Today, in a posting on his “Rough Sketch” blog at the Washington Post Dana Milbank perpetrated one of the most grotesque examples of hatchet journalism I’ve seen in a while. I’ll get to the particulars soon enough, but first it’s worth setting a little context.
Milbank was reporting on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club this morning, a speech that marked the third public appearance of Barack Obama’s former pastor in the last couple of days. The first appearance came on Friday, when Wright appeared in a PBS interview with Bill Moyers. The second came yesterday, when he spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner.
The Moyers interview was so uncontroversial that one commentator had to wonder why we hadn’t heard more about it. But the question-and-answer period after today’s Press Club speech gave the media just the kind of thing it was waiting for. Joe Klein of Time said that “Wright’s purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself–the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton–and destroy Barack Obama.” Amy Sullivan, also at Time, said bluntly that Wright’s performance at the National Press Club “can only be described as a political disaster.”
Only small-t time will tell if Sullivan is right–one sign she’s correct is that Obama is already inching his way onto the denounce-and-reject road. [UPDATE 4/29: The inches have become miles.] But it only takes one look at the transcript of Wright’s appearance at the Press Club to see that Klein’s characterization of it as “racial extremist spew” is ridiculous.
Milbank’s post is worst of all. (more…)
Tonight we raise a glass to the 22nd amendment…
(Hollywood, California)
In today’s Guardian Ronan Bennett goes after Martin Amis for “The Age of Horrorism,” a nasty 12,000-word essay on Islam published in The Observer (The Guardian’s sister pub) last year. My take on Amis’s essay, written last year after the original article came out, is here. (A shorter version, published in the U. of Chicago Sightings series, is here.)
The full text of an SMS I received at 11:13am this morning:
Please check your campus e-mail for a message from the president about a homicide that occurred last night on S. Ellis Ave.
The text message was the first non-test output of an emergency response system put in place at the U. of C. after the Virginia Tech shootings. The email, from U. of C. president Robert Zimmerman, related these further details:
It is with the greatest possible sadness that I write to inform you of the tragic killing of one of our graduate students last night. Amadou Cisse, an international student completing his Ph.D. degree in chemistry, was shot and killed at 1:26 a.m. in the street near 6120 S. Ellis Ave. We are saddened and outraged by this terrible event, and our hearts go out to the student’s family, friends, colleagues and neighbors.
According to an article in today’s Tribune, Cisse was 28 29, a graduate student in chemistry from Senegal whose research examined atomic oxygen erosion. He successfully defended his dissertation last week, and was scheduled to receive his degree on December 7. The University will award his doctorate posthumously.
UPDATE (11/20/07):
In case poetry and gender isn’t your thing, here’s something from today’s NYT:
Chicago police officers are the subject of more brutality complaints per officer than the national average, and the Police Department is far less likely to pursue abuse cases seriously than the national norm, a legal team at the University of Chicago reported Wednesday….
The national average among large police departments for excessive-force complaints is 9.5 per 100 full-time officers. For a department of Chicago’s size (13,500, second only to New York), that would correspond to 1,283 complaints a year. From 1999 to 2004, however, citizens filed about 1,774 brutality complaints a year against Chicago officers [i.e. 13.1 out of 100 officers].
The report from the U. of C. Police Accountability Project also says:
Less than five percent of the Department account for nearly half of all abuse complaints against the CPD. Indeed, 662 Chicago police officers, a little less than 5% of the CPD’s 13,500 member force, amassed 11 or more official misconduct complaints between 2001 and 2006. Because the vast majority of officers get only a few complaints in their entire careers, it is easy to identify those who may be engaged in a pattern of abusive behavior. They literally jump off the page….Yet, the CPD refuses to look or allow others to look at its “repeater” data. It chooses not to know—avoiding critical self-examination and fighting public and judicial scrutiny of its practices….
As the numbers detailed above illustrate plainly, “not knowing” about police abuse in Chicago requires a great deal of active effort. It requires a deep commitment to the machinery of denial, including denying incidents of brutality, turning a blind eye to patterns of abuse, refusing to look at data that is just a key stroke or two away, and passively encouraging a culture of silence in the face of abuse perpetrated by fellow officers.
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