale diversity office
IN other media awards, the Republic’s E.J. Montini is given best columnist and Buildproof.com, which helps folks remodel their kitchens, is deemed best local web site.
The Arizona Department of Commerce says that unemployment in the state held steady at its already high rate of 9.6 percent.
From the PBJ:
The Phoenix metro area’s unemployment rate moved from 8.7 percent in June to 8.8 percent in July
From July 2009 to July 2010 Arizona lost 6,800 jobs, or 0.3 percent of its total workforce.
6:40 AM
Young Martin Cizmar™, Intrepid Journalist, stands by his story!
Young Martin’s post on the New Times blog about how Body Count’s song “Cop Killer” has never been available is engendering a lot of comment.
PHXated discussed the many ways Young Martin was wrong here.
We understand Martin’s too busy to read all the stuff we write about him, so we were happy to see a commenter, doing business under the name “anonymous,” bring up some of the same issues:
nice research martin.
according to wikipedia, it was on the original release of the body count album, then Ice T himself decided to recall it and release the album without the song because the controversy eclipsed the musical merit of the album.
i’m no journalist, but even i can use wikipedia. first, you’re wrong in saying the song was never available, it was. next you say it was censored, which implies someone in power wouldn’t let iced tea release the song, which is not the case at all.
Martin responded with Cizmarian asperity:
Martin Cizmar says:
I never said what you’re claiming I said.
This is way too complex for you, but I’ll break it down:
/1. The list is about things that have never happened during the lifetime of the college class of 2014.
/2. During the 18 years those kids have been alive the recording has never been available in any format whatsoever.
/3. Obviously it was originally released or there would never have been a stink to begin with — this was pre-leak, pre-internet — in order for a song to become an issue it had to actually be pressed and sold. It was. Duh.
/4. Pressure was put on Ice-T and his record label to remove the track. Do you or I know what happened exactly? No. But the fact that Ice-T released it, and people started threatening the people who run his record label with boycotts, and they control his paychecks, creates the censorship. It’s more what’s known as a “chilling effect” from non-government actors than state-sponsored “you can’t say this” type censorship.
So, yes, I was exactly right in that I said it has never been sold during the lifetime of these kids (which is EXACTLY WHAT I SAID, READ THE POST) and that the song has been successfully censored since.
After all, how would that argument about the album and the musical merit, etc. apply to a 99-cent iTunes download?
Martin’s response is a keeper for Cizmarologists.
The insult to someone who had taken the time to write in and correct him.
The doubling down on stupid.
The numerous inaccuracies.
As PHXated noted, Martin’s main crime was not to have explained the Mindlist Mindset List zen correctly. He does in his response. He didn’t in the orignal post.
Yet Martin says he’d been “exactly” right.
When Martin uses the word “exactly,” it reminds me of that line from The Princess Bride:
“I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
For example:
So, yes, I was exactly right in that I said it has never been sold during the lifetime of these kids (which is EXACTLY WHAT I SAID, READ THE POST) and that the song has been successfully censored since.
There are many wrong statements there. He never said it had never been sold during the lifetime of those kids. The word lifetime doesn’t appear in the post, and neither does any similar construction.
It is, in fact, what he didn’t say.
His repeating the assertion, even in capital letters, doesn’t make it any truer.
Neither does the word “Duh.”
Also, as PHXated explained, the song wasn’t “censored.” It was released! That’s the other reason I don’t think Marty knew that the song actually had been available.
How could anyone (Warner Brothers, I guess) censor something when… they had released it?
And even if they did it hadn’t been successfully censored because … as PHXated noted, it’s widely available on mp3 blogs, and even on iTunes in a live version.
Also, the record had been out a long time. it’s not like there were only 10,000 copies sold or anything. You could get it in a used record store. Or steal your older brother’s copy.
Martin’s account of his use of the word “censorship” is interesting. What he calls “chilling effect” I call free speech.
Ice-T, who is a bonehead, is allowed to record a song called “Cop Killer.” Folks who don’t like it are allowed to protest it.
Warners, in turn, is allowed to stop selling the song if it wants. It’s a free country!
May we say, in conclusion, that Our Marty could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d just said:
“Oh, of course. I should have made that clearer in the original post. Will fix.”
p.s.: The Beloit College thingee is called the Mindset List. I called it the Mindlist originally. Will fix!
9:24 AM
Confidential to Young Martin Cizmar™: Don't believe everything you read on the internets!
Young Martin Cizmar, Award Winning Journalist™, was stunned to learn about a searing instance of censorship yesterday.
He immediately took to his digital press in the sky to protest.
Young Martin is a watchdog, of sorts, on this issue.
We blush to remember that even PHXated has come under a discomfiting Cizmarian gaze for similar crimes.
Martin was misinformed, of course, but still.
In his latest case, Our Martin had just been informed that an old song called “Cop Killer,” done by Ice-T’s then metal band, Body Count, waaay back in the early 1990s, had never been available on a recording.
“Wait, You Still Can’t Buy a Copy of "Cop Killer” By Ice-T and Body Count on ANY Format?
Young Martin was stunned:
That’s right, Ice T’s controversial song, recorded with his LA Metal band Body Count, has been successfully censored for 18 years.
That’s despicable.
Martin learned this from a silly little report called “The Mindlist,” done by some folks at Beloit College.
The Mindlist marvels that time has passed and things change.
The setup is that incoming students, being only eighteen or so, aren’t familiar with things that happened more than, uh, eighteen years ago.
To enjoy the list, you have to pretend that incoming college students have no sense of curiosity and don’t avail themselves of the myriad information services at their disposal to learn about the past, but whatever.
Its examples range from the thuddingly obvious:
Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
… to the thuddingly labored:
“Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.”
Young Martin jumped on this entry:
‘Cop Killer’ by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording.
He seemed not to apprehend—and in any case didn’t vouchsafe to readers—what PHXated just explained, that the list-makers were looking at that narrow eighteen-year period.
He didn’t seem to appreciate that “Cop Killer' had of course been released.
It was on the Body Count record, which came out, uh, nineteen years ago.
Ice-T was trying to be controversial and push the envelope in the naughty rap realm of the time.
He succeeded, and got his little nosed burned in the understandable furor that erupted. He said then, and says now, that it was his decision to pull the song off the album, not that of his label, which was Warner Brothers.
Also, even if Warners had made him pull the song, it’s not “censorship.” It’s their label, and they can release or not release what they want.
And they put it out in the first place!
After all the work Beloit and Young Martin put into this non-issue, it feels a bit churlish to point out …
… the song is available all sorts of places. You can get a live version of it on the iTunes Store, for example.
Or download it from one of more than a dozen mp3 blogs listed just here, on Elbo.ws.
And finally, let’s remember that some of these tough-talking anti-police rap guys, Ice-T prominent among them, were chuckleheads.
The complete PHXated Young Martin Cizmar™ archive is here.
7:44 AM
The complete Ben Quayle/Brock Landers links list!
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a wee little web site, Dirty Scottsdale.
On the site, folks sent in pics of marginal nightlife people, to which was paired commentary distinguished as much by its grammatical uncertainty as its utterly skanky content—generally asseverations about venereal disease and the like.
One of its early noted contributors was a guy named Brock Landers.
Landers was a man on a mission, namely to find Scottsdale’s First Foxy Chick.
This was in 2007.
Flash forward three years. Dirty Scottsdale is now a network of sites, all published under the name of The Dirty.
And meanwhile, a young man named Little Benny Quayle decides to run for Congress. This is a venue open to him if not too many other folks of his fairly undistinguished life work because he happens to be the son of a former vice president of the United States.
All is going well (well, fairly well), until a bombshell drops in a story on a national political web site.
The story says young Quayle had been a writer for Dirty Scotsdale, under the name “Brock.”
In the story, Quayle denied that it was he!
Politico: Quayle denies link to Scottsdale site
“I was not involved in the site,” Quayle said.
But the story quoted the site’s founder, Nik Richie, who would seem to have been in a position to know, saying that Quayle had posted eight to ten times on the blog.
Soon, he weighed in with his version of events on The Dirty.
The Dirty: I Think It is Time ….
He wrote:
Since the beginning (DirtyScottsdale.com) three years ago, I have gotten the same question from the DIRTY ARMY from all over the world: “Who is Brock from the Dirty Celeb Brock’s Chick?”
I have kept it a secret until right now… the mystery man is Ben Quayle aka Brock Landers, the son of Vice President Dan Quayle. If you are a DIRTY ARMY Republican, vote for Ben Quayle because he was one of the original creators of DirtyScottsdale.com which evolved into TheDirty.com.
Phoenix’s 12 News then ran this report, which features Quayle changing his story, saying:
“I just posted comments to try to drive some traffic."
KPNX 12 News: Quayle linked to thedirty.com: Congressional candidate was trying to help out
That got Politico back into the action.
Politico: Ben Quayle changes story on web site
The site took an uncharacteristically harsh tone with the political neophyte:
Ben Quayle had a hard time getting his story straight Tuesday….
And not just about writing for the site:
Richie also told POLITICO that Quayle introduced him to attorneys at the Phoenix law firm where he worked, Snell & Wilmer, so his Internet site could incorporate. But Quayle told POLITICO Tuesday morning that he couldn’t recall whether he had made the introduction.
Later in the day, however, Quayle confirmed to several Phoenix TV stations that he introduced Richie to an intellectual property attorney at Snell & Wilmer.
“He wanted an IP attorney, and I referred him to one,” Quayle told 12News. “I don’t know if they met or not.”
The story also said that “Brock”’s full name was “Brock Landers.”
At this point, the guy who founded Dirty Scottsdale and the Dirty.com is getting mad that Quayle is denying his association.
He responds:
The Dirty: Ben Quayle is Brock Landers
Richie links to what he says is some of Quayle/Landers' best work:
The Dirty: Brock’s Chick
Wondering where Quayle got the name Brock Landers?
Meanwhile, Politico gleefully stays on the story:
Politico: Quayle’s bump on road to Congress
Politico: Quayle Lashes out at political foes
Says Quayle:
“It is amazing that the media will take a casual acquaintance and turn it into something tawdry, taking the word of a smut peddler at face value."
New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins takes a few swipes at Quayle, too.
NYT: More American Idols:
Consider Ben Quayle, the son of the former vice president. He’s running for Congress in Arizona. He’s been accused of both using a phony family in his campaign pictures and helping to found a local porn site. In response, he’s come up with a new ad in which he announces that Barack Obama is the “worst president in history,” swiftly bemoans “drug cartels in Mexico, tax cartels in D.C.” and concludes that “somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place.”
Talk about a clear agenda for change. Although Quayle does show a terrible disrespect for the records of Warren Harding and James Buchanan.
And more locally, the right-wing blogger Greg Patterson says the game might be over for Young Benny Quayle.
Espresso Pundit: If this is true then Ben Quayle has no chance of going to Congress…:
The site is awful and if it’s true that Quayle is one of the founders and authors then his political career is over.
His prediction:
If it’s too late and Quayle’s name and money let him squeak through the primary then he will get crushed by CD 3 Democratic nominee Jon Hulburd (who will go on to be crushed in 2012 by Jim Waring or Dean Martin).
To distract attention, Quayle reveals himself as a noted presidential historian, contending, in a new TV commercial, that “Barack Obama is the worst president in history”:
Everyone chuckles for a day, and then goes back to asking about Dirty Scottsdale.
Meanwhile, on the national level, Quayle keeps lying. He tells ABCnews.com, too, that he only knew Richie through referring him to a lawyer.
ABC News: Ben Quayle Denies Blogging for Racy Website.
“I am not Brock Landers,” Quayle says.
Then, on Friday, Quayle lied a few more times on CNN’s John King show.
Amusingly, King is less interested in Dirty Scottsdale than he is in Quayle’s recent contentions about Obama. (“He’s only been in office eighteen months!”)
CNN: John King USA.
“I’ve been consistent with my story from the beginning”
“I had no affiliation with that website.”
Displaying, perhaps, his father’s way with handling a gaffe, Quayle, incredibly, keeps denying he was Brock Landers to the Associated Press:
AP: Like father, like son? Quayle stumbles in Arizona
Asked about the site this week, Quayle told The Associated Press that he “wrote a couple of satirical and fictional pieces for a satirical website” but that he quit doing so once the website shifted its editorial direction away from satire. Richie says the site’s content and tone have not changed from the days when Quayle was connected to it.
When asked if he wrote as Brock Landers, Quayle said: “There’s all sorts of posts under that alias and that’s not me. That’s really all I’ve got to say about that.”
Back in Arizona, the Arizona Capitol Times advances the story, discovering that Quayle’s involvement went back deeper than previously known:
Arizona Capitol Times: Quayle’s ties to ‘The Dirty’ founder began in 2005
Recalled Richie, referred to here by his real name, Hooman Karamian:
“There were chicks all over the place, trying to hook up with celebrities,” Karamian said. “We moseyed around the bar and casino tables, just making fun of chicks.”
Karamian, who made a comment on his website about a “crazy hooker” in Tahoe said he was referring to that night, but said he was only talking about a woman that he and Quayle had assumed was a prostitute and on drugs.
“I said (on TheDirty.com), ‘Hey, do you remember that crazy hooker?’ because we saw some hooker who was acting crazy,” Karamian told the Arizona Capitol Times. “I wasn’t implying that he had sex with a hooker at all.”
Thanks for clearing that up, Nik!
On Saturday, the Dirty bites back some more:
The Dirty: Ben Quayle is the Pinocchio of politics
… And on Sunday, a little more:
The Dirty: Brock Landers’ aka Ben Quayle’s Family Values Campaign
10:22 PM
Ben Quayle lies on John King
“I’ve been consistent with my story from the beginning,” he says.
“I had no affiliation with that website.”
11:47 AM
How AZCentral.com sucks, no. 38 in a series
The Republic has a bunch of stories about Rick Romley’s massive document release today.
It’s almost impossible to find them on AZCentral.com. Robert Robb’s column on Thomas should have been linked from the main story, but it isn’t.
There’s also an editorial. That wasn’t linked either.
In looking for the editorial, I noticed a prominent link to something called the Arizona Repubilc Editorial Board blog.
The subhed for the blog is “Editorials from the Arizona Republic.”
The blog stopped being updated in October 2009.
8:18 AM
Rick Romley: Unleash the documents!
Maricopa County prosecutor Rick Romley released a ton of documents about the crazy investigations Joe Arpaio’s office and Romley’s predecessor, Andrew Thomas, waged against their political enemies.
The pair kept pursuing the investigation, even though each venue they took it to—independent prosecutor, grand jury, and then prosecutor in another county—all rejected the pair’s claims.
The Republic lays out just how pathetic the case was, and how to this day Thomas fudges the truth:
After weeks of meeting, the [grand] jury decided to end the inquiry.
Both Thomas' prosecutor and officials in Romley’s office described an “end the inquiry” as rare.
On Thursday, Thomas said … [h]is office asked the grand jury to end the investigation.
Had the grand jury wanted to exonerate those under investigation, Thomas said, it could have issued a “no bill,” which means there was not enough evidence to indict.
However, one of Thomas' own prosecutors had explained to the jury during orientation that to “end the inquiry” meant “the case is so bad, there’s no further evidence that could be brought to you folks,” according to the transcripts.
“Frankly, I have been doing this a long time, and I have had three in my whole career,” deputy county attorney William Moore had said.
Robert Robb piles on here.
The paper’s editorial page is scathing:
It reflects most harshly on Thomas, who now is running for the Republican nomination for attorney general.
Thomas told The Republic’s Craig Harris on Thursday that Romley “has falsely claimed the grand jury found no evidence of wrongdoing” and that the release “vindicates” his office and proves his claims of county corruption.
Against the stark contrast of the grand jurors' own words, Thomas' arguments seem strikingly self-serving.
Citizens who supposedly could be persuaded by Thomas' prosecutors to indict a ham sandwich instead have eaten his lunch.
Despite it all, Sheriff Arpaio clings tenaciously to these now-thoroughly discredited charges. It is time he paid attention to the people and ended this contemptible inquiry once and for all.
8:11 AM
Politico continues to dog Young Benny Quayle
Politico’s latest encapsulation of Quayle’s situation is hard to argue with:
Republican congressional candidate Ben Quayle’s glossy campaign photos and polished talking points paint for voters a portrait of a longtime Arizonan, accomplished attorney and family man who will bring a “new generation” to Washington.
The claims reflect the small biographical exaggerations that often accompany a political newcomer’s first campaign. The reality is that Quayle has held three jobs in four years, posed for pictures in campaign literature with children that were not his, and grew up in Washington with a famous father, former Vice President Dan Quayle, whose influential friends have given generously to the younger Quayle’s campaign.
But Quayle, 33, has had to confront a much bigger credibility issue this week after a blogger revealed that he had once been a contributing writer for Dirty Scottsdale, a raunchy, sex-themed website that covered the club scene in his adopted home town before morphing into the national gossip site TheDirty.com.
[…]
Quayle’s connection to the site has undercut the carefully honed image of a conservative with strong family values, and his inept handling of its disclosure brings up a different association with the Quayle name – his father’s gaffe-prone history.
Meanwhile, Quayle released a new campaign commercial today, in which, he calls Barack Obama “the worst president in history.”
… which is pretty funny.
Quayle’s father, of course, is frequently cited—here and here for example—as among the worst vice presidents in U.S. history.
And Young Benny Quayle himself isn’t exactly going to go down as one of the best congressional candidates in history.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/22/uselections2008.usa
10:05 PM
By the way ... where did the name "Brock Landers" come from?
… Apparently from the film Boogie Nights.
Young Benny Quayle took the name from an interesting character.
I haven’t seen the film recently, but it comes from a film-within-a-film, “Brock Landers: Angels Live In My Town,” in which our hero, the massively endowed Dirk Diggler, casts himself as an omnisexual crime-detecting stud:
Brock Landers: You still hungry?
Jessie St. Vincent: Starving.
Brock: [Unzipping pants] Then feast on that.
The video above is just the fake film credits.
You can see the full raunchy scene with the dialogue here:
8:55 AM
A second (and more important) big unanswered Ben Quayle question
… did wife Tiffany know about his moonlighting gig looking for Scottsdale’s Firstest Foxy Lady?
I read that the man the Sonoran Alliance calls “Benny” Quayle was married “recently.”
Quayle’s double life as the skanky Dirty Scottsdale’s Brock Landers was about three years ago.
8:49 AM
Republic Watch: The revenge of Scruffy McPoochie, Living section editor
Scruffy McPoochie, the Arizona Republic’s Living section editor, loves stories about dogs.
He’ll print stories about anything if there’s a dog in it.
Dogs on Twitter: “Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
Dogs on Facebook: “Busy social network for the furry set.”
There was a story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
And, of course, the hard-bitten McPoochie’s finest moment, just five weeks later:
Another story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
(Some more examples of the section’s indefatigable appetite for such stuff here. McPoochie also has a thing for Starbucks.)
Even a grizzled vet like McPoochie can still get excited about his job.
Last week his ancient heart must have begun to race when he saw a new dog-related story come over the wires.
The subject? Dog insurance!
Wire stories like that—they come to him free, with no need for making his staff do any work—are kibbles from heaven.
McPoochie’s tail wagged excitedly as he read the expository prose:
Typically, pet owners pay a monthly premium. As their pet needs veterinary services, they pay the bills upfront, then submit them for reimbursement.
Some plans cover what in human terms are considered “well visits,” including vaccinations and checkups. But many cover only costs associated with a pet’s illness.
Not just a dog story—a story that explains how insurance works!
He’s a key part of the Arizona Republic’s secret plan to bore people to death.
Anyway, it was the work of a few minutes to whip up a hedline—“Pet health insurance can ease vet-bill shock”—and toss it into the paper.
McPoochie must have stopped reading there, because the rest of the story doesn’t really fulfill the promise of that hedline.
Consider:
Even with pet insurance, hassle-free coverage is no guarantee. Nicole Abbott found this out the hard way.
When the Chicago attorney learned that her company offered pet insurance as part of its benefits package, she immediately signed up her beloved pugs Bella and Chooch.
At the end of last year, Chooch developed an unusual type of stones in his bladder, requiring $500 worth of testing and a $1,200 surgery.
But the insurance company denied the claim, saying Chooch – who previously had problems with routine bladder stones – had a pre-existing condition.
“I tried everything, and they wound up saying I’d have to appeal to the state agency that oversees insurance,” Abbott said.
“I’d spend hours at that point, so I just said, ‘Forget it. It’s not worth it.’ ”
Shortly after Abbott got Bella, the dog had a seizure and required hundreds of dollars worth of treatment. The pet-insurance company claimed Bella’s seizure came one day shy of her policy going into effect, so the treatment wasn’t covered. Abbott disputed that claim, but again hit a brick wall.
But yesterday could not have been a good day for McPoochie.
He has a new threat to face.
Another editor is, you might say, pissing on his territory.
Consider this story, “Popularity rises for pet health insurance”, published yesterday in the Republic’s business section.
It was the second story in as many days the Arizona Republic has published about dog insurance.
McPoochie could see, however, that his competition was not in his league.
It’s hard to believe, but the paper’s business section published a story not just on the same subject, but demonstrably worse than the wire story McPoochie came up with.
The wire story, from the Chicago Tribune, led with a pretty good anecdote about an adorable Lab who swallowed a teacup.
The Republic’s stirring lede, on its version of the story?
The humanization of pets and the increased costs of veterinary care have sparked a burgeoning industry: pet health care.
Sizzling prose!
And the Republic didn’t bother to do what the Tribune did as a matter of course—find someone who can illustrate the down side of the story.
I mean, the Tribune article was a shitty idea for an article, but it was reported out with integrity.
The Republic story doesn’t give readers the downside, and instead spends a lot of time letting people who sell pet insurance talk about the industry’s rosy future …
Within the next few years, it’s likely the rising cost of veterinary care will increasingly convert pet owners without health-care plans into clients, said Doris Amdur, founder of United Pet Care, a health-care company that offers discount plans.
… and relating stories that don’t make sense, like this one:
Teri Morris secured pet insurance for her dog Bella, 9, about 5 years ago.
Although Bella hasn’t had any major health problems, Morris knows vet bills can get expensive quickly.
Morris' dog Scooby died a year ago, after she spent about $8,000 in vet bills to treat his diabetes, thyroid dysfunction and bladder cancer, she said.
“At least some of that would have been covered if he had been insured,” she said.
Ok, so she had insurance for one dog for five years, but he hasn’t gotten sick. And she had another dog, who died a year ago, but he wasn’t insured? Why didn’t she insure both dogs?
Somewhere, Scruffy McPoochie is laughing.
6:32 AM
Arizona has more than one hysterical and reckless sheriff
When you see a Drudge hedline like this, you figure it’s about Joe Arpaio:
It’s actually Paul Babeu, the attention queen who appeared in John McCain’s “Complete the danged fence” commercial.
The story is just a posting on a far-right fake-news web site that allows Babeu to natter on about how Barack Obama and the ACLU are teaming up to stop him, Babeu, from protecting the country from a “homeland security threat.”
6:55 AM
A local legislator and publisher has his wages garnished
From the Republic:
State Rep. Cloves Campbell Jr.’s paycheck from his $24,000 annual legislative salary is a lot smaller these days because a judge has ordered automatic payroll deductions to pay for a reception a non-profit group claims it had arranged for him three years ago.
Campbell for two years ignored a lawsuit from an organization called the Leadership Consortium, which said it had spent $15,000 on a D.C. reception for him. The paper says the group gives out minority scholarships.
Campbell denied to the Republic the event had been held for him. As for missing all those court appearances?
“Actually, every time (the court) sent something, I was out of town,” said Campbell, adding that he “can’t recall exactly” the details of those trips.
Campbell is the son of Cloves Campbell Sr., one of the founders of the Arizona Informant, a local black newspaper. Its web site is here.
I couldn’t find his title on the site proper, but local news reports have identified him as “co-publisher” of the paper.
6:38 AM
Memories of the Sombrero Playhouse, Part 4: The Final Chapter!
PHXated has been speaking with Gary Gohring, who in the late 1970s, managed the Sombrero Playhouse, at the time the only place in Phoenix and one of the few places in the entire Valley one could see art-house movie fare.
In the final segment, Gohring talks about his career at New Times, where he was film critic, and the end of the Sombrero.
Part one is here.
Part two is here.
Part three is here.
PHXated would love to hear your memories of movie-going in Phoenix at the time, or see any old Sombrero schedules you have!
PHXated: How did you come to work for New Times? What did you do after that? What do you do now?
Gary Gohring: I sent three sample movie reviews to the New Times in the Fall of 1973 in the hope of writing movie reviews for them. The editors at the time were kind enough to ignore their mediocrity and asked me to write a small column listing all the films currently in town.
Being an ASU undergraduate at the time, I jumped at the chance to earn a whopping $15 a column. I eventually ended up writing movie reviews for the New Times on a sporadic basis from 1973 through early 1977, and then on a regular basis from April 1978 to April 1982. I really appreciate the opportunity Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey gave me when they took back control of the paper in 1978.
I tried to write reviews that would get readers to look at a movie and its creators in a new and original way. For me, the best movie reviewers do this. Unfortunately, most readers of movie reviews (sadly, an ever shrinking number) and advertisers want reviews that reflect their taste and universal opinion. I was not successful in accomplishing what I wanted, and I never did fit the other model.
I was fortunate, though, during my tenure there to work with a great staff and some terrific writers, most notably Bart Bull, Bob Boze Bell, Sandy Lovejoy, and Dewey Webb.
I have quietly faded into oblivion since then, having moved from Phoenix in 1992. However, I still go to movies and enjoy viewing and discussing them as much as ever.
PHXated: I moved away in the late ‘70s, came back soon after to visit and … the Sombrero was just gone, with nothing there but a vacant lot. What lead to its closing?
G.G. Disagreements between Richard Charleton, the property owner, and Morey Levine, our owner, most notably concerning our showing of soft-core fare such as Emmanuelle 2, came to a peak in the summer of 1978. The most immediate result was that we lost our parking and had to lease a not-too-convenient lot nearby.
These conflicts, inconveniences, and subsequent costs to deal with them escalated, driving away patrons and affecting both programming and the bottom line.
Then we lost our exclusivity to show The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Also, there were only so many times we could show King of Hearts. The theater closed in early 1981.
Even had we not encountered the problems we did, we would probably have been buried by the coming video revolution. I believe the property was subsequently sold, but to whom I do not remember. I know the building was subsequently torn down, but I do not recall when or by whom.
PHXated: Gary, thanks again for responding!
G.G.: Hope this incomplete recollection helps in some way.
9:31 AM
AZCentral.com: Your window to all the news from the nation and world!
From AZCentral’s front page this a.m.:
7:28 AM
Brahm Resnik shows how it's done
In stark contrast to the bad job Bill Buckmaster did with the senate candidates last night in Tuscon, 12 News' Brahm Resnik took on Andrew Thomas this a.m. on “Sunday Showdown” with a great deal of toughness.
Thomas took the questions with equanimity, but it’s hard to see what more Resnik could have done.
Check it out:
1:28 PM
J.D.: "You're a liar!" McCain: "You're a pig!" Tea Party guy: "I want a popsicle!"
(Rewritten and updated, with video embedded.)
The GOP senatorial primary debate in Tucson last night was a sorry spectacle.
PHXated again thought that that bozo J.D. Hayworth came across well. He’s failing at the polls; his ludicrous past as an infomercial pitchman for a skanky company has come back to bite him on the ass; and he looks like … well, he looks like a clown.
Still, each of his answers was coherent (within the confines of the nutty far-right philosophy he was espousing) and energetic, and he came across far stronger, in command and in control of both the physical space and the dialog than McCain.
Here’s the video:
Or you can watch the event on the KUAT web site here.
The moderator, Bill Buckmaster, of the long-running public-affairs show “Arizona Illustrated,” on Tucson’s KUAT, was a caricature of the milquetoasty public broadcasting guy.
He didn’t ask a single tough question.
I mean, I guess I didn’t expect him to ask McCain about the spousal abuse described in the book Game Change, but he could have asked him about some of the terrible decisions he made during that presidential campaign, or even his recent statement that he never considered himself a maverick.
Instead, Buckmaster played entirely to the candidates' own talking points, at one point literally letting the candidates discuss the pressing issue of which was the most conservative.
There were no follow-ups, nothing that asked any of the candidates to deal with political and social realities of the issues facing Arizona.
At the end, completely giving up, he let the candidates each get free time to “set the record straight” about anything else said about them in the debate.
This produced the following exchange:
Hayworth [turning to face McCain]: “John, you wrote the book, Worth the Fighting For. You relayed what happened in South Carolina in 2000….
“You wrote, ‘Given the chance between losing and lying, I chose lying.’ John I’m sorry to say that it appears history is repeating itself here. As you deal with half truths, as you deal with blatant character attacks, as you deal with failing to own up to mistakes you have made that have hurt our nation.
“That’s what I most lament about this campaign.”
McCain [grimacing]: That’s a pretty strong attack there, and I’m tempted to respond.
“But I’m reminded of the advice from my old friend Bob Dole. Never get into a wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”
McCain then was given time to yammer on about “doing more for our vets,” though he and Hayworth were both part of the six-year-long Republican reign that produced the pointless war in Iraq, which has had a fairly deleterious affect on quite a few U.S. service people, and the lax oversight of Walter Reed Hospital, which created a big scandal for the Bush administration a few years back.
A minute or two later, the moderator let Jim Deakin, the soi-disant Tea Party candidate, have the last of the final statements. He began:
“It’s been a lot of fun. Next time, popsicles!”
PHXated’s live-blogging of the first Hayworth-McCain debate is here.
6:47 AM
Nick Martin joining the Arizona Guardian
This sucks for fans of Martin, because the Guardian is a pay site. Here’s what the local political blogger said on his site, Heat City:
That model has worked for the Guardian so far. Now, the founders are hoping to build on that accomplishment. They are open to new ideas and experiments, and that’s where I’ll be playing a role. What does that mean specifically? I’ll let you know once we figure it out.
Heat City will still be here. This site will remain a place for me to write stories that don’t have a home anywhere else. The only difference now is that my political (and sometimes legal) stories will be appearing in the Arizona Guardian.
More about Martin here.
The Guardian is here.
10:26 AM
The mysterious disappearing All-Star Game boycott of Arizona
Yesterday, you’ll remember, the Republic front page was all abuzz with talk at this year’s All-Star Game in Anaheim about boycotting next year’s game, which is currently scheduled for Chase Field in Phoenix.
Funny, today the paper fronts another big story about the All-Star Game coming to Phoenix…
… with nary a word about boycotts or SB 1070.
The same writer, too—Nick Piecoro.
This is what I hate about the Republic. How dishonest it is.
From the outside, it sure does seem like there were some high-level discussions at the paper about the splashiness of the possible boycott story Tuesday.
One might even speculate that some behind-the-scenes power brokers with some financial interest in the game’s being held here gave the paper hell.
And then, obviously, someone ordered up a “redo”—essentially the same story, scrubbed of anything that might offend the town’s sports swells.
It’s almost like rewriting history.
10:27 AM
The Espresso Pundit catches the Republic in a big error
We don’t really get Greg Patterson, who blogs as the Espresso Pundit.
He’s one of those guys who is always mad.
But why?
Let’s see… he was born white and male in a country fabulously accommodating to his type.
There were eight years of national Republican rule, complete with tax cuts, which surely benefitted him more than most…and his buddies have been in control of the AZ legislature since who knows when, delivering him lots more tax cuts.
The courts are turning the country over to the gun nets and corporations, his party got us into two wars that keep the Halliburtons of the world in the chips, and the country’s most popular news channel is an arm of the GOP.
But he’s always upset!
It’s weird.
Anyway, Patterson got the Republic dead to rights on a mistake in a recent editorial, which claimed that the state’s gun laws made restaurants and bars provide storage for gun owners if they don’t allow weapons.
He’s right about the correction, too… what should a paper do when an incorrect fact makes an entire article or editorial invalid?
8:40 AM
Arizona Republic editor Jeffrey Dozbaba dies
From the paper:
Most of his newspaper career was spent at The Republic. He began in 1978 as a copy editor, became sports editor in 1991, assistant manager editor in 1993, and then senior editor, senior director of the newsroom’s Information Center and finally was named a manager editor in March 2008. He retired in June 2009.
“He helped lead The Republic’s local news coverage and his efforts have left a lasting legacy for the Phoenix community,” said Randy Lovely, Republic editor and vice president for news. “He was a hard worker, but he played with equal energy and could also be counted on to lighten the mood and add laughter to the room.”
I don’t know if this is a Republic tradition or not, but the obit is oddly un-nihil nisi bonum:
[I]t was hard to escape some of the ribbing Dozbaba liked to dish out.
“He could insult you like nobody’s business,” Leonard said, “but he always did it with a smile.”
[…]
Former Republic reporter Bob Golfen, who knew him since college, said some of Dozbaba’s ideas, however, could be a bit hard to follow.
“He was a smart guy with great instincts, but he wasn’t always tremendously articulate,” he said.
When reading over a story, Dozbaba might say it was good but that something was missing.
“He seemed to have a deeper understanding of what we needed to do, even if he couldn’t always say it,” Golfen said.
7:43 AM
Local journo John Leptich dies of cancer
The EVT says Leptich, a longtime copy editor and report for the organization, died Monday of cancer:
A native of Chicago who frequented Wrigley Field where he met his wife-to-be in 1975, Leptich had relocated to Arizona in 1995 after working 16 years for the Chicago Tribune as a sports writer and sports copy editor. While there in 1984, he co-authored a book, This Date in St. Louis Cardinals History.
Leptich has been fighting cancer for five years—but kept working:
Last year, Leptich won first place in the Arizona Press Club’s writing contest, breaking news category, for a story about a woman who saved her six children from a burning house trailer. The story also won first place in the best news story category of the Associated Press Managing Editors/Arizona Newspaper Association’s writing contest.
Details on the funeral and donations are in the EVT obit.
7:12 AM
The Arizona Republic prints another press release from Starbucks!
You hate to keep beating up on the Arizona Republic, but it’s just so … infuriating sometimes.
We’ve noted a while back how the paper devoted two whole pages in one of its zoned sections to a story about a resort opening up a Starbucks store inside.
More recently, the paper’s business section ran a huge front-page feature about how Starbucks was introducing a new cup size.
Last week, not to be outdone, the paper’s pathetic Living section gets into the act, with a big illustrated front-page story about …
… a plastic cup the chain is selling:
The Starbucks Cold Reusable To-Go Cups are back in stores this summer.
Well, sometimes, because double-walled plastic cups, which mimic the clear-plastic cups the company uses for its iced coffees and the like, are highly sought by many Starbucks devotees and get snapped up quickly.
The piece goes on for about 15 more paragraphs.
3:52 PM
More important dog news from the Arizona Republic!
In recent posts we have noted that the Living section of the Arizona Republic has published a lot of stories about dogs—more than you’d expect from a paper that doesn’t print enough news about people.
We finally came to conclusion that the section was being edited by a dog, and even found a picture of the editor in question, which you can see here.
Reading the Living section and keeping in mind that that’s the fellow in charge helps in understanding some of the editorial choices the paper makes on a given day.
The pieces were in most cases crappy little wire-service stories about pet-related products or ephemera.
There was the one about dogs on Facebook:
“Busy social network for the furry set.”
And one about dogs on Twitter:
“Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
There was a story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
And then, mind-blowingly, another story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
While examining some old files here at PHXated world headquarters we came across a torn-out front page of the Living section from February.
We realized that we’d missed some of the paper’s hard-hitting dog coverage.
We mention it now because it’s quite a story.
It’s about a church (in LA, not Phoenix, because this is just another space-filling wire story), that allows dogs.
This is how it begins, emphasis added:
As the Presbyterian service was about to start, one of the congregants was being disruptive, making a spectacle of himself once again on a Sunday. But that’s what other members of the Los Angeles church have come to expect from Mr. Booby.
At Covenant Presbyterian Church in the city’s Westchester neighborhood, dogs like Mr. Booby are welcome congregants at the Sunday night services, where howling and sudden bouts of scratching may interrupt prayers, and the collection plate holds treats for poodles and golden retrievers alike.
The hedline?
“Howl-lelujah: Church includes dogs”
12:33 PM
Sarah Fenske leaving New Times
At the end of Fenske’s typically unputdownable last column for the paper*, she tells readers she’s leaving town.
Her next gig will be as managing editor of the Riverfront Times, the New Times paper in St. Louis**.
Her envoi:
SO LONG, FAREWELL
In case you haven’t heard, I’m leaving Arizona to work as the managing editor at New Times' sister paper in St. Louis, the Riverfront Times. And it’s fitting, I suppose, that my final column in Phoenix is about the Housing Authority of Maricopa County.
To me, this story exemplifies everything I hate about Phoenix — as well as everything I’ve grown to love. I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the country where con men prosper so quickly, where rules are broken so casually, where the rule of law is something that’s enforced only on the poor and the alien.
In almost any other big city, a guy like Doug Lingner would still be setting tile, not given the keys to a major nonprofit organization. In other places, people would be up in arms demanding Joe Arpaio’s resignation. (Say what you will about immigration, but this clown has squandered $45 million in lawyer fees and insurance payments! $45 million!) In other states, too, a guy facing a credible threat of disbarment — ahem, Andrew Thomas! — would not be considered a viable candidate for state attorney general.
Let’s face it: Shysters thrive here. Too many people are transplants who don’t care. Too many people hew too closely to ideology and have no interest in getting at the truth.
And yet, I’ve met more brave people in this state than anywhere else I’ve lived. It’s been easy to be a reporter here. For every con man, there’s someone willing to turn him in. For every Doug Lingner, there’s a Janet Belfield.
I may not miss the dry white heat of Phoenix summers. But I will miss having this weekly soapbox. And I’ll miss the brave people of Arizona, too.
* It’s about how the woman in the Maricopa County Housing Authority who has been fired after helping bring down former director Doug Lingner, who was driven out of the agency after numerous investigations and press exposes. Fenske:
Belfield, a longtime agency employee, is the one who blew the whistle on Lingner. And last week, she was fired by the housing authority. No severance. No chance to resign.
There’s not a doubt in my mind that her treatment is directly related to her attempts to expose Lingner.
** The New Times parent company is technically called Village Voice Media. It’s run out of Phoenix and Phoenix New Times remains its flagship.
7:01 AM
EaterAZ spanks Noca
The local food blog likes the Arcadia restaurant helmed by Eliot Wexler:
On a regular visit, diners leave Noca with a check average of $40+ and that is by no means a lavish meal, but definitely worth the money spent. Noca generally has good service, top notch comfort food in a fine dining environment, and of course the affable Wexler keenly and shrewdly working the floor. Wexler has made an art out of giving just the right amount of attention to the right people, ensuring their loyalty.
But it doesn’t like a new gambit the place has embarked on. “Sunday Simple Suppers” is supposed to get you three courses for $35:
It was just two small/medium-sized pieces of fried chicken on a bed of potato salad—ZZZ… And therein lies the rub (or not enough in their case). No biscuit and honey (as advertised). No special somethin’-somethin’ goin’ on with the chicken. No item on the plate that seemed to justify a (we’re figuring) $18 or $19 entree price.
[A chef like Daniel] Boulud, worth it or not, creates an experience in your mouth in a dish that is not likely easily found elsewhere. Noca’s could easily have been found at KFC for about 80% less cost. […] In fact, it seemed odd that after actually spending double than the advertised $35 menu price (we had two drinks, plus tip and tax) that we should still be hungry–a common complaint we later heard from other diners that night.
EaterAZ is here.
NOca’s Sunday Simple Supper menu is here.
8:55 PM
The Republic has it wrong: There is a First Friday this week
Despite this AZ Central front page this a.m., there's still a First Friday on Friday, just no shutdown of Roosevelt Street with the accompanying street vendors for the July and August events.
Besides the front-page graphic, the accompanying story muddles the issue too, particularly with the hedline, “Gathering won’t be held July, August as First Friday evolves.”
ArtLink page here:
7:24 AM
PHXations—Saturday, June 26, 2010
Hey Republic… If you’re doing a story about “Silent Sunday” at South Mountain Park—that’s the no cars day on the fourth Sunday of the month—would it kill you to note that when the next fourth Sunday is, so readers don’t have to go check their calendars?
For the record, fourth Sunday is tomorrow, so you can hike in the park without cars roaring by.
12:23 PM
Duke Tully R.I.P.: The comments!
From the post earlier today noting the passing of Duke Tully, the publisher of the Arizona Republic who resigned in disgrace after admitting he’d faked a lifetime of war exploits:
Francine Hardaway:
I was one of Duke Tully’s charmees in the 80s when I had my PR company. He would take me to lunch at Avanti, where he would have two martinis and tell me war stories. I knew nothing about the Air Force, so I had no way to judge truth. I was on a ski vacation with my daughters when the fraud story broke, and we still laugh about it.
Anon:
Perhaps, Francine, you would like to consider that one mistake does not define a person. That one fabrication that was difficult to let go of made him any less honourable, kind, or loving. In between your bouts of laughter, maybe you should reflect on just what gives you the right to judge someone so harshly. I’m sure you’ve never made a regrettable decision in your entire, small-minded life. I hope there are none who hold you in such low regard for a transgression of your own.
APC:
Duke was more than this one event. He was a good man, and came clean before the pressure from political enemies. He’d been dropping hints for some time, since he was wracked with guilt. Even though he was advised to quietly stop telling war stories and distance himself from it, he refused to stay quiet. THAT is the mark of an honorable man. Admitting his mistake and acknowledging fault.
And did he get any help from John McCain, after helping McCain so much? Not so much as a word of sympathy. McCain had gotten what he wanted, and washed his hands with no compassion.
Duke will be missed.
PHXated observes:
We have known Ms. Hardaway for only a short time, but are sure that her transgressions are equally entertaining but less hypocritical.
What the Republic obit didn’t mention was that Tully presided over the Republic when it was fat and self-satisfied—and a far-right defender of the status quo. (Pulliam newspapers were famously rigid and atavistic.)
The lives of all minority groups were attenuated at that time—gays and women, blacks and Hispanics. In the meantime, the small-mindedness of the city fathers (they were all of course men) laid the groundwork for the state today: A backward minor republic with a crappy, undeveloped economy; small-minded citizens; a ruefully mediocre educational system; and a bunch of social metrics identical to those of the Deep South.
We delighteded in his downfall because it was a small but enjoyable payback for those decades of intolerance and neglect.
And it’s also a reminder that our poltroons of the moment—that’s you, Russell Pearce, and you, Joe Arpaio!—may yet have their comeuppance!
1:30 PM
Duke Tully dies
The former publisher of the Arizona Republic died yesterday in Florida.
No worries that the paper would soft-pedal the scandal that drove him out of town; the obit goes into delightful detail:
Darrow “Duke” Tully, the former Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette publisher who faked an elaborate military career and resigned in disgrace, has died of complications from a stroke in Tampa. He was 78.
Tully was publisher of The Republic and Gazette until December 1985, when he resigned after learning that his political enemies were investigating his war record.
Tom Collins, Maricopa County attorney at the time, planned to have a news conference to expose Tully, who claimed to have been an Air Force combat pilot in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
[…]
Longtime friend and employee Bill Shover said Tully’s dual existence was driven by his need to win his father’s approval.
“He was rejected by the Air Force because he had bad vision and flat feet,” said Shover, former director of public affairs for Phoenix Newspapers Inc., which owned The Republic and The Gazette during Tully’s tenure.
Tully’s brother was killed in World War II during a training mission and his father criticized him for not becoming a war hero, Shover recalled.
That’s when Tully turned his sights on newspapers and was told he could curry favor with a small Indiana paper if he pretended to be a veteran.
From there, Tully’s stories about his military exploits escalated.
6:44 AM
4The Arizona Republic continues to be so weird. (An ongoing series)
Yesterday, in its Your Home section, the paper introduced a new gardening columnist, Cathy Babcock.
Babcock is a former director at the Desert Botanical Garden and seems like a nice addition to the section, and all is well and good.
Except … instead of just letting Babcock write something, the editor decided the section needed to herald the hire with an actual interview of Babcock.
The resulting piece is unbylined, even though its written in a chirpy, personal style:
She understands the heat. She understands our soil. And she understands that many of us want to plant an herb garden like the one we saw in Martha Stewart Living, and she can help us pull it off.
The unbylined story is a Republic tic we’ve discussed here and here.
Anyway, that’s all bad enough. The interview that follows is done Q&A style, with bold-faced questions, followed by what you’d think would be Babcock’s replies in normal type beneath then.
Instead, the answers to the questions are just normal article prose.
It’s weird! It reads like Babcock is talking about herself in the third person.
For example:
Are you a life-long gardener?
Babcock got interested in plants during a trip to California with her sister in the late 1980s. Babcock actually went back to school to study horticulture. She worked in accounting and “didn’t want to work in an office anymore.” She studied urban horticulture at Arizona State University, graduating in 1989, and has worked at the garden since.
And you also get just random dumbness like this:
Do you work in an office now?
Sadly, Babcock acknowledges, much of her day now is in an office…
Have you ever seen a newspaper interview done in that format before?
7:49 AM
The Arizona Republic takes a stand!
The Arizona Republic is so randomly put together and edited, despite the good work of a lot of its good writers, that it’s hard to get a bead on it.
Just to surprise us, the paper runs an unassailably documented, incredibly long, and cogently argued editorial about the much bruited-about political issue of “securing the border.”
The bad news is that it ran on the front page as a news story under a tag of “analysis.”
It was written by Dennis Wagner; it’s a great piece that lays waste to the creeps and poltroons stirring up the cheap seats with fear tactics, and it’s the kind of thing the paper should run more of.
Since it is basically an opinion piece, it’s going to attract a lot of flak, but it’s hard to argue with anything Wagner writes:
Anyone with a minimal knowledge or understanding about the nearly 2,000-mile swath of land between Mexico and the United States realizes that requiring a secure border establishes an impossible standard.
…There is no way to conclude success because authorities have no idea how many undocumented immigrants are getting through. Authorities can count only the number of unauthorized intruders captured. Such unavoidable uncertainty prevents any absolute assurances that no one is sneaking over, making declarations of victory impossible.
The story includes this mischievous passage:
Here is another way to consider the problem: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a leader in the anti-immigration movement and acclaimed as America’s toughest sheriff, cannot secure his own jails. Every year, despite armed guards, electronic locks and video monitors, inmates smuggle drugs in from the outside and sometimes even escape.
No one would blame Arpaio. All penal institutions, regardless of security measures, have breaches. Yet imagine if America adopted a position that no new laws could be passed regarding prison reform “until the nation’s jails are secure.”
Lots and lots of facts and figures in the (very long) story, which is here.
7:24 AM
Arizona squirrel scandal!
An intrepid reporter at ABC news his set his sights on a highway administration grant in the state designed to protect an endangered squirrel species.
Here’s the lede of the story, with its uneasy familiarity with English sentence construction intact:
Arizona is spending $1.25 million to build bridges for endangered squirrels over a mountain road so they don’t become roadkill and then monitor their health.
Mount Graham is in the Coronado National Forest in the southeast corner of the state. In other words, the federal government is spending money to protect wildlife in a national forest.
Heavens!
The story goes on for three pages. Turns out John McCain is agin it!
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has repeatedly criticized what he deems wasteful government spending, was asked about the squirrel bridge meeting in the town of Clifton.
“He expressed opposition to the Mount Graham red squirrel preservation effort, saying it puts unreasonable limits on forest resources that could be used to help the community’s economy,” McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan told ABCNews.com.
The last part of the story reads like this:
Squirrel Bridge Takes Precedence Over Regular Roads
Graham County Supervisor Mark Herrington thinks that the money could be better spent elsewhere.
“I don’t think it’s the smartest allocation of resources,” he said. “With all the problems were facing today, with the economy the way it is…that’s a huge expense and how do you guarantee that the squirrels are going to cross the bridge?”
Herrington said he was not consulted about the project. Instead, the Department of Transportation sent him a letter announcing the start of the project a few weeks ago.
“We could have used this money to improve roads for our citizens,” Herrington said. “There are 600 miles of bad roads in Graham County that need to be improved for the people that live here.”
The people of Graham County will have to wait for better roads. For now, it’s the squirrels' turn.
Yeah—in America, all these other priorities have taken precedence over building roads!
12:42 PM
Meet the new editor of the Arizona Republic's Living section!
Back in February, readers of the Arizona Republic’s feature section were given a wire-service story about dogs on Facebook:
“Busy social network for the furry set.”
Then there was the story about … dogs on Twitter:
“Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
Then came a hard-hitting story about pet boarding:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
Then a story about a “therapy dog” who, sniff sniff, died:
Most of these stories were wire copy, which means that instead of figuring out a way to get vibrant and essential local news into the section with folks on staff, the editor is just picking shmaltzy fluff out of the free copy the paper has available to it from the various news services it subscribes to.
You might think, after all that, that the Living section had scraped the bottom of the barrel when it came to bland and inoffensive dog news …
… and you’d be right.
Today the section has a front-page story on … Posh pads for pampered pooches!
It’s the second wire service story the section has run on this topic in the past two months.
The hedline and the story are different, but the idea is the same.
This one is called “It’s a dog’s life: Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
It’s about an upscale “pet resort.”
In Charlotte, North Carolina.
Why a paper in a industry fighting for its life would just give up in this way is a puzzlement.
… until we discovered who is currently editing the section:
8:31 AM
For Young Martin Cizmar™ fans only!
The good news is that Young Martin Cizmar, Award-Winning Journalist, writes a big New Times story today, all by himself.
The bad news is that it’s about a Twitter war between himself and, I’m not making this up, Frankie Muniz’s girlfriend, a publicist whose only client is Frankie Muniz.
(If you don’t know who Frankie Muniz is the article is mighty fine reading indeed!)
4:34 PM
Coming to Phoenix: "Vintage Bunnies"!
We are uncharacteristically indebted to the Espresso Pundit for catching an Arizona Republic story promoting an club event in town this weekend marking the 50th anniversary of the Playboy Club.
The story says it’s one of fifty around the world. Greg Patterson, who writes the blog, pointed out rightly that the photos of bygone revelry in the clubs have all the appeal of a “whites only” sign above a drinking fountain.
And then there’s the Republic’s promotion of the event…
The iconic symbol of the Playboy bunny represents a history that now spans 50 years.
On Friday night, pretty young things from across the Valley will have a chance to become a part of that legacy …
“Pretty young things”? How about “Women with artificial boobs, attenuated ambitions, and low self-esteem”?
7:43 AM
Everything you wanted to know about Arizona's budget problems ...
… except who was responsible.
From the Republic:
Debt has been a quick but uneasy solution to budget pressures.
As state tax collections lagged and demand for state services grew, lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer scrambled for ways to balance the budget. They drained the state’s “rainy-day fund,” cut spending and delayed big-dollar payments to schools. It wasn’t enough.
They anguished for more than a year before sending Brewer’s temporary 1-cent-per-dollar sales-tax increase to the ballot, where voters last month passed it.
Meanwhile, lawmakers borrowed to patch over the holes in the budget….
Arizona’s legislature is of course dominated by the GOP and has been; aside from one elliptical reference to the legislature’s being “conservative,” the story doesn’t dwell on that fact at all.
7:24 AM
The PHXated Mailbag! In which we are called an "Ed Hardy wearing dooshbag," among other things
PHXated mentioned Esquire’s new accounting of the best bars in America the other day.
Phoenix’s Rokerij was written about in the magazine proper. But the post in question also noted, in terms the following correspondence found objectionable, that another Arizona bar was mentioned in a longer online list. This was La Gitana, in Arivaca, in the far southwest corner of the state.
The writer is former state legislator Tom Prezelski:
Mr. Wyman,
While I realize that folks in Phoenix have a rather limited and parochial sense of Arizona’s geography, I think it was a tad patronizing to be so dismissive of Arivaca. Arivaca happens to be one of the oldest communities in the State, and has been important in Arizona’s history. It also has a fairly active arts and cultural community. Think of Arivaca as being a little like Cave Creek, only much smaller, less obnoxiously affluent, and far more genuine in terms of authentic Old West culture. As for La Gitana, I suggest that you venture south of Baseline Road some time to check it out before so dismissively passing judgement. The building is made of an exotic substance called adobe, something that used to be common in Phoenix in less sophisticated times. I am sure you will find it charming to see how us ignorant hayseeds in the hinterlands manage to get along despite not living in the Phoenix conurbation. You may be surprised that we have flush toilets now. Perhaps you are a little jealous that, despite its size, Phoenix merits relatively little mention in the article. Maybe you guys will get your due when Esquire publishes its list of the most undistinguished strip malls or best bars for Ed Hardy wearing dooshbags.
On balance I think the writer has a point, though not precisely the one he is making nor based on his arguments.
For the record, I wasn’t dismissive of Arivaca and in any case would scarcely hold Phoenix up as an example for anything.
I said only that Esquire’s choice of La Gitana was “rather fanciful.”
This was a dig at Esquire, not the town, and I think it’s fair to point out that even if it were Mr. Prezelski’s comment would be a bit disproportionate.
Being that it was not I think it’s fair to describe it as slightly unhinged.
On the other hand, it’s pretty funny.
And finally, in all seriousness, he got us thinking about the item and on balance I think that, instead of sniffing about Esquire’s motives we should have gone out of our way to congratulate the bar in particular and the town of Arivaca in general for the nod.
Here’s what Esquire said, in full. There was no byline:
La Gitana Arivaca, Arizona You’re having: A beer and a shot, Sunday afternoon. La Gitana has bloodstains on the floor, bullet holes in the walls, and the occasional free dental extraction on the pool table from a pliers-wielding biker. Seriously. 17201 West Fifth Street; 520-398-0810
6:44 AM
The mural controversy in Prescott gets nastier
One of the artists now says he’s been hearing racial slurs from motorists going by.
He says exactly what slurs he’s talking about in this News 12 clip, which contains Scott Light nearly having a heart attack warning people the naughty language is coming:
At the beginning of the clip, incidentally, you can see Light and his co-anchor, Tram Mai, misidentified on the screen.
8:37 AM
Cronkite School students rake in awards
From the Cronkite School, a release detailing a number of awards won by this year’s student body. Congrats to all the winners!
Carnegie-Knight News21 Schools Honored in Contests
June 4, 2010
Journalism students in the national Carnegie-Knight News21 program have been recognized with more than 40 awards for reporting, design, multimedia and photojournalism.
The students from 12 of the nation’s top journalism schools spent 10 weeks last summer reporting in-depth stories around the country and presenting them in innovative ways on the Web.
Students produced work that won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award as well as awards from the Society for News Design, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Society of Professional Journalists, among others.
The RFK collegiate journalism award went to David Kempa of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University for a project about one man’s mission to help impoverished farmers in Mexico.
The University of North Carolina won seven awards in the Society for News Design quarterly competitions. The winning projects will go on to the national competition, to be judged in August.
UNC also won eight awards in the National Press Photographers Association competition, three College Photographer of the Year honors and two awards in the Pictures of the Year International competition, which honors the best photography around the world. The school’s “Powering a Nation” project earned the Pictures of the Year International Award of Excellence, coming in behind only Reuters, MediaStorm and The Associated Press in the Documentary Project of the Year category.
UNC, ASU, Syracuse University and the University of Maryland all placed in the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Best of the Web contest and took top awards in their regional Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Awards contests. The University of California at Berkeley also placed in the AEJMC contest.
Students in the News21 program come from the nation’s leading journalism schools. They spend a semester studying critical national issues, followed by a summer traveling the country to produce in-depth news coverage and experimenting with innovative digital methods to tell their stories. Nearly 100 students participated last summer.
In addition to ASU, UNC, Maryland and Berkeley, other schools in the alliance are Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of Southern California and Syracuse University. Students from four other schools – Harvard University, the University of Missouri, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Nebraska – also contribute.
News21, headquartered at the Cronkite School in Phoenix, is part of the Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The complete list of 2010 awards:
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Best of the Web
• “Latinos & Hispanics in America,” 1st place (tie), Team Innovation
• “The Young and the Wireless,” 2nd place, Team Journalism
• “Powering a Nation,” 3rd place (tie), Team Journalism
• “The New Voters,” 3rd place (tie), Team Journalism
• “BARThood,” Honorable Mention, Team Journalism
Additionally, 2010 News21 fellow Tracy Boyer of UNC won first place in the individual journalism category for her 2009 student project Honduras and the Hidden Hunger.
42nd Annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award
• “Crossing Borders,” Sole Collegiate Winner, College Print or Online Division
International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences Webby Award
• “Powering a Nation,” Finalist, Student Sites
NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism 2010
• “Powering a Nation,” Overall Best Use of the Web
• “Powering a Nation,” 1st place, News or Feature Multimedia Package
• “Mining the Mountains,” 2nd place, Documentary Video
• “Roping the Wind,” 2nd place, Feature Video
67th Pictures of the Year International
• “Powering a Nation,” Award of Excellence, Documentary Project of the Year
• “Mining the Mountains,” Award of Excellence, Issue Reporting – Multimedia
College Photographer of the Year 2009
• “Powering a Nation,” Gold, Large Group Multimedia Project
• “Roping the Wind,” Gold, Individual Multimedia Story or Essay
• “Battle for the Mountains,” Bronze, Multimedia Project
National Press Photographers Association, Monthly Multimedia Contests
• “Debating Coal’s Future,” 1st place, Team Video
• “Religion Rejuvenates Environmentalism,” 1st place, Team Video
• “Down the Lines,” 1st place, Team Video
• “Roping the Wind,”1st place, Individual Video
• “Battle for the Mountains,” 2nd place, Team Video
• “Moving to Higher Ground,” 2nd place, Team Video
• “Powering a Nation,” 2nd place, Multimedia Project
• “Voices of Roscoe,” 3rd place, Team Video
Society for News Design Best of Multimedia Quarterly Contests
The following are winners in the Student News category and qualify for the national contest in August.
• “Fighting Battles”
• “Powering a Nation”
• “Roping the Wind”
• “Climate Refugees”
• “Down the Lines”
• “Energy Portraits”
• “The High-Energy Diet”
• “Reclaiming Creation”
Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Regional Awards
First-place regional winners qualify for national SPJ awards, to be announced this fall.
Mid-Atlantic Region
• “Debating Coal’s Future,” 1st place, Online In-Depth Reporting
• “Reclaiming Creation,” 1st place, Online Feature Reporting
• “Down the Lines,” 2nd place, Online In-Depth Reporting
• “Powering a Nation,” 2nd place, Best Independent Online Student Publication
• “The New Voters,” 3rd place, Best Independent Online Student Publication
• “Roping the Wind,” 3rd place, Online Feature Reporting
Western Region
• “Building Success,” 2nd place, Online Feature Reporting
Student Society for News Design
• “Powering a Nation,” 1st place, Best Overall College News Website
• “Powering Down,” 1st place, Best Display for Multimedia
• “Powering a Nation,” 1st place, Best Interactive or Animated Graphic
• “Debating Coal’s Future,” 1st place, Best One-Subject Stand-alone Mini-site or Special Section/Special Package of a Larger Website
3:01 PM
More on the EVT's mysterious reference to "race" problems at a (night)club in Chandler
Earlier today we noted an odd story in the East Valley Tribune, which detailed a legal dispute between a new nightclub and some other local businesses, a group of restaurants at the same strip mall.
The dispute has something to do whether the place is a club, a nightclub or a concert venue.
Way down in the story there were unexplained references to remarks about the clientele’s “race.”
But the story never said what “race” was being singled out. It could have been Hispanic or Asian, Ewok or Eloi, black or … [gulp!] white!
Friends in Chandler have subsequently informed us that clientele is black—and that African Americans were the object of the alleged racial comments alluded to in the story.
I dug through the EVT’s archive on the dispute, but didn’t find an example of the paper’s having vouchsafed this information to its readers.
Besides one sidelong reference to a “civil rights” aspect—“civil rights” being a well-known euphemism for “black-related”—there was nothing to let a disinterested reader know what in the hell was going on.
Isn’t this overdelicate? On the one hand we have the crazy Arizona Republic, which insists on capitalizing the words “black” and “white.” The Republic’s treatment gives you the sense that someone there was indignant that the word “black” was getting capitalized, and insisted on capitalizing “white,” too.
It is a practice that to my knowledge is followed by no other daily paper in the country. The Republic is the journalistic equivalent of a kid wondering why moms and dads get Mother’s Days and Father’s Days, but there’s no Kid’s Day.
(The answer, of course is that every day is Kid’s Day.)
And now we have the EVT, trying in effect whisper the news.
“It’s about race.”
Huh?
“It’s about race.”
Huh?
Previously in PHXated:
Why does the Arizona Republic capitalize the words “white” and “black”?.
4:06 PM
What's the "race" of the folks who go to Phase 54 in Chandler?
Nothing more irritating than reading a news story that raises more questions than it answers.
Phase 54 is some sort of dancing and concert venue in Chandler, at I-10 and Ray Road. It’s having a legal dispute with its landlord and some of the other businesses in its little suburban strip-mall enclave, and this has evidently turned into an actual trial.
East Valley Tribune story here.
The legal issue is apparently whether the place is a concert venue or a night club; its operations have apparently overwhelmed the mall’s available parking, which has turned the businesses nearby, including an Outback Steakhouse, against it.
The property owners, according to the story, says the lease doesn’t allow a “night club,” though it’s apparently allowed to be a “concert venue” and a plain old club club.
None of these distinctions are explained, so the story’s irritating to read.
But even that’s the the big question raised. That comes in this passage:
On Tuesday, Gama found that a transcript of a taped conversation from an Outback [Steakhouse] manager complaining about the race of club patrons will not be allowed in the case. He said it would create confusion for the jury.
Jon Harris, Phase 54’s owner, said that the real reason the restaurants don’t want the club to stay open is because they’re concerned by the racial background of club patrons.
Shouldn’t the paper tell us what race we’re talking about here?
Asians?
Hispanics?
My god, perhaps even … whites?!
The story says the club plays Top 40 music, which isn’t a specific enough clue.
The Phase 54 web site is here.
One thing the owners of Phase 54 are definitely guilty of is recycling Studio 54’s logo:
6:53 AM
Got tongue?
From the Arizona Republic’s “Things to do this weekend” page:
World Series of Beer Pong qualifier at Sandbar
If playing beer pong is a pastime for you, consider signing up for the World Series of Beer Pong qualifying competition at Sandbar Mexican Grill in Scottsdale. Sign up with a friend and play to your heart’s content against other beer pong enthusiasts. The winning team gets to travel to Las Vegas for the championships. There will be $2 draft beers and shots on special, and ladies who play get to pay half price for entry.
Only the Republic could run a photo even the organizers of a “Beer Pong World Series” might find tasteless.
We just have one question: Is the impressively outstretched tongue part of the Scottsdale gang sign the large-breasted woman is flashing?
Or was it just a sort of personal fillip of her own design?
(h/t Tyler Hurst)
6:23 PM
The Arizona Republic: All the fluff that's fit to recycle
Over at EaterAZ, an item that catches the Arizona Republic writing the same article twice, and even recycling the same phrases and sentences.
Here’s a sample EaterAZ found, from two pieces the paper did on the local food blog Foodies Like Us, with similar phrases in bold:
“Foodies Like Us is a 6,000-strong social-networking group founded in July by friends and former bankers Jay Pizarro and Susie Timm. It celebrates cooking, eating, dining and drinks, uniting Valley residents from all walks of life who love to socialize around the table. The website features restaurant reviews, recipe swaps, food chatter, cooking blogs, market finds and tips. The group also sponsors cooking classes, progressive dinners by trolley, wine tastings and happy hours.“
[EaterAZ commented:] After scratching our head as to why they’re a “dining newcomer,” we began to think that all this sounded too familiar. The picture looked familiar, too. Hey, wait a second. That IS the same picture… And many of the same press-release copied words (in bold) are there as well. Check it out, here’s something AZCentral.com published two months ago on Foodies:
“Leave it up to food lovers to create a virtual table for like-minded fans. Former banking colleagues and friends Susie Timm and Jay Pizarro (above) parlayed their mutual interest in food to create a 6,000-member-and-growing social-networking group that celebrates cooking, eating, dining and drinks. Their mantra: We are a 365-days-a-year food festival. Their Web site is filled with all things food, including restaurant reviews, recipe swaps, food chatter, cooking blogs, market finds and advice for the home mixologist. The Scottsdale-based company also sponsors cooking classes, progressive dinners by trolley, wine tastings and happy hours at top Valley eateries.”
5:26 PM
Dan Gillmor to start contributing to Salon
The Cronkite school prof, who does the blog Mediactive and specializes in new media, will be writing for the online magazine.
His first column, about Steve Jobs “control-freakery,” is here:
The control-freakery extends to the content, as we’ve seen again and again. Apple’s idea of acceptable content is roughly what you’ll find at Disneyland. The company reserves the right to bar or later remove apps that contain information for any reason it chooses. This is how the brilliant Mark Fiore found his iPhone cartoon app disallowed due to its political content — until he won a Pulitzer Prize in April, at which point Apple decided to allow it.
(Jobs says the rules changed after Fiore’s original rejection, by which time Apple realized it was making a mistake with political content, but the cartoonist didn’t realize this.)
I’m disappointed beyond words, meanwhile, that journalism organizations are racing to create apps for the iPad, even though they’re putting the final say over whether their journalism is acceptable into Apple’s hands. What does it say about their journalistic principles that they’d do this? Most won’t even respond to the question, and I’ve asked many. National Public Radio’s Kinsey Wilson, who heads up NPR’s online development, is one of the few to admit discomfort with the situation, saying that Apple holds the leverage at this point; he, and other news executives, are basically hoping Apple won’t jerk them around the way it’s done with others.
On his blog Gillmor says he gives Salon a one-week exclusivity for the columns, after which they will appear on his Mediactive site.
4:54 PM
Young Martin Cizmar™—Author!?!
From Grub Street, NY mag’s food blog, emphasis added:
The requisites of hipsterdom are ever-changing (you can’t like things once they’ve gone mainstream), but the demographic’s one constant is and always will be a whip-thin physique — the better to rock a look of apathetic disdain while zipping around on your fixed-gear. So those whose super-skinny jeans encase seriously uncool love
handles will give thanks that writer Martin Cizmar has sold Chubster, which Publishers Marketplace describes as an “appropriately snarky weight-loss and lifestyle guide for hipsters looking to shed pounds and stay cool,” to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Expect the core program to center around a regimen of street-cart tacos, Old Granddad, and cigarettes. [Publishers Marketplace (subscription required)]
PHXated does not portend to comment on physical attributes; but it is fair in this context to mention that sources close to Young Martin say that he has, through no little internal fortitude and strength of character, lost some hundred pounds recently and is eminently qualified to write such a tome, at least personal-experience-wise.
PHXated must say as well that, at our summit last week at the New Times party, Cizmar looked pretty good—much slimmer than Mouth by Southwest’s shot of Martin, above.
4:36 PM
Dark deeds at PHXated! Young Martin Cizmar™ alleges nefarious comment censoring!
Young Martin Cizmar, Award Winning Journalist™, has posted a classically Cizmarianistic comment on PHXated, in response to my recent post about his fascinating essay on the Beach Boys.
I want to repost it here so it gets the attention it deserves, in all its one-paragraph glory.
I will have more to say about it later, but for the nonce I want to address just Young Martin’s charge in his first few indignant sentences to the effect that your host is not publishing all of the site’s comments.
There are exactly two legitimate comments in the site’s queue that have not been posted.
Both, I must confess, are about Young Martin.
But since they take as their chief point of departure the subject of Young Martin’s Penis™ or Young Martin’s sucking someone else’s penis, respectively, I didn’t think they were appropriate to post.
I wanted to encourage a more elevated tone in PHXated’s comments fora.
I would also note that in the past when Young Martin has commented, PHXated has bent over backward to give them their own post. The first time, in fact, this reposting was accompanied by this:
“The note below was originally placed here as a comment, but it deserves a higher profile. I had my say; It’s only fair that Cizmar have the last word.”
Hardly the actions of a dastardly comment-denier!
Anyway, Young Martin’s latest missive follows.
His Beach Boy’s essay is here.
PHXated’s comment on that essay is here.
PHXated’s complete commentary of the life and work of Martin Cizmar is here.
First, Bill, I’m going to echo comments I’ve heard privately from others and vow that if you don’t remove the vetting process for your comments I’m done leaving them here. I’ve heard allegations of you not posting certain things which, in addition to being intellectually dishonest, is ridiculous. I’m sure the 12 readers you get a day won’t mind looking at a few spam comments from time to time if that means we can freely discuss your work without threat of a heavy-handed moderator. Second, perhaps not surprisingly, your basic point about homerism is undone by your misunderstanding of the word. Not being very familiar with sports jargon, and apparently not being resourceful enough to put it in proper context with the use of the interwebs, you write that" “‘Homerism,’ as I understand the term, is derived from the more common word ‘homer,’ a slang term for someone who would give brownie points to something for being local.” The problem? Like most things you write about, you’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle. A “Homer” is not someone who gives “brownie points.” That would probably be called a “Fanboy,” depending on the context. From Urban Dictionary: “Someone who shows blind loyalty to a team or organization, typically ignoring any shortcomings or faults they have.” The whole point of calling someone a “homer,” you can hopefully now understand, is that you’re alleging they’re unaware of their subconscious but obvious preference. They’re blindly loyal. In the reverse of that, “reverse-homerism,” I called it, someone shows blind preference to the more exotic offering. So, working with that definition (we’ll call it “The Accurate Definition”) you can see that your whole argument falls apart. The non-coincidence I’m talking about is not a “dark international deed,” nor could anyone who knows what the word Homer mean think that. It’s about the fact that most American critics tend to laud British artists a little more than their own, and vice-versa. It’s a weird phenomenon, but hopefully one you’re familiar with. I’m hesitant to make any bigger points about this to you given your inability to understand the basics. So, yeah, you seem to be asserting that I’m some sort of tin foil hat idiot who is assigning dark motives to Rolling Stone editors when, in reality, the problem is that YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT ANY SLANG TERM COINED AFTER 1993 MEANS! Paired with your desire to criticize people for using words that are too old (my use — in a COMMENT, mind you — of the obsolete but more charming definition of “portend”) it makes you completely insufferable. Actually, looking at it this way, you’ve probably libeled me, at least according to the definition your little troll friend Tyler uses. Then again, neither of you have ever made much of a point to learn what words mean before acting nutty about them. Like the time you failed to understand how I meant straw man as “an opponent set up so as to be easily refuted or defeated.” Ugh. Like I said, insufferable. Honestly, Bill, when you do stuff like this is makes me question how you could ever make a living off the written word. It’s not that you’re an idiot, Bill, it’s just that you don’t read enough. At least not enough stuff outside the narrow world of your obsessions. So, yeah, I’m sorry for using syntax you’re only kinda-sorta familiar with in my work, as it tends to offer you irresistible opportunities to look like a jackass.
10:21 AM
Young Martin Cizmar™, the Beach Boys, and "reverse homerism"
Dear Martin:
In your much-anticipated inquiry into Beach Boys Party!, there was a part I got hung up on.
It’s the emphasized phrase below.
Pet Sounds […] has been called the best rock record ever made by most of the top British music mags — NME, The Times and Mojo among them. America’s top source for all things ‘60s, Rolling Stone, in a perhaps non-coincidental case of reverse homerism, put it at number two, behind Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Let’s try to parse it out!
“Homerism,” as I understand the term, is derived from the more common word “homer,” a slang term for someone who would give brownie points to something for being local.
In this case, I think you are referring to the U.K. vs. the U.S.
If the editors of Rolling Stone were being “homerist,” they would vote for Pet Sounds over Sgt. Pepper. In this case, they didn’t, so they weren’t being “homerist”; they were being, in Cizmarianistic terms, “reverse homerist.”
By the same token, one might call you a “reverse prose stylist.”
However, this was not merely generic “reverse homerism'; it was a "perhaps non-coincidental” incidence of it.
Again, let’s take a step back. First, “coincidental.” Coincidental with what?
This is a truly cosmic question, second only to whether The Times is a “British music mag.”
I believe you are referring to the U.K. papers' having similarly reverse homeristically lauded the American Pet Sounds over the indisputably British Sgt. Pepper; in this context, Rolling Stone is unquestionably (and amusingly) coincidentally (and parallelledly) being precisely as reversely homeristic.
Yet you do not take this at face value. You delve deeper.
Could the Rolling Stone plaudits of Sgt. Pepper over Pet Sounds “perhaps” be “non-coincidental”?
I believe you are raising the question of its being … deliberate. Intentional. Planned, even.
Aha! I can hear the editors of Rolling Stone thinking. Those British papers wanna play coy, hmm? If they put Beach Boys number one, why, we’re gonna put the Beatles number one!
Young Martin’s point is finally plain.
Dark international deeds were afoot in the Rolling Stone offices, and Brian Wilson may have been cheated out of a transatlantic sweep had not this “non-coincidental reverse homerism” stolen away his rightful place at number one.
Perhaps, anyway.
Previously in PHXated!:
April 22: Confidential to Young Martin Cizmar™
April 15: Cizmar-apalooza!
April 14: Young Martin Cizmar™ update!
April 9: Should KJZZ play indie rock?
April 2: Martin Cizmar: ‘Dost thou portend to know what was notable?’
April 1: McCartney Mania! New Times' Martin Cizmar responds!
March 31: The curious Martin Cizmar
12:48 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, May 26
A blogger who calls himself “AZ Writing Coach” offers a critique of a recent Arizona Republic story here.
I don’t agree with everything he says, but I like the granular analysis.
Apropos of nothing, PHXated would like to note that Marcellino, the Italian restaurant on Northern and 12th Street, has moved to downtown Scottsdale, in the Southbridge development in the space once occupied by Digestif.
PHXated is no dining expert, but based on three visits to the Northern location, twice with New Yorkers who know a bit about the field, feels that it’s probably the most under-appreciated great restaurant in town, and wishes proprietors Marcellino and Sima Verzino well.
The news restaurant is at 7114 E. Stetson Dr. in Scottsdale. A short piece on the re-opening from the New Times' Chow Bella blog here.
4:14 PM
Joe vs. the Supes, Con't ...But is it "fever-pitchy"?
Sheriff Joe Arpaio continues to stonewall the county in its quest to look over his financial records, reports the Republic.
Here’s the first two grafs of its story:
Maricopa County sheriff’s officials said Tuesday that financial sanctions imposed by the Board of Supervisors will affect public safety, and the office likely will challenge the moves in court.
Sheriff’s Office attorneys have an 8:30 a.m. telephone conference today with a Superior Court judge on the proposed actions.
The next graf tells us that matter has hit a “fever pitch.”
Two questions. Does all that feel “fever-pitchy” to you?
And if it did, isn’t that the lede, as opposed to the drab one the paper gives us?
The answers are “no” and “yes,” because when you get to the fourth graf, you get to see what the fever-pitchiness is all about:
The board is scheduled to consider a range of additional financial actions against the sheriff at 11:30 a.m. today. The potential sanctions include canceling Sheriff’s Office credit cards, closing its outside bank accounts, restricting non-emergency travel or putting the office’s $269 million budget on line-item. The board had promised the actions would not impact public safety.
Emphasis added.
That’s the lede:
Joe Arpaio is about to have his credit cards taken away.
The Maricopa Board of Supervisors says that if Arpaio continues to refuse to open his books for the board, it will will cut off his office’s credit cards, close some of its bank accounts, and insist on approving every expenditure the sheriff makes.
6:46 AM
Arizona Republic prints the full text of SB 1070
It’s something of a stunt—we all know what the controversial parts of the bill are—but it’s nice to see a paper put some money on the line. (Four pages of newsprint ain’t cheap.).
Full text of the bill here, with helpful annotations by a UofA law prof.
Accompanying story here.
8:32 PM
Thoughts on New Times' 40th anniversary
New Times notes its 40th anniversary this week; there's a party for staffers this weekend but otherwise the paper isn't doing much to mark the occasion.
So I will.
“New Times” means two things these days, and for one of them it’s not even the right term. There’s New Times the paper, which Phoenicians have read for forty years now, and New Times the newspaper chain, which now comprises some fourteen papers and is in fact called Village Voice Media, after the ground-breaking NYC alternative weekly the chain bought four years ago.
There was a time when the very idea of New Times owning the Voice or its counterpart on the west coast, the LA Weekly, was pretty unthinkable.
(I speak as a longtime veteran of the alternative newspaper industry who worked for one of its philosophical rivals for many years and was then hired and fired by New Times itself, so take that into account as I continue.)
But the combination of poor management of the Voice papers, upheavals in the newspaper industry, and the focus and ambition of the New Times' owners, the colorful and lacerating Michael Lacey and his rather-less-well-known but arguably even-more-formidable partner, Jim Larkin, who built the pair’s business, made the two of them acknowledged titans of a significant corner of the U.S. newspaper industry.
Why was it so unlikely? I’ll tell you.
As a teen growing up in Phoenix in the years after the paper started, I didn’t understand how unusual it was; I liked the attitude, the reporting, the critics, the crusades.
But it was unusual, not least because of its catholic appeal; my parents, right-wing Republicans, liked the paper too. New Times didn’t even distribute the way others did in big cities. There wasn’t a hip part of town the weekly dominated; it was available everywhere and never felt the need to kowtow to one constituency, or play to its prejudices.
Another key factor was that the paper had a sense of fun and humor; I’m sure I’m not the only person who remembers writers like Dewey Webb and Dave Walker with some fondness.
The Phoenix paper grew and, one by one, the paper expanded into somewhat similar cities: Denver; Houston, Dallas, Miami.
As the 1980s became the 1990s, there were basically three alternative-newspaper industry models. One had the Voice as an avatar and included papers like the LA Weekly and the Boston Phoenix. They were aggressively, crusadingly, leftist.
They had national pretensions, often covering national issues and, not infrequently, international ones. Their arts sections were unashamedly intellectual and sometimes academic. Many writers became national figures. As the industry grew and consolidated the Voice became a chain and eventually took over the LA Weekly and papers in Seattle and Minneapolis, among others.
A second model was that of the Chicago Reader and its associated and offshoot papers, in San Diego, for a time L.A., Berkeley, and Washington D.C. (I worked under the Reader’s aegis for more than a decade.)
These papers were generally locally focused as well but (sometimes irritating) unattuned to civic events. They were nowhere near as editor driven or politically doctrinaire, and they generally prized contrarian opinions; indeed, they became known for letting their writer corps essentially write whatever it wanted, at whatever length.
New Times was different. Their papers' staffs were directed to produce investigative reporting—and created more of it than any other weeklies in America, and of course far more than their daily-newspaper competition. There was no advocacy journalism, and no overweening liberal and leftist columnizing; attention to affairs on the national level, much less international, was almost entirely absent.
Virtually everything in each city’s paper was about that city and nothing else, with the focus unerringly on difficult storytelling about government or corporate malfeasance, leavened with occasional traditional features. (The local New Times, for example, offers regular cover stories on local visual artists.)
Readers might not appreciate how difficult those long investigative features are to produce. There’s a reason light and trivial fare populates the pages (and, more importantly, the covers) of most publications. It’s cheap to produce, and readers (and advertisers) like it.
By devoting staff time and cover space to such stuff, New Times was investing financially in the work deeply in several ways.
And finally, where the other papers displayed their nonconformity and distinctiveness like some many pirate colors, the New Times papers were for the most part rigidly formatted and run.
As Lacey and Larkin’s empire grew, their ambitions did as well; they kept picking up papers across the country—San Francisco, St. Louis, Cleveland, Kansas City—and finally were able to put a deal together to take over the Voice chain.
There was a downside to a lot of this, but this isn’t the time to go into all of that.
Over the last decade, the alternative weekly industry has imploded even more severely than the daily one has; Craigslist, particularly, vaporized a lot of the personals and classifieds the industry’s profit margins were based on.
This is of course the fault of the industry itself, and the long-term repercussions of this have yet to fully play themselves out; the Chicago Reader chain, for example, has been bought and been through bankruptcy.
There’s always people in the industry who will mutter darkly about New Times’ future as well; the chain is a private company and no one knows what its finances are. While many of its papers make money, many might not, and the company has not only to worry about the debt it took on to buy the Voice but a nagging legal battle going on in San Francisco, where it has a $21 million (and growing) predatory pricing judgment against it.
But right now the chain remains that unlikely titan. Lacey, the editorial chief, oversees as formidable a corps of reporters as exists in the country. I think Lacey and Larkin are the only editor-publisher pair who have been jailed for practicing journalism. (It’s symptomatic of how under the radar the pair are that their arrest at the hands of Joe Arpaio on entirely spurious grounds was not front-page news across the country. Can you imagine what would have happened ten years ago if a Manhattan DA had hauled the editor and publisher of the Village Voice off to jail?)
I have no reason to suck up to the pair, so I’d like to say this: Aren’t they everything we supposedly value about the press in the U.S.? They are idiosyncratic and uncorruptible, uncompromising and fearless; unlike a lot of places that adopt the motto, Lacey and Larkin really do print the news and raise hell. And as this troubled time for a troubled industry continues, they just may end up being the last men standing.
1:21 PM
Jon Talton: The return of a native (of sorts)
Talton, a former Republic columnist and now a Seattle-based journalist and mystery writer, maintains a blog that has quickly become one of PHXated’s favorites: Rogue Columnist.
He’s back in town visiting, and has been posting some impressions. The first graf has a lot in it:
Traveling around Arizona, it’s difficult to imagine how the state can turn itself around, even if a majority understood the term. For most, a turnaround would mean a return to 40-percent population growth every decade, more sprawl, more “active adult resort living — with championship golf!,” more spec retail development and office “parks” to house the real-estate outfits, mortgage boiler rooms and call centers. The dirty secret is that as an economy, Arizona outside of Phoenix and Tucson is “the Third World,” as a prominent booster economist once told me, not for attribution. An overstatement of course, although the Third World also has its gated enclaves of the super-rich and depends heavily on tourism. But among the states, Arizona including Phoenix and Tucson performed dismally on almost any measure of economic well-being except for housing starts and population growth, the latter a mixed indicator that carries huge costs, too. And this was before the Great Recession.
The rest is here.
1:02 PM
The online East Valley Tribune has a new look
It’s the first major online move since the paper was formally taken over by Randy Miller.
PHXated thinks it looks better, but still suffers from a lot of the flaws of online newspaper sites.
Two quick examples: Note how much of the page is devoted to self-promotional crap and how many lines of navigation the site prioritizes before it starts giving its readers the news they’ve come to the site for.
And second, newspapers can’t get away from that terrestrial feeling of just not having enough room on the printed page.
That doesn’t exist online, so it’s always quizzical to me when I see a list of heds like this, in the new site’s main feature well: * Suns' outside shooting cements Game 1 loss * Mesa to crack down on crime-ridden convenience stores * Executive Board unanimously approves AIA state tournament realignment plan * Minorities are the majority at school, but not at graduation * Brewer: If Prop. 100 fails, I failed * Proposition 100 supporters have cash advantage * Night club sued by neighboring restaurants * More adults coming to EVIT for new-career training * Mesa hopes light rail brings life to downtown
A third to a half of these telegrammatic lines are utterly unparsable to readers--which means they aren't going to get read.
Why not give each of these “Top Stories” a hed and a deck that makes them understandable and inviting to a curious but disinterested reader?
11:32 AM
Nick Martin takes home a big one at the Arizona Press Club awards
While the Arizona Press Club’s fondness for Young Martin Cizmar™’s work is somewhat quizzical, the club did take note of what I think was arguably the most memorable piece of local journalism over the past year outside of the regularly impressive investigative stuff New Times does: Nick Martin’s eerie Phoenix mag piece on the mysterious “third man” involved in the horrific Serial Shooter case.
When I wrote about his piece last year, it wasn’t available online; it is now, and can be read here.
Here’s my favorite part, detailing the unusual friendship the two known shooters had:
Known by regulars as a likable drunk, [killer Sam] Dieteman was the kind of guy who could toss down cocktails until last call, sleep it off for a few hours and return to the bar again in the morning when it reopened. That lifestyle fit well with [his shooting partner] Jeff Hausner, who claimed that because of anxiety attacks, it was better to drive drunk than sober.
So when Dieteman fell on hard times in early 2006 and had no job and no place to stay, Jeff Hausner offered to let his pal stay with him for a while. The quarters would be cramped. It was a two-bedroom townhouse where Jeff Hausner was already living with his female roommate and her son. But they would make it work in their own unusual way. The son had his own bedroom. The roommate slept on a couch in the living room. And Dieteman copped a spot on a pile of blankets next to Hausner’s bed in the other bedroom.
Martin now writes the Heat City blog. He was also given a first-place nod for breaking news, notable for a guy working alone against operations with scores of reporters on duty at any given time.
From the club:
First place: Nick R. Martin, Heat City, “Exclusive: Arrests made in ’04 bombing of Scottsdale diversity office”
Judge: Acting on a tip, Martin beat the competition on a big story — arrests in the 2004 bombing of Scottsdale’s diversity office. But he didn’t stop there. Within hours, he produced two more newsy write-throughs that continued to develop the story by using court documents and Web site statements from white supremacist groups to add important details. On a tight deadline, the pieces broke new ground, were authoritative and had just the right amount of background for readers to understand the story.
And finally, Martin came in second in the category of public safety reporting:
Second place: Nick R. Martin, Heat City, “Gilbert police investigating mayor on suspicion of poisoning wife”
Judge: Expansive story, raises questions and seeks to provide answers. Utilizes public records, documents and interviews.
9:56 AM
Arizona Press Club awards—Young Martin Cizmar™ is a winner!
They say that a young journalist with a dream in his heart and a shaky conception of the meaning of words and phrases like “portend,” “rhetorical” and “straw man” can’t get a break in this older man’s and woman’s game.
But Young Martin Cizmar™, the Phoenix New Times music editor, who writes with authority, if not knowledge, about 80s synth pop and press releases, among other things, is a multiple winner in the latest Arizona Press Club awards.
He came in second place in the opinion blog category for his contributions to Up on the Sun, the New Times' music blog.
“A voice this clear and bold is unusual in modern criticism,” the judge said. “While some may disagree with the opinions, the writing is hard to put down.”
Our Martin was also cited, somewhat redundantly, as a contributor to Up on the Sun, the New Times' music blog, in the Best Feature Blog category, in first place …
… and, even more redundantly, in third place as well, as, um, a contributor to the Up on the Sun, the New Times' music blog.
But Young Martin also scored in the best music arts writing category. One of the pieces cited was “An ode to 1994: Green Day’s Dookie and the Peak of Western Civilization”, whose thesis is that the albums Martin liked in seventh grade are the best. albums. ever.
Congrats, Marty!
Complete list of Press Club winners is here.
A postscript to Young Martin’s essay on 1994: Now, any critic is entitled to his or her opinion, and Young Martin’s seventh-grade perspective is of course valuable, as are those of anyone the first year they try marijuana.
But most critics would say 1994 represented a lull in pop music after the exciting early years of that decade.
Public Enemy and Dr. Dre had released their signal albums. So had MBV and Pavement. Lolla had lost its luster. Warhorses like U2 and R.E.M. had already revivified themselves with Achtung Baby and Automatic for the People. Girl rock had peaked with Liz Phair and PJ Harvey and the Breeders. And I’m forgetting something …
… oh yeah, and Nevermind had come out three years prior, turning the music industry upside-down in the process.
Other than that, 1994 was an important year.
p.s.: I got one of Young Martin’s award categories wrong above: it was for best arts writing, not music writing.
1:44 AM
Democratic Diva nominated for best political blog by Arizona Capitol Times
The blog, which can be seen here, has been presided over of late by Donna Gratehouse, a PHXated contributor.
You can vote for her here, but you have to go through several pages of questions, including some about which legislators wear the best shoes.
3:11 PM
New Times is funding the ACLU's lawsuit against SB 1070
So write the company’s owners, Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey:
Village Voice Media [that’s the name of the Phoenix New Times' parent company, which owns 15 papers across the country] is underwriting the cost of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona’s forthcoming litigation against Senate Bill 1070, as well as two other immigration lawsuits.
Senate Bill 1070 mandates that a police officer who has “reasonable suspicion” that someone is a Mexican must detain that person. The cop must ask: Are your papers in order?
Similar legislation is under discussion in seven other statehouses.
The pair note you can make a fully tax-deductible contribution to the case online at the ACLU’s local web site or via mail at:
American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona Foundation P.O. Box 17148 Phoenix, AZ 85011
1:02 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, May 5, 2010
There’s a terrific new restaurant downtown, just south of Roosevelt Row on 1st Street. Verde is a deceptively barebones affair—nothing much more than an order window, polished concrete floor, open kitchen and tortilla-making station.
Your proprietors are Joseph Aguayo and Matt Avilla. Preparations for the place took a year—"the city doesn’t make it easy,“ Aguayo sighed to us. They were originally in partnership with high-profile local chef Patrick Boll, but that fell apart last month.
There are about a half-dozen simple dishes; we had the oregano lime chicken and potatoes estofadas … both were generous and delicious, and served with simple and fresh beans and rice, and a stack of tortillas. Verde is at 825 N. 1st St., just a block below Roosevelt. The phone is 254-4400.?
More food news! Jess Harter, until recently the East Valley Trib’s food writer, has a new blog—Mouth by Southwest.
I am indebted to Harter for his intelligent and clear writing, impressive perspective on the Valley’s food scene. (“10 best Valley restaurants that never opened”) … and this item, which features a rare photo of the reclusive Young Martin Cizmar, Portending Rhetorical Journalist™.
4:36 AM
What really happened at Freedom Communications
Freedom was the newspaper chain that, until recently, owned the East Valley Tribune. It was based in Orange County, and its flagship paper was the Orange County Register.
Freedom is now in bankruptcy.
In the narrative we hear about the trouble newspapers are in, new technology has vaporized their business model, readers want their news for free, and a watchdog vital to our democracy is at risk.
In reality, as this very long inquiry into the collapse of the company in, of all places, the Orange County Register shows, the papers brought most of their problems on themselves:
The loss of the family business could be attributed to many factors: too much debt, poor business decisions, an economic downturn of epic proportions and an inability to adapt to the changing tides of the newspaper industry.
But the center of the problem was the Hoiles family itself, the seeds planted by the pugnacious founder but exacerbated after his death by power struggles, petty jealousies, personal vendettas –- and money.
The reporter, Mary Ann Milbourn, does a good job delving into the family nuttiness that destroyed the company. Among other things, they rejected an offer in 1985 to sell the company for more than $1 billion.
A billion dollars was an enormous amount of money in 1985; it’s a trenchant indication of just how much money the industry was making at the time.
The EVT isn’t named, but it and its sister Freedom Communication papers in the Valley get this wan aside:
•In 2000, Freedom bought a group of papers in Arizona from The Thomson Corp. for a reported $180 million. Most were sold in March for $2 million.
6:43 AM
The Arizona Republic: Reviewing operas, four days later
Richard Nilsen, the paper’s fine fine-arts critic, had a review of The Barber of Seville on the front page of the Living section today.
It was a rave:
[A]s Arizona Opera’s “Barber” began, the audience was prepared to hear a perfectly adequate performance. We awaited our favorite arias and, for about five minutes or so, everything went pro forma.
Then Figaro entered the scene, with his “Largo et factotum,” and it was as if someone plugged it into 220 volts. From that moment on, this became one of the best “Barbers” ever.
But the review said he’d seen the opera Friday. The show ran Saturday and Sunday as well; PHXated saw it Sunday afternoon and there were empty seats. Wouldn’t it be better to get the thing into the paper earlier?
It took some digging, but we found Nilson’s Nilsen’s review posted online Saturday afternoon. (In weird but typically Republic fashion, it was reposted with the rest of the paper at midnight last night as well.)
The problem, we suspect, is that the paper’s Saturday deadlines are too early to accomodate a review of a Friday night performance.
What about Sunday? Well, you may find this hard to believe, but it may be true that the Republic, like many papers, has Sunday deadlines too early for a Friday evening review.
(None of these decisions, you will note, are done for the benefit of readers. They are done to make the printing schedule more convenient for the paper, and by “the printing schedule more convenient” I mean “the whole process cheaper.”)
Anyway, so why didn’t it get printed Monday?
Well the answer to that question is tougher. The section had a very important wire story from the Washington Post to run. It was about how some churches have to “meld cultures” (i.e., with, say, English and Spanish speakers).
Obviously pressing news.
It also had another very important wire story about how American Idol’s ratings are falling. (That was one was from the Post as well.)
Oh yeah, and yet one more wire story, this one from USA Today, about the lessons of the swine flu—which, you will remember, wasn’t really called swine flu, but rather the H1N1 virus, but whatever.
The paper also on Monday had to make room on the front page of its living section for a blurb about saving “40 percent at Basha’s on Shamrock Farms products,” and no, that wasn’t an advertisement, though it sure reads like one.
But wait—why couldn’t the paper run Nilsen’s review inside the section on Monday?
Well, because it had to run a story about fancy doghouses.
This carried the hedline “Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
Presumably because the alternative, “Delightful digs for discriminating doggies,” didn’t fit.
(By the way, you can see here that the “pampered pooches” phrase is an alliterative well the paper has come back to at least five times this year alone.
(Note that this story joins the paper’s recent investigative reports about dogs on Twitter and dogs on Facebook.)
The pampered pooches story was a wire story as well, of course.
Anyway, the moral to this story is the moral to all the others. Newspapers are dying because they don’t care about readers, and they don’t care about their community. If they did, they would lift a finger to get a rave review of one of the city’s premiere arts organizations by one of the paper’s more serious writers into the paper sooner than four days later.
12:54 PM
"Family news," Arizona style
Here’s some recent local family news, courtesy of Channel 3’s “AZ Family” Twitter feed in the last 24 hours:
azfamily Phoenix police investigating discovery of body in neighborhood of 71st Avenue and Osborn Road. More on http://www.azfamily.com
azfamily Search on for missing 11-year-old El Mirage girl – http://az3.tv/dwEwez
azfamily Tempe police looking into missing Arizona State student – http://bit.ly/9JQTsU
azfamily 2 brothers arrested after police officers assaulted in Scottsdale – http://az3.tv/aY9uNi
azfamily Mesa mom leaves kids in car while she goes into bar – http://bit.ly/ai9sD9
azfamily Police: Phoenix man shoots, kills neighbor in garage – http://az3.tv/cTgOy4
azfamily Candle possibly to blame for first-alarm house fire in Anthem – http://az3.tv/dw7nCc
8:11 AM
Can Apple block news media content on its new iPad?
The Cronkite School’s Dan Gillmor looks into it on his Mediactive blog, and the answer seems to be yes:
We now have confirmation from two of America’s most respected news organizations —- the Post and NPR —- that they willingly participate in a distribution/access ecosystem where the company that owns it can remove their journalism from that system for any reason it chooses.
I suspect that the spokeswomen for the Post and NPR have technically violated the terms of their companies’ developers agreements with Apple even by saying that much. Which is, of course, part of the problem.
7:49 AM
The state's biggest companies and highest paid CEOs
The former is listed by the Arizona Republic this a.m.
The trouble is that the top fifty companies are dispensed by the paper in no fewer than 25 groups of two, requiring some 24 additional clicks to see them all.
And since this is the miserable web site of the Arizona Republic, you can be assured that each click takes from between six and ten seconds to give you a new page, and that, during that time, the page will, annoyingly, re-situate itself a few times.
It’s an imensely pleasureable reading experience!
You’d think that by hitting print you might get a coherent list to read. Look how this page resolves itself:
Note how that instead of the full list, it just gives you the two entries on that page, and that it doesn’t even do that right. You can also see that the intro paragraph from the beginning of the story is repeated on each printed page.
If, laboriously, you print the whole thing out, you’d have those literary pearls of wisdom 25 times.
Finally, if you look closely on the bottom right-hand corner of the print page, you can see this legend: “Print powered by FormatDynamics”!
In other words, the Republic, like so many other media outfits, is actually paying some other company do to a crummy job formatting its print pages.
Exactly the sort of thing a media company should outsource.
Anyway, if you’re interested in how the state’s execs are doing, The PBJ is on the case tracking executive pay. It’s list of recent dispatches from company reports is here.
7:40 AM
PHXations--Friday, April 23, 2010
New Times Stephen Lemons, probably the best chronicler of the bill’s progress through the legislature, writes an opinion piece for CNN online this a.m.
Lemons notes the statement of some activists who chained themselves to the fence around the state capitol: “Our purpose is to expose Arizona’s apartheid legislation, and to uphold our dignity and human rights.” He continues:
If the use of the word apartheid seems extreme to the uninitiated, all I can say is that you have to know this bill, and this state, to understand that it is, unfortunately, all too correct. Brewer should veto this dangerous, abhorrent and costly measure.
The Arizona Republic slams the bill around in an editorial this a.m. as well but, oddly, never comes out and advocates that the governor not sign it.
Arizona faces sticker shock and buyer’s remorse if Gov. Jan Brewer signs the immigration bill on her desk. […] If the governor signs it, this bill will cost the state in many ways."
If she signs it. If …if …
So she should veto it. Right? Right?
Meanwhile, President Obama this morning called the proposed Arizona law “irresponsible”:
“Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others,” Obama said at a naturalization ceremony for service members. “That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”
What will Brewer do?
There are signs she is laying the groundwork to veto the bill. Here’s a report from MSNBC.com:
*** Brewer in the spotlight: A TELEMUNDO reporter last night asked Gov. Brewer if she was concerned that the immigration bill would lead to racial profiling in the state. Her response: “I am … am looking at that particular bill. I’ve been meeting with lawyers, and I’ve been looking at it very diligently. And when I make my decision, you will be one of the first to know.” The reporter followed up by asking if she was concerned that Arizona is sending the wrong message to the rest of the country with the bill’s potential for racial profiling. Brewer’s reply: “You know, I think that we should be concerned about racial profiling. Um, it’s illegal.”
6:05 PM
New Times' "Jackalope Ranch" arts blog is live
Managing Editor Amy Silverman says of the new blog:
New Times already blogs all about news, music and food in this town. It’s time for some culture. Whether it’s funky Grand Avenue or swank Scottsdale — intellectual pursuits or after-dark diversions — bargains on vintage or the place to see cutting-edge contemporary art — creative pursuits in the suburbs or great architecture downtown, we’ll have it for you here.
11:53 AM
PHXations--Tuesday, April 20
New Times is starting a new culture blog. It will be called Jackalope Ranch and will focus on all of the arts except music, our source says.
Music will remain the purview of the current Up on the Sun blog, with your host Young Martin Cizmar, Portending Rhetorical Journalist™.
The new blog goes live tomorrow. I assume it will be at this url, though it’s not live yet. The New Times blog home page is here.
Want to help the Fair Trade Cafe at Civic Space Park decide its hours? The owners are asking for suggestion on this Facebook page.
The next PechaKucha is moving to a bigger venue--the Irish Cultural Center. The previous venue was Fractal. The address is 1106 N. Central, on the west wide of the street just south of the I-10 overpass and just north of Portland. Details here. It's April 29 at 7 p.m.; the doors open at 6 p.m.
9:35 AM
Cizmar-a-palooza!
Young Martin Cizmar, Easily Amazed Journalist™; a detractor; and a defender comment on PHXated’s recent exegesis of a Cizmar blog post.
PHXated prefers comments that disagree with him, but for variety’s sake will start things off with Young Martin’s detractor:
Tyler Hurst said on Wednesday, April 14, 2010:
He’s a criticizer, not a critic. He’s sole job is to piss people off and get the community riled up.
I suppose being really bad at what you do is one way to get attention.
Also, why do so many journalists treat blogs as shitty first-person accounts? Can’t the words and phrases they string together in a blog format be clear, concise and interesting? That’s what bloggers do!
PHXated responds: This is a good point. PHXated’s tendency is to refer to himself in the third person, using the blog title, which seems somehow to be not as solipsistic as the straightforward use of “I” and yet also serves to irritate people already predisposed not to be fans, so I can’t claim innocence on this count. That said, there is something searchingly banal about constructions like “As a press release I got today pointed out….”
Dan Gibson said on Wednesday, April 14, 2010:
Bill, ignoring for a moment the quoting of press releases, why wouldn’t George Strait be worthy of a blog post?
Admittedly, I wrote a feature about Strait for the New Times so my perspective is already on record, but there is something interesting about a career with the longevity and accompanying success he has achieved. After all, there are few country, pop or rock acts who have topped the charts in both the early 80’s and in recent years. Obviously there’s going to be some distinction between popularity and chart success, but dismissing artists offhand based on the fact that they actually have fans or radio spins (“Quality is what matters, not chart performance”) seems just as lazy critically.
PHXated responds: Dan, thanks for writing in. I didn’t say Strait wasn’t worthy of a blog post. He is worthy of a blog post and a feature article like yours. The point was that there was nothing in the blog post to warrant its being a blog post.
If you will recall the redoubtable piece of journalism that that blog post was, it told us that Young Martin Cizmar™ did a radio show on Strait, and that he did it in the face of those who might have found fault with it.
How brave he seemed!
Then we got the regurgitated press release, the news value of which I covered in my original post, and then we were left with the comforting realization that Young Martin Cizmar™ was on a first-name basis with the singer. (“Congrats, George.”)
So George Strait is worthy of a blog post in the same way anything is worthy of a blog post, when the writer of the blog post has something interesting to say about it.
Now, being a blogger himself, PHXated (and Hitsville!) knows that not every post is tip-top. But we expect better things from Young Martin than, you know, regurgitated press releases.
I don’t understand what you mean about the “distinction between popularity and chart success.”
As to your final point, I think that Strait is an unmemorable artist but an efficient and implacable country music star. As I noted originally, the undemanding country audience is actually quite loyal to artists like him; empty hats with thirty-year careers aren’t that unusual. (Serious people have them as well; Hank Jr. had a massive run, for example, and remained frequently surprising.) I didn’t say anything about your article. I’m in favor of serious features on artists of every sort. I’m not in favor of regurgitated press releases.
Speaking of which, why are we “ignoring the quoting of press releases?” Isn’t that what my item was about?
Martin Cizmar said on Wednesday, April 14, 2010:
Bill,
I talked extensively about Strait during my hour-long guest DJ slot, where I played a lot of his best songs. Also, Dan Gibson wrote a piece for us putting Strait’s greatness in perspective. Also, my concert review discusses a lot of your rhetorical questions. It’s not like this is the first and only thing I’ve ever written about him, and the questions you ask aren’t answered elsewhere.Cizmar’s comment continues below….
PHXated responds: Dear Martin:
Thank you for that edifying account of your recent activities. The next time you write in, feel free to address the point of my post, which was that you were recycling meaningless commercial benchmarks from a record-company press release, and getting a little choked up about it besides. (“Congrats, George!”)
p.s. I did not portend to ask any “rhetorical questions.”
p.p.s.: I want to commend you on your recent tweet: “Off-Brand Fudgsicles: Always a Mistake.”
… Cizmar’s comment concludes:
Tyler,
Still haven’t heard from your lawyer! I did, however, hear from two lawyers who were quite amused by your post and our back and forth… they suggested I should actually sue you, since calling a journalist “a defaming liar” is actually defamation, in their book. Pretty funny stuff. Don’t worry, though, I’m not a little bitch.
PHXated responds: Readers who find this all opaque should know that Young Martin Cizmar™ is referring to a recent blog post by Mr. Tyler Hurst, of whom PHXated is a fan, raising some somewhat heated questions about libel after Young Martin said Mr. Hurst, a freelance marketing consultant, “con[ned] idiotic businesses into paying […] to teach them basic stuff.”
Mr. Hurst then said Young Martin was a “defaming liar,” and barristers have apparently been consulted. PHXated will keep readers apprised of any ensuing legal developments, or duels.
Previously in PHXated!:
April 14: Young Martin Cizmar™ update!
April 9: Should KJZZ play indie rock?
April 2: Martin Cizmar: ‘Dost thou portend to know what was notable?’
April 1: McCartney Mania! New Times’ Martin Cizmar responds!
March 31: The curious Martin Cizmar …
9:33 AM
Young Martin Cizmar update!
Regular readers have followed with perhaps varying degrees of interest PHXated’s back and forth with Young Martin Cizmar, Attitudinal Journalist™, the music editor of the Phoenix New Times.
Here’s Young Martin’s latest bit of music criticism.
It’s a blog post about, for some reason, George Strait:
As a press release I got today pointed out, Strait has accomplished what no other artist in the history of Billboard charts has — 30 years of consecutive Top 10 hits.
Cizmar, a youngster, doesn’t have the perspective on the music industry that would help him deal with the informational gold contained in press releases.
I’m here to help!
1) He could throw the press release away. Who cares what record companies say? A critic’s job is to say something interesting about art, not repeat PR talking points.
2) Press releases contain information with a negative value—i.e., information that people pay to have disseminated. (As opposed to pay to learn.) Repeating it just helps the PR departments going.
3) Press releases contain untrue and half-true information. For example, Cizmar’s account of Strait’s supposed record omits the word “country” before “Billboard charts.” The country charts are not the pop charts. The country audience is notoriously artist-friendly. Basically, once you’re a star, as long as you show up for fan day and suck up to the key radio programmers you’ll have hits until the day you die.
4) Any number of country artists have had hits for decade after decade after decade. I’ll stipulate that Strait perhaps might claim the consecutive string of “top ten” hits, but even that’s not all that impressive given how common hit-making longevity is in that world.
5) Why does popularity matter in any case? Quality is what matters, not chart performance.
6) I love the euphony of the phrase “As a press release I got today pointed out….” It’s poetry, sheer poetry.
7) Did i mention how pathetic it is to quote press releases?
8:49 AM
Is this the first sign of the "new" East Valley tribune?
PHXated has been under the weather and is just now catching up on a few things. An op-ed piece from a couple of days ago in the East Valley Tribune may be a portentous sign of the way the paper’s new management will be taking it:
A recent analysis by Roger Simon of PJTV Media maintains that Obama is showing signs of mental illness. A wide variety of commentators have observed that Obama displays severe narcissism. Obama is conceited, and he is demonstrating a serious disassociation from reality.
A recent case in point was Obama’s bizarre and meandering 17-minute, 2,500-word answer to the simple question about how he could justify raising taxes for ObamaCare during a recession when citizens are already overtaxed.
Emphases added. The authors, Roy and Mary Beth Brown, went on from there vigorously arguing their thesis, such as it was.
There are two types of people in the world; those who find the Browns’ political insights compelling, and those who find it odd to describe the spastic drooling of Pajamas Media’s Roger Simon as “analysis.”
Those in the second group will find it odd the EVT, which is not a Cro-Magnon operation, published the Browns’ essay.
Two theories:
It’s possible that the paper, which is operating with a staff size of about 20 percent of what it was three years ago, is in such chaos inside that it’s understandable that some Tea Party drivel that comes in over the transom could accidentally get published.
On the other hand, maybe it was deliberate.
In that case, it could be either a new gambit by the paper to make it the go-to publication for the state’s Tea Party fringe …
…or—more ominously, given that that might not be a strong business move—just a taste of the new owner’s political sensibility.
Anyone have an alternative explanation?
8:27 PM
1Does the average city employee really cost $100,000 a year?
Boy does the Arizona Republic suck at editing. I mean, it’s hard to believe there is something other than a big ol’ desk of chimpanzees reading copy before it’s printed.
Consider a story today about what the average per-employee cost of city government is.
The story begins like this:
Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio says that the average city employee costs taxpayers about $100,000 in salary and benefits. Councilman Michael Nowakowski says the average worker earns much less. Who’s right?
Both are.
Boy, it sure sounds like we’re going to get two accounts of the issues involved, with the reporter noting that it all comes down to how you massage the figures.
But it turns out … DiCiccio’s basically right. No, not even basically right. The average annual cost per employee is just shy of $98,000, period.
The story goes on for seven more paragraphs, discussing a few ancillary issues, but never challenges the figure.
Nowakowski never returns to make a different case!
Secondly, in the lede, we see a reference to “salary and benefits.” But then we see Nowakowski saying they “earn” much less.
The editor of the story could have asked the reporter to clarify this distinction. The paper could have explained that the “benefits” part of the equation is a lot—forty or fifty percent more than the base salary the employees “earn.”
So the average salary of city employees might be just $65K.
Next, the only real comparison at issue in this debate is what the costs of Phoenix are relative to other major cities. The story discusses utterly irrelevant matters like the average cost of private sector employees ($54K a year)
… with, of course, no attempt to make the case that the two labor forces are in any way comparable.
(You’d assume, in fact, that they would be much different. A big city would be most comparable to a single large corporation doing specialized highly professional and bureaucratic work.
(You gotta figure that the percentage of the work force doing low-paying basic service-industry jobs would be much, much higher in the private sector.)
We all know we have a government that pays people.
It’s an entirely fair question to ask whether Phoenix pays its employees more than other large cities.
But why does a newspaper waste the time of everyone involved by reporting on everything but the one metric that would answer the question at hand?
Doesn’t the Arizona Republic have editors?
8:45 AM
Should KJZZ play indie rock?
The New Times’ Martin Cizmar and Steve Chilton, a local music promoter, debate the issue on a podcast.
I personally can’t imagine taking the time to listen to it, but Cizmar’s distillation of their discussion he puts thusly:
Martin: Give me indie rock or just shut that shitty station down.
Steve: “I would love to see an indie rock station here. I would like that. I just don’t want to see it come at the expense of jazz.”
I don’t understand this debate on two levels. One, KJZZ is a public-radio station, dependent on listener donations to survive.
Unlike a lot of public-radio stations, it has recently been hiring more actual reporters, and ramping up its news coverage in a way that’s going to make a big difference in the quality of the news its audience gets.
Calling it “shitty” seems not entirely accurate.
And in any case, the directors and programmers need to think about the station’s future, particularly in this difficult media climate. Playing “indie” music” seems not likely to be attractive to the sort of audience that will shell out money for the station.
Still, financial issues aside, the question might be, can KJZZ serve the community better? Is there’s a niche there? Is the indie scene underserved?
Seems to me there’s more outlets for indie music than there ever has been in, like, the history of the world.
Everything’s online … there’s a million online radio stations and then Pandora; friends can pass you thumb drives or discs with hundreds of songs on them. MP3 blogs have just about any tune you can think of for free. You can stick it all on your iPod and listen to it in the car, outside, at home, wherever you want.
And the indie-rock audience, of course, is more conversant with these technologies than the jazz audience, which skews a lot older.
Who cares if a dying medium doesn’t play indie rock? And why be so derisive of about the last local quality outlet of that medium?
12:44 PM
More on the 944 mag bankruptcy
Folio magazine follows up on the bankruptcy filing of Phoenix-based 944 publishing earlier this week.
If you recall, it had something to do with some unspecified lawsuits in California. One, writes Jason Fell, has to do with a Super Bowl party the magazine put on with a company now suing it:
bq. I managed to dig up the documents for that particular case against 944, which was filed in March 2009 by California-based Explosive Productions LLC. The complaint alleges that the “Super Village” event was a financial disaster, in part because 944 kept sponsorship money for itself and “secretly” gave away thousands of tickets (including more than $1 million in VIP tickets to “potential magazine models”), actually selling fewer than 1,000 tickets. It also alleges that 944 investor Eric Crown (also co-founder and former CEO of Insight.com parent Insight Enterprises) took $180,000 worth of tickets and cabanas for his own “personal, social purposes.”
There’s another, more tawdry allegation:
Most “insidiously,” the claim continues, 944 Media’s “racial bias” led to its refusal to allow marketing of the event to Hispanic markets. “944 media was, above all, concerned with its image with the white and affluent audience it covered,” says the complaint. “That bias caused 944 Media to insist that no advertising would be purchased if that advertising was directed, even partially, at Mexicans or Latinos.”
10:11 PM
944's parent company files for bankruptcy
The move is apparently protective, Folio magazine says:
[CEO Marc] Lotenberg said 944 has received new financing to ensure that employees will continue to be paid as usual and that its magazines will remain in business during the Chapter 11 process. Later this spring, the company plans to unveil a new logo and a redesign of the magazine and Web site.
Besides the Phoenix edition (web site here), the company runs glossy lifestyle mags in Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco and Las Vegas.
11:21 AM
Stephen Lemons: Remember Brisenia and Raul Flores
The New Times columnist is noting that amid all the political points being made over the killing of border rancher Robert Krentz, perhaps by a drug smuggler from Mexico, the right has forgotten other border violence coming from its side:
But such hatred, xenophobia and immigrant-bashing has a price: a price paid last May by nine year-old Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul, allegedly murdered by minutewoman Shawna Forde and two of her cohorts, Albert Gaxiola and Jason “Gunny” Bush.
The murders took place as part of a home-invasion robbery in Arivaca, Arizona, about 11 miles north of the border. Forde was the leader of the aptly acronym-ed M.A.D., or Minuteman American Defense, and was well-known in wingnut and nativist circles.
6:55 AM
Martin Cizmar: "Dost thou portend to know what was notable?"
PHXated and the New Times’ Martin Cizmar have been billet-douxing back and forth about the latter’s review of a recent Paul McCartney show.
Much of this discussion has involved a nagging fixation on Cizmar’s part on a song called “Ob-La-Di Ob-la-da,” which is a tune from a long time ago originally done by Wings, or the Hollies, or something.
Anyway, the note below was originally placed here as a comment, but it deserves a higher profile. I had my say; It’s only fair that Cizmar have the last word
Even if that word is “portend” and he’s not 100 percent clear on its meaning.
My original post here. Our back and forth here.
--
Martin Cizmar said on Thursday, April 01, 2010:
Bill,
I think you might be confused about what was going on here… Wrestlemania and Paul McCartney were on the same day in the same complex. Jobing.com held it’s lots back and gave free parking to fans, as it always does. This is about the other lots, the ones owned by U of P, Glendale, Westgate and the tax payers (ahem). I wasn’t parking as a McCartney goer, I was parking as a wrestling goer. So all your bullshit about the hummers, etc. isn’t on point.
As for what the government could do to make things easier. Well, governments can do a lot of things to make things “easier,” to avoid ugly signs, to delegate police powers to non-sworn officers. Unfortunately for people like you, people like me keep pointing to this crusty old constitution which makes such things illegal. Sorry, dude, but even Joe Arpaio can’t just do whatever he wants for convenience state, though ignorant voters like you do their best to try and give him such powers.
I’m not sure if you are accusing me of literally pulling something from a press release, but I didn’t read any press releases on the tour. McCartney made that point from stage and it struck me. It still strikes me. That’s a song I, and a lot of other people, have been intimately in touch with for years and years. It’s a classic probably above anything in, say, U2’s catalog. As I stated, this wasn’t a “Monkberrien obscurity” it was Ob-La-Fucking-Da! Comparing that to the some B’side from the WAR album is either shamefully ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
Now, about your fuzzy math: The Beatles wrote, by my count, a total of 191 songs. 108 of those came out after Shea. So, no, he couldn’t have played 20 or 30 of those for the first time on every tour. Beyond that, I’m not talking about fucking “Sea of Holes” here, I’m talking about a very, very well known song!
And it had never been played live in the U.S. before. The reason, of course, is the fact that the Beatles stopped playing outside the studio after Shea Stadium, but it’s still telling to me. The fact that other people do a shoddy job of imitating that angle (this particular pair of pants, etc.) just reinforces for me how special McCartney is. What a class above he is.
I’ve seen McCartney twice in less than a year. You’ve seen him, what, a decade ago? Yet you portend to know what was notable?
11:06 AM
McCartney Mania! New Times' Martin Cizmar responds!
The New Times’ Martin Cizmar responded to PHXated’s recent pontifications on his coverage of the McCartney show.
It was too good a missive to leave down in the comments, so I’m reposting it here.
Along, uh, with my response to him below.
Original post here.
Martin Cizmar:
Bill,
Thanks for reading and thanks for keeping this blog – I truly appreciate anyone’s efforts to critique the pretty sad state of music journalism in this state, even if they’re going after me.
Regarding specific points:
1. I don’t think the lede is THAT boring. It’s not my best work but I don’t think it’s too long or wordy or anything.
2. Do you seriously not find anything offensive about people being stopped by private security guards on a public street? I think that’s pretty much illegal.
3. The end is intentionally hyperbolic and yuppyish. I’m fond of that voice.
4. It’s been years and years since I was accused of being too blowjobby in a review of anything. Seriously. If you look in the comments you’ll see people suggest it must have been PAINFUL for me to write such a glowing review. It really was an incredibly good show. Not to offend, but I think maybe as a rock writer of another generation you tend to skim a lot of what I write about people who aren’t legends. Even legends get bashed a lot. Heck, I hated McCartney at Coachella, but this was a special show.
5. “Just about every time anyone has toured, ever, in the history of the world, they do songs they haven’t done before.” That’s simply not true. Even a little bit true. Maybe the first night of any tour, but not after that. When’s the last time U2 played something totally new?
However, my broader point was that “Ob-La-Di,” (a song I played in seventh grade band for God sakes!) was being played for the first time in the U.S. The song is 30+ years old and very, very well known. Do you really not find that surprising?
6. You’re absolutely right about him still having stuff to make us tingly, and parceling it out bit by bit. Personally, I find that impressive. Most people cash it all in a lot sooner. Having an “Ob-La-Di” to pop on us? Sorry, that’s pretty cool. Perhaps you think I’m easily impressed, in which case you should read more of what I write.
PHXated responds:
Hey Martin:
Thanks for taking the time to write:
Still.
1) Being from another generation, I know that ledes that are a variant of “I’m the kinda guy who …” are seldom promising. Those that continue into the writer’s personal, uh, parking philosophy? I’m just thinking a guy like you has better things to write about.
2) Fine, let’s talk parking. I can’t believe I’m doing this. The issue is a large nearby concert venue bothering the neighbors. Or, to put it another way, rich folks shelling out hundreds of dollars to see someone who hasn’t recorded a good album in 25 or 35 years trying to save a few bucks on parking their Hummers on side streets and making life even more difficult for the—what was the word you used?—"rednecks" living nearby. The city could put up ugly permanent signs and so forth, or create a neighborhood parking district. Or they could make it easy on everyone, and hire a minimum-wage security guy to deal with the random asshole who still tried to park there.
3) Yeah.
4) Being someone from another generation, I’ve seen Paul McCartney a lot. I’ve even done my own (rather wordy) apologia for him. It’s right here!
It’s fine to like the show. Your angle—that stuff about him not playing certain songs before—was something out of a press release. (I doubt that you personally have been keeping track of the Beatles songs he’s been doing since Wings Over America. )
Being someone from another generation, I’ve seen so so many tours of heritage acts being touted with such tired “angles.” It’s not criticism. It’s not even hype. It’s just … something to fill space with. "This is the first time "Rod Stewart/David Bowie/U2/Neil Diamond/Page & Plant/Pink Floyd has played this particular song/with this particular person/in this particular town/wearing this particular pair of pants.”
5) Please tell me you don’t think that McCartney, U2, the Stones or just about anyone besides Bob Dylan plays a different set list each night. Shows on this scale are not seat-of-the pant affairs. The vast majority of the say two-dozen-song set list is written in stone for each tour. Even the racy optional spots are typically filled by one or two choices. That’s not to say a machine like the E Street band can’t play anything Springsteen wants on a given night. I’m not following McCartney’s career closely any more and maybe I’m wrong … maybe his tours in the 2000’s have been anything-goes affairs. But I doubt it. Paul McCartney isn’t calling audibles on stage.
I don’t know if it’s still true but at least up until recently fans of Bob Dylan, who has probably played more different songs at more different shows than any other major artist by a factor of four or five, had a list of songs he’d never played live.
From a cursory look at this U2 fan page …
… it seems that the band only has one album from which they’ve played all the songs in concert.
Now, off the top of my head (again, I’ll cop to it if I’m wrong) I’ll bet cash money McCartney could have played fifteen or twenty new different Beatles songs in each of his previous tours and still had a few ‘Ob-la-fucking-di’s to play.
In fact, I’ll bet money this would apply just to McCartney-written Beatles songs.
Note that that would mean no repeats of ‘Hey Jude,’ ‘Get Back,’ ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ ‘Fool on the Hill,’ ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Long and Winding Road,’ ‘Let It Be’ etc. etc. etc. And that there would be almost no room left for classic songs from his own solo oeuvre, much less the hot new tunes from his new album—so you would still be able to be amazed by the inclusion of ‘1985.’
He has dozens and dozens of albums (and in his case an incredible number of non-album hit singles) behind him. He’s toured five times in forty years. Paul McCartney doesn’t take requests from the stage of a stadium with a crew of hundreds trying to get the sound and video right for 60k people. Of course he hasn’t played everything he’s ever recorded live. Jesus.
6. I don’t think you’re easily impressed, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking a Paul McCartney show.
But I don’t know, maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with frothing about ‘Ob-la-di’ in the lede. It’s not like you went back to it and beat the issue into the ground in the last three grafs of your review as well.
Oh, wait …
2:46 PM
The Arizona Republic continues to be a puzzlement
You’d think a shrinking representative of a dying industry would get its act together and face the future with a coherent plan.
But we’re talking about the Arizona Republic—The Worst Newspaper in the World™.
The front page today is a mystery. The two top stories: A round-up of crazy militiamen in the Midwest and the bombings on the Moscow subway.
Both were day-old news. Neither had anything to do with Arizona. Each was a wire story.
Lower down on the page was real news about something that affects the Valley a lot: The baseball commissioner saying he would help Arizona keep the Chicago Cubs training here. I don’t follow sports, so maybe the reporter, Craig Harris, was playing catchup or something, but it certainly seemed like an original story and that it was a Republic exclusive.
And further down next to it was an actual staff-generated piece played off some national news: How Congress went on vacation without extending jobless benefits.
The story made some attempts to localize the issue. Here’s the lede:
Yet again, thousands of Arizonans are at risk of having their long-term unemployment benefits cut because Congress has not acted on an extension.
And farther down the reporter, Betty Beard, talks to some real live Arizonans who say what you’d expect:
Kris Sullivan, 52, a Phoenix resident and college graduate with sales experience, has been out of work since October 2007. Without an extension, she said the long-term unemployed like herself would be devastated.
The only problem with the story is that it doesn’t tell readers the single most salient issue, which is that the Republicans in the Senate blocked the extension—and which of course just about every other news organization in the country made plain for its readers.
You don’t have to turn it into a GOP-bashing exercise—you could explain that the Republicans said they didn’t want to raise the deficit further.
In fact, you could do that and it would have been a defensible piece, even if it still would have represented half the real story.
(Democrats would say in response that more benefits work as an additional stimulus to the economy, which it needs, and that at any rate the GOP’s concern about the deficit is a fairly new preoccupation for the party after the ruinous Bush years.)
But the question remains: Why did the paper’s editors expend a troubled institution’s resources on writing up a national story that’s demonstrably less informative than just about any wire service account they could have picked up?
3:23 PM
Why are Phoenicians so fat?
The new issue of Phoenix magazine says we’re “one of the fattest cities in the nation,” in a story that isn’t online. It’s a feature article with a lot of information about weight problems and how to overcome them, but the basis for its thesis is limited to a year-old Men’s Fitness survey.
There’s still a lot of grim info:
One in four Phoenicians is uninsured, according to the U.S. Census. Even for the insured, many policies have seemingly backward approaches toward obesity prevention. Insurance policies usually cover treatments for heart attacks, strokes or diabetes that may have been caused by obesity, but pockets clamp shut when paying for preventive servies such as nutritional counseling and education.
[…]
Almost 75 percent of Arizona high school students do not have a physical education class, and almost 60 percent do not receive physical education at all, according to Arizona’s Youth Risk Behavior Study.
The story touches on, but doesn’t explore, racial issues:
One reason for the city’s high rate of obesity is its cultural diversity. Due to a variety of factors such as genetics, cultural norms, lifestyle and socioeconomic conditions, certain ethnic and minority groups—especially the Hispanic, African American, and American INdian populations—tend to be the msot affected. That being said, obesity is happy to claim victims of an ehtnicty and age. The tragic increase of childhoo obesity is a case in point.
7:40 PM
An in-depth story on the Great New Times San Francisco Range War
New Times bought the SF Weekly, an alternative paper in San Francisco, in 1995 and instituted a now-fifteen-year-long fight with a longtime local operation, the Bay Guardian. It’s still going on.
The Seattle Stranger, which has the distinction of being run by Dan Savage, of Savage Love fame, has a very long look back at this fight, with a starring role played by New Times exec editor Michael Lacey.
PHXated worked for SF Weekly during this period. (Hired and eventually fired by Lacey.) I’m not done with the story yet, but I have some major issues with it. More on that later. Still, it’s a fascinating read for Laceyologists. I’m one.
8:31 PM
PHXations—Monday, March 15
The Rail Life blog has a good list of Irish pubs along the light rail to patronize Wednesday night, St. Patrick’s Day — the idea being you don’t have to drive home. PHXated’s favorite is the Turf, where he recently learned what white pudding and black pudding is. Pudding, it turns out, isn’t involved. The blog takes a special interest today in drinking and driving, after, Tempe Police said, a gentleman named Brayden Linville managed to drive his PT Cruiser onto the light rail bridge near Tempe Town Lake and shut down one track for at least several hours.
9:02 PM
Half the EVT newsroom laid off
A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday approved the sale of the East Valley Tribune to Randy Miller’s Thirteenth Street Media. Yesterday, in anticipation of the takeover, the paper nearly flatlined the staff that remained.
From Nick Martin at Heat City:
When they arrived at work today, employees were told they would be summoned via email to one of two meetings.
At the first meeting at 10 a.m., the sources said, dozens of employees were brought into a room on the ground floor where outgoing publisher Julie Moreno told them they were being let go. One source said the mood was exactly what you’d expect: grim. There was nervous laughter, a few tears and a lot of sad faces.
A half hour later, another group of staffers met with Miller in a room on the second floor, where he handed them letters with job offers under the new regime. There, the sources said, Miller also outlined his plan for the reorganized Tribune.
According to Martin, who used to work there and has good sources, the EVT’s newsroom staff, already downsized to about three dozen people, will now have as few as fourteen.
The number is apparently about a quarter the newsroom personnel the paper had a year or two ago. The paper is publishing only three days a week, so the impact of such cuts isn’t as bad as it might be. At the same time, the effect on the paper’s web site has been palpable and embarrassing, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere.
3:04 PM
The Arizona Republic critiques the Oscars
We’re interested in hearing Bill Goodykootz, the Arizona Republic’s smart and hardworking film critic, give his perspective on the Oscars. Here he is, talking about The Hurt Locker showing in general and the moving and historic wins of Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique in particular:
It […] meant that two actors no one dreamed would be holding Oscars during last year’s show were among the winners. And, in the end, no matter what the show is like, how much producers talk about reinventing the broadcast, how many ways they try to make it different, that’s the only change that really matters.
Hard to argue with that. The Oscars continue to evolve. You can make the argument that the last few years have seen the top nominee slates grow ever-more daring and open-minded, culminating in the last three years, in which the top awards went to, arguably, the most adventurous films of their respective years. (No Country, Slumdog and now Hurt Locker.)
Well, the Republic’s editorial page would disagree.
Yes, the Arizona Republic’s editorial page discussed the Oscars this a.m.
The page was quite peeved. You’re not going to be able to guess about what:
[Y]ou would think one would have shined a light on the fact that poor, heroic Farrah Fawcett was not included in the annual memorial of deceased movie people.
And, while we’re at it: What of Bea Arthur? And Ed McMahon? Despite mostly TV and live theater legacies, all three have film credits.
Bea Arthur and Ed McMahon!
You kind of get the feeling Arizona Republic editorial writers sit around at night and watch a lot of infomercials.
7:22 PM
Just when you thought the Arizona Republic couldn't get any worser!
Today it publishes a feature—complete with massive photo—on the cover of its business section about …
… Starbucks using a new cup size.
A. New. Cup. Size.
That’s what warrants a cover feature at the Arizona Republic.
As usual, the story itself is correspondingly insipid. Here’s the lede:
Phoenix-area coffee junkies who have grown immune to Starbucks’ maximum 24-ounce jolt now can boost their caffeine intake by 30 percent without loading up on extra shots.
The Seattle-based coffeehouse chain is test-marketing a new 31-ounce cup for iced coffees and teas in Phoenix and Tampa to determine whether customers are ready to supersize their caffeine.
For what is essentially ad copy for a corporation, it’s mighty fine prose. A graf later, looking for a little color to brighten up the story, reporter Max Jarman intrepidly finds a customer drinking from one of the new cups.
Turns out he was drinking decaffeinated ice tea.
Jarman doesn’t say what the drinks will cost, nor does he mention the nutritional issues. Extrapolating from info on Starbucks’ own nutrition pages, you can see that a 31-ounce Frappuccino will contain about 600 calories, and more than 100 grams of carbs.
As for the illustration, it’s a big picture of a coffee cup with a big ol’ Starbucks logo on the side. Some drawings to the right of the photo are a great example of the expository journalism a newspaper can provide its audience with, given some planning and just a tiny bit of creativity.
I think anyone looking at the result will immediately apprehend that a 31-ounce cup is bigger than a 24-ounce cup.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday over in the Living section, the paper has continued its fascination with psychics.
The hedline of the story is this:
Psychics see their popularity rising
Medium’s popularity a sign of public’s growing fascination with the other side
I suppose its relevant to mention that the story is about no such thing. It quotes one alleged psychic saying she was busy, but she never says she has more business than normal, and no one else does, either. (Indeed, she’s the only purported psychic quoted.)
The story does more than you’d expect by quoting a psychic debunker, but then, in an almost parodic descent into a rabit hole of journalistic over-objectivity, finds someone to quarrel with the debunker!
But Richard Mann, a professor emeritus of psychology and religion at the University of Michigan, says people have always expressed a connection with the dead….
Worst of all, the story is a wire piece from Detroit. It’s just amazing to think that an editor at the paper decided that of all the wire stories available that day, the crappy one about the psychics was the one to run.
Previously in PHXated:
5:49 PM
The living section at the Arizona Republic just ... gives up
As we’ve noticed previously, on a lot of days, the Arizona Republic living section will lack any locally generated copy. The front page will be a mishmash of wire stories about subjects that have nothing to do with Arizona or Phoenix.
Today there was a crappy little wire story about… dogs on Twitter. Well, that’s what it seemed, anyway, but it turns out it was just a junky toy from Mattel that basically just randomly posted to a Twitter account from a set of canned tweets.
The story seemed a bit samey to me. I poked around a little and found a wire story from two weeks ago about … dogs on Facebook.
3:50 AM
1Kicking the EVT while it's down, continued
Granted it’s a holiday, and granted there’s an enormous amount of pressure on the folks inside the East Valley Tribune—they don’t know, week to week, if they’re gong to have jobs.
But here again is the main feature well of the paper this a.m.:
I’m assuming the web site has something programmed into it to generate the feature well by taking the top stories from two different departments. But as we saw last week and again today, it’s maybe not smart to let the front page of a web site be created without human intervention.
7:00 AM
The Daily Wildcat: Boffing Editors Gone Wild!
The Tucson Weekly has a story about an internal range war at the Daily Wildcat, the U of A student newspaper. From the story and the comments, I learned that:
- Editor-in-Chief Alex Dalenberg was doing it with design director Maris Fisher—and at a journalism convention in Austin, “skipped their sessions and instead decided to spend that time having sex in a hotel room each day.”
- Managing Editor Shain Bergan and photo editor Rita Lichamer were boffing, too—Bergan even covering his desk with blankets so the two could have private time in the newsroom.
- And someone else, an alum of the paper, “nailed several girls from the newsroom. Including the EIC [editor-in-chief].”
Now all of this is the product of a heated back and forth to the TW reporter, or posted in comments, some of them anonymous. So whether the editorial staff is as randy a bunch of folks as they are portrayed is open to debate. (Bergan says the two were merely “reading books,” for example.)
It all started after Dalenberg did or did not fire Bergan after Bergan did or did not try to make the paper change an account of his arrest at a demonstration. All in all, fun reading.
7:00 AM
Do psychics have PR agents?
It sure seems like it. Hard to believe a big-city newspaper would be receptive to a pitch from the tarot-card industry to drum up some business—but it’s even harder to contemplate a paper coming up with this story on its own:
When the going gets tough, Valley residents apparently go in search of the metaphysical.
Local psychics and astrologers say that while they’re seeing some decline in business as longtime clients cut back on discretionary spending, the recession is bringing them many new customers.
I missed this gem in the paper; it was brought to my attention by the blog Mediactive, overseen by ASU j school prof Dan Gillmor. Says he:
No newspaper, as far as I know, gives its pages over to self-described psychics. Yet the Republic’s story quotes several, along with the astrologers, with a straight face.
It even provides a helpful sidebar explaining the difference between psychics, astrologers, fortune-tellers and mediums (in each case with the same level of “here’s what they say, never mind what science says” logic). For example, we learn that a psychic is “sensitive to non-physical or supernatural forces and influences, able to see into the future and into the events in a person’s life. Often uses tools such as tarot cards, crystals or tea leaves.” Gosh, thanks the the deeper insight.
12:00 AM
A new black newspaper in Tucson
The Vanguard is being put out by the local Black Chamber of Commerce with a 1000 print run, the AZ Daily Star says. The chamber’s president, Clarence Boykins, is the publisher.
Boykins, who said he put up the initial investment to start up the Vanguard, is publisher. He tapped Tucson freelance writer and editor Theda K. Rogers to be executive editor.
Boykins picked up the first 16-page edition, printed at Territorial Publishers, Friday and called it “a great beginning.”
He said the paper aims to improve communication for blacks who are dispersed around Southern Arizona, while increasing the understanding of black culture in the larger community.
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