Get it?

In case your newspaper hasn't hired an interpreter for the metaphor-impaired out there, imagine the conversation downtown: Hey, could you do, like, a Tundra? And it'd be, like, on the tip? Of an iceberg!

OK, as metaphors go, it's a little on the mixed side. We don't have an actual iceberg of Toyotas, let alone Toyota troubles; we have an iceberg of ice, with a Tundra on top. Not an unusual pose for your Final Four ad campaign, but just fractionally out of tune (something can be "on the tip" of your tongue, but it's "the tip of the iceberg"). And, of course, subtle as the day is long. Get it? Tip of the iceberg, Ma!

Lest you be tempted to write this one off to Those Wacky Kids and their Photoshops, bear in mind that America's Newspapers have a long tradition of throwing visual elbows on the front page when there's a point at stake. Here's Carey Orr* of the Chicago Tribune, with a mild form of the FDR- bashing that decorated the Trib's pages right up until the presses rolled for the bulldog edition of December 8.* If it reminds you of any number of recurring themes at the Fair-n-Balanced Network, like the "apology tour" and the "who's your buddy?" riff, there's probably a reason for that.

* Orr, who has been featured in these pages a couple times before, was among several Pulitzer-winners in the Trib stable. He's not the only one who drew FDR standing, or walking, or doing backflips, but based on the sample that this project drew on (November 1941 through mid-January 1942), he was the most likely to.
** I was trying to find a really good one from the Trib's near-indictment in 1942, but some boxes in the basement have yet to yield all their secrets, and it's probably in one of them.

A shadow of the past

Ever wonder how a free press behaves in a country that's about to go to war? Here's an item to ponder as the coming week's news events unfold.

If you're having trouble with the small type, that's Congress, with "sole power to declare war" in his right hand, grabbing the rampaging New Deal (the, erm, cosmopolitan-looking dude waving the sword of "Undeclared War a la Hitler") by the collar. The paper is Bertie McCormick's Chicago Tribune, the artist is Carey Orr (one of several Trib cartoonists of that era to win a Pulitzer), and the date is Nov. 26, 1941. And some useful reminders are thus entailed:

1) The idea of "liberal media" on the loose in big cities is a historical myth. If anyone hated FDR and the New Deal more than Col. McCormick, it was his Patterson cousins who ran the largest newspapers in New York and Washington.

2) Gosh, when did dissent stop being a conservative virtue?

3) We hear a lot these days about the treasonous weasels who run the New York Times and its commie ilk. It's worth recalling that when the chips are down (and, oh, a certain unfriendly embassy in Lisbon is shaking the trees for back copies of a particular newspaper*), the right-wing press still holds the title for betraying national secrets. It was, of course, the Trib that led its front on the Sunday after the battle of Midway with the announcement that the good guys had won because we'd read the bad guys' secret operational traffic.

In the fullness of time, that one seems more a spectacular screwup -- the responsible editor is better known for a later Great Moment in Headline Writing, "Dewey Defeats Truman" -- than an deliberate attempt to give aid and comfort to the enemy. Still, it kind of makes you close your eyes and envision Sean Hannity working below decks in an eastbound tanker on the North Atlantic in the weeks before the Neutrality Act was repealed, doesn't it?

Anyway, enjoy. It's amazing what a little press freedom can do for democratic debate. We ought to try it sometime.

(And if you're among those who have followed the path of the article that includes the Orr cartoon and some others, it's picking up speed on the publication runway. Long story.)

* I don't make this stuff up. Wouldn't be scholarly.

The Yankeesinterns are coming!

Gather 'round, kiddies, and we will tell stories about the good old days, when people called "editors" read things called "stories" until late in the night.

What did editors do? Well, they made sure writers were using the right words:

Buried where he lay, Carr, a Union casualty, somehow escaped re-internment at the Marietta National Cemetery.

I think what he missed was "re-interment," which is also known as "reburial." If I'm recalling it correctly, when troops are "interned," they're usually (a) still vertical and (b) in the hands of a neutral power* (though I'd want to look that up if time allowed). Whether he "escaped" internitude or not -- that's an ear call. Good writers are likely to get the ear call, bad writers are likely to lose it. Though if the Yankees had him fetching coffee and making copies all summer, maybe it's appropriate.

Editors looked for wasted words. Since we've already noted that he was serving in the U.S. Army and that he's dead, "a Union casualty" adds exactly nothing to the story. Needlesser words could hardly be found.

And editors recalled stuff from third grade:

His great-great grandfather, a Union soldier from Indiana, fought in the siege of Vicksburg in 1983 and, due to bad weather that ruined necessary paperwork, his ancestor wound up buried in an anonymous grave on the battlefield.

Look. I'm from the land of "Forget, Hell" license plates too, but -- 1983? Isn't that carrying the past-isn't-past thing a little far? The editor who thoughtfully provided a link to the Atlanta weather conditions but allowed the War of the Northern Aggression to extend into the first Reagan term needs to rethink some priorities. And whose ancestor is "his" ancestor -- the story subject's or the great-great-grandfather's? (Please remember all the hyphens while you're at it.)

Then there's the lede. Normally we're wary of whacking them too hard, but when the fluffs start to pile up in the text, the lede gets a second look:

Private Mark Carr, U.S. Army, sounds like the kind of guy who’s the backbone of any military unit — the loyal, consistent grunt who does the heavy lifting.

How did that discussion go in "Scoop" again?

"But you do think it's a good way of training oneself -- inventing imaginary news?"
"None better," said William.

Atlanta, like many (if not most) papers, has been hammered pretty severely by the iron ball. Good journalists lost jobs. Other good journalists are left to cover those gaps and whatever new ones are created under the let's-do-more-stuff-with-fewer-people philosophy. That said: Please, can we take at least one set of eyes, brain and hands away from updating the weather, writing minor cop briefs and feeding the Twitters (or whatever you kids do with your internets) and direct them back toward critical assessments of the actual copy in the for-real publication? Because if you can't even get the Civil War in the right part of the wrong century, you have issues beyond the ability of a multimedia platform to fix.

* "Sweden?" "Orr!" "Orr?" "Sweden!"

The end of irony

Yes, it's a "most people" lede, but bear with our Tribune columnist here -- he has a Point!

The two questions most people ask about a new movie are: Do I really want to see it? And, is it worth the price?

“Darkest Hour,” the film starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, is definitely worth seeing now, not later. It is worth the price.

And it is required.

Because in a West under siege, in a West — particularly the European West — that often seems lost and almost eager to capitulate to a diminished future, “Darkest Hour” isn’t merely a good film.

I didn't know you spelled "sharia" with a D, but nevertheless:

It is a necessary film.

It reminds us that heroes don’t require magic swords, superpowers, spandex costumes or comic-book inspiration.

Heroes can be quite human, even dumpy and old and fat, egotistic and self-indulgent.

... What is required is an iron will, an epic stubbornness, a refusal to listen to reasonable voices that would reasonably help bend the knee. 

And we all know where that comes from, right? 

In “Darkest Hour,” and in the other films about Churchill that I’ve seen, there is a hint about where the iron will comes from: the expectations of the British aristocracy on the young; the severe schools, the punishments, the obligations placed on the ruling class to serve the empire.

In America, we infantilize our young, and some remain boys and girls until middle age, and we make heroes of athletes and actors and entertainers. But not in the England of that time.

For the aristocracy, the will was also molded by the kind of literature that helped shape the empire, which, along with the British Navy and its guns, reinforced Great Britain’s place, ruling the seas.
Read more »

That's a plenty

What with a particularly bodacious cops lede in the morning fishwrap:

Got ’em.

U.S. Marshals captured escapee No. 3 — a convicted drug dealer who disappeared last month with his two cohorts just before the jury delivered its guilty verdicts in one of the biggest drug trials in Detroit history.

... it seemed like a good time to revisit the Forbidden Lede front, especially since a regular offender has been showing up rather often:

Enough with the calls.

That’s what one consumer is telling Kohl’s in a federal lawsuit that claims the department store is stalking her and harassing her by phone over an overdue credit card bill, calling her at all hours of the night over what she calls a measly $20. (June 17)

=====

He stole from the dead to pay for cable TV.

That’s what a mortician’s assistant is accused of doing nearly a year ago after transporting a man’s body from the morgue to a Detroit funeral home, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court. (June 11)

=====

 In the end, cooperation worked.

That’s what the government learned in relying on Derrick Miller for help in putting away corrupt politicians and crooked contractors. (May 29)

=====

Detroit may have a serious violent crime problem, an international border to keep an eye on and ongoing public corruption scandals to contend with.

But other cities have it bad, too.

That's what FBI Director James Comey said Tuesday during his first visit to Detroit since getting sworn in as America's seventh FBI chief eight months ago. (April 30)

Read more »

Today in framing

Granted, there's lots of other Fox stuff to talk about, and lots of other framing stuff, and no shortage of grammar stuff either. But the morning's top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network really captures the essence of how framing works -- and how it doesn't.

Got the difference? The hammer hed goes from "Rahm's Spendy City" (captured at 9:24 a.m. Eastern) to "Spendy City," with no change to the Photoshopped image,* a minor trim to the deck, and no mention -- still -- in the 519-word text of the guy in the image (much less "debt-plagued" or "blue stronghold," but that's piling on).

That elision isn't a problem if you're a Fox reader. Rahm Emanuel is in that rare category of Fox villains who can summarize a lead story just by illustrating it (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also comes to mind). When you say "Rahm" (or when, on reconsidering, you merely show him), you've said not just "Chicago" but all the related things that set your Fox audience to gibbering in fear: big cities, black people, feckless liberals, random violence, brown people, Obama, crooked politics, "the Chicago way," black people and the grasping hand of socialist big government. Sounds like a pretty good ROI.

That's the point of framing: "To select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described" (Entman, 1993). Properly done, an image can do all those at once without breaking a sweat -- for the right audience. If you're not a regular Fox reader, one or all of those primes might have blown right past you.** Framing is a contingent theory, not a magic-bullet theory; moral evaluations can be a feature of the message (hence Ahmadinejad could be a "dictator," even though the Iranian presidency is too constrained to allow for effective dictatoring), but they're more likely to arise from the context in which the message lands.  

Whatever else might be going on in the world, you can see why "Spendy City" is the top story: You can't take your eyes off these people for a moment, or they'll be back to digging away at the foundations of everything that made America great. And the great man's triumphant meeting with the Russian tyrant? It didn't have the right definition and interpretation*** until about noon:

Got it? This will be on the final.

If you find Planet Fox a confusing place, be reassured. Here's how A.J. Liebling described a similar planetfall in 1950:

The visitor to Chicago, awakening unalarmed in his hotel room and receiving the Tribune with his breakfast tray, takes a look at the headlines and finds himself at once transported into a land of somber horror, rather like that depicted by the science-mystery magazines. ...  As he turns the pages of the Tribune, the stranger is likely to get the feeling that some of the people and events he is reading about superficially resemble people and events he remembers having read about in the world outside, but he never can be sure.

... The effect on the adrenal glands of the morning dip into the Tribune's cosmos is amazing. The Tribune reader issues from his door walking on the balls of his feet, muscles tense, expecting attacks by sex-mad footpads at the next street corner, forewarned against the smooth talk of strangers with a British accent, and prepared to dive behind the first convenient barrier at the sound of a guided missile approaching -- any minute now -- from the direction of northern Siberia.

Should you be wondering how the Tribune treated the president's role in US-Russia relations in the good old days (Nov. 10, 1941), the cartoon is by Carey Orr. Photoshop, you have to admit, is weak tea in comparison.


 * Given the role of the 1A editorial cartoon in Chicago journalism history, I'm disappointed.
** WAKE UP, AMERICA!!1!1!!!!!!!!!!!!
*** I yield to none in my disdain for heds that play on proper names, but you have to admit a certain appreciation for "Vlad the Emailer."

A terrible beauty is born

Let the record show that on this date, 5th inst., in the year of our Lord the two thousand and eighteenth, foxnews.com has published its first house-brand editorial cartoon to illustrate a frontpage story. (At least, the first that I recall seeing, and I try to keep up with these things.)

The story itself is hardly a surprise:

Once upon a time, former intel chiefs employed a restrained and nonpartisan tone in the public eye. Now, they're diving right into the mud of today's rancorous political fights.

And the current battle between law enforcement circles and congressional Republicans over the controversial memo on alleged surveillance abuse has pulled Obama-era spy guys even deeper into the brawl.

... but the cartoon is an unusual treat. No details in the story or on the website beyond the "Branco" signature, which along with the tone and style suggests the cartoonist A.F. Branco.

The 1A cartoon itself, of course, isn't new; it's hard to miss if you keep up with isolationism, exceptionalism and the old-school Tribune. Here, indeed, is the Trib's Carey Orr from this date 70 years ago, longing for some "party discipline":

As a field of study, you have to admit it beats the heck out of Photoshop.

Today in history: War on Fox, 1942-style

What did the War on Fox look like on this day in 1942? Pretty much like this.

Back in those days, kiddies, the War on Fox pitted the World's Greatest Newspaper (and its cousins in New York and Washington) against the reckless, decadent Europe-loving commie in the White House. The artist is Carey Orr (he's been featured here before), and the occasion is the convening of a grand jury to determine whether the Chicago Tribune should be indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Two months earlier, on the Sunday after the epic U.S. victory at Midway, the Tribune had committed a slight (ahem) indiscretion: a front-page story strongly suggesting that the good guys won because they knew in advance what the bad guys were up to. That being largely true, the story was a stunningly dumb idea.

The Trib thought it had been cooperative and appropriately penitent in the wake of the story. The Navy wanted the spotlight to go away, but frequent Tribune targets like Walter Winchell kept plugging it back in. Under heavy pressure from the White House, the grand jury investigation went ahead. And the Trib fired back at the "Knox-Biddle Smear."

If you're scoring along at home, the guy on the left, pointing at the target, is Frank Knox, FDR's Navy secretary (not coincidentally, publisher of Chicago's largest evening paper, the Daily News; the hed to the left of the cartoon, not shown in this view, proclaims that he's using his position to boost his newspaper). Francis Biddle, the attorney general, is hauling ammunition. At right on the cartoon front page is Stanley Johnston, the reporter whose work set the story in motion. Next to him is Pat Maloney,* the Trib's managing editor, who wrote the hed and compounded the damage by adding bogus attribution -- "reliable sources in the naval intelligence" -- to the story. The heds are from the Trib's first-day coverage (the news broke on Friday, and "Knox uses Navy post to favor own paper" was Monday's take on the story.

Beats Photoshop, doesn't it?

* Yeah, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" guy.

'To the brink of war'

If you're one of those Hannity viewers who were disappointed beyond measure that you missed an ad for a documentary about the great German-American Bund rally of February 1939, relax. Here's what it looked like the following day at the World's Greatest Newspaper.

No, of course the headline doesn't want you to fight Nazis (be serious; it's the Trib in 1939). It's a classic flying verb or "implied subject" headline -- somebody fought some Nazis, but we can't tell you who and still make the hed big enough to carry the page, so calm down.* But with midtown New York "thrown into a turmoil," it still seems to have been a rather big deal, even half a continent away. A recounting of that event is what Fox News deemed "not appropriate for our air," according to the Hollywood Reporter.**

You can see how the page overall would create a bit of cognitive dissonance for the committed Fox viewer. There's a Carey Orr cartoon bashing the New Deal, but the "attacks on foreign governments" are actually "driving away our customers." There's a mayoral hopeful warning that a vote for Democrats in the mayoral primary "is a vote in support of the war-bent national Democratic administration." But the really confusing part has to be that attack on rampant executive powers in the first column:

The house*** today heard demands that President Roosevelt be stripped of the extraordinary powers granted him in "emergency" legislation during the six years of his administration.

The President was charged with dragging this nation to the brink of war because of his use of some of those powers to take sides in European and Asiatic conflicts. A special Republican committee, recently appointed to study the extraordinary powers of Mr. Roosevelt, led the attack with a request for liquidation of the Export-Import Bank as soon as is consistent with its present commitments. A bitter fight ensued when the house banking and currency committee sought approval of a resolution to continue the existence of the bank until June 30, 1941. The bank expires by law next June 30. 

Rep. Ham Fish has heard that the Ex-Im Bank "recently sent 23 million dollars to China," and he is none too pleased:

... The first purchase made by the Chinese government was 1,000 war trucks, he said. This constituted a direct violation of the neutrality policy of the United States, he charged, and put this country in the position of affronting the Japanese invaders of China.

Results in Entanglements
"This is only one instance of the manner in which the administration, through the special powers delegated to the President by a jittery congress, is involving the United States in foreign entanglements," Fish said.


Good thing Congress was exercising its authority over spending, right? Especially given that our relationship with the Japanese invaders is a good one and nobody's tougher on China than we are.

Anyway, aren't you sorry you missed the ad?

* Hint: It's the "50,000 foes of Bund held back by police" in the deck. It takes some work to figure out the Trib's style on cutoff rules under a streamer.
** Some newspapers were a little overenthusiastic. Here's the Washington Post ,Feb. 11: 

Some viewers of Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” on Monday night will get a jolting image: scenes from a rally of American Nazis in New York.

The images are meant not as promotion but as a warning: They will come as part of a 30-second spot for “A Night at the Garden,” a new Oscar-nominated documentary short about the rally of the German Bund at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1939. It was directed by the liberal-minded filmmaker Marshall Curry.
*** Lowercase "house" was Trib style.

Don't even think about ending ground here

Some thoughts about Fox News and the rewriting of history and current affairs, but first this candidate for Mondegreen of the Year, thanks to Sean Hannity:

WINSTON CHURCHILL: We shall fight down the beaches. We shall fight down those ending ground. We shall never surrender.

Surely if you're going to ridicule that sneaking Maoist Al Gore for daring to invoke Sir Winston, you must think enough of the old coot to have heard, oh, something like "fight on the landing grounds" somewhere in the dim, dark past?

The Gore-Churchill thing is a story for Hannity, of course, because it's been a big deal around the right-wing wankosphere. Here's how Fox handled it Tuesday:

Al Gore: Climate-Change Fight Like Battle Against Nazis
Al Gore on Tuesday compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.

Wondering why you didn't see that in your favorite source of news? Two reasons suggest themselves:
1) The craven librul media are covering up for one of their idols again!
2) It never happened. Al Gore didn't compare climate change to Hitler -- at least, not outside the fevered little minds of the Murdoch press.

I'm going with Door No. 2. This is another case in which some elements of the (ahem) British media have taken a few light liberties with what went on, meaning that by the time it reaches Fox territory, no one's going to go back and do any verifying. There's no need to -- it's in the Times!

Except, of course, that it isn't -- in the Times, that is. Odd, the link says "likens climate change to battle against Nazis," but the Times article online has the tamer -- and actually true -- "Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill in battle against climate change." Nor does Gore seem to invoke the H-word in the text:

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.

How much of that he "admitted" is open to debate. The hosts don't seem to have posted a transcript, but Gore doesn't say any such thing in the video at the Times site, and there's no further indication (I'm looking at reports from the Scotsman and Press Association as well) that Gore brought Hitler into things. And when some public whackjob invokes Hitler, it's standard journalistic practice to provide a supporting quote or two (as the Guardian does here). Absent some such evidence, I'm inclined to categorize the admission as primarily rhetorical stretch on the writer's part -- but it's the sort that allows Fox to produce an out-and-out lie without actually having to, you know, lie or anything.

It's hardly unusual to catch Fox making stuff up about people it doesn't like, but there's a bit of delightful irony in this one. For one, Hannity is a spear carrier for a political faction that excelled in hijacking Churchill for its own purposes. Here's the New York Post in February 2003:

Tony Blair's not the first British leader to risk political disaster by saying things his people weren't ready to hear. Winston Churchill, in the mid-1930s, repeatedly warned that Germany was re-arming, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and would eventually march across Europe once more. For that he was hooted down in Parliament and ridiculed, even by his own party, as a demagogic alarmist.

Well, sorta. But Churchill, a realist, was talking about a large continental power that had reached air parity with Britain by 1935 and was soon to surpass it -- not a onetime regional power in the Middle East whose airspace was effectively owned by its antagonists. It's hard to imagine Churchill demanding an invasion of Iraq in 2003, because Churchill was not an idiot.

Which brings us to the second point. Churchill wasn't just ridiculed by "his own party" (to the extent that was true in the first place; for a notional exile, he retained a very high level of access); he was an object of scorn for the American right. The cartoon above,* from Bertie McCormick's Chicago Tribune, is a typical depiction: Churchill is ready to let anyone else's boys die -- that'll be yours, Mr. and Mrs. America -- in the interest of some obscure European tribal war that we're well advised to stay out of. Nor was Col. McCormick alone. His Patterson cousins, who owned the largest papers in New York and Washington, were as virulently anti-Roosevelt and anti-intervention as he was. If the Big American Media look "liberal" today, that's partly because they were so monolithically right-wing for much of their history.

Sean Hannity isn't the kind of guy who would have been comforting Churchill in the Tory wilderness; his ilk were in the isolationist camp until the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Supporting the troops? When the Reuben James was sunk, they were writing the "We asked for it" heds in the Tribune. It's a pity Churchill -- no mean hand with the ad hominem attack -- isn't around to tee Hannity up for the lying gasbag that he is.

* Nov. 4, 1941. The cartoonist, Carey Orr, later won a Pulitzer; one of his post-Pearl Harbor cartoons provided the main title for John Dower's outstanding "War Without Mercy: Race and power in the Pacific war."